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Title: The end of the trail
The far west from New Mexico to British Columbia
Author: E. Alexander Powell
Release date: March 23, 2025 [eBook #75697]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1914
Credits: Peter Becker and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE END OF THE TRAIL ***
THE END OF THE TRAIL
[Illustration: _From a photograph by H. A. Erickson, Coronado, Cal._
THE PROMISED LAND.
Looking southward to the Gulf of California—and Mexico.]
BOOKS BY E. ALEXANDER POWELL
PUBLISHED BY CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
THE LAST FRONTIER: THE WHITE MAN’S WAR FOR
CIVILIZATION IN AFRICA. Illustrated. 8vo _net_ $1.50
GENTLEMEN ROVERS. Illustrated. 8vo _net_ $1.50
THE END OF THE TRAIL. Illustrated. 8vo _net_ $3.00
THE
END OF THE TRAIL
THE FAR WEST FROM
NEW MEXICO TO BRITISH COLUMBIA
BY
E. ALEXANDER POWELL, F.R.G.S.
AUTHOR OF “THE LAST FRONTIER,” “GENTLEMEN ROVERS,” ETC., ETC.
_WITH FORTY-EIGHT FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS
AND A MAP_
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1914
COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
Published November, 1914
[Illustration]
TO
MY FRIEND AND FELLOW-ADVENTURER
ALBERT C. KUHN
OF
RANCHO YERBA BUENA
IN “THE VALLEY OF HEART’S DELIGHT”
FOREWORD
In the dim dawn of history the Aryans, forsaking the birthplace of the
race upon the Caspian shore, poured through the passes of the Caucasus
and peopled Europe. By caravel and merchantman adventuring Europeans
crossed the western ocean and established a fringe of settlements along
this continent’s eastern rim. The American pioneers, taking up the
historic march, slowly but inexorably pressed westward, from the Hudson
to the Ohio, from the Ohio to the Mississippi, from the Mississippi
across the plains, across the Rockies, until athwart the line of their
advance they found another ocean. They could go no farther, for beyond
that ocean lay the overpopulated countries of the yellow race. The white
man had completed his age-long migration toward the beckoning West; his
march was finished; in the golden lands which look upon the Pacific he
had come to the End of the Trail.
In the great march which substituted the wheat-field for the desert,
the orchard for the forest, the work was done by the hardiest breed of
adventurers that ever foreran the columns of civilisation—the Pioneers.
And the pioneer has always lived on the frontier. Most people believe
that there is no longer any quarter of this continent that can properly
be called the frontier and that the pioneer is as extinct as the
buffalo. To prove that they are wrong I have written this book. Though
the gambler and the gun-fighter have vanished before the storm of public
disapproval; though the bison no longer roams the ranges; though the
express rider has given way to the express-train; in the hinterland of
that vast region which sweeps westward and northward from the Pecos to
the Skeena, and which includes New Mexico, Arizona, California, Oregon,
Washington, British Columbia, frontier conditions still endure and the
frontiersman is still to be found. In the unexplored and unexploited
portions of this, “the Last West,” white-topped prairie schooners—full
sisters of those which crossed the plains in ’49—creak into the
wilderness in the wake of the home seeker; the settler chops his little
farmstead from the virgin forest and rears his cabin of logs from the
trees which grew upon the site; mile-long pack-trains wend their way
into the northern wild; six-horse Concord coaches tear along the roads
amid rolling clouds of dust, their scarlet bodies swaying drunkenly upon
their leathern springs; out in the back country, where the roads run
out and the trails begin, the cow-puncher still rides the ranges in his
picturesque panoply of high-crowned Stetson and Angora chaps and vivid
shirt. But this is the last call. It is the last chance to see a nation
in the primeval stage of its existence. In a few more years, a very few,
there will be no place on this continent, or on any continent, that can
truthfully be called the frontier, and with it will disappear, never to
return, those stern and hardy figures—the pioneer, the prospector, the
packer, the puncher—who won for us the West.
The _real_ West—and by the term I do not mean that sun-kissed,
flower-carpeted coast zone, with its orange groves and apple orchards,
its palatial mansions and luxurious hotels, its fashionable resorts
and teeming, all-of-a-sudden cities, which stretches from San Diego to
Vancouver and which to the Eastern visitor represents “the West”—cannot
be seen from the terraces of tourist hostelries or the observation
platforms of transcontinental trains. Because I wished to visit those
portions of the West which cannot be viewed from a car-window and because
I wished to acquaint myself with the characteristics and problems and
ideals of the people who dwell in them, I travelled from Mexico to the
borders of Alaska by motor-car—the only time, I believe, that a car has
made that journey on its own wheels and under its own power. Because that
journey was so crowded with incident and obstacle and adventure, and
because the incidents and obstacles and adventures thus encountered so
graphically illustrate the conditions which prevail in “the Last West,”
is my excuse for having to a certain extent made a personal narrative of
the following chapters.
Without entering into a tedious recital of distances and road conditions,
I have outlined certain routes which the motorist who contemplates
turning the bonnet of his car westward might follow with profit and
pleasure. With no desire to usurp the guide-book’s place, I have deemed
it as important to describe that enchanted littoral which has become
the nation’s winter playground as to depict that back country which the
tourist seldom sees. Though I hold no brief for boards of trade and
kindred organisations, I have incorporated the more significant facts and
figures as to land values, soils, crops, climates, and resources which
every prospective home-seeker wishes to know. But, more than anything
else, I have tried to convey something of the spell of that big, open,
unfenced, keep-on-the-grass, do-as-you-please, glad-to-see-you land and
of the spirit of energy, industry, and determination which animates the
kindly, hospitable, big-hearted, broad-minded, open-handed men who dwell
there. They are the modern Argonauts, the present-day Pioneers. To them,
across the miles, I lift my glass.
E. ALEXANDER POWELL.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. CONQUERORS OF SUN AND SAND 1
II. THE SKYLANDERS 33
III. CHOPPING A PATH TO TO-MORROW 61
IV. THE LAND OF DREAMS-COME-TRUE 95
V. WHERE GOLD GROWS ON TREES 123
VI. THE COAST OF FAIRYLAND 155
VII. THE VALLEY OF HEART’S DELIGHT 187
VIII. THE MODERN ARGONAUTS 211
IX. THE INLAND EMPIRE 237
X. “WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON” 271
XI. A FRONTIER ARCADY 305
XII. BREAKING THE WILDERNESS 329
XIII. CLINCHING THE RIVETS OF EMPIRE 351
XIV. BACK OF BEYOND 387
XV. THE MAP THAT IS HALF UNROLLED 419
INDEX 455
ILLUSTRATIONS
The Promised Land _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
A Desert Dawn in New Mexico 4
Santa Fé: the Most Picturesque City between the Oceans 18
Remains of an Ancient Civilisation 24
The Land of the Turquoise Sky 38
Acoma: Supposed Ancient Site and Present Site 40
Acoma as It is To-Day 44
Acoma Hunter Home from the Hunt 48
Acoma Artisans 50
“Dance Mad!” 52
Young Acomans 54
The Education of a Young Hopi 56
The Pyramid-Pueblo of Taos 58
The Passing of the Puncher 64
Where the Roads Run Out and the Trails Begin 72
The Trail of a Thousand Thrills 88
Throwing the Diamond Hitch 90
Scenes in the Motor Journey Through Arizona 98
Not in Catalonia but in California 120
A Modern Version of the Sermon on the Mount 130
Santa Barbara, a City of Contrasts 168
The Mission of Santa Barbara 170
Lake Tahoe from the Slopes of the High Sierras 232
The Yosemite—and a Lady Who Didn’t Know Fear 250
Yosemite Youngsters, White and Red 252
The Greatest Oil Fields in the World 260
Over the Tehachapis 262
The Overland Mail 274
In the Oregon Hinterland 284
“Where Rolls the Oregon” 300
Where Rods Bend Double and Reels Go Whir-r-r-r 324
What the Road-Builders Have Done in Washington 332
The Unexplored Olympics 344
Where the Salmon Come from 348
Outposts of Civilisation 354
Breaking the Wilderness 356
Pack-Horses and a Pack-Dog 358
In the Great, Still Land 362
Sport on Vancouver Island 376
Life at the Back of Beyond 380
Transport on America’s Last Frontier 382
Transport on America’s Last Frontier 384
Scenes on the Cariboo Trail 400
Some Ladies from the Upper Skeena 422
Where No Motor-Car Had Ever Gone: Some Incidents of Mr. Powell’s
Journey Through the British Columbian Wilderness 428
Some Siwash Cemeteries 448
Heraldry in the Hinterland 450
A Land of Sublimity and Magnificence and Grandeur, of Gloom
and Loneliness and Dread 452
Map of the Far West, from New Mexico to British Columbia,
Showing the Route Followed by the Author _at end of volume_
THE END OF THE TRAIL
I
CONQUERORS OF SUN AND SAND
“The song of the deed in the doing, of the work still hot from the hand;
Of the yoke of man laid friendly-wise on the neck of a tameless land.
While your merchandise is weighing, we will bit and bridle and rein
The floods of the storm-rocked mountains and lead them down to the plain;
And the foam-ribbed, dark-hued waters, tired from that mighty race,
Shall lie at the feet of palm and vine and know their appointed place;
And out of that subtle union, desert and mountain-flood,
Shall be homes for a nation’s choosing, where no homes else had stood.”
I
CONQUERORS OF SUN AND SAND
“Isn’t this invigorating?” said a passenger on the Sunset Limited to a
lounger on a station platform as he inhaled delightedly the crisp, clear
air of New Mexico.
“No, sir,” replied the man, who happened to be a native filled with civic
pride; “this is Deming.”
The story _may_ be true, of course; but if it isn’t it ought to be,
for it is wholly typical of the attitude of the citizens of the
youngest-but-one of our national family. Indeed, I had not spent
twenty-four hours within the borders of the State before I had discovered
that the most characteristic and likeable qualities of its inhabitants
are their pride and faith in the land wherein they dwell. And this
despite the fact that their neighbours across the line in Arizona refer
to New Mexico slightingly—though not without some truth—as a State “where
they dig for water and plough for wood.”
Perhaps no region in the world, certainly none in the United States, has
changed so remarkably in the space of a single decade. Ten years ago the
only things suggested by a mention of New Mexico were cowboys, Hopi
snake-dances, Navajo blankets, and Harvey eating-houses. Five years ago
Deming was as typical a cow-town as you could find west of the Pecos.
Gin-palaces and gambling-hells were running twenty-four hours a day;
cattlemen in Angora chaps and high-crowned sombreros lounged under the
shade of the wooden awnings and used the sidewalks of yellow pine for
cuspidors; wiry, unkempt cow-ponies stood in rows along the hitching
rails which lined a street ankle-deep in dust. Those were the careless
days of “chaps and taps and latigo-straps,” when writers of the Wild West
school of fiction could find characters, satisfying as though made to
their order, in every barroom, and groups of spurred and booted figures
awaited the moving-picture man (who had not then come into his own) on
every corner.
All southern New Mexico was held by experts—at least they called
themselves experts—to be a waterless and next-to-good-for-nothing waste.
Government engineers had traversed the region and, without considering
it worth the time or trouble to sink test wells, had written it down in
their reports as being a worthless desert; and the gentlemen who make
the school geographies and the atlases followed suit by painting it a
speckled yellow, like the Sahara and the Kalahari. Real-estate operators,
racing westward to earn a few speculative millions in California, glanced
from the windows of their Pullmans at the tedious expanse of sun-swept
sand and, with a regretful sigh that Providence had been so careless as
to forget the water, settled back to their magazines and their cigars.
So the cattlemen who had turned their longhorns in among the straggling
scrub, to get such a living as they could from the sparse desert grasses,
were left in undisturbed possession, and if their uniform success in
finding water wherever they sank their infrequent wells suggested any
agricultural possibilities they were careful to keep the thought to
themselves.
[Illustration: _From a photograph copyright by Fred Harvey._
A DESERT DAWN IN NEW MEXICO.]
One day, however, one of the men in the Pullman, instead of leaning
back regretfully, descended from the train, hired a horse, and rode out
into the mesquite-dotted waste. He told the liveryman that he was a
prospector, and, in a manner of speaking, he was. Being, incidentally,
the manager of one of the largest and most profitable ranches in
California, he was as familiar with the vagaries of the desert as a
cowboy is with the caprices of his pony; and, moreover, he understood
the science of irrigation from I to N. After a few days of quiet
investigation he dropped into the commissioner’s office in Deming one
morning and filed a claim for several hundred acres of land. Most of
those who heard about it said that he was merely a fool of a tenderfoot
who was throwing away his time and money and who ought to have a guardian
appointed to take care of him, but some of the wise old cattlemen looked
worried. Within a fortnight he had erected his machinery and was drilling
for water. And wherever his wells went down, there water came up: fine,
clear, sparkling water—gallons and gallons of it. It soused the thirsty
desert and turned its good-for-nothing sand into good-for-anything loam.
The seeds which the far-seeing Californian planted, sprouted, and the
sprouts became blades, and the blades shot into stalks of alfalfa and
corn and cane—and the future of all southern New Mexico was assured.
The news of the discovery of water in the Mimbres valley and of the
miracles that had been performed through its agency spread over the
country as though by wireless, and sun-tanned, horny-handed men from half
the States in the Union began to pile into Deming by every train, eager
to take up the land while it was still to be had under the hospitable
terms of the Homestead and Desert Land acts. It was in 1910 that the
Californian, John Hund, sunk his first well; when I was in the office of
the United States commissioner in Deming four years later I found that
the nearest unoccupied land was sixteen miles from the city limits.
Should you ever have occasion to fly over New Mexico in an aeroplane
you will have no difficulty whatever in recognising the Mimbres valley;
viewed from the sky it looks exactly like a bright-green rug spread
across one end of a vast hardwood floor. Most of the valley holdings
were, I noticed, of but ten or twenty acres, comparatively few of them
being more than fifty, for the New Mexican homesteader has found that
his bank-account increases faster if he cultivates ten acres thoroughly
rather than a hundred superficially. This lesson they have had hammered
into them not alone from experience but from observing the operations
of a couple of almond-eyed brethren named Wah, hailing originally,
I believe, from Canton, who own a twenty-three-acre truck-farm near
Deming. Those vineyards on the slopes of Capri and those farmsteads
clinging to the rocky hillsides of Calabria, where soil of any kind is
so precious that every inch is tended with pathetic care, seem but crude
and amateurish efforts in agriculture when compared with the efforts
to which these Chinese brothers have carried their intensive farming.
Though watered only by a small and primitive well, their farm graphically
illustrates what can be accomplished by paying attention to those
little things which the American farmer is accustomed contemptuously to
disregard, as well as being an object-lesson in the remarkable variety
of fruits and vegetables which the valley is capable of producing. These
Chinamen make every one of their acres produce three crops of vegetables
a year. Not a foot of soil is wasted. They even begrudge the narrow
strips which are used for paths. Fruit-trees and grape-vines border the
banks of the irrigation channels, and peas, beans, and tomatoes are grown
between melon rows. A drove of corpulent porkers attend voraciously to
the garden refuse and even the reservoir has had its usefulness doubled
by being stocked with fish. Were the New Mexicans notoriously _not_
lotus-eaters, the Brothers Wah would doubtless find still another use for
their reservoir by raising in it the Egyptian water-lily. It is paying
attention to such relatively insignificant details as these which makes
J. Chinaman, Esquire, the best gardener in the world. It pays, too,
for they told me in Deming that the Wahs, from their twenty-three-acre
holding, are increasing their bank-account at the rate of eight thousand
dollars a year. After noting the cordiality with which they were greeted
by the president of the local bank, I did not doubt it. I should like to
have a bank president greet me the way he did them.
I have seen many remarkable farming countries—in Rhodesia, for example,
and the hinterland of Morocco, and the Crimea, and the prairie provinces
of Canada, not to mention the Santa Clara and the Imperial valleys of
California—but I can recall none where soil and climate seemed to have
combined so effectively to befriend the farmer as in the valley of the
Mimbres. Imagine what a comfort it must be to do your farming in a region
where you will never have to worry about how long it will be before it
rains, nor to tramp about in the mud afterward. As the annual rainfall
in this portion of New Mexico does not exceed eight inches, there is
a generous margin left for sunshine. Instead of praying for rain, and
then cursing his luck because it doesn’t come, or because it comes too
heavily, the New Mexican farmer strolls over to his artesian well and
throws over an electric switch which sets the pump agoing. When his
fields are sufficiently irrigated he throws the switch back again. From
the view-point of health it would be hard to improve upon the climate
of the Mimbres valley, or, for that matter, of any other portion of
New Mexico, its elevation of four thousand three hundred feet, taken
with the fact that it is in the same latitude as Algeria and Japan and
southernmost California, giving it summers which are hot without being
humid or oppressive and winters which are never uncomfortably cold.
Like their neighbours in other parts of the Southwest, the farmers of
southern New Mexico have gone daft over alfalfa. To me—I might as well
admit it frankly—one patch of alfalfa looks exactly like another, and
they all look extremely uninteresting, but I suppose that if they were
netting me from fifty to seventy-five dollars an acre a year, as they
are their owners, I would take a more lively interest in them. I never
arrived at a town in New Mexico, dirty, hungry, and tired, but that there
was a group of eager boosters with a dust-covered automobile awaiting me
at the station.
“Jump right in,” they would say. “We have an alfalfa field over here that
we want to show you. It’s only about thirty miles across the desert and
we’ll get you back before the hotel dining-room is closed.”
They’re as enthusiastic about a patch of alfalfa in New Mexico as the
Esquimaux of Labrador are about a stranded whale.
If you have an idea that you would like to be a hardy frontiersman and
wear a broad-brimmed hat and become the owner of a ranch somewhere in
that region which lies between the Gila and the Pecos, it were well
to disabuse yourself of several erroneous impressions which seem
to prevail about life in the Southwest. In the first place, you can
dress just as much like the ranchmen whom you have seen depicted in
the magazines as you wish—fleecy _chaparejos_ and a horsehair hat
band and a pair of spurs that jingle like an approaching four-in-hand
when the wearer walks and all the rest of the paraphernalia—for they
are a tolerant folk, are the New Mexicans, and have become accustomed
to all sorts of queer doings by newcomers. In many respects they are
the politest people that I know. When I was in New Mexico I carried a
cane, and no one even smiled. But the newcomer must not imagine that
he can gallop madly across the ranges, at least in the vicinity of the
towns, for he is more likely than not to be hauled up before a justice
of the peace and fined for trespassing on some one’s alfalfa field or
cabbage patch. (Cabbages, though painfully prosaic, are about the most
profitable crop you can grow in New Mexico; they pay as high as three
hundred and fifty dollars an acre.) And the intending rancher must
make up his mind that he must begin at the beginning. New Mexico is no
place for the agriculturist _de luxe_ who expects to sit on the piazza
of his ranch-house and watch the hired men do the work. No, sirree! It
is a roll-up-your-sleeves-spit-on-your-hands-and-pitch-in land where
every one works and is proud of it. And there is always enough to do,
goodness knows! This is virgin soil, remember, and first of all it has
to be cleared of the _piñon_ and mesquite and chaparral which cover it.
This clearing and grubbing costs on an average, so I was told, about
five dollars an acre, but you get a supply of fire-wood in return—and
there’s nothing that makes a cheerier blaze on a winter’s night than a
hearth heaped with the roots of mesquite. In other countries you chop
down your fuel with an axe; in New Mexico you dig it up with a hoe.
Then there is the matter of well digging, which, including the cost of
boring, machinery, and housing, works out at from fifteen to twenty-five
dollars an acre. Since the construction of several large power-plants,
the cost of pumping has been greatly reduced by the use of electricity.
It is quite possible, of course, for the five or ten acre man to secure
tracts close to town with all the preliminary work done for him, water
being provided from a central pumping plant and his pro-rata share of the
capitalised cost added to the price of his land, which may be purchased,
like a piano or an encyclopedia, on the instalment plan. That will be
about all, I think, for facts and figures.
One of the most interesting things about the settlers with whom I talked
in southern New Mexico is that, so far as any previous knowledge of
agriculture was concerned, most of them were the veriest amateurs. One
man whom I met had taught school in Iowa for a quarter of a century, but
along in middle life he decided that there was more money to be made
in teaching corn and cabbages how to shoot than there was in teaching
the same thing to the young idea. Another was a Methodist clergyman
from Kentucky who told me that he had never had a real conception of
the hell-fire he preached about until he started in one scorching July
morning to sink an artesian well in the desert. Still a third successful
settler had been a physician in Oklahoma, while there are any number
of “long-horned Texicans,” as the Texan cattlemen are called, who have
moved over into New Mexico and become farmers. Scattered through the
country are a few Englishmen; not of the club-lounging, bar-loafing,
remittance-man type so common in Canada and Australia, but energetic,
hard-working youngsters who are earnestly engaged in building homes for
themselves in a new country and under an adopted flag. Not all of the
Englishmen who have come out to New Mexico have proven so steady or
successful, however, for a few years ago an English syndicate purchased
a Spanish land grant of some two million acres in the vicinity of Raton
and sent out a complete equipment of British managers, superintendents,
foremen, butlers, valets, men servants, lodge keepers, gardeners,
coachmen, and other functionaries, not to mention coaches, tandem carts,
a pack of foxhounds, and other paraphernalia of the sporting life. A man
who witnessed their detrainment at Raton told me that it was more fun
than watching the unloading of the Greatest Show on Earth. It was a great
life those Englishmen led while it lasted—tea at four every afternoon,
evening clothes for dinner, and then a few rubbers of bridge—but it
ended in the property being taken over at forced sale by a group of
hard-headed Hollanders, who harnessed the four-in-hands to ploughs, used
the tandem carts for hauling wood, set the hounds to churning butter, and
are making the big place pay dividends regularly.
Some two hundred miles north of Deming as the mail-train goes is
Albuquerque, the metropolis of the State—if the term metropolis can
properly be applied to a place with not much over twelve thousand
inhabitants—set squarely in the centre of the one hundred and twenty-two
thousand square mile parallelogram which is New Mexico. Albuquerque is
a railway centre of considerable importance, for from there one can
get through cars north to Denver and Pike’s Peak, south to the borders
of Mexico and its revolutions, and west to the Golden Gate. One of the
things that struck me most forcibly about Albuquerque—and the observation
is equally applicable to all the rest of New Mexico—is that instead of
having weather they enjoy climate. It is pretty hard to beat a land where
the moths have a chance to eat holes in your overcoat but never in your
bed blankets. Climate is, in fact, Albuquerque’s most valuable asset,
and she trades on it for all she is worth—and it is worth to her several
million dollars per annum. It is one of the few cities that I know of
where they want and welcome invalids and say so frankly. They could not
do otherwise with any consistency, however, for half the leading citizens
of the town arrived there on their backs, clinging desperately to life,
and were lifted out of the car window on a stretcher. These one-time
invalids are to-day as husky, energetic, up-and-doing men as you will
find anywhere. Heretofore Albuquerque has been much too busy catering
to the wants of the thousands of tourists and invalids who step onto
its station platform each year to pay much attention to agricultural
development; but bordering on the town are several thousand acres of as
fine, healthy desert as you will find anywhere outside of the Sahara.
They are enclosed, as though by a great garden wall, by the Manzano
ranges, and the gentleman who whirled me across the billiard-table
surface of the desert in his motor-car told me that the government now
has an irrigation project under consideration which, by damming the
waters of the Rio Grande, will reclaim upward of four hundred thousand
acres of this arid land. And the great government irrigation projects now
in operation elsewhere in the Southwest have shown that water can produce
as many things from a desert as the late Monsieur Hermann could from
a gentleman’s hat. So one of these days, I expect, the country around
Albuquerque, from the city limits to the distant foot-hills, will be as
green with alfalfa as Ireland is with shamrock.
They have a commercial club in Albuquerque that _is_ a club. At first I
thought I had wandered into a hotel by mistake, for, with its spacious
lobby, its busy billiard-tables, its handsome rugs and furniture, and
the mahogany desk with the solicitous clerk behind it, it is about as
distantly related to the usual commercial club as one could well imagine.
It gives those men in the community who are doing things, and the others
who want to be doing things or ought to be doing things, a place where
they can meet and discuss, over tall, thin glasses with ice tinkling in
them, the perennial problems of taxes, pavements, irrigation, crops,
fishing, house building, automobiles, and the climate. I would suggest to
the club’s board of governors, however, that it take steps to remove the
undertaker’s establishment which flanks the entrance. When one drops into
a place to get some facts regarding the desirability of settling there,
it is not exactly reassuring to be greeted by a pile of coffins.
Whoever was responsible for the architecture of the University of New
Mexico buildings, which stand in the outskirts of Albuquerque, deserves
a metaphorical slap of commendation. New Mexico is a young State and not
yet overly rich in this world’s goods, so that if, with their limited
resources, they had attempted to erect collegiate buildings along the
usual hackneyed lines, with Doric porticoes and gilded cupolas and all
that sort of thing, the result would probably have looked more like a
third-rate normal school than like a State university. But they did
nothing of the sort. Instead, they erected buildings adapted from the
ancient communal cliff dwellings, constructing them of the native adobe,
which is durable, inexpensive, warm in winter and in summer cool. All
the decorations, inside and out, are Indian symbols and pictures painted
in dull colors upon the adobe walls. Thus, at a moderate cost, they have
a group of buildings which typify the history of New Mexico and are in
harmony with its strongly characteristic landscape; which are admirably
suited to the climate; and which are unique among collegiate institutions
in that they are modelled after those great houses in which the Hopi
lived and worked before the dawn of history on the American continent.
Santa Fé, the capital of the State, is, to my way of thinking, the
quaintest and most fascinating city between the oceans. Very old, very
sleepy, very picturesque, it presents more neglected opportunities than
any place I know. I should like to have a chance to stage-manage Santa
Fé, for the scenery, which ranks among the best efforts of the Great
Scene Painter, is all set and the costumed actors are waiting in the
wings for their cues. Give it the advertising it deserves and the curtain
could be rung up to a capacity house. Where else within our borders is
there a three-hundred-year-old palace whose red-tiled roof has sheltered
nearly five-score governors—Spanish, Pueblo, Mexican, and American? (In
a back room of the palace, as you doubtless know, General Lew Wallace,
while governor of New Mexico, wrote “Ben Hur.”) Where else are Indians
in scarlet blankets and beaded moccasins, their braided hair hanging in
front of their shoulders in long plaits, as common sights in the streets
as are traffic policemen on Broadway? Where else can you see groups of
cow-punchers on sweating, dancing ponies and sullen-faced Mexicans in
high-crowned hats and gaudy sashes, and dusty prospectors with their
patient pack-mules plodding along behind them, and diminutive burros
trotting to market under burdens so enormous that nothing can be seen of
the burro but his ears and tail?
Though at present it is only a sleepy and forgotten backwater, with the
main arteries of commerce running along their steel channels a score of
miles away, Santa Fé could be made, at a small expenditure of anything
save energy and taste, one of the great tourist Meccas of America. To
begin with, it is the only place still left in the United States where
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West could merge into the landscape without causing
a stampede. Those who know how much pains and money were spent by the
municipality of Brussels in restoring a single square of that city to
its original mediæval picturesqueness, whole blocks of brick and stone
having to be torn down to produce the desired effect, will appreciate the
possibilities of Santa Fé, where the necessary restorations have only to
be made in inexpensive adobe. Desultory efforts are being made, it is
true, to induce the residents to promote this scheme for a harmonious
ensemble by restricting their architecture to those quaint and simple
designs so characteristic of the country, the Board of Trade providing
an object-lesson in the possibilities of the humble adobe by erecting
a charming little two-room cottage, with an open fireplace, a veranda,
and a pergola, at a total expense of one hundred dollars, but every now
and then the sought-for architectural harmony is given a rude jolt by
some one who could not resist the attractions of Queen Anne gables or
Clydesdale piazza columns or Colonial red-brick-and-green-blinds.
Set at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo Range, a mile above the level of
the sea, with one of the kindliest all-the-year-round climates in the
world, and with an atmosphere which is far more Oriental than American,
Santa Fé has the making of just such another “show town” as Biskra,
in southern Algeria, where Hichens laid the scene of “The Garden of
Allah.” If its citizens would wake up to its possibilities sufficiently
to advertise it as scores of Californian towns with not half of its
attractions are advertised; if they would restore the more historically
important of the crumbling adobe buildings to their original condition
and erect their new buildings in the same characteristic and inexpensive
style; if they would keep the streets alive with the colourful figures
of blanketed Indians and Mexican venders of silver filigree; and if the
local hotel would have the originality to meet the incoming trains with
a four-horse Concord coach, such as is inseparably associated with the
Santa Fé Trail, instead of a ramshackle bus, they would soon have so many
visitors piling into the New Mexican capital that they could not take
care of them. But they are a _dolce far niente_ folk, are the people of
Santa Fé, and I expect that they will placidly continue along the same
happy, easy, sleepy path that they have always followed. And perhaps it
is just as well that they should.
[Illustration: A dwelling.
A street.
_From a photograph copyright by Jess Nusbaum._ Interior of a room.
SANTA FÉ: THE MOST PICTURESQUE CITY BETWEEN THE OCEANS.]
“They call me Santa Fé for short,” the New Mexican capital might answer
if one inquired its name, “but my whole name is La Ciudad Real de la
Santa Fé de San Francisco,” which, translated into our own tongue,
means “The Royal City of the Holy Faith of Saint Francis.” It is some
name—there is no denying that—but historically the town is quite able to
live up to it. Fifteen years before the anchor of the _Mayflower_ rumbled
down off New England’s rocky coast, Juan de Oñate, an adventurous and
gold-hungry gentleman of Spain, marching up from Mexico, had raised over
the Indian pueblo which had occupied this site from time beyond reckoning
the banner of Castile. In 1680 came the great Indian revolt; the Spanish
soldiers and settlers were surprised and massacred and the brown-robed
friars were slain on the altars of the churches they had built. For
twelve years the Pueblos ruled the land. Then came De Vargas, at the
head of a column of steel-capped and cuirassed soldiery and, after a
ferocious reckoning with the Indians, retook the city in the name of his
Most Catholic Majesty of Spain. With the overthrow of Spanish dominion
in Mexico, the City of the Holy Faith became the northernmost outpost of
the Mexican Republic, and Mexican it remained until that August morning
in 1846 when General Kearney and his brass-helmeted dragoons clattered
into its plaza and raised on the palace flagstaff a flag that was never
to come down. That episode is commemorated by a marble shaft which rises
amid the cottonwoods on the historic plaza. On its base are carved the
words in which General Kearney proclaimed the annexation of New Mexico
to the United States:
“_We come as friends to make you a part of the representative government.
In our government all men are equal. Every man has a right to serve God
according to his conscience and his heart._”
At the other end of the plaza another monument marks the end of the
famous Santa Fé Trail, over which, in prairie-schooners and Concord
coaches and on the backs of mules and horses, was borne the commerce of
the prairies. Santa Fé was to the historic trail of which it was the
end what Bagdad is to the caravan routes across the Persian desert. No
sooner would the lead team of one of these mile-long wagon-trains top
the surrounding hills than word of its approach would spread through
Santa Fé like wildfire. “_Los Americanos! Los Carros! La Caravana!_”
the inhabitants would call to one another as they turned their faces
plazaward, for the coming of a wagon-train was as much of an event as
is the arrival of a steamer at a South Sea island. By the time that the
first of the creaking, white-topped wagons, with its five yoke of oxen,
had come to a halt before the custom-house, every inhabitant of the
town was in the streets. A necessary preliminary to any trading was for
the chief trader to make a call of ceremony upon the Spanish governor
and, after a laboured interchange of salutes and compliments, to pay
him the enormous toll of five hundred dollars per wagon imposed by the
Spanish government upon wagon-trains coming from the United States.
It came out of the pockets of the Spaniards in the end, however, for
the American traders simply added it to the prices which they charged
for their merchandise, which were high enough already, goodness knows:
linen brought four dollars a yard, broadcloth twenty-five dollars a
yard, and everything else in proportion. It is no wonder that the
traders of the plains often retired as wealthy men. Stephen B. Elkins
came to New Mexico, where he was to found his fortune, as bull-whacker
in a wagon-train; one of the traders, Bent by name, came in time to sit
himself in the governor’s palace in Santa Fé; and Kit Carson’s earlier
years were spent in guiding these commercial expeditions. With the
driving of the last spike in the Union Pacific Railroad, however, the
importance of Santa Fé as a half-way house on the overland route to
California vanished, and since then it has dwelt, contentedly enough, in
its glorious climate and its memories of the past.
Up the Cañon of the Santa Fé, over the nine-thousand-foot Dalton Divide,
and down into the Cañon of the Macho, several hundred gentlemen, in
garments of a somewhat conspicuous pattern provided by the State,
are building what will in time take rank as one of the world’s great
highways. It is to be called the Scenic Highway, and when it is
completed it will form a section of the projected Camino Real from
Denver to El Paso. It promises to be to the American Southwest what the
Sorrento-Amalfi Drive is to southern Italy and the famous Corniche Road
is to the south of France. By means of switchbacks—twenty-two of them in
all—it will wind up the precipitous slopes of the great Dalton Divide,
twist and turn among the snow-capped titans of the Sangre de Cristo
Range, skirt the edges of sheer precipices and dizzy chasms, drop down
through the leafy solitudes of the Pecos Forest Reserve, and then stretch
its length across the rolling uplands toward Taos, the pyramid-city of
the Pueblos.
Within a hundred-mile radius of Santa Fé are three of the most wonderful
“sights” in this or any other country: the hill-city of Acoma, the
pyramid-pueblo of Taos (both of which are described at length in the
succeeding chapter) and the Pajarito National Park. The Pajarito
(in Spanish, remember, the j takes the sound of h) provides what is
unquestionably the richest field of archæological research in the United
States, the remains of the inconceivably ancient civilisation with which
it is literally strewn, bearing much the same relation to the history of
the New World that the ruins of Upper Egypt do to that of the Old. To
reach the Pajarito, where the ruins of the cave people exist, you can
ride or drive or motor. As the distance from Santa Fé is only about forty
miles, if you are willing to get up with the chickens you can make it in
a single day. Comfortable sleeping quarters and excellent meals can be
had at the hospitable ranch-house of Judge Abbott, or, if you prefer, you
can take along a pair of blankets and some provisions and sleep high and
dry in a cave once occupied by one of your very remote ancestors. The
very courteous gentlemen in charge of the American School of Archæology
at Santa Fé are always glad to furnish information regarding the best way
to enter the Pajarito. Twenty odd miles north of Santa Fé and, debouching
quite unexpectedly upon the flat summit of a mesa, you look down upon the
iridescent ribbon which is the Rio Grande as it twists and turns between
the sheer, smooth walls of chalky rock which form the sides of White
Rock Cañon. Coming into this great gorge at right angles are the smaller
cañons—chief among them the one known as the Rito de los Frijoles—in
whose precipitous walls the cave folk hewed their homes. Some of these
smaller cañons are hundreds of feet above the bed of the Rio Grande, with
openings barely wide enough to let the mountain streams fall through into
the river below.
You must picture the Rito de los Frijoles as an immensely long and
narrow cañon—so narrow that Rube Marquard could probably pitch a stone
across—with walls as steep and smooth and twice as high as those of
the Flatiron Building. Then you must picture the lower face of this
rocky wall as being literally honeycombed by thousands—and when I say
thousands I do not mean hundreds—of windows and doors and port-holes
and apertures and other openings to caves hollowed from the soft
rock of the cliffs. It is a city of the dead, silent as a mausoleum,
mysterious as the lines of the hand, older than recorded history. This
once populous city consisted of a single street, _twelve miles long_,
its cave-dwellings, which were reached by ladders or by steps cut in the
soft tufa, rising above each other, tier on tier, like some Gargantuan
apartment building. Such portions of the face of the cliff as are not
perforated with doors and windows are embellished with pictographs,
many of them in an extraordinary state of preservation, which, if the
sight-seeing public only knew it, are as interesting and far more
perplexing than the wall-paintings in the Tombs of the Kings at Thebes.
On the floor of the valley the archæologists have laid bare the ruins
of a circular community house which, when viewed from above, bears a
striking resemblance to the ancient Greek theatre at Taormina, while on
the Puyé to the north a communal building of twelve hundred rooms—larger
than the Waldorf-Astoria—has been excavated. Farther down the Rito is
the stone circle or dancing floor to which the prehistoric young folk
descended to make merry, while their parents kept an eye on them from
their houses in the cliff. (I doubt not that, when the sun began to
sink behind the Jemez, some skin-clad mother would lean from the window
of her fifth-story flat and shrilly call to her daughter, engrossed in
learning the steps of the prehistoric equivalent of the tango on the
dancing floor below: “A-ya, come up this minute! You hear me? Your paw’s
just come home with a dinosaur and he wants it cooked for supper.”) Three
miles up the cañon, half a thousand feet up the face of the cliff, is
the arched ceremonial cave where, secure from prying eyes, this strange
people performed their still stranger rites. Thanks to the energy of
the American Archæological Society, this cave has been restored to the
same condition in which it was when prehistoric lodge members worked
their mysterious degrees and made the quaking initiates ride the goat.
Though it is the aim of the society to year by year restore portions of
the Rito until the whole cañon has returned to its original condition,
such difficulty has been experienced in obtaining the necessary funds
that at the present rate of progress it will take a century to effect a
complete restoration. Yet our millionaires pour out their wealth like
water to promote the excavation and restoration of the ruins of alien
peoples in other lands. Though carloads of pottery and utensils have
been carted away to enrich museums and private collections, the surface
of the Pajarito has been scarcely scratched, _more than twenty thousand_
communal caves and dwellings remaining to tempt the seekers of lost
cities. Where did the inhabitants of this strange city go—and why? What
swept their civilisation away? When did the age-old silence fall? These
are questions which even the archæologists do not attempt to answer. All
that they can assert with any degree of certainty is that the caves which
underlie the communal dwellings in the Pajarito yield ample evidence of
having been occupied by human beings in the days of the lava flow, when
the mastodon and the dinosaur roamed the land and the world was very,
very young.
[Illustration: “The arched ceremonial cave where ... this strange people
performed their still stranger rites.”
“The archæologists have laid bare the ruins of a circular community
house.”
REMAINS OF AN ANCIENT CIVILISATION.]
* * * * *
Of the three great elemental industries of New Mexico—cattle raising,
sheep raising, and mining—cattle raising was the first and, more
than any other, gave colour to the country. The early Spanish and
Mexican settlers were cow-men, and the old Sonora stock, “all horns and
backbone,” may still be seen on some of the interior ranges, though they
are now almost a thing of the past. Then came the great wagon-trains
of Texans, California bound, many of whom, attracted by the wealth of
pasturage, stopped off and turned their long-horned cattle out on the
grass-grown desert. As Texas and the Middle West became fenced and
civilised, the old-time cattlemen drove their herds farther and farther
toward the setting sun. In those days there were no sheep to compete for
the pasture; mountains and desert were clothed with grass so rich and
long that they looked as though they were upholstered in green velvet;
there was not a strand of barbed wire between the Pecos and the Colorado.
New Mexico was indeed the cow-man’s paradise. Though the range has in
many places been ruined by droughts and overstocking; though a woolly
wave has encroached upon the lands which the cow-man had regarded as
inalienably his own, there are, nevertheless, close to a million head
of cattle within the borders of the State, by far the greater part of
which are Herefords and Durhams, for the imported stock has increased the
cow-man’s profits out of all proportion to the initial expense.
Feeding with equal right and freedom upon the same public domain are
upward of five million head of sheep, for New Mexico is the home of the
wool industry in America. The early Spanish settlers kept large flocks
of the straight-necked, coarse-wooled Mexican sheep in the country around
Santa Fé, and from them the Navajos and Moquis, those industrious weavers
of blankets and workers in silver, soon stole or bartered for enough to
start a sheep business of their own, it being said that a third of all
the sheep in the State are now owned by Indians. Unlike cattle, sheep,
in cool weather, can exist without water for a month at a time; so, when
the desert turns from yellow to green in the spring, they drift out over
it in great flocks which look for all the world like fleecy clouds. Each
flock, which usually consists of several thousand sheep, is attended by a
herder and his “rustler,” who cooks, packs in supplies, and brings water
in casks from the nearest stream for the use of the herder and his dogs,
the juicy browse providing all the moisture that the sheep require.
Owing to its warm, dry weather, New Mexico is one of the earliest
shearing stations in the world, the work beginning the latter part of
January and lasting until the first of May. In this time enough wool is
clipped to supply a considerable portion of the people of the United
States with suits and blankets. Until quite recently the shearing of the
wool was a long and tedious task, even the more expert hand shearers
seldom being able to average more than sixty or seventy fleeces a day.
When machine shearing was introduced into New Mexico a few years age,
however, this daily average was promptly doubled. Sheep-shearers are
probably the best-paid and hardest-working class of men in the world,
receiving from seven to eight and a half cents a head and averaging one
hundred and twenty-five sheep a day. The best of them, however, shear
from two to three hundred sheep in a single day, the record, I believe,
being three hundred and twenty-five. As the shearing season only lasts
through six months of the year, during which time they must travel from
Texas to Montana, the unionised shearers demand and receive high wages,
some of them making as much as twenty dollars a day. Yet, in spite of
this and of the grazing fee of six cents a head for all sheep that feed
on forest reserves, it is safe to say that the wool-growers are the most
prosperous men in New Mexico.
* * * * *
The social fabric of New Mexico is a curious blending of Mexicans,
Indians, and Americans. Of these elements the Mexicans are by far the
most numerous, their customs, costumes, and language lending a decidedly
Spanish flavour to the country. Living for the most part in scattered
settlements along the mountain streams or in their own quarters in the
towns, they enjoy a lazy, irresponsible, and not uncomfortable existence
in return for their humble labour, not differing materially, either in
their mode of life, manners, or morals, from their kinsmen below the
Rio Grande. Shiftless, indolent, indifferently honest, the peons of
New Mexico, like the South African Kaffirs and the Egyptian fellaheen,
are nevertheless invaluable to the welfare of the State, for they
perform practically all the labour on the ranches, mines, and railways.
Politically they are an element to be reckoned with, about seventy-five
per cent of the population of Santa Fé being Mexicans, while sixty per
cent of the State Legislature is from the same race. As a result of this
Latin preponderance in the population, practically all Americans in New
Mexico are compelled to have at least a working knowledge of Spanish,
which is really the _lingua franca_ of the country, it being by no means
unusual to find one who speaks it better than the Mexicans themselves.
Owing to the great influx of settlers during the last few years, the
Mexican proportion of the population has been greatly reduced, as is
confirmed by the increasing use of the English language and of English
newspapers.
One of the strangest religious sects in the world—the Penitentes—are
recruited from the Mexican element of the population. Although this
dread form of religious fanaticism has its centre in the region about
San Mateo, it permeates peon life in every quarter of the State. For the
Penitente is not an Indian; he is a Mexican. The Indians of the Pueblos
repudiate Penitente practices. Neither is the Penitente a Catholic, for
the Church has fought his terrible rites tooth and nail, though thus
far it has fought them in vain. He is really a grim survivor of those
secret orders whose fanaticism and religious excesses became a byword
even in the calloused Europe of the Middle Ages. The sect is divided
into two branches: the Brothers of Light—_La Luz_—and the Brothers of
Darkness—_Las Tinieblas_. Though they hold secret meetings with more
or less regularity throughout the year in their lodges or _morados_,
they are really active only during the forty days of Lent. During that
period both men and women flog their naked backs with scourges of aloe
fibre, wind their limbs with wire or rope so tightly as to stop the
circulation, lie for hours at a time on beds of cactus, make pilgrimages
to mountain shrines with their unstockinged feet in shoes filled with
jagged flints, stagger torturing miles across the sun-baked desert under
the weight of enormous crosses, while on Good Friday this carnival of
torture culminates in one of their number, chosen by lot, actually being
crucified. It has been a number of years, however, since a Penitente has
died on the cross, for, since the law came to New Mexico, they have found
it wiser to fasten their willing victim to the cross with rope instead of
nails. Though sporadic efforts have been made to break up the sect, they
have thus far been unsuccessful, as it is no secret that many men high in
the political life of New Mexico bear on their backs the tattooed cross
which is the symbol of the order.
Though the growth of the white population has heretofore been slow,
it has begun to increase by leaps and bounds with the development of
irrigation. Though New Mexico now contains representatives from every
State in the Union and from pretty much every country in the world, the
average run of society exhibits a tendency toward high-crowned hats that
shows the dominating influence of Texas. They are, I think, the most
hospitable folk that I have ever met; they are tolerant of other people’s
opinions; have a tendency to ride rather than walk; are ready to fight at
the drop of the hat; hate to count their money; lie only for the sake of
entertainment; like a big proposition; and know how to handle it—there
you have them, the gentlemen of New Mexico. But don’t go out to New
Mexico, my Eastern friends, with the idea that you can butt into society
with the aid of a good cigar—because you can’t. They are a free-born,
free-living, free-speaking folk, are the dwellers out in the back country
where the desert meets the mountains and the mountains meet the sky, and
they don’t give a whoop-and-hurrah whether you come or stay away.
* * * * *
Such, in brief, bold outline, is the New Mexico of to-day. I have
tried to paint you a picture, as well as I know how, of the progress,
potentialities, and prospects of this, the youngest but one of the
sisterhood of States. Though New Mexico, as a Territory, was willing
enough to be a synonym for Indian villages and snake-dances and cavorting
cowboys, the State of New Mexico stands for something very different
indeed. Though it welcomes the tourists who come-look-see-spend-go, it
prefers the settlers who are prepared to stay and make it their home.
Unlike its sister State of Arizona, New Mexico does not suffer from that
greatest of privations—lack of water—for the mountain-flood waters that
now go to waste would store great reservoirs, there is the flow of
numerous streams and river systems, and below the surface are artesian
belts of water waiting only to be tapped by the farmer’s well. That the
soil, once watered, is very fertile is best proved by the orchards,
gardens, and meadows which cover the valleys of the Mimbres and the
Pecos. Ten years ago the cattlemen of New Mexico used to say that it
took “sixty acres to raise a steer”; to-day, thanks to irrigation, a
single acre of alfalfa does the business. In gold, silver, coal, and
copper the State is very rich—the largest copper mine in the world is at
Silver City—while its turquoise deposits surpass those of Persia. And the
people are as big-hearted and broad-minded and open-handed as you will
find anywhere on earth. Taking it by and large, therefore, a man with
some experience, a little capital, plenty of energy and ambition, and an
intimate acquaintance with hard work should go a long way in New Mexico.
He would find down there a big, new, unfenced, up-and-doing country and
a set of sun-bronzed, iron-hard, self-reliant men of whom any country
might be proud. These men are the modern _conquistadores_, for they have
conquered sun and sand. To-day they are only commonplace farmers, but,
when history has granted them the justice of perspective, they will be
called the Pioneers.
II
THE SKYLANDERS
“Here still a lofty rock remains,
On which the curious eye may trace
(Now wasted half by wearing rains)
The fancies of a ruder race.
...
And long shall timorous Fancy see
The painted chief, and pointed spear,
And Reason’s self shall bow the knee
To shadows and delusions here.”
II
THE SKYLANDERS
Six minutes after midnight the mail-train came thundering out of nowhere.
With hissing steam and brakes asqueal it paused just long enough for me
to drop off and then roared on its transcontinental way again to the
accompaniment of a droning chant which quickly dropped into diminuendo,
its scarlet tail lamps disappearing at forty miles an hour, leaving me
abandoned in the utter darkness of the desert. The Casa Alvarado at
Albuquerque, with its red-shaded candles and snowy napery, where I had
dined only four hours before, seemed very far away. Some one flashed a
lantern in my face and a voice behind it inquired:
“Are you the gent that’s goin’ to Acoma?”
“I am,” said I, “if I can get there.”
“Well, I reckon you’ll get there all right, seein’ as how the trader at
Laguna’s sent a rig over for you. Bob made a little money on a bunch o’
cattle a while back and he’s been pretty damned independent ever since
’bout takin’ folks over to Acoma. Says it’s too hard on his horses. But
when Bob says he’ll do a thing he does it. Hi, Charlie!” he shouted, “you
over there?”
A guttural affirmative came out of the blackness. As the loquacious
station agent made no offer to light my footsteps, I cautiously picked
my way across the rails, slid down a steep embankment into a ditch,
scrambled out of it, and descried before me the vague outlines of a
ramshackle vehicle drawn by a pair of wiry, unkempt ponies.
“How?” grunted the driver, who, as my eyes became accustomed to the
darkness, I saw was an Indian, his hair, plaited in two long braids with
strands of vivid flannel interwoven, hanging in front of his shoulders,
schoolgirl fashion. I clambered in, the Indian spoke to his ponies, and,
breaking into a lope, they swung off across the desert, the wretched
vehicle lurching and pitching behind them.
It is an unforgettable experience, a ride across the New Mexican desert
in the night-time. The sky is like purple velvet and the stars seem very
near. The silence is not the peaceful stillness that comes with nightfall
in settled regions, but the mysterious, uncanny hush that hangs over
other ancient and deserted lands—Upper Egypt, for example, and Turkestan.
Our way was lined with dim, fantastic shapes whose phantom arms seemed to
warn or beckon or implore, but which, in the prosaic light of morning,
resolved themselves into clumps of piñon, and mesquite, and prickly-pear.
The ponies shied suddenly at a stirring in the underbrush—probably a
rattlesnake disturbed—and in the distance a coyote gave dismal tongue.
Slipping and sliding down a declivity so abrupt that the axles were level
with the ponies’ backs, we rattled across the stone-strewn bed of an
_arroyo seco_, as they term a dried-up watercourse in that half-Spanish
region, and clattered into a settlement whose squat, flat-roofed hovels
of adobe, unlighted and silent as the houses of Pompeii, showed dimly on
either hand.
“Laguna?” I inquired.
“Uh-huh,” responded my taciturn companion, pulling up his ponies
sharply before a dwelling considerably more pretentious than the rest.
“Trader’s,” he added laconically.
As, stiff, chilled, and weary, I scrambled down, the door swung open to
reveal a lean figure in shirt and trousers, silhouetted by the light from
a guttering candle.
“I’m the trader,” said he. “I reckon you’re the party we’ve been
expectin’. We ain’t got much accommodation to offer you, but, such as it
is, you’re welcome to it. I’m afeard my youngsters’ll keep you awake,
though. I’ve got six on ’em an’ they’ve all got the whoopin’-cough, so me
an’ my old woman hain’t had a chanct to shet our eyes for the last week.”
It wasn’t the cough-harassed children who kept me wide-eyed and tossing
through the night, however. It was Sheridan, I think, who remarked that
had the fleas of a certain bed upon which he once slept been unanimous,
they could easily have pushed him out. Had the tiny hordes which were in
possession of my couch had an insect Kitchener to organise and lead them,
I should certainly have had to spend the night upon the floor. I learned
afterward that the Indians of the neighbouring pueblos have a name for
Laguna which, in the white man’s tongue, means “Scratch-town.”
From Laguna to Acoma is a four hours’ drive across the desert. It is very
rough and more than once I feared that I should require the services of
an osteopath to rejoint my vertebræ. And it is inconceivably dusty, the
ponies kicking up clouds of fine, shifting sand which fills your eyes
and nose and ears and sifts through your garments until you feel as
though you were covered with sandpaper instead of skin. The sun beats
down until the arid expanse of the desert is as hot as the whitewashed
base of a railway-station stove at white heat. Everything considered,
it is not the sort of a drive that one would choose for pleasure, but
it is a very wonderful drive nevertheless, for the New Mexican desert
is a kaleidoscope of colour. It is a land of black rocks and orange
sand, flecked with discouraged, hopeless-looking clumps of sage-green
vegetation; of violet, and amethyst, and purple mountain ranges; and
overhead a sky of the brightest blue you will find anywhere outside a
wash-tub. The cloud effects are the most beautiful I have ever seen,
great masses of fleecy cirrus drifting lazily, like flocks of new-washed
sheep, across the turquoise sky. Everywhere the colours are splashed on
with a barbaric, almost a theatrical, touch. It is a regular back-drop
of a country; its scenery looks as though it should have been painted on
a curtain. When a party of Indians, with scarlet handkerchiefs twisted
about their heads pirate fashion, lope by astride of spotted ponies, the
illusion is complete. “You’re not really in New Mexico, you know,” you
say to yourself. “This is much too theatrical to be real. You’re sitting
in an orchestra chair watching a play, that’s what you’re doing.”
[Illustration: _From a photograph by A. C. Vroman._
THE LAND OF THE TURQUOISE SKY.
“Great masses of fleecy cirrus drifting lazily, like flocks of new-washed
sheep, across the turquoise sky.”]
Swinging sharply around the shoulder of a sand-dune, a mesa—a table-land
of rock—reared itself out of the plain as unexpectedly as a slap in
the face. The driver pointed unconcernedly with his whip. “_La Mesa
Encantada_,” he grunted. The Enchanted Mesa! Was there ever a name which
so reeked with mystery and romance? Picture, if you can, a bandbox-shaped
rock, almost flat on top and covering as much ground as a good-sized city
square, higher than the Times Building in New York and with sides almost
as perpendicular, set down in the middle of the flattest, yellowest
desert the imagination can conceive. Seen from the distance, it suggests
the stump of an inconceivably gigantic tree—a tree a thousand feet in
diameter and sawed squarely off four hundred and thirty feet above the
ground. On one side it is as sheer and smooth as that face of Gibraltar
which looks Spainward, and when the evening sun strikes it slantingly
it turns the monstrous mass of sandstone into a pile of rosy coral. It
is one of the most impressive things that I have ever seen. Solitary,
silent, mysterious, redolent of legend and superstition, older than Time
itself, it suggests, without in any way resembling, those Colossi of
Memnon which stare out across the desert from ruined Thebes.
Those disputatious cousins Science and Tradition seem to have agreed for
once that the original Acoma stood on the top of the _Mesa Encantada_,
or Katzimo, as the Indians call it, in the days when the world was
very young. Ever since Katzimo first attracted scientific attention
the archælogists have quarrelled like cats and dogs over this question
of whether it had ever been inhabited, just as they are quarrelling in
Palestine as to the site of Calvary. A few years ago the Smithsonian
Institution, desirous of settling the controversy for good and all,
despatched to New Mexico a gentleman of an inquiring turn of mind,
who succeeded in performing the supposedly impossible feat of scaling
the sheer cliffs which, from time beyond reckoning, have guarded the
secret of the mesa. On the plateau at the top he found fragments of
earthenware utensils, which would seem to prove quite conclusively that
it had been inhabited in long-past ages by human beings, thus supporting
the traditions which prevail among the Indians regarding this mighty
monolith. Whether the Enchanted Mesa has ever been inhabited I do not
know; no one knows; and, to tell the truth, it does not greatly matter.
According to the legend current among the Pueblos, this island in the air
was originally accessible by means of a huge, detached fragment leaning
against it at such an angle that it formed a precarious and perilous
ladder to the top. Its difficulty of access was more than compensated
for, however, by its security from the attacks of enemies, whether on
two feet or four, for Katzimo is supposed to have echoed to human
voices in those dim and distant days when the mastodon and the dinosaur
roamed the land. The Indian legend has it that, while the men of the
tribe were absent on a hunting expedition and the able-bodied women were
hoeing corn in the fields below, some cataclysm of nature—most probably
an earthquake—jarred loose the ladder rock and toppled it over into the
plain, leaving the town on the summit as completely cut off from human
help as though it were on another planet. The women and children thus
isolated perished miserably from starvation, and their spirits, so the
Indians will assure you, still haunt the summit of Katzimo. On any windy
night you can hear them for yourself, moaning and wailing for the help
that never came. That is why it were easier to persuade a Mississippi
darky to spend a night in a graveyard than to induce an Indian to linger
in the vicinity of the Enchanted Mesa after dark.
[Illustration: _From a photograph by A. C. Vroman._
“A bandbox-shaped rock, higher than the Times Building in New York and
with sides almost as perpendicular.”
_From a photograph by A. C. Vroman._
“The mesa on which the modern Acoma is perched might be likened to a
gigantic billiard-table three hundred and fifty-seven feet high.”
ACOMA: SUPPOSED ANCIENT SITE AND PRESENT SITE.]
The survivors of the tribe chose as the site of their new town the top
of a somewhat lower mesa, three miles or so from their former home. If
the Enchanted Mesa resembles a titanic bandbox, the mesa on which the
modern Acoma is perched might be likened to a gigantic billiard-table,
three hundred and fifty-seven feet high, seventy acres in area upon its
level top, and supported by precipices which are not merely perpendicular
but in many cases actually overhanging. It presents one of the most
striking examples of erosion in the world, does Acoma, the sand which
has been hurled against it by the wind of ages, as by a natural
sand-blast, having cut the soft rock into forms more fantastic than were
ever conjured up by Little Nemo in his dreams. Battlements, turrets,
arches, minarets, and gargoyles of weather-worn, tawny-tinted rock rise
on every hand. There are two routes to the summit and both of them
require leathern lungs and seasoned sinews. One, called, if I remember
rightly, the “Padre’s Path,” is little more than a crevasse in the solid
rock, its ascent necessitating the vigorous use of knees and elbows
as well as hands and feet, it being about as easy to negotiate as the
outside of the Statue of Liberty. The other path, which is considerably
longer, suggests the stone-paved ascent to some stronghold of the Middle
Ages—and, when you come to think about it, that is precisely what it
is—the resemblance being heightened by the massive battlements of eroded
rock between which it winds and the strings of patient donkeys which plod
up it, faggot-laden. Though of fair width near the bottom, it gradually
narrows as it zigzags upward, finally becoming so slim that there is
not room between the face of the cliff and the brink of the precipice
for two donkeys to pass. It was at this inauspicious spot that I first
encountered one of these dwellers in the sky—“skylanders” they might
fittingly be called. He was a low-browed, sullen-looking fellow, with a
skin the colour of a well-worn saddle and an expression about as pleasant
as a rainy morning. His shock of coarse black hair had been bobbed
just below the ears and was kept back from his eyes by the inevitable
_banda_; his legs were encased in _chaparejos_ of fringed buckskin, and
his shirt tails fluttered free. He came jogging down the perilous pathway
astride of a calico donkey and, with the background of rocks and sand,
cut a very striking and savage figure indeed. “He’ll make a perfectly
bully picture,” I said to myself, and, suiting the action to the thought,
I unlimbered my camera and ambushed myself behind a projecting shoulder
of rock. As he swung into the range of my lens I snapped the shutter.
It was speeded up to a hundredth of a second, but in much less time
than that he had dismounted and was coming for me with a club. I have
read somewhere that the Acomas are a mild-mannered, inoffensive folk.
Well, perhaps. Still, I was glad that I had in my jacket pocket the
largest-sized automatic used by a civilised people, and I was still
gladder when Man-That-Wouldn’t-Have-His-Picture-Taken, glimpsing its
ominous outline through the cloth, moved sullenly away, shaking his stick
and muttering sentiments which needed no translation. He was an artist
in the way he laid on his curses, was that Indian. An army mule-skinner
would have taken off his hat to him in admiration.
Of all the nineteen pueblos of New Mexico, Acoma is the most interesting
by far. Indeed, I do not think that I am permitting my enthusiasm to get
the better of my discrimination when I class it with Urga, Khiva, Mecca,
the troglodyte town of Medenine in southern Tunisia, and Timbuktu as one
of the half dozen most interesting semicivilised places in existence.
Where else in all the world can you find a town hanging, as it were,
between land and sky and reached by some of the dizziest trails ever trod
by human feet; a town of many-floored but doorless dwellings, which have
ladders instead of stairs and whose windows are of gypsum instead of
glass; a town where the women build and own the houses and the men weave
the women’s gowns; where the husbands take the names of their wives and
the children the names of their mothers; where the belongings of a dead
man are destroyed upon his grave and the ghosts are distracted so that
his spirit may have time to escape; a town where religious mysteries, as
incredible as those of voodooism and as jealously guarded as those of
Lhasa, are performed in an underground chamber as impossible of access by
the uninitiated as the Kaaba? Where else shall you find such a place as
that, I ask you? Tell me that.
[Illustration: _From a photograph by A. C. Vroman._
“The massive battlements of eroded rock between which it winds ...
suggest the stone-paved ascent to some stronghold of the Middle Ages.”
_From a photograph by A. C. Vroman._
“You gain access to the first floor of an Acoma dwelling precisely as
you gain access to the hold of a ship.”
ACOMA AS IT IS TO-DAY.]
Acoma has the unassailable distinction of being the oldest continuously
inhabited town within our borders, though how old the archæologists
have been unable to conjecture, much less positively say. Certain it is
that it was ancient when the Great Navigator set foot on the beach of
San Salvador; that it was hoary with antiquity when the Great Captain
and his mail-clad men-at-arms came marching up from Vera Cruz for the
taking of Mexico. One needs to be very close under its beetling cliffs
before any sign of the village can be detected, as the houses are of the
same color and, indeed of the same material as the rock upon which they
stand and so far above the plain that, as old Casteñeda, the chronicler
of Coronado’s expedition in 1540, records, “it was a very good musket
that could throw a ball as high.” The lofty situation of the town and
the effect of bleakness produced by the entire absence of vegetation
and by the cold, grey rock of which it is built reminded me of San
Marino, that mountain-top capital of a tiny republic in the Apennines,
while in the startling abruptness with which the mesa rears itself out
of the desert there is a suggestion of those strange monasteries of
Metéora, perched on their rocky columns above the Thessalian plain. The
village proper consists of three parallel blocks of houses running east
and west perhaps a thousand feet and skyward forty. They are, in fact,
primeval apartment-houses, each block being partitioned by cross-walls
into separate little homes which have no interior communication with
each other. Each of these blocks is three stories high, with a sheer
wall behind but terraced in front, so that it looks like a flight of
three gigantic steps. (At the sister pueblo of Taos, a hundred miles or
so to the northward, this novel architectural scheme has been carried
even further by building the houses six and even seven stories high
and terracing them on all four sides so that they form a pyramid.) The
second story is set well back on the roof of the first, thus giving
it a broad, uncovered terrace across its entire front, and the third
story is similarly placed upon the second. In Acoma, which has about
seven hundred people, there are scarcely a dozen doors on the ground;
and these indicate the abodes of those progressive citizens who, not
satisfied with what was good enough for their fathers, must be for ever
experimenting with some new-fangled device. Barring these cases of recent
innovation, there are no doors to the lower floor, the only access to
a house being by a rude ladder to the first terrace. If you are making
a call on the occupants of the first story, you wriggle through a tiny
trap-door in the floor of the second and literally drop in upon them—so
literally that your hosts see your feet before they see your face. It is
a novel experience ... yes, indeed. You gain access to the first floor of
an Acoma dwelling precisely as you gain access to the hold of a ship—by
climbing a ladder to the deck and then descending through a hatchway.
If you wish to leave your visiting-card at the third-floor apartment
or if you have a hankering to see the view from the topmost roof, you
can ascend quite easily by means of queer little steps notched in the
division walls. The ground floor is always occupied by the senior members
of the family, the second terrace is allotted to the daughter first
married, and the upper flat goes to the daughter who gets a husband next.
If there are other married daughters they must seek apartments elsewhere
or live with grandpa and grandma in the basement.
Most writers about Acoma seem to be particularly impressed with the
cleanliness of its inhabitants and the neatness of their homes. I don’t
like to shatter any illusions, but it struck me that the much-vaunted
neatness of these people consisted mainly in covering their beds with
scarlet blankets and whitewashing their walls. I have heard visitors
exclaim enthusiastically as they peered in through an open doorway: “Why,
I wouldn’t mind sleeping there at all.” They are perfectly welcome to
so far as I am concerned. As for me, I much prefer a warm blanket and
the open mesa. All of the Pueblo Indians are as ignorant of the elements
of sanitation as a Congo black. If you doubt it, visit one of these sky
cities on a scorching summer’s day when there is no wind blowing. As an
old frontiersman in Albuquerque confided to me: “Say, friend, I’d ruther
have a skunk hangin’ round my tent than to have to spend a night to
leeward o’ one of them there Hopi towns.”
Civilisation has evidently found the rocky path to Acoma too steep to
climb, for when I was there not a soul in the place spoke a word of
English. There was a daughter of the village who had been educated at
Carlisle—Marie was her name, I think—but she was away on a visit. Perhaps
she couldn’t stand the loneliness of being the only civilised person in
the community. That is one of the deplorable features incident to our
system of Indian education. A youth is sent to Carlisle or Hampton or
Riverside, as the case may be, and after being broken to the white man’s
ways is sent back to his own people on the theory that, by force of
example, he will alter their mode of living. But he rarely does anything
of the sort, for his fellow tribesmen either resent his attempts to
introduce innovations or treat him with the same contemptuous tolerance
with which the hidebound residents of a country village regard the youth
who is “college l’arned.” So, after a time, becoming discouraged by the
futility of attempting to teach his people something that they don’t want
to know, he either goes out into the world to earn his own livelihood as
best he may or else he again leaves his shirt tails outside his breeches,
daubs his face with paint on dance days, and, forgetting how to use a
fork and napkin, goes back to the manners and usages of his fathers.
But you mustn’t get the idea that Acoma is wholly uncivilised, for it
isn’t. One household has an iron bed with large brass knobs, another
boasts a rocking-chair, and a third possesses a sewing-machine. But the
most convincing proof that these untutored children of the sky possess a
strain of culture is in the fact that Acoma can boast no phonograph to
greet the visitor with the raucous strains of “Every Little Movement” and
“Alexander’s Ragtime Band.”
[Illustration: _From a photograph copyright by Fred Harvey._
ACOMA HUNTER HOME FROM THE HUNT.]
In many respects the most remarkable feature of Acoma is its immense
adobe church, built upward of three centuries ago. It is remarkable
because every stick and every adobe brick in it was carried up the
heart-breaking, back-breaking trails from the plains three hundred feet
below on the backs of patient Indians. There are timbers in that church
a foot and a half square and forty feet long, brought by human muscle
alone from the mountains a long day’s march away. And it is no tiny
chapel, remember, but a building of enormous proportions, with walls
ten feet thick and sixty feet high, and covering more ground than any
modern church in America. As a monument of patient toil it is hardly less
wonderful than the Pyramids; it was as long in building as the Children
of Israel were in getting out of the wilderness. Above its gaudy altar
hangs a royal gift, the town’s most treasured possession—a painting of
San José, presented to Acoma two centuries and a half ago by his Most
Catholic Majesty Charles the Second of Aragon and Castile. Faded and
time-dimmed though it is, that picture once nearly caused an Indian
war. Some years ago the neighbouring pueblo of Laguna, suffering from
drought and cattle sickness and all manner of disasters, looked on the
prosperity of Acoma and ascribed it to the patronage of the painted San
José. So Laguna, believing that if the saint could bring prosperity to
one pueblo, he could bring it to another, asked Acoma for the loan of
the picture, and, after a tribal council, the request was granted. Their
confidence in the saint was justified, for no sooner had the picture
been transferred to the walls of Laguna’s bell-hung, mud-walled mission
church than the rains came and the crops sprouted, and the cattle throve,
and the tourists, leaning from their car windows, bought more pottery
and blankets than they ever had before. After a time, however, Acoma
gently intimated to Laguna that a loan was not a gift and asked for the
return of the picture. Whereupon the Lagunas retorted that if possession
was nine points of the law in the white man’s country, in the Indian
country it was ten points—and then some, and that if the Acomas wanted
the picture they could come and take it—if they could. For several weeks
there was much sharpening of knives and cleaning of Winchesters in both
pueblos, and at night the high mesa of Acoma resounded to those same war
chants which preceded the massacre of Zaldivar and his Spaniards. But the
saner counsels of the Indian agent prevailed, for these hill-folk are at
heart a peaceable people, and they were induced to submit the dispute
over the picture to the arbitrament of the white man’s courts. Perhaps it
was well for the peace of central New Mexico that Judge Kirby Benedict,
who heard the case, decided in favour of the plaintiffs and ordered the
picture restored to Acoma forthwith. But when the messengers sent from
Acoma to bring the sacred treasure back arrived at Laguna they found that
the picture had mysteriously disappeared. But while riding dejectedly
back to Acoma to break the news of the calamity they discovered under
a mesquite bush, midway between the two pueblos—God be praised!—the
missing picture. The Acomas instantly recognised, of course, that San
José, released from bondage, had started homeward of his own volition
and had doubtless sought shelter in the shade of the mesquite bush until
the heat of the day had passed. He hangs once more on the wall of the
ancient church, just where he did when he came, all fresh and shiny, from
Madrid, and every morning the hill people file in and cross themselves
before him and mutter a little prayer.
[Illustration: _From a photograph by A. C. Vroman._
The pottery painter.
_From a photograph by A. C. Vroman._
The blanket weaver.
_From a photograph by A. C. Vroman._
The turquoise driller.
ACOMA ARTISANS.]
In front of the church is the village graveyard, a depression in the rock
forty feet deep and two hundred square, filled with earth brought on the
backs of women from the far plain. It took them nearly forty years to
make it. Is it any wonder that the patient, moccasined feet of centuries
have sunk their imprint in the rock six inches deep? And the work was
done by women! Imagine the New York suffragettes carrying enough dirt in
sacks to the top of the Metropolitan Building to make a graveyard there.
The bones lie thick on the surface soil, now literally a bank of human
limestone. Dig down into that ghastly stratum and you would doubtless
find among the myriads of bleached and grinning skulls some that had been
cleft by sword-blade or pierced by bullet—grim reminders of that day, now
three centuries agone, when Oñate’s men-at-arms carried Acoma by storm
and put three thousand of its defenders to the sword, as was the Spanish
custom. A funeral in Acoma’s sun-seared graveyard is worth journeying
a long, long way to see. When the still form, wrapped in its costliest
blanket, has been lowered into its narrow resting-place among the
skeletons of its fathers; when upon the earth above it has been broken
the symbolic jar of water; when the relatives have brought forth pottery
and weapons and clothing to be broken and rent upon the grave that they
may go with their departed owner; when all these weird rites have been
performed the wailing mourners file away to those desolate houses where
the shamans are blinding the eyes of the ghosts that they may not find
the trail of the soul which has set out on its four days’ journey to the
Land That Lies Beyond the Ranges. It is a strange business.
American dominion has not yet resulted in destroying the picturesque
costumes of the Acomas, and I hope to Heaven that it never will.
Civilisation has enough to answer for in substituting the unlovely
garments of Europe for the beautiful and becoming costumes of China and
Japan. In Acoma the people always look as though they were dressed up
for visitors, although, as a matter of fact, they are nothing of the
sort. Like all barbarians, they are fond of colours. The tendencies of a
man may be pretty accurately gauged by the manner in which he wears his
shirt. If he lets it hang outside his trousers he is a dyed-in-the-wool
conservative, and you can make up your mind that he has no glass in
_his_ windows or doors to _his_ ground floor. But if he tucks it into
his trousers, white-man fashion, it may be taken as a sign that he is
a progressive, an aboriginal Bull Mooser, as it were, in which case he
usually goes a step further by hiding the picturesque _banda_, with
its suggestion of the buccaneers, beneath a sombrero several sizes too
large. On dance days, however, liberals and conservatives alike discard
their shirts and trousers for the primitive breech-clouts of their
savage ancestors, streak and ring their lithe, brown bodies with red and
yellow pigments, surmount their none too lovely features with fantastic
head-dresses, and transform themselves into very ferocious and repellent
figures indeed. A Hopi in his dancing dress looks like the creature of a
bad dream.
[Illustration: _From a photograph by A. C. Vroman._
“DANCE MAD!”
“On dance days they streak and ring their lithe bronze bodies with
red and yellow pigments, surmount their none too lovely features with
fantastic head-dresses, and transform themselves into the creatures of a
bad dream.”]
The women wear a peculiar sort of tunic, somewhat resembling that worn
by their cousins on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, which exposes the
neck and one round, bronze shoulder. The garment is well chosen, for
the Acomas have the finest necks and busts of any women that I know.
This is due, no doubt, to the fact that they carry all the water used
in their houses from the communal reservoir in _tinajas_ balanced on
their heads, frequently up a ladder and two steep flights of stairs,
thus unconsciously developing a litheness of figure and a mould of form
that would arouse the envy of Gaby des Lys. Over their shoulders is
drawn a little shawl, generally of vivid scarlet. Then there is more
scarlet in the kilts which reach from the waist to the knees and a
contrast in the black stockings which come to the ankle, leaving bare
their dainty feet—the smallest and prettiest women’s feet that I have
ever seen. The feet of all these hill-folk are abnormally small, the
result, doubtless, of the constant clutching of the uneven rock. The
picturesqueness of the women’s costumes is enormously increased by the
quantities of turquoise-studded silver jewellery which they affect,
which tinkles musically when they walk. This jewellery, which they
hammer out of Mexican _pesos_, obtaining the turquoises from the rich
and highly profitable local mines, forms one of the Acomas’ chief
sources of revenue, for they sell great quantities of it to the agents
of the curiosity dealers along the railway and these resell it to the
tourists on the transcontinental trains at a profit of many hundred per
cent. They make several other forms of decorative wares: blankets, for
example—though the Hopi blankets are not to be spoken of in the same
breath with the beautiful products of the looms of their unfriendly
Navajo neighbours—and pottery jars which they patiently decorate in fine
grey-black designs and burn over dung-fed fires. Everything considered,
their work is probably the most artistic done by any Indians in America
to-day.
But to return to the highway of narrative from which I find that I
have inadvertently wandered. When a girl is old enough to get married,
which is usually about the time that she reaches her twelfth birthday,
she is expected to arrange her lustrous blue-black hair in two large
whorls, like doughnuts, one on each side of her dainty head. The whorl
is supposed to typify the squash blossom, which is the Hopi emblem of
maidenhood. To arrange this complicated coiffure is a long day’s task,
and after it is once made the owner puts herself to acute discomfort by
sleeping on a wooden head-rest, so as not to disarrange it. When a girl
marries, which she generally does very early in her teens, she must no
longer wear the _nash-mi_, as the whorls are called. Instead, her hair
is done up in two pendent rolls, symbolical of the ripened squash, which
is the Hopi emblem of fruitfulness. And after you have seen the litters
of fat, brown babies which gambol like puppies before every door, and
the rows of roguish children’s faces which peer down at you from every
sun-scorched housetop, you begin to think that there must be some virtue
in this symbolical hair-dressing after all.
[Illustration: _From a photograph by A. C. Vroman._
“When a girl is old enough to get married she is expected to arrange her
lustrous, blue-black hair in two large whorls.”
_From a photograph by A. C. Vroman._
“Rows of roguish children’s faces which peer down at you from every
sun-baked housetop.”
YOUNG ACOMANS.]
Acoma is Mrs. Pankhurst’s dream come true. From time beyond reckoning the
women have possessed the privileges and power for which their pale-faced
sisters are so strenuously striving. Not only is Mrs. Acoma the ruler
of her household but she is absolute owner of the house and all that is
in it. In fact, a man is not permitted to own a house at all, and if
his wife wishes to put him out of her house she may. Instead of a woman
taking her husband’s name after marriage, he takes hers, and the children
that they have also take the name of their mother. In other words, if Mr.
Smith marries Miss Jones he becomes Mr. Jones and their children are the
little Joneses. And the men accept their feminine rôles even to playing
nursemaid while the women do the work, it being not the exception but
the rule to see even the governors and war captains dandling squalling
papooses on their knees or toting them up and down the main street on
their backs. A comic artist couldn’t raise a smile in Acoma, for he would
find that all his pet jokes are there accepted facts.
[Illustration: _From a photograph copyright by Fred Harvey_.
His first riding lesson.
_From a photograph copyright by Fred Harvey_.
The dancing lesson.
_From a photograph copyright by Fred Harvey_.
The history lesson.
THE EDUCATION OF A YOUNG HOPI.]
Even more interesting than Acoma, from an architectural standpoint,
is the pyramid pueblo of Taos (pronounced as though it were spelled
“_tous_,” if you please). This strange town—in many respects the most
extraordinary in the world—is built on the floor of a mountain-girdled
valley, some seventy miles due north from Santa Fé, and can best
be reached by leaving the main line of the railway at Barrancas or
Servilleta and driving out to the pueblo by wagon or stage. Though it
is quite possible to reach Taos from Santa Fé in a single day, the
journey is a very fatiguing one, it being much better to spend the night
at the ranch-house at Arroyo Hondo and go on to the pueblo in comfort
the next morning. There are really two towns—the white man’s and the
Indian’s—four miles apart. White man’s Taos consists of little more than
a sun-swept plaza bordered on all four sides by Mexican houses of adobe,
while running off from the plaza are numerous dim and narrow alleys,
likewise lined by humble dwellings of whitewashed mud, in one of which
that immortal hero of American boyhood, Kit Carson, lived and died.
For Taos, you must understand, was long the terminus of that historic
trail by which the traders and trappers from Kansas and Missouri went
down into the Southwest. Here, then, came such famous frontiersmen as
Carson and Jim Bridger, and Manuel Lisa, and Jedediah Smith to barter
beads and calico and rum for blankets and turquoises and furs. Save for
a few greybeards who dwell in their memories of the exciting past, the
frontiersmen have all passed round that dark turning from which no man
returns, and Taos plaza hears the jingle of their spurs and the clatter
of their high-heeled boots no more. In their stead have come another
breed of men, who carry palettes instead of pistols and who confront the
Indian with brushes instead of bowie-knives; for Taos, because of its
extraordinary wealth of sun and shadow, of yellow deserts and purple
mesas, of scarlet blankets and white walls, has become the rendezvous
for a group of brilliant painters who are perpetuating on canvas the red
men of the terraced houses. Seen at dusk or in the dimness of the early
dawn, Taos bears a striking resemblance to the low, squat pyramids at
Sakkara, for it consists, in fact, of two huge pyramidal structures,
one six the other seven stories high, with a stream meandering between.
In their general construction the houses of Taos are like those of
Acoma, but instead of being terraced only on the front, they are built
in two huge squares which are terraced on all four sides, looking from
a little distance like the pyramids which children erect with stone
building-blocks. These two huge apartment houses together accommodate
upward of eight hundred souls. Like other Hopi dwellings, they can only
be entered by means of ladders, pulling up the ladder after him being
the Pueblo’s way of bolting his door. Though it needs iron muscles and
leathern lungs to reach the apartments at the top, the view over the
surrounding country well repays the exertion. Taos presents, I suppose,
the nearest approach to socialistic life that this country has yet known,
for the houses are built and occupied communally, the truck-gardens,
grain-fields, and grazing lands are held in common, and if there is a
surplus of hay or grain it is sold by the community.
The communal form of government existing among the Hopi has proven so
successful in practice that the Bureau of Indian Affairs has long since
adopted the policy of leaving well enough alone. Although these Indians
of the terraced houses are wards of the nation, to use a term which has
become almost ironic, the white man’s law stops short at the boundaries
of their pueblos, for they make their own laws, enforce them with their
own police, maintain their own courts of justice, and inflict their own
peculiar punishments. In Taos, for example, the stocks are still used
as a punishment for misdemeanours, though the Indians go the Puritans
one better by clamping down the culprit’s head as well as his hands
and feet. At the head of the Pueblo system of government is an elected
governor, known as the _cacique_, whose word is law with a capital L.
Associated with him is a council of wise men called _mayores_, whose
powers are a sort of cross between those of a board of aldermen and a
college faculty. The activities of this patriarchal council frequently
assume an almost parental character, it being customary for it to advise
the young men of the pueblo when to marry—and whom. If an Indian gets
into a dispute with a white man the case is tried in the county court,
but differences between themselves are settled according to their own
time-honoured customs. Though the police force of Acoma consists of but
a solitary constable, whose uniform is a gilt cord around the crown of
his sombrero, he takes himself quite as seriously as a member of the
Broadway traffic squad, and, judging from his magnificent physique and
the extremely businesslike revolver swinging from his hip, I doubt not
that he would prove quite as efficient in an emergency.
[Illustration: _From a photograph by A. C. Vroman._
THE PYRAMID-PUEBLO OF TAOS.
“At Taos the novel architectural scheme has been carried even further by
building the houses five and even six stories high and terracing them on
all four sides, so that they form a sort of pyramid.”]
The Hopi are as stern and inflexible in the administration of those
laws regulating the conduct of the community as were the Old Testament
prophets. When a member of the tribe plays football with the public
morals, as occasionally happens, he or she is tried by the _mayores_
and, if found guilty, is expelled from the pueblo, bag and baggage. The
system is as efficacious as it is inexpensive. As it chanced, I had an
opportunity to see this novel form of punishment in operation. I was
descending from the mesa at Acoma with my Laguna driver, who, in the
absence of Carlisle-taught Marie, had served as my interpreter. He was
a surly, taciturn fellow whose name, if my memory serves me faithfully,
was Kill Hi. It should have been Kill Joy. As we reached the foot of the
precipitous path my attention was attracted by a crowd, composed of the
major portion of the pueblo’s population, which was stolidly watching
four Indians—the constable and three others—loading a woman whose hands
and feet were bound with ropes into a wagon. Despite her screams and
struggles, they tossed her in as indifferently as they would a sack of
meal.
“Who is she? What’s the matter?” I asked Kill Hi.
“Oh, nothin’ much,” was the indifferent answer. “She damn bad woman. They
no want her here. They tell her to get out quick—vamoose. She no go. So
they take her off in wagon like you see.”
“But what are they going to do with her?”
“Oh, I don’ know. Dump her out in desert, mebbe.”
“But what will happen to her?” I persisted. “Won’t she starve to death?”
“Oh, I don’ know,” said Kill Hi carelessly, cramping the buckboard so
that I could get in. “Mebbe. P’raps. Acomas, they queer folks; not like
other people.”
He was quite right—they certainly are _not_.
III
CHOPPING A PATH TO TO-MORROW
“We’re the men that always march a bit before
Though we cannot tell the reason for the same;
We’re the fools that pick the lock that holds the door—
Play and lose and pay the candle for the game.
There’s no blaze nor trail nor roadway where we go;
There’s no painted post to point the right-of-way,
But we swing our sweat-grained helves and we chop a path ourselves
To To-morrow from the land of Yesterday.”
III
CHOPPING A PATH TO TO-MORROW
They came bucketing into town at a hand-gallop, hat brims flapping, spurs
jingling, tie-down straps streaming, their ponies kicking the dusty road
into a yellow haze behind them. With their gay neckerchiefs and sheepskin
chaps they formed as vivid a group as one could find outside a Remington.
They pulled up with a great clatter of hoofs in front of the Golden West
saloon and, leaving their panting mounts standing dejectedly, heads to
the ground and reins trailing, went stamping into the bar. Having had
previous experience with their sort, I made bold to follow them through
the swinging doors; for more unvarnished facts about a locality, its
people, politics, progress, and prospects, are to be had over a mahogany
bar than any place I know except a barber’s chair.
“What’ll it be, boys?” sang out one of them, as they sprawled
themselves over the polished mahogany. I expected to see the bartender
matter-of-coursely shove out a black bottle and six small glasses, for,
according to all the accepted canons of the cow country, as I had known
it a dozen years before, there was only one kind of a drink ever ordered
at a bar. So, when two of the party expressed a preference for ginger ale
and the other four allowed that they would take lemonade, I felt like
going to the door and taking another look at the straggling frontier town
and at the cactus-dotted desert which surrounded it, just to make sure I
really was in Arizona and not at Chautauqua, New York.
It required scant finesse to engage one of the lemonade drinkers in
amicable and illuminating conversation.
“Round-up hereabouts?” I inquired, by way of making an opening.
“Nope,” said my questionee. “Leastways not as I knows of. You see,” he
continued confidentially, “we’ve quit cow-punching. We’ve tied up with
the movies.”
“With the what?” I queried.
“The movies—the moving-picture people, you know,” he explained. “You see,
the folks back East have gone plumb crazy on these here Wild West picture
plays and we’re gratifying ’em at so much per. Wagon-train attacked by
Indians—good-lookin’ girl carried off by one of the bucks—cow-punchers
to the rescue, and all that sort of thing. It’s good pay and easy work,
and the grub’s first-rate. Yes, sirree, it’s got cow-punching beaten to a
frazzle. I reckon you’re from the East yourself, ain’t you?”
I admitted that I was, adding that my bag was labelled “New York.”
“The hell you say!” he exclaimed, regarding me with suddenly increased
respect. “From what I hearn tell that sure must be some wicked town.
Gambling joints runnin’ wide open, an’ every one packs a gun, I hear,
an’ shootin’ scraps so frequent no one thinks nothing about ’em. It
ain’t a safe place to live, I say. Now, down here in Arizony things is
different. We’re peaceable, we are. We don’t stand for no promisc’us
gun-play and, barring one or two of the mining towns, there ain’t a poker
palace left, and I wouldn’t be so blamed surprised if this State went dry
in a year or two. Well, s’long, friend,” he added, sweeping off his hat,
“I’m pleased to’ve made your acquaintance. The feller with the camera’s
waitin’ an’ we’ve got to get out an’ run off a few miles of film so’s to
amuse the people back East.”
[Illustration: THE PASSING OF THE PUNCHER.
“Cowboys cavorting in front of cinematographs instead of corralling
cattle—that’s what civilisation has done for Arizona.”]
I stood in the doorway of the Golden West saloon and watched them as
they swung easily into their saddles and went tearing up the street
in a rolling cloud of dust. Then I went on my way, marvelling at the
mutability of things. “That’s what civilisation does for a country,”
I said to myself. “Lemonade instead of liquor; policemen instead of
pistol fighters; cowboys cavorting in front of cinematographs instead
of corralling cattle.” At first blush—I confess it frankly—I was as
disappointed as a boy who wakes up to find it raining on circus morning,
for I had revisited the Southwest expecting to find the same easy-going,
devil-may-care, whoop-her-up-boys life so characteristic of that
country’s territorial days. Instead I found a busy, prosperous State,
still picturesque in many of its aspects but as orderly and peaceful as
Commonwealth Avenue on a Sunday morning.
It wasn’t much of a country, was Arizona, the first time I set foot in
it, upward of a dozen years ago. A howling wilderness is what the Old
Testament prophets would have called it, I suppose, and they wouldn’t
have been far wrong either. Certainly Moses and his Israelites could
not have wandered through a region more forbidding. Sand and sage-brush
and cactus; snakes and lizards and coyotes; grim purple mountains in
the distance and, flaming in a cloudless sky, a sun pitiless as fate.
Cattlemen and sheepmen still fought for supremacy on the ranges; faro
players still drove a roaring business in the mining-camps and the
cow-towns; men’s coats screened but did not altogether conceal the
ominous outline of the six-shooter. As building materials adobe and
corrugated iron still predominated. Portland cement, the barbed-wire
fence, the irrigation ditch, and alfalfa had yet to come into their
own. In those days—and they were not so very long ago, if you
please—A-r-i-z-o-n-a spelled Frontier with a capital F.
I recall a little incident of that first visit, insignificant enough
in itself but strangely prophetical of the changes which were to come.
Riding across the most desolate and inhospitable country I had ever seen,
a roughly written notice, nailed over the door of a ramshackle adobe
ranch-house standing solitary in the desert, riveted my attention. The
ill-formed letters, scrawled apparently with a sheep brush dipped in tar,
read:
40 MILES FROM WOOD
40 MILES FROM WATER
40 FEET FROM HELL
GOD BLESS OUR HOME
As I pulled up my horse, fascinated by the grim humour of the lines, the
rancher appeared in the doorway and, with the hospitality characteristic
of those who dwell in the earth’s waste places, bade me dismount and
rest. Such of his face as was not bearded had been tanned by sun and
wind to the colour of a well-smoked brier; corduroy trousers belted over
lean hips and a flannel shirt open at the throat accentuated a figure as
iron-hard and sinewy as a mountain-lion. About his eyes, puckered at the
outer corners into innumerable little wrinkles by much staring across
sun-scorched ranges, lurked the humorous twinkle which suggested the
Yankee or the Celt.
“I stopped to read your sign,” I explained. “If things are as
discouraging as all that I suppose you’ll pull out of here the first
chance you get?”
“Not by a jugful!” he exclaimed. “I’m here to stay. You mustn’t take that
sign too seriously; it’s just my brand of humour. This country don’t look
up to much now, I admit, but come back here in a few years, friend, and
you’ll need to be introduced to it all over again.”
“But you’ve no water,” I remarked sceptically.
“We’ll have that before long. You see,” he explained eagerly, “the
Colorado’s not so very far away and there’s considerable talk about the
government’s damming it and bringing the water down here in diversion
canals and irrigation ditches. If the government doesn’t help us, then
we’ll sink artesian wells and get the water that way. Once get water
on it and this soil’ll do the rest. Why, friend, this land’ll raise
anything—_anything!_ I’m going to put in alfalfa the first year or two,
until I get on my feet, and then I’m going to raise citrus fruits.
There’s never enough frost here to worry about, and all we need is water
to make this the finest soil for orange growing on God’s green earth.
Just remember what I’m telling you,” he concluded impressively, tapping
my knee with his forefinger to emphasise his words, “though things look
damned discouraging just now, this is going to be a great country some
day.”
As I rode across the desert I turned in my saddle to wave him a
farewell, but he had already forgotten me. He was marking, in the
bone-dry, cactus-dotted soil, the places where he was going to set
out his orange-trees. Though our paths have not crossed again, I have
always remembered him. Resolute, resourceful, optimistic, self-reliant,
blessed with a sense of humour which jeers at obstacles and laughs
discouragements away, with as fanatic a faith in the future of the land
as has a Moslem in the Koranic paradise, he has typified for me those
pioneers who, by their indomitable courage and unyielding tenacity, are
converting the arid deserts of the Southwest into a veritable garden of
the Lord.
Recently, after a lapse of little more than a decade, I passed that way
again. So amazing were the changes which had taken place in that brief
interim that, just as my optimist had prophesied, I needed a second
introduction to the land. Where I had left a desert, arid, sun-baked,
forbidding, I found fields where sleek cattle grazed knee-deep in
alfalfa, and groves ablaze with golden fruit. Stretching away to the
foot-hills were roads which would have done credit to John Macadam, and
scattered along them at intervals were prosperous looking ranch-houses of
cement or wood; there was a post-office and a trim row of stores, and a
schoolhouse with a flag floating over it; straggling cottonwoods marked
the courses of the irrigation streams and in the air was the cheerful
sound of running water. There were two things which had brought about
this miracle—pluck and water.
Nowhere has the white man fought a more courageous fight or won a more
brilliant victory than in Arizona. His weapons have been the transit and
the level, the drill and the dredge, the pick and the spade; and the
enemy which he has conquered has been the most stubborn of all foes—the
hostile forces of Nature. The story of how the white man, within the
space of less than thirty years, penetrated and explored and mapped this
almost unknown region; of how he carried law and order and justice into a
section which had never had so much as a speaking acquaintance with any
one of the three before; of how, realising the necessity for means of
communication, he built highways of steel across this territory from east
to west and from north to south; of how, undismayed by the savageness
of the countenance which the desert turned upon him, he laughed, and
rolled up his sleeves, and spat on his hands, and slashed the face of
the desert with canals and irrigating ditches, and filled those canals
and ditches with water brought from deep in the earth or high in the
mountains; and of how, in the conquered and submissive soil, he replaced
the aloe with alfalfa, the mesquite with maize, the cactus with cotton,
forms one of the most inspiring chapters in our history. It is one of the
epics of civilisation, this reclamation of the Southwest, and its heroes
are, thank God, Americans.
Other desert regions have been redeemed by irrigation; Egypt, for
example, and Mesopotamia, and parts of the Sudan, but the peoples of
all those regions lay stretched out in the shade of a convenient palm,
metaphorically speaking, and waited for some one with more energy than
themselves to come along and do the work. But the Arizonians, mindful
of the fact that God, the government, and Carnegie help those who help
themselves, spent their days wielding pick and shovel and their evenings
in writing letters to Washington with toil-hardened hands. After a time
the government was prodded into action and the great dams at Laguna
and Roosevelt are the result. Then the people, organising themselves
into co-operative leagues and water-users’ associations, took up the
work of reclamation where the government left off, and it is to these
energetic, persevering men who have drilled wells and ploughed fields and
dug ditches through the length and breadth of that great region which
stretches from Yuma to Tucson that the metamorphosis of Arizona is due.
More misconceptions are prevalent about Arizona than about any other
region on the continent. The reclamation phase of its development has
been so emphasised and advertised that among most of those who have not
seen it for themselves the impression exists that it is a flat, arid,
sandy, treeless country, a small portion of which has, miraculously
enough, proved amenable to irrigation. This impression has been confirmed
by various writers who, sacrificing accuracy for a phrase, have dubbed
Arizona “the American Egypt,” which, to one who is really familiar with
the physical characteristics of the Nile country and the agricultural
disabilities under which its people labour, seems a left-handed
compliment at best. Egypt—barring the swamp-lands of the Delta and a
fringe of cultivation along the Nile—is a country of sun-baked yellow
sand, as arid, flat, and treeless as an expanse of asphalt pavement.
Arizona is nothing of the sort. In its most arid regions there is a small
growth of green even in the dry season, while after the rains the desert
bursts into a brilliancy and diversity of bloom incredible to one who has
not seen it. How many people who have not visited Arizona are aware that
within the borders of this “desert State” is the largest pine forest in
the United States—six thousand square miles in area? Egypt, on the other
hand, is, with the exception of the date-palm, virtually treeless. In
Egypt there is not a hill worthy the name between Alexandria and Wady
Halfa; Arizona has range after range of mountains which rise two miles
and more into the air. Egypt is not a white man’s land and never will be.
Arizona will never be anything else. If it is necessary to drag in Egypt
at all (save as concerns antiquities) then, for goodness sake, pay the
Khedive’s country a real compliment by calling it “the African Arizona.”
[Illustration: _From a photograph by H. A. Erickson, Coronado, Cal._
WHERE THE ROADS RUN OUT AND THE TRAILS BEGIN.
The Arizona desert: “It is more or less rolling country, corrugated by
buttes and mesas and unexpected outcroppings of rock, its surface covered
by a confused tangle of desert vegetation.”]
The thing that surprised me most in Arizona was the desert. An Arab would
not call it desert at all; a Bedouin would never feel at home upon it.
I had expected to find a waste of sand, treeless, shrubless, plantless,
incapable of supporting anything—yellow as molten brass, sun-scorched,
unrelenting. That is the desert as one knows it in Africa and in Asia.
The Arizona desert is something very different indeed. In the first
place, it is not yellow at all but a sort of bluish-grey; “driftwood”
is probably the term which an interior decorator would use to describe
its peculiarly soft and elusive colouring. Neither is it flat nor has
it the sand-dunes so characteristic of the Sahara. On the contrary, it
is a more or less rolling country, corrugated by buttes and mesas and
unexpected outcroppings of rock and sometimes gashed by _arroyos_, its
surface covered with a confused tangle of desert vegetation so whimsical
and fantastic in the forms it assumes that it looks for all the world
like a prim New England garden gone violently insane. There is the
_cholla_, for example, whose fuzzy white spines, so innocent-looking at
a distance, might deceive the stranger into supposing that it was a sort
of wildcat cousin of the gentle pussy-willow; the towering _sajuaro_,
often forty feet in height and bearing a striking resemblance to those
mammoth candelabra which flank the altars of Spanish cathedrals; the
octopus-like _ocatilla_, whose slender, sinuous branches, tipped with
scarlet blossoms, seem to be for ever groping for something which they
cannot find; the grotesque prickly pear, looking not unlike a collection
of green pincushions, abristle with pins and glued together at the edges;
the sombre creosote bush, the scraggy mesquite, the silvery grease-wood,
the bright green _paloverde_. These, with the white blossoms of the
yucca and the pink, orange, yellow, scarlet, and crimson flowers of the
cacti, the brilliant shades of the rock strata, the purples and violets
and blues of the encircling mountains, the fleecy clouds drifting like
great flocks of unshorn sheep across an ultramarine sky, combine to form
a picture as far removed from the desert of our imagination as one could
well conceive. Less picturesque than these colour effects, the portrayal
of which would have taxed the genius of Whistler, but more interesting
to the farmer, are the fine indigenous grasses which spring up over the
mesas after the summer rains (some of them being, indeed, extraordinarily
independent of the rainfall) and furnish ample if not abundant pasturage
for live stock. I am quite aware, of course, that those California-bound
tourists who gather their impressions of Arizona from the observation
platform of a mail-train while streaking across the country at fifty
miles an hour are accustomed to dismiss the subject of its possibilities
with a wave of the hand and the dictum: “Nothing to it but sun, sand,
and sage-brush.” Were those same people to see New York City from the
rear end of a train they would assert that it consisted of nothing but
tenements and tunnels. It is easy to magnify the barrenness of an arid
region, and, that being so, I would respectfully suggest to the people
of Arizona (and I make no charge for the suggestion) that they instruct
their legislators to enact a law banishing any one found guilty of
applying the defamatory misnomer “desert” to any portion of the State.
Though it were not well to take too literally the panegyrics of the
soil and its potentialities which every board of trade and commercial
club in the State print and distribute by the ton, there is no playing
hide-and-seek with the fact that the soil of a very large part of Arizona
is as versatile as it is productive. At the celebration with which the
people of Yuma marked the completion of the Colorado River project,
prizes were awarded for _forty-three distinct products of the soil_. To
recount them would be to enumerate practically every fruit, vegetable,
and cereal native to the temperate zone and many of those ordinarily
found only in the torrid, for Arizona combines in an altogether
exceptional degree the climatic characteristics of them both. This not
being a seedsman’s catalogue, it is enough to say that the list began
with alfalfa and ended with yams.
Everything considered, I am inclined to think that the shortest road
to agricultural prosperity lies through an Arizona alfalfa field, for
this proliferous crop, whose fecundity would put a guinea-pig to shame,
possesses the admirable quality of making the land on which it is grown
richer with each cutting. They told me some prodigious alfalfa yarns in
Arizona, but, as each district goes its neighbour’s record a few tons to
the acre better, I will content myself with mentioning that, in certain
parts of the State, as many as _twelve crops of alfalfa have been cut in
a year_. I wonder what your Eastern farmer, who thanks his lucky stars if
he can get one good crop of hay in a year, would think of life in a land
like this?
Certain of the orange-growing sections of Arizona have been unwisely
advertised as “frostless.” This is not true, for there is no place
within our borders which is wholly free from frost. It is quite true,
however, that the citrus groves of southern Arizona stand a better
chance of escaping the ravages of frost than those in any other part
of the country. The fruit ripens, moreover, considerably earlier, the
Arizona growers being able to place their oranges, lemons, and grapefruit
on Eastern dinner-tables a full month in advance of their Californian
competitors.
Unless I am very much mistaken, two products hitherto regarded as alien
to our soil—the Algerian date and Egyptian cotton—are bound to prove
important factors in the agricultural future of Arizona. There is no tree
which produces so large a quantity of fruit and at the same time requires
so little attention as the date-palm when once it gets in bearing,
date-palm groves in North Africa, where the prices are very low, yielding
from five to ten dollars a tree per annum. They are, as it were, the
camels among trees, for they thrive in soil so sandy and waterless that
any other tree would die from sheer discouragement. The date-palm has
long since passed the experimental stage in Arizona—the heavily laden
groves, which any one who cares to take the trouble can see for himself
at several places in the southern part of the State, giving ocular
evidence of the success with which this toothsome fruit can be grown
under American conditions. The other crop which has, I am convinced, a
rosy future in Arizona is Egyptian cotton, which will thrive on less
water than any crop grown under irrigation. The fibre of the Egyptian
cotton being about three times the length of the ordinary American-grown
staple, it can always find a profitable market among thread manufacturers
when our Southern cotton frequently goes unharvested because prices are
too low to pay for picking, an average of about fifty-five million pounds
of Egyptian cotton being imported into the United States each year. With
the fertile soil, the warm, dry climate, and the water resources which
are being so rapidly developed, the day is not far distant when the
traveller through certain sections of Arizona will look out of the window
of his Pullman at a fleeting landscape of fleecy white.
“That isn’t snow, is it, George?” he will ask the porter, and that
grinning Ethiopian will answer:
“No, suh, dat ain’t snow—dat’s ’Gyptian cotton.”
* * * * *
This is no virgin, untried soil, remember. Centuries before the great
Genoese navigator set foot on the beach of San Salvador, southern
Arizona was the home of a dense and prosperous population, skilled
in agriculture and past masters in irrigation, the canals which
they constructed, the ruins of which may still be seen, providing
object-lessons for the engineers of to-day. It is peculiarly interesting
to recall that when the crusaders were battling with the Saracens in
Palestine, when the Byzantine Empire was at the height of its glory, when
the Battle of Hastings had yet to be fought, when Canute of Denmark ruled
in England, a remarkable degree of civilisation prevailed in this remote
corner of the Americas. By civilisation I mean that the inhabitants of
this region dwelt in desert sky-scrapers four, five, perhaps even six
stories in height, that they possessed an organised government, that they
had evolved a practical co-operative system not unlike the water-users’
associations of the Arizona of to-day, and that, by means of a system
of dams, aqueducts, and reservoirs—the remains of which may still be
seen—they had succeeded in reclaiming a by no means inconsiderable
region. So great became the agricultural prosperity of this early people
that it excited the cupidity of the warlike tribes to the north, who, in
a series of forays probably extending over decades, at last succeeded
in exterminating or driving out this agricultural population. Their
many-storied dwellings crumbled, the canals and aqueducts which they
constructed fell into disrepair, the soil once again dried up for lack
of water and returned in time to its original state, the habitat of the
cactus and the mesquite, the haunt of the coyote and the snake.
Centuries passed, during which migratory bands of Indians were the only
visitors to this silent and deserted land. Then, trudging up from the
Spanish settlements to the southward, came Brother Marcos de Niza in his
sandals and woollen robe. He, the first white man to set foot in Arizona,
after penetrating as far northward as the Zuñi towns, returned to Mexico,
or New Spain, as it was then called, where he related what he had seen
to one of the Spanish officials, Don Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, who
promptly equipped an expedition and started northward on his own account.
Followed by half a thousand Spanish horse and foot, a few hundred
friendly Indians, and a mile-long mule train, the expedition wound across
the burning deserts of Chihuahua, over the snow-clad mountains of Sonora,
through rivers swollen into torrents by the spring rains, and so into
Arizona, where, raising the red-and-yellow banner, he took possession
of all this country in the name of his Most Catholic Majesty of Spain.
This was in the year of grace 1540, when the ghost of Anne Boleyn still
disturbed the sleep of Henry VIII and when Solyman the Magnificent was
hammering at the gates of Budapest. By the beginning of the seventeenth
century the country now comprising the State of Arizona was dotted with
Spanish priests, who, in their missions of sun-dried bricks, devoted
themselves to the disheartening task of Christianising the Indians. In
1680, however, came the great Indian revolt; the friars were slain upon
their altars, their missions were ransacked and destroyed, and the work
of civilisation which they had begun was set back a hundred years.
The nineteenth century was approaching its quarter mark before the first
American frontiersmen, pushing southward from the Missouri in quest
of furs and gold, penetrated Arizona. Came then in rapid succession
the Mexican War, which resulted in the cession to the United States
of New Mexico, which then included all that portion of Arizona lying
north of the Gila River; the discovery of gold in California, which,
by drawing attention to the country south of the Gila as a desirable
transcontinental railway route, resulted in its purchase under the
terms of the Gadsden Treaty; and the outbreak of the Civil War, a
Confederate invasion of Arizona in 1862 resulting in its organisation
as a Territory of the Union. The early period of American rule was
extremely unsettled; Indian massacres and the dangerous elements which
composed the population—prospectors, cow-punchers, adventurers, gamblers,
bandits, horse thieves—leading to one of the worst though one of the most
picturesque periods of our frontier history. On February the 14th, 1912,
the Territory of Arizona was admitted to the sisterhood of States, and
George W. P. Hunt, its first elected governor, standing on the steps of
the capitol, swung his hat in the air and called on the assembled crowd
for three cheers as a ball of bunting ran up the staff and broke out into
a flag with eight-and-forty stars.
Notwithstanding the fact that the area of Arizona is greater than
that of Italy, there are only three communities in the State—Phœnix,
Tucson, and Prescott—which by any stretch of the census taker’s figures
are entitled to be called cities. They are, however, as far removed
from the whoop-and-hurrah, let-her-go-Gallegher cow-towns which most
outlanders associate with the Southwest as a young, attractive, and
well-poised college girl is from a wild-eyed and dishevelled, militant
suffragette. Phœnix, the capital, I had pictured as consisting of
a broad and very dusty main street bordered by houses of adobe and
unpainted wooden shacks, its sidewalks of yellow pine shaded by wooden
awnings, with cow-ponies tied to the railings and with every other place
a temple to the goddesses of Alcohol or Chance. I was—I admit it with
shame—as ignorant as all that, and this is my medium of apology. As
a matter of fact, Phœnix is as modern and up-to-the-minute as a girl
just back from Paris. Its streets are paved so far into the country
that you wonder if the Venezuelan asphalt beds are likely to hold out.
Its leading hotels are as liberally bathtubised as those of Broadway,
and the head waiter in the Adams House café will hand you a menu which
contains every gastronomic delicacy from caviare d’Astrachan to fromage
de Brie. Gambling is as unfashionable as it is at Lake Mohonk, the
municipal regulations being so stringent that such innocent affairs as
raffles, church fairs, and grab-bags are practically prohibited, while
the charge for a liquor licence has been placed at such a prohibitive
figure that gentlemen with dry throats are compelled to walk several
blocks before they can find a place with swinging doors. Tucson, on the
other hand, still retains many of its Mexican characteristics. It is a
town of broad and sometimes abominably dusty streets lined with many
buildings of staring white adobe, the sidewalks along its principal
business thoroughfares being shaded by hospitable wooden awnings, which
are a godsend to the pedestrian during the fierce heat of midsummer.
It is a picturesque and interesting town, is Tucson, and, as the
guide-book writers put it, will well repay a visit—provided the weather
is not too hot and the visit is not too long. Prescott, magnificently
situated on a mountainside in the Black Hills, is the centre of an
incredibly rich mining region—did you happen to know that Arizona is
the greatest producer of copper in the world, its output exceeding
that of Montana or Michigan or Mexico? The feature of Prescott that I
remember most distinctly is the “Stope” room in the Yavapai Club, an
architectural conceit which produces the effect of a stope, or gallery in
a mine—fitting tribute of the citizens of a mining town to the industry
which gives it being.
Should you ever find yourself on the Santa Fé, Prescott & Phœnix Railway,
which is the only north-and-south line in the State, forming a link
between the Santa Fé and Southern Pacific systems, I hope that you will
tell the conductor to let you off at Hot Springs Junction, which is the
station for Castle Hot Springs, which lie a score or so of miles beyond
the sound of the locomotive’s raucous shriek, in a cañon of the Bradshaw
Mountains. It is a _dolce far niente_ spot—a peaceful backwater of the
tumultuous stream of life. Hemmed in on every side by precipitous walls
of rock is a toy valley carpeted with lush, green grass and dotted with
palms and fig trees and innumerable varieties of cacti and clumps of
giant cane. A mountain stream meanders through it, and on the hillside
above the scattered buildings of the hotel, whose low roofs and deep,
cool verandas, taken in conjunction with the subtropic vegetation,
vividly recall the dak-bungalows in the Indian hills, are three great
pools screened by hedges of bamboo, in which one can go a-swimming in
midwinter without having any preliminary shivers, as the temperature of
the water ranges from 115 to 122 degrees.
When I was at Castle Hot Springs I struck up an acquaintance with an
old-time prospector who asserted that he was the original discoverer of
the place.
“It was nigh on forty year ago,” he began, reminiscently. “I’d been
prospectin’ up on the headwaters of the Verde. One day, while I was
ridin’ through the foot-hills west o’ here a war party of ’Paches struck
my trail, an’ the fust thing I knowed the hull blamed bunch was after me
lickety-split as fast as their ponies could lay foot to ground. I was
ridin’ a pinto that could run like hell let loose in a rainstorm, and as
she was middlin’ fresh I reckoned I wouldn’t have much trouble gettin’
away from ’em, an’ I wouldn’t, neither, if I’d been tol’rable familiar
with the country hereabouts. But I warn’t; and by gum, friend, if I
didn’t ride plumb into this very cañon! Yes, sirree, that’s just what I
went an’ done! Its walls rose up as steep an’ smooth as the side of a
house in front o’ me an’ to the right o’ me an’ to the left o’ me—an’
behind me were the Injuns, yellin’ an’ whoopin’ like the red devils that
they were. I seen that it was all over but the shoutin’, for there warn’t
no possible chanct to escape—not one!”
“And what happened to you?” interrupted an excited listener.
“What happened to me?” was the withering answer. “Hell, what could
happen? They killed me, damn ’em; _they killed me!_”
* * * * *
From a climatic standpoint Arizona is really a tropic country modified in
the north by its elevation. It has no summer or winter in the generally
accepted sense, but instead a short rainy season in July and August and
a dry one the rest of the year. In the spring and fall dust-storms are
frequent—and if you have never experienced an Arizona dust-storm you have
something to be thankful for—while in the summer it gets so hot that
I have seen them cover the skylight of the Hotel Adams in Phœnix with
canvas and keep a stream of water playing on it from sunup to sundown.
The warmest part of the State, and, in fact, the warmest place north of
the lowlands of the Isthmus—barring Death Valley—is the valley of the
lower Gila in the neighbourhood of Yuma, where the mercury in a shaded
thermometer not infrequently climbs to the 130 mark. It should be said,
however, that, owing to the extreme dryness of the air, evaporation from
moist surfaces is very rapid, so that the high temperatures of southern
Arizona are decidedly less oppressive than much lower temperatures in a
humid atmosphere. As a result of this dryness and of the all-pervading
sunshine, Arizona has in recent years come to be looked upon as a
great natural sanitarium, and to it flock thousands of sufferers from
catarrhal and tubercular diseases. Everything considered, however, I do
not believe that Arizona is by any means an ideal sick-man’s country;
for, particularly in advanced stages of tuberculosis, there is always the
danger of overstimulation, the patient, buoyed up by the champagne-like
quality of the air, feeling well before he is well and overexerting
himself in consequence.
Perhaps the innate politeness of the Arizonians was never put to a
severer test than it was a few years ago, when Mr. Chauncey Depew, then
at the height of his fame as a speaker, utilised the opportunity afforded
by changing engines at Yuma to address a few remarks to the assembled
citizens of the place from the platform of his private car. Now Yuma,
as I have already remarked, has the reputation of being the red-hottest
spot north of Panama, and its residents are correspondingly touchy when
any illusion is made to the torridness of their climate. Imagine their
feelings, then, when Mr. Depew, in the course of his remarks, dragged
in the bewhiskered story of the soldier who died at Fort Yuma from a
combination of sunstroke and delirium tremens. The following night his
bunkie received a spirit message from the departed. “Dear Bill,” it ran,
“please send down my blankets.” Now that story is hoary with antiquity. I
have heard it told in the officers’ mess at Aden, and at Bahrein at the
head of the Persian Gulf, and on the terrace of the club in Zanzibar,
with its locale laid in each of those places, and I haven’t the least
doubt in the world but that it evoked a yawn from King Rameses when it
was told to him in Thebes. Yet the inhabitants of Yuma, with a politeness
truly Chesterfieldian, not only did not yawn or groan or hiss when Mr.
Depew saddled the ancient libel upon their town, but it is said that one
or two of them even laughed hoarsely. The Arizonian heat is not of the
sunstroke variety, however, and the thrasher gangs work right through it
all summer from ten to fourteen hours a day; and this, remember, is only
in the desert half of the State—the mountain half is as high and cool as
you could wish, with snow-capped mountains and green grass and running
water and fish and game everywhere.
Speaking of game, certain portions of Arizona still offer opportunities
aplenty for the sportsman who knows how to ride and can stand fatigue. In
the foot-hills of the Catalina Range mountain-lions are almost as common
as are back-yard cats in Brooklyn. Patience, perseverance, and a pack
of well-trained “b’ar dogs” rarely fail to provide the hunter with an
opportunity to swing his front sights onto a black bear or a cinnamon on
the Mogollon Plateau. Spotted leopards, or jaguars, frequently make their
way into the southern counties from Mexico and serve to furnish handsome
rugs for the ranch-houses of the region. Though small herds of antelope
are still occasionally seen, the law has stepped in at the eleventh hour
and fifty-ninth minute and prevented their complete extermination. But
if you want an experience to relate over the coffee and cigars that will
make your friends’ stories of bear hunting in British Columbia and moose
hunting in Maine sound as tame and commonplace as woodchuck shooting on
the farm, why don’t you run down to that portion of Arizona lying along
the Mexican border and hunt wild camels? I’m perfectly serious—there
_are_ wild camels there. They came about in this fashion: Along in the
late seventies, if I am not mistaken, the Department of Agriculture,
thinking to confer an inestimable boon on the struggling settlers of
the arid Southwest, imported several hundred head of camels from Egypt,
arguing that if they could carry heavy burdens over great stretches of
waterless and pastureless desert in Africa, there was no reason why they
could not do the same thing in Arizona, where almost identically the
same conditions prevailed. But the paternalistic officials in Washington
failed to take into account the prejudices of the packers. Now, the camel
is a supercilious and ill-natured beast, quite different from the patient
and uncomplaining burro, but the Arabs, who have grown up with him, as it
were, make allowance for the peculiarities of his disposition and get
along with him accordingly. Not so the Arizona packer. He took a hearty
dislike to the ship of the desert from the first and never let pass an
opportunity to do it harm. As a result of this hostility and abuse, many
of the poor beasts died and the remainder were finally turned loose in
the desert to shift for themselves. If they have not multiplied they at
least have not decreased and are still to be found in those uninhabited
stretches of desert which lie along the Mexican frontier. They are not
protected by law and are wild enough and speedy enough to require some
hunting; so if you want to add to your collection of trophies a head
that, as a cowboy acquaintance of mine put it, is really “rayshayshay,”
you can’t do better than to go into the desert and bag a dromedary.
* * * * *
In speaking of Arizona it must be borne in mind that the State consists
of two distinct regions, as dissimilar in climate and physiography
as Florida and Maine. Theirs is the difference between plateau and
plain, between sandstone and sand, between pine and palm. If you will
take a pencil and ruler and draw a line diagonally across the map of
the State, from Mojave City on the Colorado, to Bisbee on the Mexican
border, you will have a rough idea of the extent of these two zones.
That portion of the State lying to the north of this imaginary line is
a six-thousand-foot-high plateau, mountainous and heavily forested,
with green grass and running water and cold, dry winters, and an
annual rainfall which frequently exceeds thirty inches. To the south
of this quartering line lies a tremendous stretch of arid but fertile
land, broken at intervals by hills and mountain ranges, with a sparse
vegetation and an annual rainfall which, particularly in the vicinity
of the Colorado, often does not exceed three inches. It is in this
southern portion, however, that the future of Arizona lies, for the
success of the great irrigation projects at Roosevelt and Laguna (and
which will doubtless be followed in the not far distant future by similar
undertakings on the Santa Cruz, the San Pedro, the Agua Frio, the Verde,
the Little Colorado, and the lower Gila) have given convincing proof that
all that its arid soil requires is water to transform it into a land of
farms and orchards and gardens, in which the energetic man of modest
means—and it is such men who form the backbone of every country—can find
a generous living and a delightful home.
[Illustration: THE TRAIL OF A THOUSAND THRILLS.
The road from Phœnix to the Roosevelt Dam—“its right angle corners and
hairpin turns are calculated to make the hair of the motorist permanently
pompadour.”]
A grave injustice has been done to the people of the State by those
fiction writers who have depicted Arizona society as consisting of
cow-punchers, faro dealers, and bad men. The pictures they still persist
in drawing of towns shot up by drunken cowboys, of saloons and poker
palaces running at full blast, of stage-coaches and mail-trains held up
and robbed, are as much out of date, if the reading public only knew
it, as crinoline skirts and flowered satin vests. As a matter of fact,
Arizona claims the most law-abiding population in the United States, and
the claim is copper-riveted by the criminal records. The gambler and
the gun fighter have disappeared, driven out by the force of public
disapproval. The Arizona Rangers, that picturesque body of constabulary
which policed the country in territorial days, have been disbanded
because there is no longer work for them to do. While it is not to be
denied that a large number of the citizens, particularly in the range
country, still carry firearms, it must not be inferred that crime is
winked at or that murder is regarded with a whit more tolerance than
it is in the East. The sheriffs and marshals of Arizona are famous as
“go-gitters” and a very large proportion of the gentry whom they have
gone for and gotten are promptly given free board and lodging in a large
stone building at Florence, on the outer walls of which men pace up and
down with Winchesters over the shoulders. The Arizona State Penitentiary
at Florence is one of the most modern and humanely conducted penal
institutions in the United States, being under the direct supervision of
Governor Hunt, who is one of the foremost advocates of prison reform in
the country. When I visited the penitentiary with the governor, instead
of spending the night at the residence of the warden, he insisted on
occupying a cell in “murderer’s row.” His experiment in introducing the
honour system in the Arizona prisons has met with such pronounced success
that roads and bridges are now being constructed throughout the State by
gangs of prisoners in charge of unarmed wardens. In this connection they
tell an amusing story of an English tourist who was getting his first
view of Arizona from the observation platform of a Pullman. As the train
tore westward his attention was attracted by the conspicuous suits worn
by a force of men engaged in building a bridge.
“I say,” he inquired, screwing a monocle into his eye and addressing
himself to the Irish brakeman, “who are the johnnies in the striped
clothing?”
“Thim’s som uv Guv’nor Hunt’s pets from th’ Sthate prison,” was the
answer. “Most av thim’s murtherers too.”
“My word!” exclaimed the Briton, staring the harder. “Isn’t it jolly
dangerous to have murderers running loose about the country like that?
What?”
“Not at all,” the brakeman answered carelessly; “yez see, sorr, in most
cases there was exterminating circumstances.”
* * * * *
The other day, when the promoters of Phœnix’s annual carnival wished
to obtain a stage-coach to use in the street pageants, they could not
find one in the State; they had all been bought by the moving-picture
concerns. A stage still runs over the mountains from Phœnix to Globe,
driven by a gentleman who chews tobacco and wears a broad-brimmed hat,
but it has sixty-horse-power engines under it and the fashion in which
the driver takes the giddy turns—he assured me that he went round them
on two wheels so as to save rubber—is calculated to make the passengers’
hair permanently pompadour. Out in the back country, where the roads
run out and the trails begin, the cow-puncher is still to be found,
but he, like the longhorns which he herds, is rapidly retreating before
civilisation’s implacable advance.
[Illustration: _From a photograph by H. A. Erickson, Coronado, Cal._
THROWING THE DIAMOND HITCH.
“Out in the back country ... the old, picturesque life of the frontier
is still to be found.”]
* * * * *
The history of Arizona divides itself into three epochs—the aboriginal,
the exploratory, and the reclamatory, or, if you prefer, the Indian,
the Spanish, and the American—and each of these epochs is typified by
a remarkable and wholly characteristic structure: the ruins of Casa
Grande, the Mission of San Xavier del Bac, and the Roosevelt Dam. Casa
Grande—“the Great House”—or Chichitilaca, to give it its Aztec name,
which rises from the desert some sixty miles southeast of Phœnix, is the
most remarkable plain ruin in the whole Southwest and the only one of
its kind in the United States. It is a four-storied house of sun-dried
puddled clay, forming, with its cyclopean walls, its low doorways so
designed that any enemy would have to enter on hands and knees, and
its labyrinth of rooms, courtyards, and corridors, a striking and
significant relic of a forgotten people. Already a ruin when discovered,
in 1694, by the Jesuit Father Kino, how old it is or who built it even
the archæologists have been unable to decide. Its crumbling ruins are
emblematic of a race of sturdy red men, growers of grain and breeders of
cattle, whose energy and resource wrested this region from the desert,
and who were driven out of it by the greed of a stronger and more warlike
people.
In the shadow of the foot-hills, where the Santa Rita Mountains sweep
down to meet the desert half a dozen miles outside Tucson, stands the
white Mission of San Xavier del Bac. It is the sole survivor of that
chain of outposts of the church which the friars of the Spanish orders
stretched across Arizona in their campaign of proselytism three centuries
ago. I saw it for the first time at sunset, its splendid, carved façade
rose-tinted by the magic radiance of twilight, its domes and towers
and minarets silhouetted against the purple of the mountains as though
carved from ivory. Perhaps it is the dramatic effect produced as,
swinging sharply around the corner of the foot-hills, one comes upon it
suddenly, standing white and solitary and lovely between the desert and
the sky, but I shall always rank it with the Taj Mahal, the Alhambra,
and the Mosque of Sultan Hassan as one of the most beautiful buildings I
have ever seen. If California had that mission she would advertise and
exploit it to the skies, but they don’t seem to pay much attention to
it in Arizona, being too much occupied, I suppose, with other and more
important things. In fact, I had to inquire of three people in the hotel
at Tucson before I could learn just where it was. Although the patter of
monastic sandals upon its flagged floors has ceased these many years,
San Xavier is neither deserted nor run down, for the sonorous phrases
of the mass are still heard daily from its altar, serene and smiling
nuns conduct a school for Indian children within the precincts of its
white-walled cloisters, and at twilight the angelus-bell still booms
its brazen summons and the red men from the adjacent reservation come
trooping in for evening prayer. The last of the Arizona missions, it
stands as a fitting memorial to the courageous _padres_ who first brought
Christianity to Arizona, many of them at the cost of their lives.
Eighty miles north of Phœnix, at the back of the Superstition Mountains
and almost under the shadow of the Four Peaks, is the great Roosevelt
Dam—the last word, as it were, in the American chapter of Arizona’s
history. Those who know whereof they speak have estimated that four
fifths of the State is fitted, so far as the potentialities of the soil
is concerned, for agriculture, but hitherto the lack of rainfall has
reduced the available area to that which lay within the capabilities of
the somewhat meagre streams to irrigate. This was particularly true of
the region of which Phœnix is the centre. Came then quiet, efficient men
who proceeded to perform a modern version of the miracle of Moses, for,
behold, they smote the rock and where there had been no water before
there was now water and to spare. Across a narrow cañon in the mountains
they built a Gargantuan dam of sandstone and cement to hold in check
and to conserve for use in the dry season the waters of the river which
swirled through it. The great artificial lake, twenty-five square miles
in area, thus created, holds water enough to cover more than a million
and a quarter acres with a foot of water and assures a permanent supply
to the two hundred and forty thousand acres included in the project.
The farmers of the Salt River valley, which comprises the territory
under irrigation, forming themselves into an association, entered into a
contract with the government to repay the cost of the dam in ten years,
whereupon it will become the property of the landowners themselves; the
water, under the terms of the agreement, becoming appurtenant to the
land. Just as the crumbling ruins at Casa Grande serve as a reminder of
a race long since dead and gone, and as the white mission at Tucson is a
memorial to the Spaniards who came after them, so is the mighty dam at
Roosevelt, together with its accompanying prosperity, a monument to the
courage, daring, and resource of the American. It is a very wonderful
work that is being done down there in Arizona, and to the toil-hardened,
sun-tanned men who are doing it I am proud to raise my hat. Such men are
pioneers of progress, carpenters of empire, and they are chopping a path
for you and me, my friends, “to To-morrow from the land of Yesterday.”
IV
THE LAND OF DREAMS-COME-TRUE
“It lies where God hath spread it,
In the gladness of His eyes,
Like a flame of jewelled tapestry
Beneath His shining skies;
With the green of woven meadows,
And the hills in golden chains,
The light of leaping rivers,
And the flash of poppied plains.
...
Sun and dews that kiss it,
Balmy winds that blow,
The stars in clustered diadems
Upon its peaks of snow;
The mighty mountains o’er it,
Below, the white seas swirled—
Just California stretching down
The middle of the world.”
IV
THE LAND OF DREAMS-COME-TRUE
Because it is at the very bottom of the map and almost athwart the
imaginary line which separates the Land of Mañana from the Land of
Do-It-Now, the Imperial Valley seems the logical place to begin a journey
through southern California. The term “southern California,” let me
add, is usually applied to that portion of the State lying south of
the Tehachapis, which would probably form the boundary in the event of
California splitting into two States—an event which is by no means as
unlikely as most outsiders suppose. No romance of the West—and that is
where most of the present-day romances, newspaper, magazine, book, and
film, come from—excels that of the Imperial Valley. These half a million
sun-scorched acres which snuggle up against the Mexican boundary, midway
between San Diego and Yuma, have proven themselves successors of the
gold-fields as producers of sudden wealth; they are an agricultural Cave
of Al-ed-Din. Now, the trouble with writing about the Imperial Valley
is that if you tell the truth you will be accused of being a booster.
But, to paraphrase Davy Crockett: “Be sure your facts are right, then go
ahead.” And I am sure of my facts. You may believe them or not, just as
you please.
Not much more than a decade ago two brothers, freighting across the
Colorado Desert from Yuma to San Diego, stumbled upon twelve human
skeletons, white-bleached, upon the sand—grim tokens of a prospecting
party which had perished from thirst. To-day the Colorado Desert is no
more. Almost on the spot where those distorted skeletons were found a
city has risen—a city with cement sidewalks and asphalted streets and
electric lights and concrete office-buildings and an Elks’ Hall and
moving-picture houses; a city whose municipal council recently passed
an ordinance prohibiting the hitching of teams on the main business
thoroughfare, “to prevent congestion of traffic,” as a local paper
explained in breaking the news to the farmers. About the time that we
changed the date-lines on our business stationery from 189- to 190- this
was as desolate, arid, and hopeless-looking a region as you could have
found between the oceans—and I’m not specifying which oceans either.
Even the coyotes, as some one has remarked, used to make their last
will and testament before venturing to cross it. In 1902 the United
States Department of Agriculture sent one of its soil experts—at least
he was called an expert—to this region to investigate its agricultural
possibilities. Here is what he reported: “Aside from the alkali, which
renders part of the soil practically worthless, some of the land is
so rough from gullies or sand-dunes that the expense of levelling it
is greater than warranted by its value. In the one hundred and eight
thousand acres surveyed, 27.4 per cent are sand-dunes or rough land....
The remainder of the level land contains too much alkali to be safe,
except for resistant crops. One hundred and twenty-five thousand acres
have already been taken up by prospective settlers, many of whom talk
of planting crops which it will be absolutely impossible to grow. They
must early find that it is useless to attempt their growth.” If the
sun-bronzed settlers had followed this cock-sure advice, the Imperial
would still be a waste of sun-swept sand. But pioneers are not made that
way. Instead of becoming discouraged and moving away after reading the
report of the government expert, they merely grinned confidently and
went on clearing the sage-brush from their land—for sixty miles to the
eastward, across a country as flat as a hotel piazza, the Colorado River,
with its wealth of water, rolled down to the sea. And water was all that
was needed to turn these thirsty sands into pastures and orchards and
gardens. The government curtly declining to lend its aid, the settlers
went ahead and brought the water in themselves. It took determination
and perspiration, a lot of both, to dig a diversion canal across those
threescore miles of burning desert, but by the end of 1902 the work
was done, the valley was introduced to its first drink of water, and
the first crops were begun. To-day the Imperial Valley, with its seven
hundred miles of canals, is the greatest body of irrigated land in the
world. In 1900 the government was offering land there for a dollar and
a quarter an acre. In 1914 land was selling (_selling_, mind you, not
merely being offered) for _just a thousand times that sum_.
[Illustration: How Mr. and Mrs. Powell saw Arizona.
“One comes upon it suddenly, standing white and solitary and lovely
between the desert and the sky.”
SCENES IN THE MOTOR JOURNEY THROUGH ARIZONA.]
Its soil is, I suppose, everything considered, the most fertile and
versatile in the world. Its one hundred and twenty-five thousand acres of
alfalfa yield twelve crops a year. I was shown a patch of thirty-three
acres from which forty-five head of cattle are fed the year round. Later
on another proud and prosperous husbandman showed me some land which
had produced two and a half bales of long-staple cotton to the acre.
Early in February the valley growers begin to export fresh asparagus;
their shipments cease in April, when districts farther north begin
to produce, and start again in the fall when asparagus has once more
become a luxury. Pears ripen in December; figs are being picked at
Christmas; grapes are sent out by the car-load in early June, six weeks
before they ripen elsewhere save under glass. The valley is famous for
its cantaloups, which are protected during their early growth by paper
drinking cups. It would seem, indeed, as though Nature was trying to
recompense the Imperial Valley for the unhappiness of her earlier years
by giving her the earliest and the latest crops. A restricted region in
the northeastern part of the valley is the only spot in the New World in
which the Deglet Noor date—a variety so jealously guarded by the Arabs
that few samples of it have ever been smuggled out of the remote Saharan
oases of which it is a native—matures and can be commercially grown.
Barely a dozen years have slipped by since the Imperial Valley was
wedded to the Colorado River. From that union have sprung five towns
which are now large enough to wear long pants—Imperial, El Centre,
Calexico, Holtville, and Brawley—while several other communities are
in the knickerbocker stage of development. Though scarcely a decade
separates them from the yellow desert, they resemble frontier towns
about as much as does Gary, Ind. The wooden shacks and corrugated-iron
huts so characteristic of most new Western towns are wholly lacking
in their business districts. The buildings are for the most part of
concrete in the appropriate Spanish mission style; every building
is designed to harmonise with its neighbours on either side; every
building has its _portales_, or porticoed arcade, over the sidewalk,
thus providing pedestrians with a welcome protection from the sun; for,
though the valley boosters never cease to emphasise the fact that there
is practically no humidity, they forget to add that in summer the air is
like a blast from an open furnace door.
When I was in the valley I dined with a friend one night on the terrace
of the very beautiful country club of El Centro. Pink-shaded candles cast
a rosy glow upon the faultless napery and silver of our table and all
about us were similar tables at which sat sun-tanned, prosperous-looking
men in white flannels and women in filmy gowns. Silent-footed Orientals
slipped to and fro like ghosts, bearing chafing-dishes and gaily coloured
ices and tall, thin glasses with ice tinkling in them. When the coffee
had been set beside us we lighted our cigars and, leaning back in great
contentment, looked meditatively out upon the moonlit countryside. Amid
the dark patches of alfalfa and the shadow-dappled plots which I knew to
be truck-gardens; through the ghostly branches of the eucalyptus, whose
leaves stirred ever so gently in the night breeze, gleamed the cheerful
lights of many bungalows.
“A dozen years ago,” said my host impressively, “that country out there
was a howling wilderness. Its only products were cactus and sage-brush.
Its only inhabitants were the coyote, the lizard, and the snake. The man
who ventured into it carried his life in his hands. Look at it now—one of
the garden spots of the world! It’s one of God’s own miracles, isn’t it?”
And I agreed with him that it was.
* * * * *
From El Centro to San Diego is something over a hundred miles, but until
very recently it might as well have been three hundred, so far as freight
or passenger traffic between the two places was concerned, that being the
approximate distance by the roundabout railway route. Though a railway is
now in course of construction which will eventually give the valley towns
direct communication with Yuma and San Diego, the enterprising merchants
of the latter city had no intention of waiting for the completion of
the railway to get the rich valley trade. So they raised a quarter of a
million dollars and with that money they proceeded to build a highway
into the Imperial Valley. Over that highway, which is as good as any
one would ask to ride on, rolls an unending procession of motor-trucks,
bearing seeds and harness and farming implements and phonographs and
pianos and brass beds from San Diego stores to Imperial Valley ranches,
and poultry and early fruit and grain from those ranches back to San
Diego. That illustrates the sort of people that the San Diegans are. It
is almost unnecessary to add that the road has already paid for itself
with interest.
To understand the peculiar geography of San Diego, and of its joyous
little sister Coronado, you must picture in your mind a U-shaped harbour
containing twenty square miles of the bluest water you will find anywhere
outside a bathtub. Strewn upon the gently sloping hillsides which form
the bottom of the U are the chalk-white buildings and tree-lined,
flower-banked boulevards which make San Diego look like one of those
imaginary cities which scene-painters are so fond of painting for
back-drops of comic operas. The right-hand horn of the U corresponds to
the rocky headland known as Point Loma, where Madame Tingley and her
disciples of the Universal Brotherhood theosophise under domes of violet
glass; and in the very middle of the U, or, in other words, in the middle
of San Diego harbor, on an almost-island whose sandy surface has been
lawned and flower-bedded and landscaped into one of the beauty-spots of
the world, is Coronado.
Coronado isn’t really an island, you understand, for it is connected with
the mainland by a sandy shoe-string a dozen miles long and so narrow that
even a duffer could drive a golf-ball across it. There is nothing quite
like Coronado anywhere. It may convey something to you if I say that it
is a combination of Luxor, Sorrento, and Palm Beach. And then some. It
is one of those places where, unless you have on a Panama hat and white
shoes and flannel trousers (in the case of ladies I don’t insist on the
trousers, of course), you feel awkward and ill-dressed and out of the
picture. You know the sort of thing I mean. There are miles of curving,
asphalted parkways, bordered by acres of green-plush lawns; and set down
on the lawns are quaint stone-and-shingle bungalows with roses clambering
over them, and near-Tudor mansions of beam and plaster, and the most
beautiful villas of white stucco with green-tiled roofs, which look as if
they had been brought over entire from Fiesole or the Lake of Como. Over
near the shore is the Polo Club, which does not confine its activities
to polo, as its name would imply, but, like the Sporting Club of Cairo,
caters to the golfer and the tennis player, and the racing enthusiast
as well. Every afternoon during the polo season _tout le monde_ goes
pouring out to the Polo Club in motors and carriages, on horseback, on
street-cars, and afoot, to gossip along the side lines and swagger about
in the saddling paddock and cheer themselves hoarse when eight young
gentlemen in vivid silk shirts and white breeches and tan boots, and
hailing from London or New York or San Francisco or Honolulu or Calgary,
as the case may be, go streaking down the field in a maelstrom of dust
and colour and waving mallets and flying hoofs. After it is all over
and the colours of the winning team have been hoisted to the top of the
flagstaff and the losers have drunk the health of the victors from a
Gargantuan loving-cup, every one goes piling back to the great hostelry,
whose red-roofed towers and domes and gables rising above the palm groves
form a picture which is almost Oriental as they silhouette themselves,
black, fantastic, and alluring, against the kaleidoscopic evening sky.
There are certain hotels which, because of the surpassing beauty of their
situation or their historic or literary associations or the traditions
connected with them, have come to be looked upon as institutions,
rather than mere caravansaries, which it is the duty of every traveller
to see, just as he should see Les Invalides and the Pantheon and the
Alcazar, and, if his purse will permit, to stop at. In such a class I
put Shepheard’s in Cairo, the Hermitage at Monte Carlo, the Danieli
in Venice, the Bristol in Paris, the Lord Warden at Dover, the Mount
Nelson at Cape Town, Raffles’s at Singapore, the Waldorf-Astoria in New
York, the Mission Inn at Riverside, the Hotel del Monte at Monterey,
and the Hotel del Coronado. It is by no means new, is the Coronado, nor
is it particularly up-to-date, and from an architectural standpoint
it leaves much to be desired, but it shares with the other famous
hotels I have mentioned that indefinable something called “atmosphere”
and it stands at one of those crossways where the routes of tourist
travel meet. To find anything to equal the brilliant scene for which
its great lobby is the stage you will have to go to the east coast of
Florida or Egypt or the Riviera. From New Year’s to Easter its spacious
corridors and broad verandas are thronged with more interesting types
of people than any place I know save only Monte Carlo. Suppose we sit
down for a few minutes, you and I, and watch the passing show. There
are slim, white-shouldered women whose gowns bespeak the Rue de la Paix
as unmistakably as though you could read their labels, and other women
whose gowns are just as unmistakably the products of dressmakers in
Schenectady and Sioux City and Terre Haute. There are well-groomed young
men, well-groomed old men, and overgroomed men of all ages; men bearing
famous names and men whose names are notorious rather than famous. There
are big-game hunters, polo players, professional gamblers, adventurers,
explorers, novelists, mine owners, bankers, landowners who reckon their
acres by the million, and cattlemen who count their longhorns by the tens
of thousands. There are English earls, and French marquises, and German
counts; there are women of Society, of society, and of near-society; men
and women whose features the newspapers and bill-boards have made as
familiar as the faces of Dr. Woodbury and Mr. Gillette, and, mingling
with all the rest, plain, every-day folk hailing from pretty much
everywhere between Portland, Ore., and Portland, Me., and whose money it
is, when all is said and done, which makes this sort of thing possible.
They come here for rest, so they take pains to assure you, but they are
never idle. They bathe in the booming breakers when the people beyond the
Sierras are shivering before their bathtubs; they play golf and tennis as
regularly as they take their meals; they gallop their ponies madly along
the yellow beach in the early morning; they fish off the coast for tuna
and jewfish and barracuda; they take launches across the bay to see the
flying men swoop and circle above the army aviation school; they watch
the submarines dive and gambol like giant porpoises in the placid waters
of the harbour; they play auction bridge on the sun-swept verandas or
poker in the seclusion of the smoking-room; and after dinner they tango
and hesitate and one-step in the big ballroom until the orchestra puts
up its instruments from sheer exhaustion. At Coronado no one ever lets
business interfere with pleasure. If you want to talk business you had
better take the ferryboat across the bay to San Diego.
San Diego’s history stretches back into the past for close on four
hundred years. Her harbour was the first on all that devious coast-line
which reaches from Cape San Lucas to the Straits of Juan de Fuca in which
a white man’s anchor rumbled down and a white man’s sails were furled.
In her soil were planted the first vine and the first olive tree. The
first cross was raised here, and the first church built, and beneath the
palms which were planted by the _padres_ in the valley that nestles just
back of the hill on which the city sits the first lessons in Christianity
were taught to the primitive people who inhabited this region when the
paleface came. Here began that remarkable chain of outposts of the church
which Father Junipero Serra and his indomitable Franciscans stretched
northward to Sonoma, six hundred miles away. And here likewise began El
Camino Real, the King’s Highway, which linked together the one-and-twenty
missions and which forms to-day the longest continuous highway in the
world, and, without exaggeration, the most beautiful, the most varied,
and the most interesting.
I don’t know the population of San Diego, because a census taken
yesterday would be much too low to-morrow. The San Diegans claim that
they arrive at the number of the city’s inhabitants by the simple method
of having the census enumerators meet the trains to count the people when
they get off. For, as they ingenuously argue, any one who once comes to
San Diego never goes away again, unless it be to hurry back home and pack
his things. In a country where both population and property values have
increased like guinea-pigs, the growth of San Diego is spoken of with
something akin to awe. In the year that Grant was elected President, a
second-hand furniture dealer named Alonzo Horton closed his little shop
in San Francisco and with the savings of a lifetime—some say two hundred
and sixty dollars, some eight hundred—in a belt about his waist, took
passage on a steamer down the Californian coast. With this money he
bought, at twenty-six cents an acre, most of what is now San Diego. Some
of those lots which the shrewd old furniture dealer thus acquired could
not now be bought for less than a cool half million! Two decades later
came John D. Spreckels, bringing with him the millions he had amassed
in sugar, and gave to San Diego a street-railway, electric lights, a
water-system, one of the most beautiful theatres on the continent, and a
solid mile of steel-and-concrete office-buildings of uniform height and
harmonious design.
The people of San Diego are adamantine in their conviction that theirs
is a city of destiny. They assert that within a single decade the name
of San Diego will be as familiar on maps, and newspapers and bills of
lading as New Orleans or Genoa or Yokohama or Calcutta or Marseilles.
And they have some copper-riveted facts with which to back up their
assertions. In the first place, so they will tell you, they have the
harbour; sixteen miles long, forty to sixty feet deep, and protected
from storms or a hostile fleet by a four-hundred-foot wall of rock. When
the fortifications now in course of construction are completed San Diego
will be as safe from attack by sea as though it were on the Erie Canal.
Secondly, San Diego is the first American port of call for westbound
vessels passing through the Panama Canal, and one of these days, unless
the plans of the Naval Board of Strategy miscarry, it will become a
great fortified coaling station and naval base, for it is within easy
striking distance of the trans-Pacific lanes of commerce. Thirdly, it is
the logical outlet for the newly developed sections of the Southwest,
the grade between Houston and San Diego, for example, being the lowest
on the continent—and commerce follows the lines of least resistance.
Fourthly (this sounds like a Presbyterian sermon, doesn’t it?), San
Diego will soon have a rich and prosperous hinterland, without which
all her other advantages would go for nothing, to supply and to draw
from. Experts on agricultural development have assured me that the day
is coming when the Imperial Valley, of which San Diego is already the
recognised _entrepôt_, will support as many inhabitants as the Valley
of the Nile. Nor is this assertion nearly as visionary as it sounds,
for the zone of cultivation in the Nile country is, remember, only a
few miles wide. Beyond the Imperial Valley lie the constantly spreading
orchards and alfalfa fields which are the result of the Yuma and Gila
River projects. East of Yuma is the great region, of which Phœnix is
the centre, which acquired prosperity almost in a single night from the
Roosevelt Dam. East of Phœnix again the Casa Grande irrigation scheme is
converting good-for-nothing desert into good-for-anything loam. Beyond
Casa Grande the great corporation known as Tucson Farms is redeeming
a large area by means of its canals and ditches, while still farther
eastward the titanic dam at Elephant Butte, which the government is
building to conserve the waters of the Rio Grande, will snatch from the
clutches of the New Mexican desert a region as large as a New England
State. And these are not paper projects, mind you. Some of them are
completed and in full swing; others are in course of construction, so
that by 1920 an almost continuous zone of irrigated, cultivated, and
highly productive land will stretch from San Diego as far eastward as the
Rio Grande. And, as the San Diegans gleefully point out, the settlers on
these new lands will find San Diego nearer by from one hundred to two
hundred miles than any other port on the Pacific Coast as a place to ship
their products and to do their shopping. But the people of San Diego
are such notorious boosters that before swallowing the things they told
me I sprinkled them quite liberally with salt. In fact, I wasn’t really
convinced of the genuineness of San Diego’s prospects until I happened
to meet one evening on a hotel terrace a member of America’s greatest
banking-house—a house whose credit and prestige are so unquestioned that
its support is a hall-mark of financial worth.
“What do you think about this San Diego proposition?” I asked him
carelessly, as we sat over our cigars. “Is it another Egyptian bubble
which will shortly burst?”
“That was what I thought it was when I came out here,” he answered, “but
since investigating conditions I have changed my mind. It looks so good
to us, in fact, that we intend to back up our judgment by investing
several millions.”
So far as attracting visitors is concerned, San Diego’s most valuable
asset is her climate. Though the southernmost of our Pacific ports and
in the same latitude as Syria and the North African littoral, it has the
most equable climate on the continent, the records of the United States
Weather Bureau showing less than one hour a year when the mercury is
above 90 or below 32. According to these same official records, the sun
shines on three hundred and fifty-six days out of the three hundred and
sixty-five, so that rain is literally a nine days’ wonder. San Diego’s
climate is that of Alaska in summer and of Arabia in winter, and, if you
don’t believe it, the San Diegans will prove it by means of a temperature
chart, zigzagging across which are two lines, one bright red, the other
blue, which denote summer and winter climates circling the globe and
which converge at only one point on it—San Diego. As a result of these
unique climatic conditions, San Diego, unlike most resort cities, has
two seasons instead of one. The Eastern tourists have hardly taken
their departure in the spring before the hotels and boarding-houses
begin to fill up with people who have come here to escape the torrid
heat of a Southwestern summer. Many of these summer visitors are small
ranchers from Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah, and from across the line
in Chihuahua and Sonora, to whom the rates charged at the hotels would
be prohibitive. To accommodate this class of visitors there has sprung
into being on the beach at Coronado a “tent city.” The “tents” consist
for the most part of one or two room bungalows with palm-thatched roofs
and walls and wooden floors and equipped with running water, sanitary
arrangements, and cooking appliances. The Coronado Tent City contains
nearly two thousand of these dwellings which can be rented at absurdly
low figures. For those who do not care to do their own cooking the
management has provided a restaurant where simple but well-cooked meals
can be had at nominal prices; there is a dancing pavilion for the young
people, a casino on whose verandas the mothers can gossip and sew and
at the same time keep an eye on their children playing on the sand, and
a club house with pool-tables and reading-matter for the men. The place
is kept scrupulously clean, it is thoroughly policed, hoodlumism is not
tolerated, and, everything considered, it seemed to me a most admirable
and inexpensive solution of the perennial summer-vacation problem for
people of modest means.
* * * * *
Because I wanted to see something more than that narrow coastwise
zone which comprises all that the average winter tourist ever sees of
California; because I wanted to obtain a more intimate knowledge of
the country and its people than comes from a car-window point of view;
because I wanted to penetrate into those portions of the back country
still undisturbed by the locomotive’s raucous shriek and eat at quaint
inns and sleep in ranch-houses and stop when and where I pleased to
converse with all manner of interesting people, I decided to do my
travelling by motor-car. And so, on a winter’s sunny morning, when the
flower vendors in the plaza of San Diego were selling roses at ten
cents a bunch and the unfortunates who dwelt beyond the Sierras, rim
were begging their janitors for goodness’ sake to turn on more steam,
I turned the nose of my car northward and stepped on her tail, and
with a rush and roar we were off on a journey which was to end only at
the borders of Alaska. As, with engines purring sweet music, the car
breasted the summit of the Linda Vista grade our breath was almost taken
away by the startling grandeur of the panorama which suddenly unrolled
itself before us. At our backs rose the mountains of Mexico, purple,
mysterious, forbidding, grim. Spread below us, like a map in bas-relief,
lay the orchard-covered plains of California; to the left the Pacific
heaved lazily beneath the sun; to the right the snow-crowned Cuyamacas
swept grandly up to meet the sky, and before us the beckoning yellow road
stretched away ... away ... away.
I have never been able to resist the summons of the open road. I always
want to find out what is at the other end. It goes somewhere, you see,
and I always have the feeling that, far off in the distance, where
it swerves suddenly behind a wood or disappears in the depths of a
rock-walled cañon or drops out of sight quite unexpectedly behind a
hill, there is something mysterious and magical waiting to be found.
About the road there is something primitive and imperishable. Did it
ever occur to you that it has been the greatest factor in the making
of history, in the spread of Christianity, in the march of progress?
Some one has said, and truly, that the rate and direction of human
progress has always been determined by the roads of a people. For a time
the marvel of modern inventions caused the road to be forgotten. The
steamship sailed majestically away in contempt of the road upon the shore
and the locomotive sounded its jeering screech at every crossing along
its right of way. But still the road stayed on. But now the miracle of
the motor-car has brought the road into its own again and started me
ajourneying in the latest product of twentieth-century civilisation,
with the strength of threescore horses beneath its throbbing hood, up
that historic highway which has been travelled in turn by Don Vasquez
del Coronado and his steel-clad men-at-arms, by Padre Serra in his
sandals and woollen robe, by Jedediah Smith, the first American to find
his way across the ranges, by Frémont the Pathfinder, by the Argonauts,
by Spanish _caballeros_ and Mexican _vaqueros_ and American pioneers,
by priests afoot and soldiers on horseback and peasants on the backs of
patient burros, by lumbering ox-carts and white-topped prairie-schooners
and six-horse Concord stages—and now by automobiles. In El Camino Real
is epitomised the history and romance of the West. It is to western
America what the Via Appia was to Rome, the Great North Road to England.
It has been in turn a trail of torture, a course of conquest, a road of
religion, a route to riches, a path of progress, a highway to happiness.
He who can traverse it with no thought for anything save the number of
miles which his indicator shows and for the comforts of the hotel ahead;
who is so lacking in imagination that he cannot see the countless phantom
shadows who charge it with their unseen presence; who is incapable of
appreciating that in it are all the panorama and procession of the West,
had much better stay at home. The only thing that such a person would
understand would be a danger-signal or a traffic policeman’s club.
I am convinced that if the several thousand Americans who go on annual
motor trips through Europe, either taking their cars with them or hiring
them on the other side, could only be made to realise that on the edge
of the Western ocean they can find roads as smooth and well built as the
English highways or the _routes nationales_ of France, and mountains as
high and sublimely beautiful as the Alps or the Pyrenees, and scenery
more varied and lovely than is to be found between Christiania and Capri,
and vegetation as luxuriant and hotels more luxurious than on the Côte
d’Azur, and a milder, sunnier, more equable climate than anywhere else
on the globe, they would come pouring out in such numbers that there
wouldn’t be garages enough to hold their cars. In 1913 the legislature of
California voted eighteen millions of dollars for the improvement of the
roads, and that great sum is being so judiciously expended in conjunction
with the appropriations made by the other coast states that by early in
1915 a motorist can start from the Mexican border and drive northward
to Vancouver—a distance considerably greater than from Cherbourg to
Constantinople—with as good a road as any one could ask for beneath his
tires all the way.
It is very close to one hundred and forty miles from San Diego to
Riverside if you take the route which passes the rambling, red-tiled,
adobe ranch-house famous as the home of _Ramona_; dips down into Mission
Valley, where from behind its screen of palms and eucalyptus peers
the crumbling and dilapidated façade of the first of the Californian
missions; swirls through La Jolla with its enchanted ocean caverns;
climbs upward in long sweeps and zigzags through the live-oak groves
behind Del Mar; pauses for a moment at Oceanside for a farewell look at
the lazy turquoise sea, and then suddenly swings inland past Mission
San Luis Rey and the mission chapel of Pala and the Lake of Elsinore.
That is the route that we took and, though it is not the shortest, it is
incomparably the most beautiful and the most interesting. We found by
experience that one hundred and forty miles is about as long a day’s run
as one can make with comfort and still permit of ample time for meals
and for leisurely pauses at places of interest along the way. Once, in
the French Midi, I motored with a friend who had chartered a car by the
month with the agreement that he was to be permitted to run four hundred
kilometres a day. It mattered not at all how fascinating or historically
interesting was the region we were traversing, we must needs tear through
it as though the devil were at our wheels. We couldn’t stop anywhere, my
host explained, because if we did he wouldn’t be able to get the full
allowance of mileage to which he was entitled. Some day, however, I’m
going through that same country again and see the things I missed. Next
time I think that I shall go on a bicycle. With highways as smooth as the
promenade-deck of an ocean liner it is a temptation to burn up the road,
of course, particularly if your car has plenty of power and your driver
knows how to keep his wits about him. But that sort of thing, especially
in a country which has so many sights worth seeing as California, smacks
altogether too much of those impossible persons who boast of having
“done” the Louvre or the Pitti in an hour. Half the pleasure of motoring,
to my way of thinking, is in being able to stop when and where you
please—_and stopping_.
Between San Diego and Oceanside the road hugs the coast as though it
were a long-lost brother. It is wide and smooth and for long stretches
led through acres and acres of yellow mustard. This, with the vivid blue
of the sea on one side and the emerald green of the wooded hillsides on
the other, made the country we were traversing resemble the flag of some
Central American republic. I think that the most beautiful of the little
coast towns through which the road winds is Del Mar, perched high on a
cypress-covered hill looking westward to Cathay. This is the home of the
Torrey pine, which is found nowhere else in the world. In the springtime
the mesas above the sea are all aflame with yellow dahlias and the
hillsides at the back are as gay with wild flowers as a woman’s Easter
bonnet. Del Mar is an interesting example of the rehabilitation of a
down-and-out town. A few years ago it was little more than a straggling,
grass-grown street lined with decrepit, weather-beaten houses. A
far-sighted corporation discovered the ramshackle little hamlet, bought
it, subdivided it, laid out miles of contour drives and a golf course,
and built a little gem of a hostelry, modelled and named after the
inn at Stratford-on-Avon, on the hill above the sea. Now the place is
awake, animated, prosperous. Bathers dot its ten-mile crescent of silver
sand; artists pitch their easels beneath the shadow of the friendly
live-oaks; on the flower-carpeted hill slopes have sprung up the villas
and bungalows of the rich. A few miles farther up the coast you can lunch
beneath the vine-hung pergolas of the quaint Miramar at Oceanside, nor
does it require an elastic imagination to pretend that the hills behind,
grey-green with olive groves, are those of Amalfi and that the lazy,
sun-kissed sea below you is the Mediterranean instead of the Pacific.
Four miles inland from Oceanside, in a swale between low hills, stands
all that is left of the Mission of San Luis, Rey de Francia, which, as
its name denotes, is dedicated to Saint Louis, King of France. Begun when
Washington was President of the United States and Alta California was
still a province of New Spain, completed when the nineteenth century was
but a two-year-old, and secularised by the Mexican authorities after the
expulsion of the Spaniards in 1834, the historic mission has once again
passed into the hands of the Franciscan Order which built it and is now
a training-school for priests who wish to carry the cross into foreign
lands. The ruins of the mission—which, thanks to the indefatigable
efforts of the priest in charge, are being restored to a semblance of
their original condition as fast as he is able to raise the money—are
among the most picturesque in California. We stopped there on a golden
afternoon, when the sunlight, sifted and softened by the interlacing
branches of the ancient olive trees, cast a veil of yellow radiance upon
the crumbling, weather-worn façade and filtered through the arches of
those cloistered corridors where the cowled and cassocked brethren of
Saint Francis were wont to pace up and down in silent meditation, telling
their beads and muttering their prayers.
Nestling in a hollow of the hills, twenty miles northeast of San Luis
Rey, over a road which is comparatively little travelled and only
indifferently smooth, is the _asistencia_ or mission chapel of San
Antonio de Pala. Even though it were not on the road to Riverside,
it would be well worth going out of one’s way to see because of its
picturesque _campanario_, with a cactus sprouting from its top, and
the adjacent Indian village with its curious burial-ground. The little
town, which centres, of course, about the chapel, the agency, and the
trader’s, stands on the banks of the San Luis Rey River, with high
mountains rising abruptly all around. Here, in sheet-iron huts provided
by a paternal government and brought bodily from the East and set up in
this secluded valley, dwell all that is left of the Palatingwa tribe—a
living refutation of our boast that we have given a square deal to the
Indian. Once each year the Palatingwas are visited by their friends of
neighbouring tribes, and for a brief time the mountain valley resounds to
the barbaric clamour of the tom-toms and to the plaintive, pagan chants
which were heard in this land before the paleface came. The mission
chapel, after standing empty for many years, once more has a priest, and
at sunset the bell in the ancient campanile sends its mellow summons
booming across the surrounding olive groves and the copper-coloured
villagers, just as did their fathers in Padre Serra’s time, come trooping
in for evening prayer.
[Illustration: _From a photograph by Avery Edwin Field._
_From a photograph by Avery Edwin Field._
NOT IN CATALONIA BUT IN CALIFORNIA.
“A great hotel which combines the architectural features of the
Californian missions—cloisters, patios, brick-paved corridors, bell-hung
campaniles, ivy-covered buttresses—with an Old World atmosphere and
charm.”]
But of all the California missions, from San Diego in the south to
Sonoma in the north, the one I like the best is the Mission Miller at
Riverside—and any one who has ever stopped there will unhesitatingly
agree with me. Its real name, you must understand, is the Mission
Inn, and there is no hostelry like it anywhere else in the world.
At least I, who am tolerably familiar with the hotels of five-score
countries, know of none. In it Frank Miller, the Master of the Inn, as
he loves to be called, has succeeded in commercialising romance to an
extraordinary degree. He might be said, indeed, to have taken the cent
from sentiment. In other words, he has built a great hotel which combines
the architectural features of the most interesting of the Californian
missions—cloisters, patios, quadrangles, brick-paved corridors, bell-hung
campaniles, ivy-covered buttresses, slender date-palms with flaming
macaws screeching in them—with an Old World atmosphere and charm, and in
such a setting he dispenses the same genial and personal hospitality
which was a characteristic of the Spanish _padres_ in the days when the
travellers along El Camino Real depended on the missions for food and
shelter.
V
WHERE GOLD GROWS ON TREES
“Dost thou know that sweet land where the orange flowers grow?
Where the fruits are like gold and the red roses blow?”
V
WHERE GOLD GROWS ON TREES
It was in the heyday of the Second Empire. The French army was at its
autumn manœuvres and the country round about Rheims was aswarm with
troopers in brass helmets and infantry in baggy red breeches. Louis
Napoleon was directing the operations in person. Riding one day through
a vineyard at the head of a brigade, he suddenly pulled up his horse and
turned in his saddle.
“Halt!” he ordered. “Column right into line! Attention! Present ... arms!”
“But who are you saluting, sire?” inquired one of his generals in
astonishment, spurring alongside.
“The grapes, _mon général_,” replied the Emperor; “for do they not
represent the wealth and prosperity of France?”
* * * * *
It was the astonishing prosperity of the orange belt which brought the
incident to mind. For an entire morning we had been motoring among the
orange groves which make of Riverside an island in an emerald sea. The
endless orchards whose shiny-leaved trees drooped under their burden of
pumpkin-coloured fruit; the chalk-white villas and the blossom-smothered
bungalows of which we caught fleeting glimpses between the ordered rows;
the oiled roads, so smooth and level that no child could look on them
without longing for roller-skates; the motor-cars standing at almost
every doorstep—all these things spelled prosperity in capital letters.
“It seems to me,” I remarked to the gentleman who was acting as our
guide (these same orange groves had made him a millionaire in less than
a decade), “that it would not be unbefitting if the people of Riverside
followed the example of Louis Napoleon when he saluted the grapes”; and I
told him the story of the Emperor in the vineyard.
“You are quite right,” said he. “Would you mind stopping the car?” and,
standing in the tonneau very erect and soldierly, he lifted his hat.
“My Lady Citrona,” he said gravely, “I have the honour to salute you, for
it is to you that the prosperity of southern California is chiefly due.”
* * * * *
What its harbour has done for San Diego, what its climate has done for
Santa Barbara, its oranges have done for Riverside. Thirty years ago you
could not have found it on the map. To-day it is the richest community
_per caput_—which is the Latin for inhabitant—between the ice-floes of
the Arctic and the Gatun Dam. At least that is what Mr. Bradstreet—the
gentleman, you know, who publishes the large green volume which tells
you whether the people you meet are worth cultivating—says, and he
ought to know what he is talking about. Though it can boast few if any
“show-places” such as are proudly pointed out to the open-mouthed tourist
in Pasadena and Santa Barbara, it is a pleasant place in which to dwell,
is this happy, sunny, easy-going capital of the citrus kingdom. It is
as substantial-looking as a retired banker; it is as spick and span as
a ward in a hospital; it is as satisfying as a certified cheque—and,
incidentally, it is as dry as the desert of Sahara. You are regarded
with suspicion if you are overheard asking the druggist for alcohol for
a spirit-lamp. It is, moreover, the only place I know that has foiled
the exaggeratory tendencies of the picture post-card makers. Its oranges
are so glaringly yellow, its trees so vividly green, its poinsettias so
flamingly red, its snow-topped mountains so snowily white, its skies so
bright a blue that the post-card artists have had to be truthful in spite
of themselves.
I think that the spirit of Riverside is epitomised by two great
wrought-iron baskets which flank the entrance to the dining-room of its
famous hostelry, the Mission Inn. One of them is filled with oranges, the
other with flowers. And you are expected to help yourself; not merely to
take one as a souvenir, you understand, but to fill your pockets, fill
your arms. “That’s what they’re there for,” the Master of the Inn will
tell you. That little touch does more than anything else to make you
feel that southern California really is a land of fruit and flowers and
that they are not hidden behind the garden walls of the rich but can be
enjoyed by everyone. It goes far toward counteracting the unfavourable
impression a stranger receives in a certain ornate hotel in Los Angeles
where he is charged forty cents for a sliced orange!
Ciceroned by the orange millionaire, we motored up a zigzag boulevard,
with many horseshoe bends and hairpin turns, to the summit of Mount
Rubidoux, a domesticated and highly landscaped mountainette within the
city limits. Moses and his footsore Israelites, looking down upon the
Promised Land, could have seen nothing fairer than the view which greeted
us on that winter’s Sunday morning. I doubt if there has been anything
more peacefully enchanting than a Sunday morning in southern California
in the orange season since a “To Let” sign was nailed to the gates of the
Garden of Eden. It suggests, without in any way resembling, such a number
of things: a stained-glass window in a church, for example; an Easter
wedding; Italy in the springtime ... but perhaps you don’t grasp just
what I mean.
From Rubidoux’s rocky base the furrowed orange groves, looking exactly
like quilted comforters of bright-green silk, stretch away, away, until
they meet just such a yellow arid desert as Riverside used to be before
the water came, and the desert sweeps up to meet tawny foot-hills, and
the foot-hills blend into amethystine mountain ranges and these rise
into snowy peaks which gleam and sparkle against a sapphire sky. And
from the orange groves rises that same subtle, intoxicating fragrance
(for you know, no doubt, that orange-trees bear blossoms and fruit at
the same time) that you get when the organist strikes up the march from
“Lohengrin” and the bride floats up the aisle. The significant thing
about it all, however, is not the surpassing beauty and extraordinary
luxuriance of the vegetation, but the fact that there is any vegetation
here at all. No longer ago than when women wore bustles this region was a
second cousin to the Sahara, dry as a treatise on mathematics, dusty as a
country pike on circus day, but which now, thanks to the faith, patience,
energy, and courage of a handful of horticulturists, has been transformed
into a land which is a cross between a back-drop at a theatre and a
fruit-store window.
* * * * *
Once each year, toward the close of the fasting month of Ramazan, the
Arabs of the Sahara make a pilgrimage to a spot in the desert near
Biskra, in southern Algeria. From a thousand miles around they come—by
horse and by camel and on the backs of asses—for the sake of a prayer in
the yellow desert at break of day. This “Great Prayer,” as it is called,
is one of the most impressive ceremonies that I have ever witnessed,
and I little thought that I should ever see its like again—certainly
not in my own land and among my own people. Once each year the people
of Riverside and the surrounding country also make a pilgrimage. They
set out in the darkness of early Easter morning, afoot, ahorseback, in
carriages, and in panting motor-cars, and assemble on the summit of
Mount Rubidoux in the first faint light of dawn. They group themselves,
fittingly enough, about the cross which has been erected in memory
of Padre Junipero Serra, that indomitable friar who first brought
Christianity to the Californias, and who, on his weary journeys between
the missions which he founded, not infrequently spread his blankets for
the night at the foot of this same hill. Last year upward of six thousand
people gathered under the shadow of the Serra cross to greet the Easter
morn. As sunrise approached, a group of girls from the Indian School,
standing on a rocky eminence, sang “He Is Risen,” and then, as a red
glow in the east heralded the coming of the sun, the sweet, clear notes
of a cornet rang out upon the morning air in the splendid bars of “The
Holy City.” Just as the last notes died away a spark of light—brighter
than the arc-lamps which still glared in the streets of the city
below—appeared above the San Bernardino’s topmost rim and a moment later
the full orb of the sun burst forth in all its dazzling glory, turning
the purple mountains into peaks of glowing amethyst and the sombre
valleys into emerald islands swimming in a sea of lavender haze. “Lord,
Thou hast been my dwelling-place in all generations.... I will lift up
mine eyes to the hills from whence cometh my help,” chanted the people in
solemn unison. And then Dr. Henry van Dyke, fittingly garbed in a Norfolk
jacket and knickerbockers, with a mammoth boulder for a pulpit, read his
“God of the Open Air.” With the Amen of the benediction there ended the
most significant and impressive service that I have ever heard under
the open sky and one which sharply refutes the frequent assertion that
America is lacking in those quaint ceremonies and picturesque observances
which make Europe so attractive to the traveller.
[Illustration: A MODERN VERSION OF THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT.
The Easter sunrise service on Mount Rubidoux, near Riverside, “sharply
refutes the frequent assertion that America is lacking in those quaint
ceremonies and picturesque observances which make Europe so attractive to
the traveller.”]
It is threescore miles from Riverside to Pasadena, provided you go via
Redlands, Smiley Heights, and San Bernardino, and it is flowers and
fruit-trees all the way. Just as every visitor to London asks to be
directed to Kew Gardens, so every visitor to the orange belt asks to be
shown Smiley Heights. Its late owner was a hotel proprietor of national
fame who amassed a fortune by running his great summer hostelries at
Lake Mohonk, N. Y., in conformance with the discipline of the Methodist
Church, among the rules which the guests are required to observe being
one which states that “visitors are not expected to arrive or depart
on the Sabbath.” Smiley Heights is a remarkable object-lesson in the
horticultural miracles which can be performed in California with water
and patience. When bought by Mr. Smiley it was a barren, bone-dry mesa,
whose entire six hundred acres did not have sufficient vegetation to
support a goat, but which, by the lavish use of water, and fertilisers,
and the employment of a small army of landscape architects and gardeners,
has been transformed into a beauty-spot which is worth using several
gallons of gasoline to see. In Cañon’s Crest, to give the place the
name bestowed by its owner, is epitomised the story of all southern
California, for on every side of this semitropic garden of pines, palms,
peppers, oranges, olives, lemons, figs, acacias, bamboos, deodars, and
roses, roses, roses, stretches the sage-brush-covered desert from which
it was snatched and to which, were it deprived of care and water, it
would quickly return. If you will look from the right-hand window of your
north-bound train, just before it reaches Redlands, you can see it for
yourself: a flower-smothered, tree-covered table-land rising abruptly
from an arid plain.
I wonder if other motorists get as much enjoyment from the signs along
the way as I do. The notices along the Californian roads struck me as
being more original and amusing than any that I had ever seen. Most
of them were worded with an after-you-my-dear-Alphonse politeness
which made acquiescence with their courteous requests a pleasure,
though occasionally we were confronted with a warning couched in such
threatening terms that it seemed to shake a metaphorical fist in our
faces. Who, I ask you, would not cheerfully slow down to lawful speed in
the face of the stereotyped request which is used on the roads between
Riverside and Pasadena: “Speed limit thirty miles an hour—a reasonable
compliance with this request will be deeply appreciated”? Another time,
however, as we were humming along one of those stretches of oiled
delight which make the speedometer needle flutter like a lover’s heart,
we were greeted, as we swept into the outskirts of some Orangeburg or
Citronville, by a great brusque placard which menaced us in staring black
letters with the threat: “Fifty dollars fine for exceeding the speed
limit.” As a result we crept through the town as sedately as though we
were following a hearse, which was, I suppose, the very effect the city
fathers aimed to produce, but as we left the limits of the municipality
our resentment was dispelled by a sign so placed as to catch the eye of
the departing motorist. It read: “So long, friend! Come again.”
There is one word that you should never, _never_ mention in the orange
belt and that is—frost. That severe frosts are few and far between
is perfectly true, as is attested by the fact that the road from
Riverside to Pasadena runs through a vast forest of treasure-bearing
trees. That there is another and less joyous side to the business of
raising breakfast-table fruit was brought sharply home to me, however,
by noting that the orchards I passed were dotted with hundreds, yes,
thousands, of little cylindrical oil-stoves—the kind that they use in
New England farmhouses to heat the bedroom enough to take a bath in on
Sunday mornings. When the weather observer in Los Angeles flashes to the
orange-growing centres a warning of an impending frost, the countryside
turns out _en masse_ as though to repel an invader, and soon the groves
are dotted with myriad pin-points of flame as the orchardists wage their
desperate battle with the cold, with stoves, braziers, smudge-pots, and
bonfires for their weapons. Though at long intervals a frost comes which
does wide-spread and incalculable damage, as in 1913, that they _are_
infrequent is best proved by the fact that automobile, phonograph, and
encyclopedia salesmen find their most profitable markets in the orange
belt.
The cultivation of citrus fruits has been so systematised of recent years
that nowadays, if one is to believe the alluringly worded prospectuses
issued by the concerns engaged in selling citrus lands, all the owner of
an orange grove has to do is to sit in a rocking-chair on his veranda,
watch his trees grow and his fruit ripen, have it picked, packed, and
marketed by proxy, and pocket the money which comes rolling in. According
to the specious arguments of the realty dealers, it is as simple as
taking candy from children. You simply can’t lose. According to them, it
works out something after this fashion. Prof. Nathaniel Nutt, principal
of a school at Skaneateles, N.Y., decides that when his teaching days are
over he would like to spend his carpet-slipper years on an orange grove
under California’s sunny skies. Lured by the glowing advertisements, he
invests in ten acres of land planted to young trees and piped for water.
The price is five hundred dollars an acre, of which he pays one fifth
down and the balance in four annual instalments. By the time that his
grove is old enough to bear, therefore, it will be fully paid for. In
its fifth year—according to the dealer, at least—Mr. Nutt’s grove will
yield him fruit to the value of five hundred dollars an acre, so that
it will pay for itself the very first year after it comes into bearing.
Moreover, during the five years that must of necessity intervene before
the trees can be expected to droop under their golden crop, there is no
real necessity for Mr. Nutt’s coming to California, for, by the payment
of a purely nominal sum, he can have his grove cultivated, irrigated,
and cared for under the direction of expert horticulturists while he
continues to teach the Skaneateles youngsters their three R’s. As soon as
the grove comes into bearing he will be notified, whereupon he will send
in his resignation to the School Board, pack his grip, buy a ticket to
California, and settle down as an orange grower with an assured income
of five thousand dollars a year (ten acres multiplied by five hundred
dollars, you see) for life. Simple, isn’t it? But let us suppose, just
for the sake of argument, that about the time that Prof. Nutt’s trees
come into bearing a devastating frost comes along and in a single night
wipes his orchard out. Is it likely that he will be able to stand the
financial strain of setting out another grove and irrigating it and
fertilising it and caring for it for another five years? All of which
goes to prove that orange growing is no business for people of limited
means. Like speculating in Wall Street, it is an occupation which should
only be followed by those who have sufficient resources to tide them over
serious reverses and long periods of waiting. For such as those, however,
there is no denying that gold grows on orange-trees.
Citrus growing, as I have already remarked, has been greatly simplified
of late by the organisation of growers’ unions. These unions are a result
of the long and bitter struggle the citrus growers have waged to oust
the intrenched middlemen and speculators. A few years ago the growers
found themselves facing the alternatives of organisation or bankruptcy.
They chose the former. The first to organise were the Riverside growers,
who built a common packing-house, put a general manager in charge, and
sent their fruit to it to be inspected, packed, sold, and shipped. So
successful did the experiment prove that other districts soon followed
Riverside’s example, until to-day there is no orange-growing section
in the State that does not have its own packing-house. But the growers
did not stop there. They soon found that, if they were to get the
top-of-the-market prices for their fruit, some system must be devised
for getting market quotations at the eleventh hour and fifty-ninth
minute and then diverting their shipments to the highest market. Here
is an example: a car-load of oranges from Redlands might arrive in the
Milwaukee freight yards the same day as a car-load from San Bernardino,
in which case the Milwaukee market would be glutted, while in Saint Paul
there might be a shortage of the golden fruit. To meet this necessity
the local packing-houses grouped themselves together in shipping
exchanges, of which there are now in the neighbourhood of a hundred
and thirty, handling sixty per cent of California’s citrus crop. But,
as the industry grew, still another organisation was needed: a big
central fruit exchange to handle problems of transportation, to gather
information about the markets, and to supply daily quotations, and legal,
technical, and scientific information. Thus there came into being the big
central exchange, as a result of which the growers have been enabled
to market their own fruit regardless of the speculators. This central
exchange keeps a salaried agent on every important market in the country.
No commissions and no dividends are paid; there is no profit feature
whatsoever. Against each box of fruit passing through the exchange is
assessed the exact expense of handling, and the entire proceeds, less
only this expense, are remitted to the grower. The local packing-house
unions exist solely to pick, pack, and ship; the district unions exist
solely to handle the local problems of the association; the central union
exists for the purpose of gathering and supplying quotations and other
information. Each of these unions is duly incorporated and has a board of
directors, the growers electing the directors of the district union and
these in turn electing the directors of the central union. Each union is
a pure democracy—one vote a man, independent of his financial status or
his acreage.
Few outsiders appreciate the enormous proportions to which California’s
citrus industry has grown. Three of every four oranges grown in the
United States come from Californian groves, which yield a fifth of the
entire citrus production of the world. The orange and lemon groves of
California now amount to approximately a quarter of a million acres and
are increasing at the rate of twenty-five thousand acres a year, for,
as it takes a grove five years to come into bearing and nine years to
reach maturity, population multiplies faster than the groves can grow.
Notwithstanding this formidable array of facts and figures, it is open
to grave doubt whether an orange grove is a safe investment for a person
of modest means. Though a great deal of money has unquestionably been
made in citrus growing, there is no denying the fact that it is a good
deal of a gamble. One of the largest and most successful growers in
California, a pioneer in the industry, said to me not long ago: “If the
best friend I have in the world sent me a cheque for ten thousand dollars
and asked me to invest it for him in citrus property, I would send it
back to him unless I knew that there was plenty of money where that came
from. I have made money in orange growing, it is true, but only because
there has never been a time that I have not had ample resources to fall
back on.” And here is the other side of the shield. We stopped for lunch
one day at the rose-covered bungalow of a young widow whose husband had
died a few years before, leaving her with two small children and twenty
acres of oranges.
“These twenty acres,” she told me, as we sat on the terrace over the
coffee, “pay for the maintenance of this house, for the education of
my two youngsters, for the up-keep of my little motor-car, and for my
annual trips back East. And I don’t have to economise by wearing cotton
stockings, either.”
I have shown you both sides of the orange question; you can decide it for
yourself.
* * * * *
Some one with a poetic fancy and an imagination that worked overtime
has asserted that Pasadena means “the Pass to Eden.” Though this is,
to say the least, a decidedly free translation, it is, nevertheless, a
peculiarly fitting one, for I doubt if there is any spot on earth where
Adam and Eve would feel more at home than in the enchanting region of
oak-studded foot-hills and poppy-carpeted valleys to which Pasadena is
the gateway. What Cannes and Mentone and Nice are to Europe, Pasadena is
to America: a place where the fortunate ones who can afford it can idle
away their winters amid the same luxurious surroundings and under the
same _cielo sereno_ that they would find on the Côte d’Azur. Enclosed
on three sides by a mountain wall which effectually protects it from
the cold land winds, Pasadena nestles amid its subtropical gardens on
the level floor of the San Gabriel Valley, ten miles from _La Puebla
de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles_, to give the second city of
California its full name. It is said, by the way, that the people of
Los Angeles have twenty-three distinct ways of pronouncing the name
of their city. Mr. Charles Lummis, the author, who is a recognised
authority on the Southwest, has attempted to secure a correct and uniform
pronunciation of the city’s name by distributing among his friends the
following:
“My Lady would remind you, please,
Her name is not ‘Lost Angy Lees’
Nor Angy anything whatever.
She trusts her friend will be so clever
To share her fit historic pride,
The _g_ should not be jellified;
Long _o_, _g_ hard and rhyme with ‘yes’
And all about Los Angeles.”
It is a Spotless Town in real life, is Pasadena. It is as methodically
laid out as a Nuremburg toy village; it is as immaculate as a new pair of
white kid gloves. At the height of the season, which begins immediately
after New York’s tin-horn-and-champagne debauch on New-Year’s Eve and
lasts until Fifth Avenue is ablaze with Easter millinery, you can find
more private cars side-tracked in Pasadena railway yards and more
high-powered automobiles on its boulevards than at any pleasure resort
in the world. It is much frequented by the less spectacular class of
millionaires, to whom the frivolity of the Palm Beach life does not
appeal, and more than once I have seen on the terrace of the Hotel Green
enough men whose names are household words to form a quorum of the
board of directors of the Steel Trust. Though dedicated to pleasure,
Pasadena has an extraordinary number of large and beautiful churches,
and, as their pulpits are frequently occupied by divines of international
reputation, they are generally filled to the doors. In fact, I have
counted upward of three hundred motor-cars parked in front of two
fashionable churches in Colorado Street.
Just as the Eastern visitor to San Francisco is invariably shown three
“sights”—Chinatown, Golden Gate Park, and the Cliff House, so, when
he goes to Pasadena, he is shown Orange Grove Avenue, taken through
the Busch Gardens, and hauled up Mount Lowe. Orange Grove Avenue is a
mile-long, hundred-foot-wide stretch of asphalt bordered throughout its
entire length by palms, pepper-trees, and plutocrats. We drove along
it quite slowly, taking a resident with us to point out the houses
and retail any odds and ends of gossip about the people who lived in
them, like the lecturers on the rubberneck coaches. It was almost as
interesting as reading the advertising pages in the magazines, for most
of the names he mentioned were familiar ones: we had seen them hundreds
of times on soap and tooth-powder and ham and corsets and safety-razors.
Then we motored over to the Busch Gardens, which were the hobby of the
late St. Louis brewer and on which he lavished the profits of goodness
knows how many kegs of beer. Though exceedingly beautiful in spots, they
are too much of a horticultural _pousse-café_ to be wholly satisfying.
Roses and orchids and pansies and morning-glories and geraniums and
asters are exquisite by themselves, but they don’t look particularly
well crowded into the same vase. That is the trouble with the Busch
Gardens. The profusion of subtropical vegetation is characteristically
Californian; the sweeping greensward, overshadowed by gnarled and hoary
live-oaks, recalls the manor parks of England; the prim, clipped hedges
and the _jets d’eau_ suggest Versailles; the gravelled promenades,
bordered by marble seats and rows of stately cypress, bear the
unmistakable stamp of Italy; while the cast-iron dogs and deer and gnomes
which are scattered about in the most unexpected places could have come
from nowhere on earth save the Rhineland.
The climax of a stay in Pasadena is the trip up Mount Lowe. You can no
more escape it and preserve your self-respect than you can go to Lucerne
and escape going up the Rigi. From Rubio Cañon, near the city limits, a
cable incline which in Switzerland would be called a funicular, climbs
up the mountainside at a perfectly appalling grade. All the way up you
speculate as to what would happen if the cable _should_ break. When two
thirds of the way to the summit the passengers are transferred to an
electric car which, alternately clinging like a spider to the mountain’s
precipitous face or creeping across giddy cañons by means of cobweb
bridges, twists and turns its hair-raising way upward to the Alpine
Tavern, a mile above the level of the valley floor. The far-flung orange
groves with the sun shining upon them, the white villas of Pasadena and
Altadena peeping coquettishly from amid the live-oaks, the rounded,
moleskin-coloured foot-hills splotched with yellow poppies, the double
rows of blue-grey eucalyptus (in Australia they call them blue-gums)
and the white highways which run between them, in the distance the
towering sky-line of Los Angeles beneath its pall of smoke, and, farther
still, the islands of San Clemente and Santa Catalina rising, violet and
alluring, from the sun-flecked sea, combine to form a picture the Great
Artist has but rarely equalled.
Different people, different tastes. Those who prefer the whoop-and-hurrah
of popular seaside resorts can gratify their tastes to the limit at any
one of the long and beautiful beaches—Long Beach, Redondo, Santa Monica,
Venice—which adjoin Los Angeles. Here the amusements which await the
visitor are limited only by his pocketbook and his endurance. The scenes
along this coast of joy in summer beggar description. The splendid sands
are alive with bathers; the promenades, lined with all the peripatetic
shows of a popular seaside resort, swarm with good-natured, jostling,
happy-go-lucky crowds. There is no rowdyism, as is the rule rather than
the exception at similar resorts in the East, and there is amazingly
little vulgarity, the boisterous element which prevails, say, at Coney
Island, being totally lacking, this being due, no doubt, to the fact
that several of the beaches have “gone dry.” At Long Beach the really
beautiful Virginia, than which there are not half a dozen finer seaside
hotels in the United States, provides accommodation for those who wish to
combine the hurly-burly of Manhattan Beach with the more sedate pleasures
of Marblehead or Narragansett. At Redondo you can risk your neck on the
largest scenic railway in the world (they called them roller-coasters
when I was a boy), or you can bathe in the largest indoor swimming pool
in the world, or you can go down on the beach and disport yourself in the
surf of the largest ocean in the world, though it is only fair to add
that this last is not the exclusive property of Redondo. At Santa Monica
you can sit on a terrace overlooking the sea and eat fried sand-dabs—a
fish for which this portion of the Californian littoral is famous and
which is as delicious as the pompano of New Orleans. At Venice you can
lean back in a gondola, while a gentleman of Italian extraction in white
ducks and a red sash pilots you through a series of lagoons and canals,
and, if you have a sufficiently vigorous imagination, you may be able
to make yourself believe that you are in the city of the Doges. Though
somewhat noisy and nearly always crowded—which is, of course, precisely
what their promoters want—the Los Angeles beaches provide the cleanest
amusements and the most wholesome atmosphere of any places of their kind
that I know.
Though Los Angeles is fifteen miles from the sea as the aeroplane flies,
and considerably farther by the shortest railway route, the Angelenos
have done their best to mitigate this unfortunate circumstance by
attempting to convert the indifferent harbour of San Pedro, twenty miles
away, into a great artificial seaport. Everything that money can do has
been done. The national government has dredged and improved the harbour
and built a huge breakwater at enormous cost, and Los Angeles, which
has extended her municipal limits so as to include San Pedro, has spent
millions more in the construction of several miles of concrete quays
and the installation of the most powerful and modern electric loading
machinery. There is even under serious consideration a plan for digging
a ship-canal from San Pedro to Los Angeles so that seagoing vessels can
discharge and take on cargo in the heart of the commercial district.
Though in time, as a result of the impetus provided by the completion
of the Panama Canal and the astounding growth of Los Angeles, which
now has a population of considerably over half a million (in 1890 it
had only fifty thousand), San Pedro will doubtless develop into a port
of considerable importance for coastwise commerce, its limitations are
not likely to permit of its ever becoming a dangerous rival of its great
sister ports of San Francisco and San Diego. The attitude of the San
Franciscans toward the laudable efforts of Los Angeles to get a harbour
of her own is amusingly illustrated by a story they tell upon the coast.
When the big breakwater was completed and San Pedro was ready to do
business, Los Angeles celebrated the great event with a banquet, among
the guests of honour being a gentleman prominent in the civic life of
San Francisco. Toward the close of an evening of self-congratulation and
of fervid oratory on Los Angeles’s dazzling future as one of the great
seaports of the world, the San Franciscan was called upon to respond to a
toast.
“I have listened with the deepest interest, gentlemen,” he began, “to
what the speakers of the evening have had to say regarding your new
harbour at San Pedro, and I have been impressed with a feeling of regret
that this magnificent harbour, which you have constructed at so great an
expenditure of money and effort, is not more easy of access from your
beautiful city. Now it strikes me, gentlemen, that you could overcome
this unfortunate circumstance by laying a pipe-line from Los Angeles to
San Pedro. Then, if you would suck as hard as you have been blowing this
evening, you would soon have the Pacific Ocean at your front door.”
* * * * *
Strung along the coast of California, from Point Loma to Point
Concepcion, are the Channel Islands. Counting only the larger ones, they
number twelve: three Coronados, four Santa Catalinas, and five in the
Santa Barbara group; but if you include them all, small as well as large,
there are thirty-five distinct links in the island chain which stretches
from wind-swept San Miguel to the Coronados. What the Azores, Madeira,
and the Canaries are to Europe, these enchanted isles are to the Pacific
Coast. They have the climatic charm of the Riviera without its summer
heat; the delights of its winters without the raw, cold winds which sweep
down from the Maritime Alps. With their palms and semitropic verdure they
have all the appearance of the tropics, yet they have not a tropical
climate, the winters having the crispness of an Eastern October and the
summers being cooler than any portion of the Atlantic seaboard south of
Nova Scotia.
Southernmost of the chain and not more than ten miles southwest from San
Diego as the sea-gull flies is the group of rock-bound islets known as
Los Coronados, which belong to Mexico. Though uninhabited and extremely
rough, they are surrounded by forests of kelp and form famous fishing
grounds for the big game of the deep. About a hundred miles to the
northward, off the coast of Los Angeles County, is the group of which
Santa Catalina is the largest and the most famous. Though Santa Catalina
is only twenty-seven miles from San Pedro, the port of Los Angeles,
it takes the _Cabrillo_, owing to her tipsy gait and the choppy sea
which generally prevails in the channel, nearly three hours to make the
passage, which is as notorious for producing _mal de mer_ as that across
the Straits of Dover.
The prehistoric people who inhabited Santa Catalina during the Stone Age,
and of whom many traces have been found in the kitchen-middens which dot
the island, were first awakened to the fact that the world contained
others than themselves when the Spanish sea-adventurer Cabrillo dropped
the anchors of his caravels off their shores. Nearly a century passed
away and then Philip III gave the island to one of his generals as a
present. Some two hundred years were gathered into the past before Pio
Pico, the Mexican governor of Alta California, sold the island for the
price of a horse and saddle. In later years various other transfers took
place from time to time, James Lick, who lies buried under his great
telescope on Mount Hamilton, being for a period lord of the island. Later
it was purchased as a prospective silver mine by an English syndicate,
but the ore ran out and the disgusted Britishers were glad to dispose of
it to the Banning Company, which is the present owner.
Santa Catalina, which is about twenty-seven miles long, is shaped,
with great appropriateness, like a fish, the smaller portion, which
corresponds to the tail, being connected with the main body of the
island by a sandy isthmus. The island is surrounded on all sides by a
dense jungle of kelp and other marine plants, whose wonders visitors are
able to view from glass-bottomed boats. The topography of the island
is scarcely less striking than the sea gardens which surround it. From
the mountain peaks which rise to a height of two thousand feet or more,
V-shaped cañons, their ridges pitched like the roof of a Swiss chalet,
sweep down, ever widening, to the silver beaches of the sea. On the
southern slopes cactus and sage-brush, grim offspring of the desert,
cling to the naked, sun-baked rocks; on the other, the cooler side,
dense, growths of mountain lilac, manzanita, chaparral, elder and other
flowering shrubs form a striking contrast. Most of the vast acreage of
the island is a sheep ranch and wild-goat range, but one cañon at the
eastern end is devoted to the visitor and filled by the charming town
of Avalon with a winter population of seven or eight hundred, which
in summer increases to that many thousand. Avalon is unlike any other
place that I know. It is built on the shore of a crescent-shaped bay
at the mouth of a deep cañon which almost bisects the island. At the
upper end of this cañon a great wall formed by a mountain ridge protects
the town from ocean winds and gives it what is probably the nearest
approach in the world to the “perfect climate.” The quaint houses of
the town, many of them of charming and distinctive design, cling to the
rocky hillsides and dot the slopes of the cañons, adapting themselves,
with characteristic Americanism, to circumstances and conditions.
Along the water-front are the large hotels, a concert pavilion, and
the aquarium—which, by the way, has a larger variety of marine animals
than the famous aquarium at Naples; farther up the beach is a large and
handsome bath-house where hundreds bathe daily, and in the cañon at the
back of the town are the picturesque and sporting golf-links and the
tennis-courts. Though the island offers the visitor an extraordinary
diversity of amusements, Avalon’s _raison d’être_ is angling with rod and
reel and everything is subservient to that. To it, as big-game hunters
go to Africa, come fishermen from the farthermost corners of the world
in quest of the big game of the sea. From the south side of the Bay of
Avalon a long pier wades out into the water. Just as the bridge across
the Arno in Florence is the resort of the gold and silver smiths, so this
pier is the resort of the professional tuna boatmen. Along it, on either
side, are ranged their booths or stands, each with its elaborate display
of the paraphernalia of deep-sea fishing; a placard over each booth bears
the owner’s name and his power-boat is anchored close by. At the end of
the pier is a singular object which resembles a gallows. Beside it is a
locked scales. On the gallows-like affair the great game-fish are hung
and photographed, and on the scales all the fish taken in the tournaments
are weighed by the official weighers of the Tuna Club.
If you will glance to starboard as the _Cabrillo_ steams slowly into
Avalon Harbour, you will notice a modest, brown frame building, with a
railed terrace dotted with armchairs, built on piles above the water.
This is the Tuna Club, the most famous institution of its kind in the
world. To become eligible to membership in this unique club one must take
on a rod of not over sixteen ounces or under six feet and with a line
of not more than twenty-four threads, a fish weighing over one hundred
pounds. If elected one receives the coveted blue button, which is the
angler’s Legion of Honour and to obtain which has cost many fishermen
thousands of dollars and years of patience, while others have won it
in a single day. The club holds organised tournaments throughout the
fishing season, offering innumerable trophy cups and medals of gold,
silver, and bronze for the largest tuna, albacore, sea-bass, yellowtail,
and bonito caught by its members. I might mention, in passing, that the
largest tuna ever taken was caught off Santa Catalina by Colonel C. P.
Morehouse, of Pasadena, in 1899; when placed on the official scales the
indicator registered two hundred and fifty-one pounds. I know of no more
interesting way in which to pass an evening than to sit on the terrace
of the Tuna Club, looking out across the moonlit bay, and listen to
the tales told by these veterans of rod and reel: of Judge Beaman, who
hooked a tuna off Avalon and was towed by the angry monster to Redondo,
a distance of thirty miles, or of Mr. Wood, who played a fish for seven
hours before it could be brought to gaff. I have yarned with professional
elephant and lion hunters in the clubs at Mombasa and Zanzibar, and I
give you my word that their stories were not a whit more fascinating than
the tales of battles with marine monsters which I listened to on the
terrace of the Tuna Club at Avalon.
Santa Catalina’s nearest neighbour is San Clemente, twenty miles long,
whose northern shore is a wonderland of grottoes, caves, and cliffs and
on whose rolling upland pastures browse many thousand head of sheep. A
hundred miles or so to the northward are the islands composing the Santa
Barbara group: Anacapa, Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, and San Miguel. The coast
of Anacapa—“the ever-changing”—is a maze of strange caverns gnawed from
the rock by the hungry sea, one of them, of vast size, having once served
as a retreat for the pirates who formerly plied their trade along this
coast, and now for sea-lions and seals, a skipper from Santa Barbara
doing a thriving business in capturing these animals and selling them for
exhibition purposes, the seals of Santa Cruz being in demand by showmen
all over the world because of their intelligence and willingness to
learn. The island, which is arid and deserted, is a sheep ranch; the fact
that there is little or no water on it apparently causing no discomfort
to the sheep, as their coats become so soaked at night as a result of the
dense fogs that by morning each animal is literally a walking sponge.
Barring Santa Catalina, Santa Cruz is by far the most interesting and
attractive of the Channel Islands, being worthy of a visit if for no
other reason than to see its painted caves, which have been worn by the
waves into the most fantastic shapes and dyed by the salts gorgeous and
varied colors. Viewed from the sea, Santa Cruz appears to be but a jumble
of lofty hills, sheer cliffs, and barren, purple mountains, gashed and
scarred by cañons and gorges in all directions. But once you have crossed
this rocky barrier which hems the island in, you find yourself in the
loveliest Valley that the imagination could well conceive, with palms and
oleanders and bananas growing everywhere and a climate as perfect and
considerably milder than that of Avalon. The island is the property of
the Caire estate; its proprietor is a Frenchman, and French and Italian
labourers are employed exclusively on the ranch and in the vineyards
which cover the interior of the island. When you set foot within the
valley you leave America behind. The climate is that of southern France.
The vineyard is a European vineyard. The brown-skinned folk who work in
it speak the patois of the French or Italian peasantry. The ranch-houses,
of plastered and whitewashed brick, with their iron balconies and their
quaint and brilliant gardens, might have been transplanted bodily from
Savoy, while the great flocks of sheep grazing contentedly upon the
encircling hills complete the illusion that you are in the Old World
instead of within a hundred miles of the newest metropolis in the New.
There are two distinct seasons at Santa Cruz—the sheep-shearing and the
vintage—when the French and Italian islanders are reinforced by large
numbers of Barbareños, from Santa Barbara across the channel, who pick
the grapes in September and twice yearly shear the sheep. Though the
surface of the island is cut in every direction by cañons, gulches,
and precipices, the Barbareño horsemen, who are descended from the old
Mexican vaquero stock, mounted on the agile island ponies, in rounding up
the sheep, ride at top speed down precipitous cliffs and along the brinks
of giddy chasms which an ordinary mortal would hesitate to negotiate with
hobnailed boots and an alpenstock. It is a thrilling and hair-raising
exhibition of horsemanship and nerve and, should you ever happen to be
along that coast at shearing time, I would advise you to obtain a permit
from the Caire family and go over to Santa Cruz to see it.
Sport in the Channel Islands is not confined to fishing, for there is
excellent wild-goat shooting on Santa Catalina and wild-boar shooting
on Santa Cruz. Though both goats and boars are doubtless descended from
domestic animals introduced by the early Spaniards, they have lived so
long in a state of freedom that they provide genuinely exciting sport.
These wild pigs are dangerous beasts for an unmounted, unarmed man to
meet, however, for they combine the staying qualities of a Georgia
razor-back with the ferocity of a Moroccan boar and will charge a man
without the slightest hesitation.
Taking them by and large, the Channel Islands are, I believe, unique.
Where else, pray, within a half day’s sail of a city of six hundred
thousand people, can one explore pirates’ caves, pick bananas from the
trees, shoot wild goat and wild boar, angle for the largest fish in
existence, and, no matter what the season of the year, dwell in a climate
of perpetual spring?
VI
THE COAST OF FAIRYLAND
“All in the golden weather, forth let us ride to-day,
You and I together on the King’s Highway.
The blue skies above us, and below the shining sea;
There’s many a road to travel, but it’s this road for me.
...
It’s a long road and sunny, it’s a long road and old,
And the brown _padres_ made it for the flocks of the fold;
They made it for the sandals of the sinner folk that trod
From the fields in the open to the mission-house of God.
...
We will take the road together through the morning’s golden glow,
And we’ll dream of those who trod it in the mellowed long ago;
We will stop at the Missions where the sleeping _padres_ lay,
And we’ll bend a knee above them for their souls’ sake to pray.
We’ll ride through the valleys where the blossom’s on the tree,
Through the orchards and the meadows with the bird and the bee,
And we’ll take the rising hills where the manzanitas grow,
Past the grey tails of waterfalls where blue violets blow.
Old conquistadores, O brown priests and all,
Give us your ghosts for company when night begins to fall;
There’s many a road to travel, but it’s this road to-day,
With the breath of God above us on the King’s Highway.”
VI
THE COAST OF FAIRYLAND
Following the example of the late J. Cæsar, Esquire, the well-known Roman
politician, who districted Gaul into three parts, California might be
divided into three provinces of pleasure: the Sierras, the Sequoias, and
the Sands. Though nowhere separated by a journey of more than a single
day at most, these three zones are as dissimilar in their physical and
climatical characteristics and in the recreations they offer to the
visitor as the coast of Brittany is from the Engadine, as the Black
Forest is from the Italian Lakes, or, coming nearer home, as unlike
each other as the White Mountains are unlike Atlantic City, as Muskoka
is unlike Bar Harbour. Within the confines of a region five hundred
miles long and barely two hundred wide may be found as many varieties of
climate, scenery, and recreation as are provided by all the resorts of
eastern America and Europe put together.
That California’s summer climate is even more delightful than its
whiter climate is a fact which not one outlander in a hundred seems
able to comprehend. Because the paralysing cold of an Eastern winter
is equalised by a correspondingly sweltering summer, your average
Easterner, who has heard all his life of California’s winter climate,
finds it impossible to disabuse himself of the conviction that a region
which is so climatically blessed by Nature during one half of the year
must, as a matter of course, be cursed with intolerable weather during
the other half, so as to strike, as it were, an average. A climate
which is equally inviting in January and in July is altogether beyond
his comprehension. He fails to understand why Nature does not treat
California as impartially as she does other regions, making her pay for
balmy, cloudless winter days with summers marked by scorching heat and
torrential rains. Summer in California is really equivalent to an Eastern
June. The nights are always cool, and the blankets, instead of being
packed away in moth balls, cover you to the chin. There is no humidity
and the air, which in most summer climates is about as invigorating
as lemonade, is as crisp and sparkling as dry champagne. Nor is there
any rain. This is literal. There is, I repeat, no rain. Each August
the Bohemian Club of San Francisco produces its famous Grove Play in a
natural amphitheatre formed by the rocks and redwoods of the Californian
forest. The cost of the production runs into many thousands of dollars
and involves many months of effort, but the preparations are made with
the absolute assurance that the performance will be unmarred by rain.
In a quarter of a century the club members have not been disturbed by
so much as a sprinkle. Did you ever plan a motor trip or a picnic or
a fishing excursion during an Eastern summer only to be awakened on
the morning of the appointed day by the rain pattering on the roof?
That sort of thing doesn’t happen in California any more than it does
in Egypt. Pick out your midsummer day, no matter whether it is a week
or a month or a year ahead, and on that morning you will find the
weather waiting for you at the front door. This absence of rain is not
an entirely unmitigated blessing, however, for it means dust. And such
dust! I have never seen any region so intolerably dusty as is the Great
Valley of California in midsummer except the Attic Plain. A jack-rabbit
scurrying across the desert sends up a column of dust like an Indian
signal-fire. Along the coast, however, the dust nuisance is ameliorated
to some extent by the summer fogs which come rolling in from the sea
at dawn, leaving the countryside as fresh and sparkling as though it
had been sprinkled by a heavy dew. The farther up the coast you go,
the heavier these fogs become, until, north of Monterey, they resemble
the driving mists so characteristic of the Scottish highlands. For the
benefit of golfers I might add that these moisture-laden fogs make
possible the chain of splendid turf golf-links which begin at Monterey,
the courses farther south, where there is but little moisture during the
summer, being characterised by greens of oiled sand and fairways which
during six months of the year are as dry and hard as a bone. Artists will
tell you that the summer landscapes of California are far more beautiful
than its winter ones, and I am inclined to believe that they are right,
for in June the countryside, with its unnumbered _nuances_ of green and
purple, is transformed, as though by the wave of a magician’s wand, into
a dazzling land of russets and burnt oranges and chromes and yellows.
California may best be described as a great walled garden with one
side facing on the sea. It is separated from those unfortunate regions
which lie at the back of it by the most remarkable garden wall in all
the world. This wall, which is, on an average, two miles high, is five
hundred miles long, having Mount San Jacinto for its southern and Mount
Shasta for its northern corner. At the back of the garden rises, peak on
peak, range on range, the snow-clad Sierra Nevada. Gradually descending,
the high peaks give way to lesser ones, the ranges dwindle to foot-hills,
the foot-hills run out in cañons and grassy valleys, the valley slopes
become clothed with forests, the forests merge into groves of gnarled,
fantastic live-oaks, and these in turn to gorse-covered dunes which
sweep down to meet the sea. The whole of this vast garden—mountain,
forest, and shore—is dotted with accommodations for the visitor which
are adapted to all tastes and to all purses and which range all the way
from huge caravansaries which rival those of Ostend and Aix-les-Bains,
of Narragansett and Lake Placid, to tented cities pitched beneath the
whispering redwoods or beside the murmuring sea.
Unless you have seen the Lago di Garda at its bluest, unless you have
loitered beneath the palms which line the Promenade des Anglais at Nice,
unless you have bathed on the white sands of Waikiki, unless you have
motored along the Corniche Road, with the sun-flecked Mediterranean on
the one hand and the dim blue outline of the Alps upon the other, you
cannot picture with any degree of accuracy the beauties of this enchanted
littoral. From Cannes, where the Mediterranean Riviera properly begins,
to San Remo, where it ends, is barely one hundred miles, every foot of
which is so built over with hotels and villas and straggling villages
that you feel as though you were passing through a city, the impression
being heightened by the gendarmes who stare at you suspiciously and by
the admonitory notices which confront you at every turn. From Coronado,
where the Californian Riviera begins, to the Golden Gate, where it
ends, is six hundred miles, and every foot of that six hundred miles
is through a veritable garden of the Lord. Along this coast date-palms
and giant cacti give place to citrus groves ablaze with golden fruit
and these, in turn, merge into the grey-green of the olive; the olive
groves change to orchards of peach and apricot and prune, and these lose
themselves in time in hillsides green with live-oaks, and the live-oaks
turn to redwoods and the redwoods yield to pines. Bordering this historic
coastal highway—El Camino Real, it is still called—are vast ranches
whose hillsides are alive with grazing flocks and herds; great estates,
triumphs of the landscape-gardener’s skill, with close-clipped hedges and
velvet lawns from amid which rise Norman châteaux and Italian villas and
Elizabethan manor-houses; quaint bungalows with deep, cool verandas,
half hidden by blazing gardens; and, of course, hotels—dozens and dozens
of them, with roses tumbling in cascades of colour over stucco walls and
cool terraces shaded by red-striped awnings. It is indeed an enchanted
coast, and I, who had always boasted to myself that I had seen too many
of the world’s beauty-spots to give my allegiance to any one of them,
have—I admit it frankly—fallen victim to its spell.
* * * * *
Between Los Angeles and Ventura lies one of the most flourishing
agricultural regions in the State, the districts through which we sped
on the wings of the winter morning being variously noted for their
production of hay, walnuts, olives, beets, and beans. Ventura is the
railroad brakeman’s contraction of San Buenaventura—it is obvious that
a trainman could not spare the time to enunciate so long a name—the
picturesque coast town and county-seat owing its origin to the mission
which the Franciscan _padres_ founded here a year after the Battle of
Yorktown and which is still in daily use. From Ventura we made a detour
of fifteen miles or so for the purpose of visiting the Ojai Valley (it
is pronounced “O-hi” if you please), a little place of surpassing beauty
which not many people know about, like Thun in the Bernese Oberland, or
Annecy, near Aix-les-Bains. The road to the Ojai strikes directly inland
from the coast, following the devious course of the Matilija, climbing
up and up and up, through forests of live-oaks and mountain meadows
carpeted with wild flowers, until it suddenly debouches into the valley
itself. Because the Ojai is so very beautiful, and is at the same time so
simple and sylvan and unpretending, it is a little difficult to give an
accurate idea of it in words. Though Mount Topotopo, the highest of the
peaks which hem it in, is not much over six thousand feet, it can best
be compared, I think, to some of the Alpine valleys, such as Andermatt,
for example, or the one below Grindelwald. I do not particularly like
the idea of continually dragging in Europe as a standard of comparison
for things American, but so many of our people have come to know Europe
better than they do their own country that it is the only means I have of
making them realise the beauties and wonders on which, with the coming of
each summer, they habitually turn their backs.
To visualise the Ojai you must imagine a boat-shaped valley, ten miles
long perhaps and a fifth of that in width, entirely surrounded by a
wall of purple mountains. The floor of the valley is covered with lush
green grass and dotted with thousands of gnarled and hoary live-oaks
with venerable grey beards of Spanish moss. Through the trees peep the
shingled, weather-beaten cottages of Nordhoff, which, with its leafy
lanes, its shady blacksmith shop, its cosy inn, and its collection of
country stores with the inevitable group of loungers chewing tobacco
and whittling and settling the affairs of the nation in the shade of
their wooden awnings, is as quaint and sleepy and unspoiled a hamlet
as you can find west of Cape Cod. The annual tournaments of the Ojai
Valley Tennis Club, which for nearly twenty years have been held each
spring on the pretty oak-fringed courts behind the inn, attract the crack
players of the coast, and here have been developed no less than six
national champions. As you ascend the mountain slopes the character of
the vegetation abruptly changes, the oak groves giving way to orchards
of orange, lemon, fig, and olive, which, taken in conjunction with the
palms and the veritable riot of flowers, give to the sides of the valley
an almost tropical appearance. The Ojai is said to have more varieties
of birds and flowers than any place in the United States, and I think
that the statement is doubtless true. It is like an aviary in a botanical
garden. Snuggled away in the mountains at the back of the Ojai are two
equally enchanting but much less frequented valleys: the Matilija and the
Sespe—the latter accessible only on a sure-footed horse along a mountain
trail which is precipitous in places and nowhere overwide. In the spring
and summer the streams which tumble through these mountain valleys are
alive with trout jumping-hungry for the fly. If you can accommodate
yourself to simple accommodations and plain but wholesome fare you can
eat and sleep and fish a very delightful vacation away at the rate of two
dollars a day or ten a week.
High on the slopes of the Ojai, its brown shingles almost hidden by the
Gold of Ophir roses which clamber over it, is a little hotel called The
Foot-hills. It is an unpretending little inn with perhaps forty rooms at
most. But, shades of Lucullus and Mrs. Rorer, what meals they set before
you! Brook-trout which that very morning were leaping in the Matilija,
hot biscuits with honey from the Sespe, huge purple figs, grapefruit
fresh-picked from the adjacent orchard, strawberries with lashings of
thick yellow cream. I’ve never been able to decide which I like best
about the Ojai, its scenery or its food. But as it becomes better
known and more people begin to go there, I suppose the same thing will
happen to it which happened to a dear little _albergo_ in Venice which
I once knew and loved. For many years it stood on the Guidecca, quite
undiscovered by the tourist, and in their day had sheltered the Brownings
and Carlyle. It was a sure refuge from the bustle and turmoil of the big
hotels, and not infrequently I used to go there for a lunch of omelet and
strawberries and Chianti served under a vine-clad pergola on the edge of
the canal. The first time that I took Her to Venice, I said, as we were
leaving the great caravansary where we were stopping:
“I know a place where we will lunch. I haven’t been there for years and I
don’t remember its name, but I think that I can find it,” and I described
it in detail to Angelo, our gondolier.
“_Si, si, signor_,” he assured me, and shoved off with his long oar.
Four times we rowed up and down the Guidecca without my being able to
locate my beloved little hotel.
“This must have been the place you meant, signor,” Angelo said finally,
pointing to a building which was rapidly being demolished and to a
staring sign which read: “A new five-story hotel with hot and cold
running water, electric lights, and all modern conveniences will shortly
be erected on this site. Meals _prix fixe_ or _à la carte_. Music every
evening.”
And that, I suppose, is what will happen to my little hotel in the Ojai
when the world comes to learn about it. So I beg you who read this not to
mention it to any one.
* * * * *
Until quite recently the route from the Ojai to Santa Barbara led over
the Casitas Pass by a precipice-bordered road so narrow and dangerous
that the fear of it kept many motorists away. But now the Casitas is a
thing of the past, for a highway has been built along the edge of the
sea by what is known as the Rincon route, several miles of it lying over
wooden causeways not unlike the viaducts for Mr. Flagler’s seagoing
railway on the Florida keys. This portion of the coast is one long
succession of _barrancas_, each with a rocky creek bed worn by the winter
torrent at its bottom, so that the road builders had many obstacles with
which to contend. It is a very beautiful highway, however, and reminds
one at every turn of the Corniche Road along the Riviera, with the same
lazy ocean on the one side and the same blue serrated mountains on the
other. Through Carpinteria we ran, pausing in our flight just long enough
to take a look at a grape-vine with a trunk eight feet in circumference,
which has borne in a single season, so its guardian assured us, upward
of ten tons of grapes; through Summerland, where the forest of derricks
and the reek of petroleum suggest the hand of Rockefeller; past Miramar,
as smothered in flowers as the heroine of d’Annunzio’s play; through
Montecito, with its marble villas and red-roofed mansions rising above
the groves of cypress and cedar; down the splendid Ocean Drive, where the
great rollers from the Pacific come booming in to break in iridescent
splendour on the silver strand; and so into Santa Barbara, the Newport
of the West, where buildings of stone and concrete jostle elbows with
picturesque hovels of adobe.
Santa Barbara presents more curious contrasts, I suppose, than any place
between the oceans. Drawn up beside the curb you will see a magnificent
limousine, the very latest product of the automobile builder’s art,
with the strength of fourscore horses beneath its sloping hood and as
luxuriously fitted as a lady’s boudoir; a Mexican vaquero, sombreroed,
flannel-shirted, his legs encased in high-heeled boots and fleecy chaps,
fresh from the cattle-ranges on the other side of the mountains, will
rein up his wiry mustang and dexterously roll a cigarette and ask the
liveried chauffeur for a match—_Muchas gracias, Señor_. On State Street
stands a huge concrete office-building, the very last word in urban
architecture, with hydraulic elevators and cork-paved corridors and
up-to-the-minute ventilating devices, and all the rest. A man can stand
in front of that building and toss an orange into the _patio_ of a long,
low, deep-verandaed dwelling whose walls of crumbling adobe show that it
dates from the period when this land was ruled from Madrid instead of
Washington. Though there are plenty of buildings dating from the Spanish
era left, the observing stranger will note that few if any of them retain
their original roofs of hand-made, moss-grown tiles. Why? Because the old
Spanish tiles will bring almost any price that is asked for them, being
in great demand for roofing the houses of the rich. In fact, I know of
one Santa Barbara mansion which is roofed with tiles brought from the old
cathedral at Panama. Nor have I the least doubt in the world that these
plutocratic philistines would strip the historic mission which is Santa
Barbara’s chiefest asset of its tiles and bells and crosses if the monks
could be induced to sell them.
Over in the section known as the Old Town all the houses are Mexican
in character, their walls tinted yellow, pink, bright blue. This, with
the palm-trees and the cactus in the dusty, unkempt dooryards, the
groups of brown-faced, black-eyed youngsters by the gates, and the
Spanish names—Garcias, Ortegas, Oteros, Espinosas, De la Guerras—which
one sees everywhere, makes one realise that Santa Barbara is still
Latin in everything save cleanliness. Merely to read the street
names—Cañon Perdido, Anapamu, Arellaga, Micheltorena, Pedragoso, Chapala,
Salsipuedes—makes you feel that you are in some Castilian town and not in
the United States of the twentieth century at all. Why on earth, while
they were about it, they didn’t call the town’s main thoroughfare La
Calle del Estado instead of prosaic State Street, I fail to understand.
This glaring inconsistency in nomenclature is almost compensated for,
however, by the little square down on the ocean front which is called the
Plaza del Mar. Here barelegged youngsters, guarded by anxious nurses,
gambol upon the sands; here the old folks doze contentedly upon the green
benches and look out to sea and listen to the music of La Monica’s band;
here lovers sit silently, clasping hands beneath the palms, just as other
children, other old folk, other lovers are doing in other plazas in Old
Spain.
[Illustration: “Even the imposing façade of the Arlington, with its
arches, cloisters, terraces, and _campanarios_, suggests a Spanish
monastery.”
“A long, low, deep-verandaed dwelling whose pottery roof and walls of
adobe show that it dates from the period when this land was ruled from
Madrid instead of Washington.”
SANTA BARBARA. A CITY OF CONTRASTS.]
To understand the charm of Santa Barbara as a place of residence, you
should stroll down State Street on a winter’s morning. Like Bellevue
Avenue in Newport, it is the meeting-place for all the town. Youths in
tweed jackets and flannel trousers stand beside the curbs chatting with
pretty girls in rakish, vivid-coloured motor-cars. Dowagers descend from
stately limousines and enter the shops to order sweetbreads and cotillion
favours and the latest novels. Young men astride of mettlesome ponies
trot by on their way to polo practice. Prosperous-looking, well-groomed
men of years, who look as though they might be bank presidents and
railway directors and financiers and probably are, pause to discuss the
wretched weather prevailing in the East and to thank their lucky stars
that they are out of it and to challenge each other to a game of golf.
Slim young girls in riding-boots and beautifully cut breeches patronise
the soda-fountains and hang over the fiction counters in the bookstore
and chatter volubly about tennis and theatres and tango teas. It is one
big reception, at which every one knows every one else and every one
else’s business. Though there is a great deal of wealth and fashion in
Santa Barbara, there is likewise a great deal of informality, which makes
it a pleasant contrast to Pasadena, which is so painfully conscious of
its millionaires that life there possesses about as much informality as a
court ball.
The ancient mission, which with the climate is Santa Barbara’s chief
attraction, provides the _motif_ for the city’s architecture, and the
citizens have made a very commendable effort to live up to it, or
rather to build up to it, even the imposing façade of the Arlington,
with its arches, cloisters, terraces and _campanarios_, suggesting a
Spanish monastery far more than a great tourist hotel. It is the monks
themselves, however, who have been the most flagrant offenders against
the canons of architectural good taste, for within a stone’s throw of
their beautiful old mission they have erected a college which looks for
all the world like a shoe factory surmounted by a cupola and a cross. No
matter from what point upon the encircling hills you look down upon the
city, that atrocious college, as angular, uncompromising, and out of the
picture as a New England schoolmarm at a _thé dansant_, comes up and hits
you in the eye.
[Illustration: THE MISSION OF SANTA BARBARA.
“The sunlight, sifted and softened by the interlacing branches of the
ancient sycamores, cast a veil of yellow radiance upon the crumbling,
weather-worn façade.”]
Perhaps you were not aware that about one out of every ten plays which
flicker before your fascinated eyes on the motion-picture screen were
taken in or near Santa Barbara, for the country round about the town is
a moving-picture producer’s paradise and several companies have built
their studios there and make it their permanent headquarters. Within
a five-mile radius of the Plaza del Mar are settings in which can be
enacted scenes laid anywhere between Cancer and Capricorn. There are
sandy beaches which might have been made expressly for shipwrecks and
buccaneering exploits and similar “water stuff”; there are Greek and
Spanish villas hidden away in subtropical gardens which would provide
backgrounds for anything from the “Odyssey” to “The Orchid-Hunter”; and
back of them are tawny foot-hill ranges where bands of cow-punchers,
spectacularly garbed, pursue horse thieves or valorously defend
wagon-trains attacked by Indians, taking good care, however, to keep
within the focal radius of the camera.
Of the many things in and about Santa Barbara which appeal to the
imagination, I think that I liked best the miniature caravels which
surmount the massive gate-posts at the entrance to the Arlington. To most
visitors I suppose that they are only puppet vessels, quaintly rigged
and strangely shaped, to be sure, but nothing more. But to me they stand
for something very definite indeed, do those little carven craft. They
represent the _San Salvador_ and the _Vittoria_, the little caravels in
which Juan Rodrigues Cabrillo, the intrepid Portuguese sea adventurer
who hired his sword and services to Spain, sailed up this storied
coast upward of three centuries ago and whose anchors rumbled down off
these very shores. From out the mist of fiction, romance, legend, and
fairy-tale which beclouds the early history of California, the certain
and authenticated voyage of this Portuguese sailor of fortune stands out
sharp and clear as the one fact upon which we can rely. Though he never
returned from the land which he discovered, though he has been overlooked
by History and forgotten by Fame, his adventure has become immortal, for
he put California on the map.
* * * * *
Were you to turn your back on the Pacific at some point between Santa
Barbara and San Luis Obispo and strike due eastward, you would find
athwart your path, shortly before reaching the Nevada line, the crudest
and most forbidding of the earth’s waste places—Death Valley. At the very
back of California, paralleling the eastern boundary of Inyo County,
sandwiched between the great wall formed by the High Sierras and the
burning sands of the Colorado Desert, this seventy-five-mile-long gash
in the earth’s surface—the floor of the valley is two hundred and ten
feet below the level of the sea—is one of the most extraordinary regions
in the world. It is a place of contrasts and contradictions. Though in
summer it is probably the hottest place on earth, in winter the cold
becomes so great that the thermometer cannot record it. Its aridity is
so extreme that men have died from lack of moisture with water at their
lips. Though rain is virtually unknown, the lives of the inhabitants
are frequently menaced by the floods which result from cloudbursts. A
mountain range, whose rocks are of such incredibly vivid colours that
even a scene-painter would hesitate to depict them as they are, is
called the Funeral Range. Though nearly a score of lives were lost when
the valley was christened, and though its history from that day to this
has been one of hardship, peril, and death, with little to relieve its
harshness, for fully half the year Death Valley is as healthy a spot as
any on the continent. During the other half, however, it is a sample
package of that fire-and-brimstone hell of which the old-time preachers
were wont to warn us. Indeed, the hereafter could hold no terrors for a
man who was able to survive a summer in Death Valley.
The valley first became known by the tragedy which gave it its name. The
year following the discovery of gold in California a party of thirty
emigrants, losing their heads in their mad lust for the yellow metal,
left the well-travelled Overland Trail and struck south through this
region in the hope of finding a short cut to the gold-fields. But they
found a short cut to death instead, for they lost their way in the valley
and eighteen of them perished horribly from thirst. The valley, which
runs almost due north and south, is about seventy-five miles long, and at
its lowest point, where the climate is the worst, it is not over eight
miles in width. To the west the Panamints reach their greatest altitude,
while on the east the Funeral Range is practically one huge ridge, with
almost a vertical precipice on the side next the valley. To the south
another range, running east and west, shuts in the foot of the valley
and turns it into a _cul-de-sac_. Seen from the summit of the Panamint
Range, the valley looks for all the world like a huge grey snake marked
with narrow bands of dirty white, which are the borax deposits. Far to
the north, gleaming in the sunlight like a slender blade of steel, is
the Amargosa River, while on either side of the valley the ranges rear
themselves skyward in strata of such gorgeous colours that beside them
the walls of the Grand Cañon would look cold and drab. The vegetation is
scant, stunted, and unhappy; the thorny mesquite shrub takes on a sickly
yellowish tinge; the sage-brush is the colour of ashes; even the cactus,
which flourishes on the inhospitable steppes of the adjacent Mohave
Desert, has given up the struggle to exist in Death Valley in despair.
But, arid as the valley is, it has two streams running through it. One,
the Amargosa, comes in at the north end, where it forms a wash that gives
out volumes of sulphuretted hydrogen which poisons the air for miles
around. The other is Furnace Creek, whose waters are drinkable though
hot. Everything considered, it is not exactly a cheerful place, is Death
Valley.
Weather Bureau officials would tell you, should you ask them, that
when there is ninety per cent of humidity in the air the weather is
insufferably oppressive; that air with seventy per cent of humidity is
about right; that sixty or fifty per cent, as when a room is overheated
by a stove or furnace, will produce headaches; while, should the
percentage be reduced to thirty, or even forty, the air would become
positively dangerous to health. Imagine, then, what existence must be
like in Death Valley in midsummer, when the air, raised to furnace heat
by its passage over the deserts, is kiln-dried in the pit below sea-level
until its percentage of moisture is _less than one half of one per
cent_! Effects of this ultrararefied air are observed on every hand. Men
employed in ditch digging on the borax company’s ranch were compelled
to sleep in the running water with their heads on stones to keep their
faces above the surface—and this was not in the hottest weather, either.
Furniture built elsewhere is quickly and utterly ruined. Tables warp into
fantastic shapes. Chairs split and fall apart. Water barrels incautiously
left empty lose their hoops in an hour. Eggs are boiled hard in the
sand. A handkerchief taken from the tub and held up in the sun will dry
more quickly than it would before a red-hot stove. One end of a blanket
that is being washed will dry while the other is still in the tub. Meat
killed at night and cooked at six in the morning is spoiled by nine.
A man cannot go without water for an hour without becoming insane. A
thermometer, hung in the coolest place available, for forty-eight hours
never dropped below 104, repeatedly registered 130, and occasionally
climbed to 137. A borax driver died, canteen in hand, atop his wagon.
“He was that parched that his head cracked open over the top,” said a man
who saw the body.
But in October, strange as it may seem, Death Valley becomes a dreamy,
balmy, _dolce far niente_ land, the home of the Indian summer. Later
in the season snow falls in the mountains to the west to a depth of
three feet or more. At the Teels Marsh borax works the thermometer has
registered 120 in the shade of the house in August and yet before the
winter was over the mercury froze and the temperature dropped to 50
below zero! There is no place on earth, so far as I am aware, where so
wide a variation has been recorded. Though it rarely if ever rains in
the valley, cloudbursts frequently occur amid the adjacent mountain
tops—usually in the hottest weather and when least expected—and in the
face of the roaring floods which follow the people in the valley fly to
the foot-hills for their lives. More appalling than the floods, however,
are the sand-storms which are a recognised feature of life (existence
would be a better term) in Death Valley. A sand-storm sweeping down that
vale of desolation is a never-to-be-forgotten sight. The wind shrieks by
with the speed of an express train. A dense brown fog completely blots
the landscape out. Sand augers rise like slender stems joining sand and
sky, whirling madly hither and thither through the burning atmosphere
like genii suddenly gone mad. The air is filled with flying pebbles,
sand, and dust. It is like a Dakota blizzard with the grit of broken
volcanic rock in place of snow. These sand-storms commonly last for
three days; then they end as suddenly as they began, leaving the desert
swooning amid its shifting waves of heat. Mirages raise up spectral
cities, groves, tree-bordered rivers, lush, green fields as though by the
sweep of a magician’s wand. In the rarefied air the ruins of an adobe hut
are magnified into a sky-scraper; arrow weeds become stately palms; a
crow walking on the ground appears to be a man on horseback.
The borax deposits for which the valley is famous are exactly alike in
their general appearance: a bowl-shaped depression hemmed in by barren
hills and at the bottom of this bowl an expanse that looks like water
or salt or dirty snow or chalk, according to the distance, but which
is really the boracic efflorescence on the bed of a dried-up lake.
Walking out upon the marsh, one finds it covered with a sandy-looking
crust through which the feet generally break, clay or slime being found
beneath. To reach the railway the borax has to be hauled half a hundred
miles by wagon under a deadly sun. The wagons used are huge affairs with
wheels seven feet in diameter and tires eight inches wide, each carrying
ten tons. Two tremendous Percherons are harnessed to the pole and ahead
of them, fastened by double-trees to a steel chain that stretches from
the forward axle, are nine pairs of mules, the driver from his lofty seat
controlling his twenty animals by means of a one-hundred-and-twenty-foot
jerk line, a bucket of stones, and a complete assortment of
objurgations. The next time, therefore, that you chance to see a package
of borax, stop and think what it has cost—insufferable heat, bitter cold,
sand-storms, agonizing thirst, sunstroke—yes, sometimes even death.
* * * * *
From Santa Barbara, El Camino Real, ever glowing, ever luring, bids
_adios_ to the sea for a time and sweeps inland again through a land
of oak groves and olive orchards and frequent outcroppings of rock,
which, with the bleak purple mountains rising up behind it, bears so
startling a resemblance to Andalusia that the homesick Spanish friars
must have rubbed their eyes and wondered whether they were really in
the New World after all. Our road, winding steadily upward under the
shadow of giant oaks and sycamores, crossed the Santa Ynez Range by the
Gaviota Pass (_gaviota_, I might note in passing, meaning sea-gull in the
Spanish tongue), the car, its engines humming the monotone which is the
motorist’s lullaby, taking the long, steep grades like a hunted cat on
the top of a back-yard fence.
From the summit of the pass we dropped down the brush-clothed flanks of
the mountains by a zigzag road into a secluded river valley whose peace
and pastoral loveliness were as grateful, after the stirring grandeur of
the Gaviota, as is the five-o’clock whistle to the workman after a busy
day. By this same pass the trail of the _padres_ ran when, a century
ago, they walked between the missions, so that it was with peculiar
appropriateness that there rose before us, as we swung around a shoulder
of the mountain, the Mission of Santa Ynez, its white colonnades gleaming
like ivory in the morning sunlight, its pottery roof forming a splendid
note of colour against the lush, green fields, its cross-surmounted
campanile pointing heavenward, just as the fingers of its cassocked
builders were wont to do. Thanks to the patience and perseverance of
Padre Alejandro, the priest in charge, the famous mission, which was
in a deplorable state of neglect when he came there a dozen years ago,
has been reroofed and in a large measure restored, the south corridor,
which runs the length of the _convento’s_ front, where the brown-robed
monks were wont to pace up and down in silent meditation, having been
transformed into a sort of loggia, bright with sunshine and fragrant with
flowers. It is a pleasing survival of the spirit of the old monastic days
that no one, derelict, hobo, or tramp, who applies at the Mission Santa
Ynez for food or shelter is ever turned away. I think the thing that
brought home to me most vividly the hardships endured by the cowled and
sandalled founders of these missions was a great umbrella of yellow silk,
bordered with faded blue, which caught my attention in the sacristy.
“What was this umbrella used for, father?” I inquired.
“That, my son,” said Padre Alejandro, “was used by the _padres_ to shield
themselves from the sun on their journeys between the missions, for they
were not permitted to ride but were compelled by their vows to go always
afoot. Though Father Serra was lame, and every step that he took caused
him the extremest anguish, he not once but many times walked the six
hundred miles which lay between San Diego and his northernmost mission at
Sonoma.”
One would naturally suppose that the people of California would be
inordinately proud of these crumbling missions which have played so
great a part in the history of their State and would take steps to have
them preserved as national monuments, just as the French Government
preserves its historic châteaux. But, for some unexplainable reason, just
the opposite is true, the priests in charge of several of the missions
assuring me that they had the greatest difficulty in obtaining funds to
effect even the most imperative repairs, depending very largely on the
contributions of Eastern visitors. We Americans excuse ourselves for this
unpardonable neglect by explaining that we are still a young people,
which, of course, is true. It is equally true, however, that by the time
we are old enough to appreciate their historic significance and value,
there will be no missions left to preserve.
Should you who read this follow in our tire tracks, you should not fail
to stop for luncheon at a hamlet, not far from Santa Ynez, called, from
the olive orchards which surround it, Los Olivos. There is a little inn
there kept by a Frenchman named Mattei—a Basque he is, if I remember
rightly—who will serve you just such a meal as you can get at one of
those wayside _fondas_ in the Pyrenees. The country adjacent to Los
Olivos is noted for its fishing and shooting, so that instead of the
roast-beef-mashed-potatoes-pie-and-coffee luncheon which the motorist
learns to expect, we had set before us brook-trout fried in flour and
bread-crumbs, ripe brown olives which had been soaked in garlic and oil,
roast quail as plump as young chickens, an omelet _à la Espagnole_, and
heaping bowls of wild strawberries, the whole washed down with a wine
rarely seen in America—real white Chianti. It is the very unexpectedness
of such meals which makes them stand out like white milestones along the
gastronomical highway.
More Spanish in character and atmosphere even than Santa Barbara is
Monterey, three hundred miles farther up this enchanted coast. Careless
of the changes which are being wrought about it, it lazes on its
sun-kissed hillside, its head shaded by groves of palm and live-oak,
its feet laved by the tepid waters of the bay. The town is built on the
slopes of a natural amphitheatre, looking down upon a U-shaped harbour
containing the bluest water you ever saw. Rising steeply behind the town
is the hill where the Spanish _castillo_ used to stand, which is now
surmounted by grim, black coast-defence guns and by the yellow barracks
which house the garrison. At the foot of Presidio Hill is the sheltered
cove where Vizcaino landed to take possession of this region in the
name of his Most Catholic Majesty of Spain, and where, years later,
Padre Serra also landed to take possession of it in the name of a far
mightier King. Here, on clear days, you can see on the harbour bottom
the bleached and whitened bones of the frigate _Natalia_, on which
Napoleon escaped from Elba. Down by the water-front, where the soiled
and smelly fishing-boats with their queer lateen sails rub shoulders
with the spotless, white-hulled yachts, the old custom-house stands in
the shadow of a patriarchal cypress. It has looked on many strange and
thrilling scenes, has this balconied building of whitewashed adobe; it
has seen the high-prowed caravels swinging at anchor in this bay with
the red-and-yellow flag of Spain drooping from their carven sterns; it
has seen the swarthy Spanish governors reviewing their steel-capped and
cuirassed soldiery in the sun-swept plaza; it has seen the _fiestas_ and
other merrymakings which marked the careless Mexican régime; and on that
July day in 1846 it saw the marines in their leather chacoes and the
blue-jackets in their jaunty hats land from the American frigates, saw
them form in hollow square upon the plaza, saw their weapons held rigid
in burnished lines of steel as a ball of bunting crept up the flagstaff,
and heard the roar of cheers as it broke out into a flag of stripes and
stars.
In historic interest and significance this little town of Monterey is
to the West what Boston is to the East. Here was planned the conquest
of California; here the first American flag was raised upon the shores
of the Pacific; here was the first capital and here was held the first
constitutional convention of California. Follow Alvardo Street up the
hill, between rows of adobe houses with pottery roofs and whitewashed
walls set in gardens aglow with roses, fuchsias, and geraniums, to the
group of historic buildings at the top. Here you will be shown the Larkin
house, where dwelt the last American consul in California and in which
were hatched the plots which led up to the American occupation; the
picturesque home of the last Spanish governor of the Californias; Colton
Hall, in which the first constitutional convention assembled on the day
of California’s admission to the Union; the little one-roomed dwelling
that Sherman and Halleck occupied when they were stationed here as young
lieutenants and the other house where dwelt the beautiful señorita
whom Sherman loved long years before he won imperishable fame beneath
the eagles at Shiloh; and, by no means least in interest, the wretched
dwelling where that immortal genius Robert Louis Stevenson lodged for a
year or more, and the little restaurant where he took his meals, and the
green pathways which he wandered.
In the edge of the town stands the church of San Carlos, one of the
best preserved mission churches of California, whose sacristy contains
the most precious religious relics in the State; for here the priest in
charge will reverently show you Father Serra’s own chasuble, cope, and
dalmatics and the altar service of beaten silver which was brought out
for him from Spain. The _padre-presidente_ preferred Carmel over the
hill to all his other missions, however, and it was there, where the
Carmel River ripples down between the silent willows to its mother, the
sea, that he came back to die. There, beneath the altar of the ancient
mission, his ashes lie buried in the land which his labours transformed
from a savage wilderness to a vineyard of the Lord.
From Monterey you may motor or drive or street-car or foot it to Del
Monte, which is only a mile away. Whichever method you choose, I should
take the longest way around if I were you, so as to approach the hotel
through the glorious wild-wood by which it is enveloped. And after you
have twisted and turned for a mile or more through a wilderness of
bloom and foliage, like the children in the story-book in search of
the enchanted castle, and after you have concluded that you have lost
your way and are ready to abandon the quest, all unexpectedly you catch
a glimpse of its red-roofed towers and spires and gables rising above
the tree tops. Built in the Queen Anne style of thirty years ago, huge
and rambling and not unpicturesque, surrounded by acres of lawn and the
finest live-oaks I have ever seen, it bears a quite striking resemblance
to the Gezireh Palace—now a hostelry for tourists—which the Khedive
Ismail built on an island in the Nile. Del Monte suggests not one, but
many places, however. Its lawns and live-oaks, the perfection of which is
the result of more than a third of a century of care, in many respects
recall the famous country-seats of England, though the vegetation, of
course, is very different; the gardens, which offer a continual feast
of colour, remind one of Cintra, outside of Lisbon, while the cypress
maze is a duplicate of that at Hampton Court. The artificial lake,
surrounded by subtropical vegetation and approached by a palm-bordered
esplanade, has about it a suggestion of a Damascus garden that I know,
while from the golf-links—than which there are none better in the
West—looking across the tree tops to where the white houses of Monterey
overhang the bay, it is difficult to believe that you are not on the
hill behind Mustapha Superieur, looking down upon the white buildings
of Algiers. Although Del Monte is an enchanted garden at any time of
the year, the “high season” is in July and August, when the golfing,
polo-playing set flock down from Burlingame and San Mateo exactly as
the corresponding section of society on the other side of the continent
flocks to Newport and Bar Harbour. During these two months the polo field
resounds to the thunder of galloping hoofs and the click of mallet and
ball; the golf-links on the rolling downs above the sea are alive with
players taking part in the great midsummer tournament which is the most
important golfing fixture on the Pacific Coast; and in the evenings
white-shouldered women and white-shirted men dip and whirl and glide to
fervid music upon a glassy floor or stroll amid the gardens which the
light of the summer moon and the fragrance of the flowers transform into
a fairyland.
The logical way to follow El Camino Real is from south to north, as we
did, for that was the way of the _padres_; so it was quite natural that
our next stop after leaving Monterey and its Mission of Carmel should be
at the secluded and almost forgotten Mission of San Juan Bautista. San
Juan Bautista—Saint John the Baptist—is just such a lazy, sleepy, pretty
little hamlet as you can find at almost every turning of a Catalonian
road. Along its lanes—they are too narrow and straggling to be dignified
with the name of streets—stand quaint adobe houses smothered in jasmine
and passion-vine, hedged in by fences of prickly pear, and shaded by
cypress and untidy eucalyptus trees. Though the plaza up the hill, where
the Spanish soldiery, and after them the Mexican, used to parade and
where the _fiestas_ used to be held, is weed-grown and lonely, it is not
deserted, for the townsfolk still go flocking to mass in obedience to the
summons of the mission bells, and, thanks to the renaissance of the rural
districts caused by the ubiquitous motor-car, the dining-room of the
hotel, once the barracks of the Mexican garrison, is nearly always filled
with guests. Close by the hotel is the old adobe building which served as
the headquarters of General Castro, the Mexican commander, and back of
the town rises the hill known as the Hawk’s Nest, where Frémont and his
handful of American frontiersmen fortified themselves and defied Castro
and his soldiers to come and take them. San Juan Bautista is a place
where I could have loitered for a week instead of a day, for who, with a
spark of romance in his soul, could resist the appeal at the top of the
hotel note-paper: “A relic of the distant past, when men played billiards
on horseback and the trees bore human fruit”?
VII
THE VALLEY OF HEART’S DELIGHT
“He touched my eyes with gladness, with balm of morning dews,
On the topmost rim He set me, ’mong the hills of Santa Cruz,
And I saw the sunlit ocean sweep, I saw the vale below—
The Vale of Santa Clara in a sea of blossomed snow.”
VII
THE VALLEY OF HEART’S DELIGHT
I first heard about the place from the captain of a little coasting
steamer in the Indian Ocean. It was moonlight, I remember, and we were
leaning over the rail, watching the phosphorescent waves curl away from
the vessel’s bow. We had both seen more than our shares of the world
and we were exchanging opinions of what we had seen over the captain’s
Trichinopoli cheroots. Perhaps it was the effect of the moonlight on the
silent waters, but I am more inclined to think it was the brandy which
his silent-footed Swahili steward had just served us, which caused him to
grow confidential.
“A few more voyages and I’m going to quit the sea,” he remarked.
“Yes?” said I interrogatively. “And what will you do then? Get a berth as
harbour master at Shanghai or port captain at Suez or somewhere?”
“No,” said he, “I’m going to build a house for myself and the missis in
a valley that I know; a house painted white with green blinds and with a
porch as broad as a ship’s deck, and I’m going to have a fruit orchard
and a flower garden with red geraniums in it, and I’m going to raise
chickens—white Wyandottes, I think, but I’m not quite certain.”
“Of all things!” I ejaculated. “My imagination isn’t elastic enough for
me to picture an old sea-dog like you settled down in a white farmhouse
raising fruit and chickens. Where is all this going to be?”
“In the Santa Clara,” said he.
“It sounds like the name of a Pullman car or a tune in the hymn-book,”
said I.
“It’s neither,” said he; “it’s a valley in California.”
“Tell me about it,” I suggested.
“I can’t,” said he. “It’s too beautiful—in the spring the whole valley
is a sea of blossoms, like cherry season in Japan; and beyond are green
hillsides that might be those of Devonshire; and looming up back of the
hills are great brown-and-purple mountains that look like those at the
back of Cintra, in Portugal (that’s some place, too, believe _me_); and
there is always the smell of flowers in the air, such as you get in
Bulgaria in the attar-of-rose season; and I’ve never seen a sky as blue
anywhere else except in the Ægean; and——”
“That’s enough,” I interrupted. “That’s where I’m going next. Any place
that will make a hardened old sea captain become poetical must be worth
seeing.”
* * * * *
Months later, in Algiers, I found myself sitting at a small iron table on
a sun-bathed terrace overlooking the orange-and-olive-and-palm-fringed
shores of the Mediterranean. There are only five views to equal it in all
the world. As I sat gazing out across the waters toward France a fellow
countryman strolled up and dropped into the seat beside me. I knew that
he was an American by the width of his hat brim and because he didn’t
wait for an introduction.
“Fine morning,” I remarked pleasantly. “Wonderful view from this terrace,
isn’t it? And the sunshine is very warm and cheering.”
“Pretty fair,” he assented gloomily; “pretty fair for this place. But in
the part of the world I come from fine mornings and wonderful views and
sunshine are so darned common that it never occurs to us to mention them.”
“Where is your home, may I ask?” I inquired, for want of anything better
to say.
“In the Santa Clara Valley of California,” he answered proudly. “God’s
favourite country, sir! He took more pains with it than any place he ever
made, not even barring the original Eden. This is a very pleasing little
view, I admit; a very pleasing one, but I wish I could take you up on the
slopes of Mount Hamilton just before sunset and let you look across the
valley to Los Gatos when the prune orchards are in blossom. As for the
climate, why, say, my friend——”
“Yes, yes, I know,” I said soothingly, for when a man gets a lump in his
throat while talking about his native land it’s time to change the topic
of conversation. “I know; I’ve heard all about it before. Fact is, I’m on
my way there now.”
“You _are_?” he exclaimed incredulously, and, leaning back in his chair,
he clapped his hands until the Arab waiter came running. “Garsong,” said
he, “bring us a bottle of the best wine you’ve got.” When the amber
fluid was level with the rims we touched our glasses:
“It’s poor stuff compared with the wine we make in California,” he said,
“but it’ll do to drink a toast in.” He stood up, bareheaded and very
straight, as British officers do when they drink to the king.
“Friend,” said he, and his voice was husky, “here’s to God’s favourite
valley—here’s to the Santa Clara.”
* * * * *
If you go to the Santa Clara when I did, which was in March, when the
unfortunates who live beyond the Sierra Nevada are still waking up to
find ice in their water-pitchers, you will find that the people of the
valley are celebrating the Feast of the Blossoms. It is a very beautiful
festival, in which every man, woman, and child in this fifty-mile-long
garden of fruit and flowers takes part, but you cannot appreciate its
true significance until you have climbed to a point on the slopes of
the mountains which form the garden wall, where the whole enchanting
panorama lies before you. Did you ever see one hundred and twenty-five
square miles of trees in snow-white blossom at one time? No, of course
not, for nowhere else in all the world can such a sight be seen. I, who
have listened to the voice of spring on five continents and in more than
five-score countries, assure you that it is worth the seeing.
Personally, I shall always think of the Santa Clara as a sleeping maiden,
fragrant with perfume and intoxicatingly beautiful, lying in a carven
bed formed by the mountains of Santa Cruz, curtained by fleecy clouds,
her coverlet of eiderdown tinted with rose, quilted with green, edged
with yellow; her pillow the sun-kissed waters of San Francisco Bay. When
you come closer, however, you find that the coverlet which conceals her
gracious form is in reality an expanse of fragrant blossoms; that the
green tufts are the live-oaks which rise at intervals above the orchards
of cherry, peach, and prune; and that the yellow edging is the California
poppies which clothe the encircling hills.
Sentimentally and commercially it is fitting that the people of the
Santa Clara Valley should celebrate the coming of the blossoms, for they
are at once its chief beauty and its chief wealth. In a single season
these white and fragrant blossoms have provided the breakfast tables of
the world with one hundred and thirty million pounds of prunes, to say
nothing of those luscious pears, peaches, cherries, and apricots which
beckon temptingly from grocers’ windows and hotel buffets from Salt Lake
City around to Shanghai. No other single fruit of any region, not even
the fig of Smyrna, the date of Tunis, the olive of Spain, or the currant
of Greece, is so widely distributed as the prune of the Santa Clara
Valley. The people of the valley will assure you very earnestly that the
reason their wives and daughters have such lovely complexions is because
they make it a point to eat prunes every morning for breakfast. Whether
due to the prunes or not, I can vouch for the complexions.
Barring the coast of Tripolitania, where it is harvest time all the year
round, but where the Arabs are offering no inducements to settlers, and
the Imperial Valley, whose summer heat makes it undesirable as a place
of permanent residence, the Santa Clara Valley has more crops, through
more months of the year, than any place I know. Ceres makes her annual
appearance in February with artichokes—the ones that are priced at a
dollar a portion on the menus of New York’s fashionable hotels; in March
the people of the valley are having spring peas with their lamb chops;
April brings strawberries, although, as a matter of fact, they are to
be had almost every month of the year; in May the cherry pickers are at
work; the local churches hold peaches-and-cream sociables in June; by
the ides of July the valley roads are alive with teams hauling cases
of pears, plums, and apricots to the railway stations; August, being
the month of prunes, is marked with red on the Santa Clara calendars;
September finds the presses working overtime turning grapes into wine,
and the prohibitionists likewise working overtime trying to turn “wet”
communities into “dry” ones; in October the men are at work in the
orchards picking apples and the women are at work in the kitchens baking
apple pies; the huge English walnuts which wind up dinners half the
world around are harvested in November; while in December and January
the prodigal goddess interrupts her bounty just long enough to let the
fortunate worshippers at her shrine observe the midwinter holidays. After
such a recital it is almost needless to add that the valley boasts both
the largest fruit-drying houses and the largest fruit canneries in the
world, for in the Santa Clara they dry what they can and can what they
can’t.
The _chef-lieu_ of the valley is San José. It may interest Easterners to
know that Don Caspar de Portola and his men, marching up from the south
in their search for the lost Bay of Monterey, had looked down from the
valley’s mountain rim upon the spot where the city now stands four years
before the Boston Tea Party; while that indomitable Franciscan, Father
Junipero Serra, had established the great Mission San José, and was hard
at work Christianising and teaching the Indians of this region before
the ink was fairly dry on the Declaration of Independence and while the
three thousand miles of country which lies between the valley of the
Santa Clara and the valley of the Connecticut was still an unexplored
wilderness. The last time that the gentlemen with the census books
knocked at San José’s front doors they reported that the city had forty
thousand people, and it keeps agrowing and agrowing. It has about four
times as many stores as any place of its size that I can recall, but that
is because the local merchants depend on the trade of the rural rather
than the urban population, for the hardy frontiersmen who rough it in
this portion of the West run in to do their shopping by automobile or
trolley-car or else give their orders over the telephone. There are two
things about the city which I shall remember. One is the street-cars,
which have open decks forward and aft, with seats running along them
lengthwise, on which the passengers sit with their feet hanging over
the side, as though on an Irish jaunting-car. In pleasant weather the
display of ankles on the street-car makes them look, from the sidewalks,
like moving hosiery advertisements. The other municipal feature which
riveted my attention was a sort of attenuated Eiffel Tower, sliced off
about half-way up, which straddles the two main streets of the city at
their intersection, and from the top of which a powerful search-light
signals to the traveller on the valley highroads, to the shepherd on the
mountains, to the fisherman on San Francisco Bay: “Here is San José.”
If there is anywhere a royal road to learning, it is the fifty-mile-long
one which meanders up the Santa Clara Valley, for there are more
schoolhouses scattered along it than there are milestones, and they’re
not the little red schoolhouses of which our grandfathers brag, either.
Every time our motor-car swung around the corner of a prune orchard we
were pretty certain to find a schoolhouse of concrete, usually in the
overworked mission style of architecture, with roses and honeysuckle and
wistaria clambering over the door. The youngster who wants to travel the
royal road to knowledge can commence his journey in one of the concrete
schoolhouses at Gilroy, which is at the southern portal of the valley;
the second stage will take him up to the great high school at San José,
which is so extensive and handsome and completely equipped that it would
make certain famous Eastern colleges feel shamefaced and embarrassed; the
final stage along this intellectual highway is only eighteen miles in
length and ends at Palo Alto, amid whose live-oaks rise the yellow towers
and red-tiled roofs of that great university which Leland Stanford,
statesman and railway builder, founded in memory of the son he lost,
and which he endowed with the whole of his enormous fortune. He gave
the eight thousand acres of his famous stock-farm for the purpose, and
to-day white-gowned “co-eds” wander, book in hand, where the paddocks
once stood, and spike-shod sprinters dash down the track, where the great
mare Sunol used to put close on half a mile a minute behind her spinning
sulky wheels. It is one of the great universities of the world, is Leland
Stanford, Jr., and, with its cloistered quadrangles, its wonderful mosaic
façades, and its semitropical surroundings, certainly one of the most
beautiful. It stands, fittingly enough, at the valley’s northern gateway
and at the end, both literally and metaphorically, of the royal road to
learning; so that the valley-bred youth who passes through its doors with
his sheepskin in his pocket finds himself on the threshold of that great
outside world for which, without leaving his native valley, he has been
admirably prepared.
Speaking of roads, they have built one running the length of the State
and, therefore, of the Santa Clara Valley, which would cause Mr. John
MacAdam, were he still in the land of the living, to lift his hat in
admiration. It is really a restoration of El Camino Real, that historic
highway which the Spanish conquistadores built, close on a century and
a half ago, for the purpose of linking up the one-and-twenty missions
which the indefatigable Padre Serra flung the length of California as
outposts of the church, and which did more to open up the Pacific Coast
to civilisation and colonisation and commerce than any undertaking save
the construction of the Southern Pacific. Were this highway in the East I
am perfectly sure that they would cheapen it by calling it the Shore Road
or the State Pike, but it speaks well for California’s appreciation of
the picturesque and the appropriate that she has decided to cling to the
historic name of El Camino Real—the Royal Road—the King’s Highway.
Although the Santa Clara Valley, properly speaking, ends at Palo Alto,
the ultrafashionable colonies of Burlingame, San Mateo, and Hillsboro
may, for the purposes of this chapter, at least, be considered as within
its compass. These are to the Pacific Coast what Lenox and Tuxedo are
to the Eastern world of fashion: places where the rich dwell in great
country houses set far back in splendid parks, with none but their fellow
millionaires for neighbours and with every convenience for sport close at
hand. Full of colour and animation are the scenes at their ivy-covered
stations when the afternoon trains from San Francisco pull in; for here,
at least, the motor-car has not ousted the horse from his old-time
popularity, and the gravelled driveways are alive with tandem carts and
runabouts and spider phaetons, with smart grooms in whipcord liveries and
leather gaiters standing rigidly at the heads of the horses. Probably
the finest examples of architecture in California are to be seen in the
neighbourhood of Burlingame and San Mateo, the only other communities
which can rival them in this respect being Montecito, near Santa Barbara,
Oak Knoll, outside of Pasadena, and Hollywood, a suburb of Los Angeles.
The East and, for that matter, all of the rest of America owe
California a debt of gratitude for her development of a native domestic
architecture. The first true homes for folk of real culture but moderate
incomes were produced on the Pacific Coast. In the type of house that
abounds to-day in California comfort, tradition, and art have been
skilfully and interestingly combined. Based on the old missions, which
in their turn drew inspiration from the ideals of the Spaniard and the
Moor, modern Californian architecture has nevertheless made servants, not
masters, of those traditions. Though drawing from the romantic background
of the conquistadores and the _padres_ the sturdy spirit, the simple
lines, and the practical details of the old frontier buildings, the
main virtue of these Californian homes is that they possess a definite
relation to the soil and climate and the habits of the people. But,
though back of each design lurks the motive of the Spanish missions,
there is no monotony, no sameness; but, on the contrary, a remarkable
variety of design. Each possesses the characteristic features of the
Californian home: the low, wide-spreading roof lines, the solid walls,
generally of concrete or plaster, the frank use of structural beams,
the luxurious spaces of veranda and balcony, the tiled terraces and
pottery roofs, the cool, inviting patios, and the quiet loveliness of
the interiors. It is true, of course, that many house-builders have been
unable to resist the temptation of Colonial, Norman, Dutch, and Tudor,
but, as their culture increases, Californians are fast realising that an
architecture designed for inhospitable climates is utterly incongruous in
California’s semitropical surroundings.
It rained one of the days that I spent in San José, and my genial host
was so apologetic about it that I actually felt sorry for him. Though
rain is seldom unwelcome in a horticultural country, the residents
don’t like to have it come down in bucketfuls when visitors whom they
are anxious to impress with the perfection of their climate are around.
They are as proud of their climate in the Santa Clara Valley as a boy
is of “his first long pants,” and to back up their boasts the residents
carry in their pockets the blue slips of the Government Weather Bureau’s
monthly reports to show the stranger. I’m not fond of figures, unless
they happen to be on cheques drawn in my favour, but I was impressed by
the fact, nevertheless, that in 1913 the valley had only fifty-eight
cloudy days, sixty-four which were overcast, and two hundred and
thirty-four in which there was not a cloud to dim the turquoise of the
sky. Carrying my investigations a little further, I found that during the
greater part of February, which is the coldest month of the year, the
mercury remained above 55, only four times dropping as low as 33, while
there were only four days in August when the thermometer needle crept up
to 79, and once in the same month it fell as low as 42, thus giving a
solar-plexus blow to the idea stubbornly held by most Easterners that in
summer California is an anteroom to Hades.
To this unvarying geniality of the climate and to the careless,
happy-go-lucky, pleasure-loving strain handed down from the Spanish and
Argonaut pioneers are due the invincible gaiety and the passionate love
for the out-of-doors which are among the most likeable characteristics
of the Californians. One of the first things that strikes an Eastern
visitor is the fact that the Californians can always find time for
amusement, and they enter into those amusements with the enthusiasm and
the whole-souled gaiety of children. On the Pacific Coast recreation is
considered quite as important as business—and business does not suffer,
either. There is about these Californian merrymakings an abandon, a
joyousness, a childlike freedom from restraint which is in striking
contrast to the restrained, self-conscious pleasures of the older, colder
East. To the colourful _fiestas_ of the Spanish and Mexican eras may be
traced the out-of-door festivities which play so large a part in the life
of the people on the Pacific Coast, such as the midwinter Tournament of
Roses at Pasadena, the Portola Festival with which the San Franciscans
celebrate the discovery of San Francisco Bay, the Feast of the Blossoms
held each spring in the Santa Clara Valley, the Battle of Flowers which,
until very recently, was a feature of life at Santa Barbara, but which,
for some unexplainable reason, has been abandoned, the Rose Festival at
Portland, the Potlatch at Seattle. Under much the same category are the
classic plays given in the wonderful Greek Theatre at the University
of California, the sylvan masks produced by the colony of authors and
artists at Carmel-by-the-Sea, and the Bohemian Club’s celebrated Grove
Play.
No account of Californian festivals is in any way complete without at
least a brief description of the last named, which is characterised
by a beauty of production and a dignity of treatment that make it in
many respects an American Bayreuth. For forty years the Bohemian Club
of San Francisco has gone into the California redwoods each summer for
a fortnight’s outing. This famous club, founded in 1872 by a coterie
of actors, newspaper men, and artists, now has a membership of upward
of thirteen hundred, representing all that is best in the art, music,
literature, drama, and science of the West. No one may become a member
who has not achieved a distinction of sorts in one of these fields, the
anticommercial spirit which animates the club being aptly expressed by
the quotation at the top of its note-paper: “Weaving spiders come not
here.” The Bohemian Grove, which consists of about three hundred acres
of forest and contains some of the finest redwood giants in California,
stands on the banks of the Russian River, ninety miles to the north of
San Francisco. The stately redwoods stand in a gentle ravine whose
floor and slopes in the rainless midsummer are bright with the canvas
of the club encampment, which resembles a sort of sylvan Durbar; for
the camps, many of which are elaborately arranged and furnished, are
made of canvas in the gayest colours—scarlet and white, green and white,
blue and yellow—with flags and banners and gorgeous Oriental lanterns
everywhere. Here, during the first two weeks in every August, congregate
close on a thousand men who have done things—authors of “best sellers,”
builders of bridges and dams and lighthouses and aqueducts, painters
whose pictures hang on the line at the Paris Salon or on the walls of
the Luxembourg, composers of famous operas, writers of plays which have
made a hit on Broadway, presidents of transcontinental railway systems,
celebrated singers, men who have penetrated to the remotest corners of
the earth—wearing the dress of the woods, calling each other “Bill” or
“Jim” or “Harry” as the case may be, and becoming, for the time being,
boys once more. A steep side of the ravine forms the “back-drop” of the
forest stage, the spectators—no woman has ever taken part in the play
or witnessed an original performance—sitting on redwood logs under the
stars. The Grove Play is an evolution from a simpler programme, which was
originally known as “High Jinks.” It is now a serious composition, with
music, largely symbolical in character, created entirely by members of
the club, in which many artists of international fame have taken part,
always in the amateur spirit.
But to return to our Valley of the Santa Clara. In the Panhandle of
Texas a ranch usually means anywhere from five thousand acres upward
of uncultivated land; in the Santa Clara a ranch means anywhere from
five acres upward of the most highly cultivated soil in the world. East
of the Sierra Nevada, where scientific fertilisation and intensive
cultivation are still wearing short dresses, five acres are scarcely
worth considering, but five acres in California, properly planted and
cared for, ofttimes supports a family in something akin to luxury. I had
pointed out to me in the Santa Clara Valley at least a score of small
holdings which yield their owners annually in the neighbourhood of five
hundred dollars an acre. All of these hardy pioneers have telephones and
electric lights and electric power for pumping and daily newspaper and
mail deliveries. When they have any business in town, instead of going
down to the corral and roping a bronco, they either stroll through the
orchard and hail an electric car or they crank up the family automobile.
While I was in the Santa Clara Valley I asked a number of those questions
to which every prospective home seeker wants to know the answers. I
found that improved land, planted to prune, apricot, or peach trees old
enough to bear, can be had all the way from four hundred to seven hundred
dollars an acre, according to its location. At a conservative estimate
this land, so I was told by a banker whose business it is to lend
money on it (and you can trust a banker for never being oversanguine),
can be depended upon to yield an income of from one hundred to three
hundred dollars an acre, it being by no means an unusual thing for a
well-managed ranch to pay for itself in two or three years. I found
that a ten-acre orchard—which is quite large enough for one man to
handle—could be had for five thousand dollars, the purchaser paying,
say, two thousand dollars down and carrying the balance on a mortgage
at seven per cent, which is the legal rate of interest in California.
The local building and loan associations would lend him two thousand
dollars to build with, which he could repay, at the rate of twenty-four
dollars a month, in ten years. Two thousand dollars, I might add, will
build an extremely attractive and comfortable six-room bungalow, for the
two chief sources of expense to the Eastern home builder—cellars and
furnaces—are not necessary in California. Such a place, provided its
owner has horse sense, is not afraid of work, and knows good advice when
he hears it, should yield from fifteen hundred to two thousand dollars a
year, in addition to which the whole family can find ready employment,
at excellent wages, in the orchards or packing-houses during the fruit
season. For this work a man receives from two dollars to two dollars and
a half a day and can count on fairly steady employment through at least
eight months of the year, while many women and girls, whose deft fingers
make them particularly valuable in the work of wrapping and packing
the finer grades of fruit, can earn as high as twenty dollars a week
during the busy season. This work, I might add, attracts an altogether
exceptional class of people, for university and high-school students and
the wives and daughters of small ranchers eagerly avail themselves of
this opportunity to add to their incomes, the fruit orchards, during the
picking season, looking less like a hive of workers than like a gigantic
picnic among the shaded orchard rows, in which the whole countryside is
taking part.
The air in the Santa Clara Valley is said to be the clearest in the
world, though they tell you exactly the same thing at Colorado Springs,
and in the Grand Cañon of Arizona, and at Las Vegas, N. Mex. The Santa
Clara air is clear enough, however, for all practical purposes. In fact,
its extraordinary clarity sometimes lends itself to extraordinary uses. I
have a friend whose residence is set on a hillside high on the valley’s
eastern rim. One day, idly scanning the distant landscape through his
field-glasses, he noted that the field hands employed on the ranch of a
neighbour on the opposite hillside, twenty odd miles away, knowing that
they could not be observed by their employer, were loafing in the shade
instead of working. My friend called up his neighbour by telephone and
told him that his men were soldiering, whereupon that gentleman rode up
the hillside and gave his astonished employees such a tongue-lashing that
when the six-o’clock whistle blew that night they had blisters on their
hands.
Lack of labour is one of the most serious problems with which the
fruit-growers of California have had to contend, though it is believed
that this will be remedied, in some measure at least, by the flood of
European immigration which will pour through the Panama Canal. Twenty
years ago the labour problem was solved by the Chinaman, who was the most
industrious and dependable labourer California has ever had, but with the
agitation which resulted in closing our doors to the Celestial most of
the Chinese in California entered domestic service and now command such
high wages—fifty dollars a month is the average wage of a Chinese house
boy or cook—that only the well-to-do can afford to employ them. Time
and again I have heard clear-headed Californians of all classes assert
that the admission, under certain restrictions, of a hundred thousand
selected Chinese would prove an unqualified blessing for California. The
relentless war waged by California—or, rather, by the labour element
of California—against the admission of Chinese immigrants was based on
the difference in the standard of living. The yellow man could live in
something very akin to luxury on about a tenth of the ration required for
a white man’s support. In other words, the Chinaman could outstarve the
white man; therefore the Chinaman must go. And there has never been any
one to take his place.
Outside of the Pacific Coast the impression seems to prevail that the
Chinaman’s place has been taken by the Japanese. This is not so. To
begin with, Japanese labour is not cheap labour. The Japanese do not
work for less pay than white men, unless it be temporarily, so as
to obtain the white man’s job. Japanese house cleaners and gardeners
demand and receive a minimum wage of thirty-five cents an hour, and
in California, where most people of modest means are compelled to do
their own housework because of the scarcity of and exorbitant wages
demanded by domestic servants, housewives are thankful to get Japanese
by the day at any price. Their standard of living is as high as that of
other nationalities; much higher, in fact, than that of peoples from
southern Europe. There is no pauperism among them and astonishingly
little crime. They dress well, eat well, spend money lavishly for
entertainment. But the Jap, unlike the Chinaman, “talks back.” He is not
in the least impressed by the American’s claim of racial superiority.
In fact, he considers himself very much better than the white man and,
if the opportunity presents itself, does not hesitate to say so. He is
patronising instead of patronised. He has proved that he is the white
man’s equal in every line of industry and in some his superior. Three
times in succession a Japanese grower has virtually cornered the potato
crop of the Pacific Coast. The Japanese has driven the Greek and the
Portuguese out of the fishing industry, in which they believed that they
were impregnably intrenched. As a result of these things he steps off the
sidewalk for no one. He knows that back of him stands a great empire,
with a powerful fleet and one of the most efficient armies in existence,
and he takes no pains to disguise this knowledge in his relations with
the white man.
To tell the truth, the prohibition of land ownership, the segregation of
school children are but pretexts put forward by a jealous and resentful
white population to teach the yellow man his place. The assertion that
Japanese ownership of land is a menace to white domination is the veriest
nonsense, and every Californian knows it. There are ninety-nine million
acres in California and of this area the Japanese own or lease barely
thirty thousand acres, or _twelve hundredths of one per cent_. The
fifty-eight thousand Japanese in California form but two and one half per
cent of the total population. These figures, which are authoritative,
are not very menacing, are they? The bulk of the Japanese reside in
Los Angeles County and in the delta of the Sacramento and San Joaquin
Rivers, where they work gigantic potato fields and truck-gardens and
asparagus beds. Now, Los Angeles, mind you, has never demanded Japanese
exclusion. Protests poured into Sacramento from the white settlers of
the delta country against the passage of the anti-alien land laws. Why,
then, you ask, does the entire Pacific Coast, including British Columbia,
exhibit such intense dislike for the Jap? Because, as I have said, he
has shown that he can beat the white man at his own game; because he is
not in the least meek and humble as befits an alien and “inferior” race;
because he believes in his heart that in an armed conflict Nippon could
whip the United States as thoroughly as she whipped China and Russia;
because, as a result of this belief, he perpetually swaggers about
with his hat cocked on one side and a chip perched invitingly on his
shoulder; because, in short, his very manner is a constant irritation to
the Californians. And until the status of the Japanese upon the Pacific
Coast is definitely and finally established by international treaty this
irritation may be expected to continue and to increase.
* * * * *
I wonder if sometimes, at that sunset hour when the lengthening shadows
of the hills fall athwart the blossoming orchards, there do not
wander through the Santa Clara those whom the eyes of mortals cannot
see—Portola, swart of face under his steel cap, come back to feast his
eyes once more, from the top of yonder hill, on that fertile valley
which he was the first white man to see; Father Serra, mild-mannered
and gentle-voiced, trudging the dusty highroad in his sandals and
woollen robe, pausing to kneel in prayer as the bells boom out the
Angelus from that mission which he founded; Captain Jedediah Smith, the
first of the pathfinders, a strange and romantic figure in his garb of
fringed buckskin, leaning on his long rifle as he looks down on the
homesteads of the thousands who followed by the trail he blazed across
the ranges; Stanford, who linked the oceans with twin lines of steel,
pacing the campus of that great seat of learning which he conceived and
built—guardian spirits, all, of that valley for which they did so much
and which they loved so well.
VIII
THE MODERN ARGONAUTS
“For once you’ve panned the speckled sand and seen the bonny dust,
Its peerless brightness blinds you like a spell;
It’s little else you care about; you go because you must,
And you feel that you could follow it to hell.
You’d follow it in hunger, and you’d follow it in cold;
You’d follow it in solitude and pain;
And when you’re stiff and battened down let some one whisper ‘Gold,’
You’re lief to rise and follow it again.”
VIII
THE MODERN ARGONAUTS
I once knew an Englishman and his wife who were possessed with a mania
for things Egyptian. Some people were unkind enough to say that they
were “dotty” on the subject, but that was an exaggeration. They knew all
there was to know about Egyptian customs from the days of Amenhotep to
those of Abbas Hilmi; they had delved in the sand-smothered ruins across
the river from Luxor; they could converse as fluently in the degraded
patois of the native coffee-houses as in the classic Arabic spoken at the
University of El Azhar. Their chief regret in life was that they had not
been born Egyptians. Their names were—but never mind; it is enough to say
that they had coronets on their visiting cards and owned more fertile
acres in Devonshire than an absentee landlord has any right to possess.
Whenever they came to Cairo, which they did regularly at the beginning
of the cold weather, they could never be induced to take the comfortable
motor-bus which the management of Shepheard’s Hotel thoughtfully provides
for its guests—at ten piastres the trip. Instead, they would wire ahead
to have a couple of camels meet them at the station, and, perched atop
of these ungainly and uncomfortable beasts, would amble down the Sharia
Kamel, which is the Fifth Avenue of Cairo, and dismount with great pomp
and ceremony in front of their hotel to the delectation of the tourists
assembled upon its terrace. I once asked them why they chose this
outlandish mode of conveyance when there were a score or so of perfectly
good taxicabs whose vociferously importunate drivers were only awaiting
a signal to push down their little red flags and set their taximeters
whirring.
“Well, it’s this way,” was the answer. “We’re jolly fond of everything
Egyptian, y’ know. Sort of steeped ourselves, as you might say, in the
country’s history and politics and customs and language and all that sort
of thing. This city is so romantic and picturesque that a motor-car seems
to be inappropriate and unfitting—like wearing a top hat in the country,
y’ know. So we always have the camels meet us—yes. All bally nonsense, I
suppose, but it sort of keeps us in the spirit of the place—makes us feel
as though we were living in the good old days before the tourist Johnnies
came and spoiled it all. Same idea that Vanderbilt has in driving his
coach from London down to Brighton. You can make the trip by train in
half the time and for half the money and much more comfortably, but you
lose the spirit of the old coaching days—the atmosphere, as the painter
fellows call it. Rum sort of an idea to use camels instead of taxis,
perhaps, but we like it and that’s the chief thing after all, isn’t it?
What?”
That was precisely the frame of mind which caused us to disregard the
one hundred and twenty-five miles of oiled highway which reaches, like a
strip of hotel linoleum, from San Francisco to the Californian capital,
and load ourselves, together with our six-cylindered Pegasus, aboard
the stern-wheel river boat which leaves the Pacific Street wharf for
Sacramento at half past eight on every week-day morning. That section of
our Mexico-to-Alaska journey which lay immediately before us, you must
understand, led through a region which is indelibly associated with “the
days of old, the days of gold, the days of ’Forty-Nine,” and to storm
through it in a prosaic, panting motor-car seemed to us as incompatible
with the spirit of romance which enshrouds it as it would to race through
the canals of Venice in a gasoline launch. Feeling as we did about it,
the consistent thing, I suppose, would have been to have hired a creaking
prairie-schooner and plodded overland to the mines in true emigrant
fashion, but as the few prairie-schooners still extant in California
have fallen into the hands of the moving-picture concerns, who work them
overtime, we compromised by journeying up to the gold country by river
boat, just as the Argonauts who came round the Horn to San Francisco were
wont to do.
Whoever was responsible for dubbing the Sacramento River trip “the
Netherlands Route” could have had but a bowing acquaintance with Holland.
I don’t like to shatter illusions, but, to be quite truthful, the banks
of the Sacramento are as unlike the Low Countries as anything well could
be. The only thing they have in common are the dikes or levees which
border the streams and the truck-gardens which form a patchwork quilt
of vegetation behind them. The Dutch waterways are, for the most part,
small, insignificant affairs, third or fourth cousins to the Erie Canal,
and so narrow that you can sling your hat across them. The Sacramento
River, on the contrary, is a great maritime thoroughfare four hundred
miles in length and navigable for three quarters of that distance, being
fourth among the rivers of the United States in tonnage carried. From
the deck of a Dutch canal-boat you cannot see a mountain, or anything
which could be called a mountain by courtesy, with a telescope. Look
in whichever direction you will from a Sacramento River boat and you
cannot escape them. Even at night you can descry the great walls of the
Coast and Sierra Nevada Ranges looming black against a purple-velvet
sky. And the racing windmills with their weather-beaten sails—the
most characteristic note in a Dutch landscape—are not there at all.
It’s rather a pity, it seems to me, that Californians persist in this
slap-dash custom of labelling the natural beauties for which their State
is famous with European tags. Why, in the name of heaven, should that
enchanted littoral which stretches from Coronado to Monterey be called
“Our Italy”? Why should the seaward slopes of the Santa Ynez Range, at
the back of Santa Barbara—a region which is Spanish in history, language,
and tradition—be dubbed “the Riviera”? Why should Santa Barbara itself,
for that matter, be called “the American Mentone”? Is there a single
sound reason why the majestic grandeur of the Sierra Nevada should be
cheapened by labelling it “the American Alps”? No, not one. And it seems
to me, as a visitor, a travesty to nickname the Sacramento, a river as
long and as commercially important as the Seine and draining the greatest
agricultural valley in the world, “the Netherlands Route”—because,
forsooth portions of its banks are protected against overflow by levees.
Compare the wonders of California to those of Europe by all means, if
you will, and nine times out of ten they will emerge victorious from the
comparison; but for goodness’ sake don’t saddle them with names which in
themselves imply secondariness.
The Sacramento is a river of romance. To those conversant with the
stirring story of early California, its every bend and reach and
landing-place recalls some episode of those mad days when the news that
a man had discovered yellow gravel in a Sierran mill-race spread like
a forest-fire across the land, and the needy, the desperate, and the
adventurous came pouring into California by boat and wagon-train. About
it still hover memories of the days when this river of dikes ran between
high banks; when the great valley to which it gives its name was as
unsettled and unknown as the basin of the Upper Congo; when Sacramento,
then but a cluster of tents about a log stockade, was an outpost on the
firing-line of civilisation. This winding stream was the last stage in
the long journey of those gold hunters who came round the Horn in their
stampede to the mines. The river voyage was one of dreams and doubts,
of hopes and fears. At every landing where the steamer touched were
heard reports of new bonanzas found in the Sierran gulches, of gold
strikes on the river bars, of mountain brooks whose beds were aglitter
with the precious ore. Returning down this same river, as time went on,
were the booted, bearded, brown-faced men who were going home—ah, happy
word!—after having “made their pile” and those others who had staked and
lost their all.
The river trip of to-day gives graphic proof of the changes which
threescore years have wrought; it shows that agriculture, not mining,
is now the basis of the State’s prosperity, just as it must be the
basis of every civilisation which is to endure. The interest commenced
at the journey’s very start. Swinging out from the unending procession
of ferries which form, as it were, a Brooklyn Bridge between Oakland
and San Francisco, we churned our way under the cliffs of Alcatraz, the
white-walled prison perched upon its summit looking for all the world
like the sea-fowl for which this penal isle is named. Though Alcatraz
may lack the legendary interest which attaches to the Château d’If, that
rocky islet in the harbour of Marseilles where the Count of Monte Cristo
was imprisoned, it is no less picturesque, particularly at sunset, when
the expiring rays of the drowning sun, striking through the portals
of the Golden Gate, transform it into a lump of rosy coral rising from
a peacock sea. Off our port bow Tamalpais, a weary colossus wrapped
in a cape of shaggy green, looked meditatively down upon the heedless
city as, seated upon the hills, he laved his feet—the Marin and Tiburon
Peninsulas—in the cooling waters of the bay. Keeping well to the eastern
shore, where the lead shows seven fathoms clear, we skirted the city’s
shipping front, where fishing-boats, their hulls painted the bright hues
the Latins love, and some—the Greek-owned ones—with great goggle eyes
at their bows (the better to detect the fish, of course), were slipping
seaward like mallards on the wing. To starboard lay the shores of Contra
Costa County (meaning, as you doubtless surmise, “the opposite coast”),
the long brown fingers of its innumerable wharfs reaching out into the
bay as though beckoning to the merchantmen to come alongside and take
aboard the cargoes—oil, wine, lumber, grain, cheese, fruit—which had been
produced in the chimneyed factories that fringe this coast or raised
in the fertile valleys which form its hinterland. Crossing over to the
port rail as our steamer poked its stubby nose into the narrow Straits
of Carquinez, we could make out Mare Island Navy Yard with the fighting
craft in their coats of elephant grey riding lazily at anchor in front
of it, while against the hill slopes at the back snuggled the white
houses of Vallejo, the former capital. Our first stop was at Benicia,
on the right bank of the Carquinez Straits, which lie directly athwart
the Overland Route to the East and are familiar to transcontinental
travellers as the place where their entire train, from engine to
observation-car, is loaded on a titanic ferry. This was the home of
Heenan, the “Benicia Boy,” the blacksmith who fought his way upward to
the heavyweight championship of the world, and the forge hammer he used
is still proudly preserved here as a memento of the brawny youngster
who linked the drowsy village with a certain brand of fame. Benicia
succeeded Vallejo as the capital of California, and the old State House
where the Argonaut lawmakers held their uproarious sessions still stands
as a monument to the town’s one-time importance, which departed when its
parvenu neighbour, Sacramento, offered the State a cool million in gold
for the honour of being its capital.
Leaving sleepy Benicia, with its memories of prize-fighters and
lawmakers, in our wake, we debouched quite suddenly into Suisun Bay
(suggestive of Japan and the geisha girls, isn’t it?) with the Suisun
marshes just beyond. You will have to journey north to Great Central
Lake, in the heart of Vancouver Island, or south to Lake Chapala, in the
Mexican State of Jalisco, to get wild-fowl shooting to equal that on
these grey marshes, for here, in what Easterners call winter-time but
which Californians designate duck time, or the season of the rains, come
mallard, teal, sprig, and canvasback, plover, snipe, and brant, in flocks
which literally darken the sky. In the waters hereabouts is centred the
fishing industry of the Sacramento River, which has been monopolised by
swarthy, red-sashed fellows who speak the patois of Sicily or Calabria
or the Greek of the Ægean Isles. No wonder that these sons of the south
look on California as a land of gold, for an industrious fisherman,
who will attend to his nets and leave alone the brandy and red wine of
which they are all so fond, can earn twenty-five dollars a week without
any danger of contracting heart disease; his brother in Palermo or the
Piræus would consider himself an Andrew Carnegie if his weekly earnings
amounted to that many _lire_ or _drachmæ_. If one is in quest of colour
and picturesqueness he can steep himself in them both by taking up his
residence for a time among these fisherfolk of Suisun Bay, but if he does
so he had better take the precaution of keeping a serviceable revolver in
his coat pocket and leaving his address with the river police.
The delta formed by the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers, which, after
paying toll to the fruitful valleys through which they pass, clasp hands
near Suisun Bay and wander together toward the sea, bears a striking
resemblance to the maze of islands and lagoons and weed-grown waterways
at the mouth of the Nile. Some of these low-lying islands are but camping
grounds for migrating armies of wild fowl; on others, whose rich fields
are guarded by high dikes such as you see along the Scheldt, are the
truck-gardens, tended with the painstaking care that makes the Oriental
so dangerous a competitor of the Caucasian. It is these river gardens
which make it possible for the San Franciscan to have asparagus, peas,
artichokes, alligator pears, and strawberries on his table from Christmas
eve around to Christmas morning, and more cheaply than the New Yorker can
get the same things in cans. Indeed, a quarter of the asparagus crop of
the United States comes from these levee-shielded tule lands along the
Sacramento. That, I suppose, is why it is so hard for an Eastern _bon
vivant_ to impress a Californian. The New Yorker, thinking to give his
San Franciscan friend a real treat, takes him to Sherry’s or the Plaza
and, shutting his eyes to the prices on the menu, orders a meal in which
such out-of-the-season delicacies as asparagus figure largely.
“Quite like home,” remarks the Californian carelessly. “My wife writes
that she is getting asparagus from our own garden every day now and
that strawberries are selling in the market for fifteen cents a box.
Alligator-pear salad? Not any, thanks. The chef at the club insists on
giving it to us about four times a week, so I’m rather tired of it. If
it’s all the same to you I think I’d like some pumpkin pie and milk.”
Hanging over the rail, I took huge delight in watching the stream of
traffic which turned the river into a maritime Broadway: stern-wheel
passenger steamers, ploughing straight ahead, with never a glance to
right or left, like a preoccupied business man going to his office; busy
little launches, teuf-teuffing here and there as importantly as district
messenger boys; panting freighters with strings of grain-laden barges
in tow; ugly, ill-smelling tank-steamers carrying Mr. Rockefeller’s
petroleum to far-off, outlandish ports; scow-schooners, full sisters
of those broad-beamed, huge-sailed lumbering craft which bring the
products of the Seine banks down to the Paris markets; big black
dredgers, mud-stained and grimy, like the labourers they are, hard at
work reinforcing the dikes against the winter floods; tide-working
ferries, lazy, ingenious, resourceful craft which swing across the river,
up-stream or down, making the current or the tide or both do their work
for them.
After Isleton is passed the river settles down to an even width of
sixscore yards, flowing contentedly between banks festooned with wild
grape-vines and shaded by oaks and walnuts, sycamore and willows, between
which we caught fleeting glimpses of prosperous homes whose splendid
trees and ordered gardens reminded us of country places we knew along
the Thames. This is the most beautiful part of the river by far. Every
now and again we glimpsed the mouth of a leafy bayou which seemed to
invite us to explore its alluring recesses in a canoe. A moment later a
little bay would disclose a fine old house with stately white columns
and a mansard roof—the result, most probably, of the owner’s success in
the gold-fields sixty years ago. These homes along the Sacramento have
none of the _nouveau riche_ magnificence of the mansions at Pasadena and
Montecito, but they are for the most part dignified and characteristic of
that formative and romantic period in which they were built. Clarksburg,
one hundred and ten miles from San Francisco, is the last stop before
Sacramento, ten miles farther on. Here the river banks become more
busy. Steam, motor, and electric lines focalise upon the capital. We
passed a colony of house-boats, not the floating mansions one sees at
Henley, but simple, unpretentious craft which admirably answer their
purpose of passing a summer holiday. Wharfs began to appear. A great
black drawbridge, thrusting its unlovely length across the river,
parted sullenly for us to pass. Above a cluster of palms and blossoming
magnolias the dome of the capitol appeared, the last rays of the setting
sun striking upon its gilded surface and turning it into a flaming orb.
The air was heavy with the fragrance of camellias. A bell tinkled sharply
in the engine room, the great stern wheel churned the water frantically
for a moment and then stopped, the boat glided deftly alongside the
wharf, the gang-plank rumbled out. “All ashore!” bawled some one. “All
ashore! Sacramento!”
In the gold-rush days Sacramento was to the mining region what
Johannesburg is to the Rand—a base of supplies, a place of amusement,
where the miners were wont to come to squander their gold-dust over the
polished bars of the saloons and dance halls or on the green tables of
the gambling-houses. Those were the free-and-easy days when anything
costing less than a dollar was priced in “bits,” a bit having no
arbitrary value but being equivalent to the amount of gold-dust which
could be held between the thumb and forefinger. In the days when placer
mining was in its glory, debts were discharged in gold-dust instead of
coin, and it often happened when a man was paying a small grocery bill,
or more particularly when he was buying a drink, the bartender, instead
of taking the trouble to weigh the dust, would insert his thumb and
forefinger in the miner’s buckskin “poke” and lift a pinch of gold-dust.
So it came to pass that when a man applied for a job as bartender his
ability to fill the position would be tested by the proprietor asking,
“How much can you raise at a pinch?” whence the familiar colloquialism
of the present day. The more that he could raise, of course, the more
valuable he would be as an employee, the chief requisite for a successful
bartender being, therefore, that he should have splay fingers. In
gold-rush times steamers ran daily from San Francisco to Sacramento, just
as they do to-day, for the river provided the quickest and easiest means
of reaching the mines from the coast, while six-horsed Concord coaches,
the names of whose drivers were synonyms for reckless daring, tore along
the roads to Marysville, Stockton, and Nevada City as fast as the horses
could lay foot to ground.
To fully appreciate the miracle of reclamation, whereby the banks of
the Sacramento have been transformed from worthless drowned lands into
the richest gardens in the world, you should motor down the splendid
boulevard which for a dozen miles or more parallels the river. The
miners along the Sacramento early found that the easiest and cheapest
method of getting gold was to direct a powerful stream of water against
the hillsides, washing the hills away and diverting the resultant mud
into long sluice-boxes, in which the gold was collected. The residue
of mud and water was then turned back into the streams again and was
carried down and deposited in the bed of the Sacramento River, gradually
decreasing its capacity for carrying off flood waters and making its
navigation impossible for large boats. Hence, when the spring freshets
came the swollen river overflowed and devastated the farms and orchards
along its banks. For forty years this sort of thing continued, the
protests of the farmers and fruit growers being ignored, for in those
days the miners virtually ruled the land. But as time wore on, mining
gradually decreased in importance and agriculture grew, until, in 1893,
the farming interests became powerful enough to induce Congress to stop
all hydraulic mining and to put all mining operations on streams in the
San Joaquin and Sacramento Valleys under the control of the California
Debris Commission. Once rid of the bugaboo of the hydraulic nozzle and
its resultant obstruction of the river channels, the farmers along the
Sacramento got together and purchased a number of clam-shell dredgers
and set to work to build new levees and to repair the old ones. If you
will follow the course of the Sacramento for a few miles outside the
capital, either by road or river, you will see them at work. It is very
interesting. A great arm, ending in a sort of hand like two clam-shells,
reaches out over the river and the hand plunges into the stream. When the
hand, which is in reality a huge steel scoop with hinged jaws, emerges
from its gropings at the river-bottom it is filled with sand, whereupon
the arm carries it over and empties it upon the bank. This is the way
in which the dikes which border the Sacramento are constructed, one
clam-shell dredger doing as much work in a day as five hundred men. As a
result of this ingenious contrivance you can make the circuit of Grand
Island on an oiled road, forty feet wide, which has been built on top of
the dikes. Below you on one side is the river; on the other orchards and
gardens from which come annually a quarter of the world’s asparagus crop,
the earliest cherries in the United States, and a million boxes of pears.
I think that the most significant thing that I saw in Sacramento was
Sutter’s Fort, or, to be quite accurate, the restored remnants of it.
Three quarters of a century ago this little rectangular fortification
was the westernmost outpost of American civilisation. In 1839 a Swiss
soldier of fortune named John Augustus Sutter obtained from the Mexican
Government a grant of eleven square leagues of land on the banks of the
Sacramento River and permission to erect a stockade as a protection
against the encroachments of the Indians. The stockade, however, quickly
grew into something closely resembling a fort, with walls loopholed for
musketry and capable of resisting any attack unsupported by artillery.
Sutter’s Fort, or “New Helvetia,” as the owner called his little kingdom,
was on the direct line of overland immigration from the East, and as a
result of the strategic position he occupied and of his influence with
the Mexican authorities, Sutter soon became the virtual ruler of all
this Sierran region. During those stirring days when Frémont and his
frontiersmen came riding down from the passes, it was this Swiss-American
adventurer who held the balance of power on the Pacific Coast, and it
was in no small measure due to the encouragement and aid he gave the
American settlers that California became American. The old frontiersman
died in poverty, the great domain of which he was the owner having been
wrested from him, on one pretext and another, each flimsier than the one
preceding, during the turmoil and lawlessness which marked the gold-rush
days. To-day the old fort is the centre of a highly landscaped city
park; the muzzles of its brass field-guns frown from their embrasures
down paved and shaded avenues; street-cars clang their noisy way past
the gates which were double-barred at night against the attacks of
marauding bands of Mexicans and Indians; and at night spluttering
arc-lamps illuminate its loopholed, vine-clad walls. Sacramento has
acknowledged the great debt she owes to Sutter by giving his destitute
grandson employment as a day labourer on the grounds of the fort which
his grandfather built and to which the capital city of California owes
its being.
There are two routes open to the automobilist between Sacramento and
Lake Tahoe and, historically as well as scenically, there is little to
choose between them. The Placerville route, though considerably the
longer, traverses the country immortalised by Bret Harte and inseparably
associated with the “Forty-Niners.” From Sacramento to Folsom the
highway follows the route of the first railroad built in California,
this jerk-water line, constructed in 1854 to take the miners in and
the gold-dust out, being the grandfather of those great systems which
now cover the State with a cobweb of steel. At Folsom, built on the
edge of a sheer cliff high above the waters of the American River, is
the stone-walled château where a thousand or more gentlemen who have
emerged second best from arguments with the law are dwelling in enforced
seclusion at the expense of the State. Placerville is the historic
“Hangtown” of early days, having gained its original name from the fact
that the sacredness of law and order was emphasised there in the good old
days by means of frequent entertainments known as “necktie parties,” the
hosts at these informal affairs being committees of indignant citizens.
At them the guest of honour made his positively last appearance. It
was here that “Wheelbarrow John” Studebaker, by sticking to his trade
of wheelwright instead of joining in the mad stampede to the diggings,
laid the foundation for that great concern whose vehicles are known
wherever there are roads for wheels to run on. At Coloma, not far from
Placerville, a heroic statue does honour to the memory of John Marshall,
the news of whose discovery of yellow sand in a mill-race brought fortune
seekers flocking Californiaward from every quarter of the globe. Though
fruit growing has long since succeeded mining as the chief industry of
this region, and though the buildings mentioned in the stories of Bret
Harte and Mark Twain have for the most part gone to wrack and ruin,
these towns of the “Mother Lode” still retain enough of their old-time
interest and picturesqueness so that it does not require a Bausch &
Lomb imagination to picture them as they were in the heyday of their
existence, when their streets and barrooms and dance halls were filled
with the flotsam and jetsam of all the earth: wanderers from dim and
distant ports, adventurers, seafarers, soldiers of misfortune, gamblers,
absconding bank clerks, farmers, unsuccessful merchants, out-at-elbows
professional men, men of uneasy conscience and women of easy virtue,
world without end.
When Congress put an end to hydraulic mining the mining men made an
outcry that rose to heaven. The prosperity of California was ended.
The State was going to the bow-wows. There was nothing but gloom and
disaster ahead. The companies that owned the water-rights along the
American River planted their properties to grape-vines and used their
hydraulic apparatus to water them with. But always they were tormented
with the knowledge that under the roots of the vines was gold, gold,
gold. Spurred on by this knowledge, there was devised a new process of
gold extraction; a process that not only did not deposit any débris in
the rivers but which proved to be far more profitable than the old.
Ground that had not yielded enough gold to pay for its being worked
was turned into “pay dirt” through the agency of the giant gold dredger
invented in New Zealand and later developed to its highest efficiency in
California. Picture to yourself a boulder-strewn field, covered with the
tailings of old mining operations, with here and there a pit as large
as the foundation for a sky-scraper made by the hydraulic miners. Each
successive layer of gravel in this field, straight down to bed-rock,
bears gold in small quantities—gold brought there ages ago by the waters
of the river. To extract this gold by the old methods was obviously as
unprofitable as it was illegal. So they tried the new method imported
from the gold-fields of New Zealand. It is not easy to explain the
workings of a modern gold dredger unless you have seen one. Go out into
the middle of a field and dig a pit—a pit large enough to contain a city
office-building. Run water into the pit until it becomes a mud-hole. Then
build in that mud-hole a great steel caisson of several thousand cubic
tons displacement. There you have the basis of the mammoth contrivances
which have supplanted the ’Forty-Niner’s pick and pan. Each of these
dredgers costs a quarter of a million dollars to build and labours night
and day. The business end of the dredger consists of an endless chain
of buckets, each of which weighs two tons when empty, which burrow down
into the mud-hole until they strike bed-rock. The gravel which they
bring up, after being saturated with water, is passed over quicksilver
tables which collect the gold, and runs out again at the bottom of the
pit, thus reversing the natural arrangement of the soil, the dirt
being left on the bottom and the gravel and cobbles on top. It costs
in the neighbourhood of seven thousand dollars a month to operate one
of these dredgers, but the resultant “clean-up” pays for this several
times over. Not only is the gold extracted from the earth as effectually
as a bartender squeezes the juice out of a lemon, but rock crushers
convert the mountains of cobbles into material for building highways
all over the surrounding region, and on the aerated and renovated soil
which the dredgers leave behind them any crop on earth will thrive. Thus
has mechanical genius succeeded in turning those hereditary enemies,
Agriculture and Mining, into coworkers and friends.
[Illustration: LAKE TAHOE FROM THE SLOPES OF THE HIGH SIERRAS.]
Because we wished to follow the route which the overland emigrants
had taken in their epoch-making march, we did not go to Tahoe through
Placerville, which is connected with Tallac, at the southern end of the
lake, by one of the finest motor highways in California, but chose the
more direct and equally good road which climbs over the Sierras by way
of Colfax, Dutch Flat, and Emigrant Gap. Upward and upward wound our
road, like a spiral stairway to the skies. One of the most characteristic
features of this Sierra region is that the traveller can see at a glance
the lay of the whole land. Nowhere else, so far as I am aware, not from
the Saint Bernard, or Ararat, or even from Darjeeling, can one command
such comprehensive views as are to be had from the rocky promontory
known as Cape Horn, or from Summit, which, as its name implies, is at
the top of the pass. At our feet, like a map spread out upon the ground
for our inspection, lay California. The dense forests which clothed the
upper slopes of the Sierras gave way to orchards of pear and apple, and
these changed to the citrus groves which flourish on the lower, balmier
levels, and the green of the orange zone ended abruptly in the yellow
of the grain-fields, and this merged into the checker-board of the
truck-gardens, and through these we could dimly descry the blue ribbon of
the Sacramento turning and twisting and doubling on its tortuous way to
the sea.
The summit of the pass is one hundred and five miles from Sacramento,
and in that distance we had ascended just seven thousand feet, or seven
hundred feet higher than Mount Washington, the highest peak east of the
Rockies. From Summit to Truckee is fourteen miles and we coasted all
the way, the rush of mountain air in our faces as we swept silently and
smoothly down the long diagonals recalling the sensation on the Cresta
Run at Saint Moritz. Swinging suddenly around a shoulder of the mountain
at the “Three Miles to Truckee” sign, we found ourselves looking down
upon a lake, a very gem of a lake, so scintillatingly blue amid the
encircling forest that it looked like a sapphire set in jade. So smiling
and pure and beautiful it was that it seemed impossible to associate it
with the ghastliest and most revolting incident in Californian history.
Yet this was Donner Lake and those who have heard the terrible tale of
the Donner party, for whom it was named, are not likely to forget it.
A party of some eighty emigrants—men, women, and children—making their
way to California by the Overland route, and delayed by an ill-advised
detour, reached the site of the present town of Truckee late in the
autumn of 1846. While attempting to cross the pass a blinding snow-storm
drove in upon them. The story of how the less robust members of the party
died, one by one, from starvation, and of how the survivors were forced
to eat the bodies of their dead comrades—Donner himself, it is claimed,
subsisted on the remains of his grandmother; of the “Forlorn Hope” and of
its desperate efforts to reach the settlements in the Sacramento Valley,
in which only seven out of the twenty-two who composed it succeeded; of
the successive relief expeditions sent out from Sutter’s Fort; and of the
final rescue in the spring of 1847 of the pitiful handful of survivors,
illustrates as nothing else can the incredible hardships and perils
encountered by the American pioneers in their winning of the West. A grim
touch of humour is lent to the tragedy by the fact that two Indians in
charge of some cattle which Sutter had sent to them were killed and eaten
by the starving emigrants, on the theory of the frontiersman, no doubt,
that the only good Indian is a dead one. The hospitable Sutter, in a
statement published some months later, complained most bitterly of this
ungrateful act, saying that they were welcome to the cattle but that they
were unjustified in depriving him of two perfectly good Indians.
Truckee still bears all the earmarks of a frontier town, for miners,
cow-punchers, and lumbermen, bearded to the eyes, booted to the knees,
and in several cases quite evidently loaded to the neck, lounged in the
shade of the wooden awnings and swapped stories and spat tobacco juice
as they waited for the train bringing the San Francisco papers to come
in; while rows of saddle ponies, heads drooping and reins trailing in
the dust, waited dejectedly at the edge of the raised wooden sidewalks
for their masters. From Truckee to Tahoe our way led through the Truckee
cañon, running for a dozen miles or more so close to the banks of the
sparkling, tumbling mountain river that we could have cast for the
rainbow-trout we saw in it without having to leave the car. Dusk fell,
and hard on its heels came its mother, the Dark, but still the yellow
road, turned by the twin beams of the headlights to silver now, wound
and turned and twisted interminably on, now swerving sharply as though
frightened by the ghostliness of a thicket of white birches, then
plunging confidently into the eerie darkness of a grove of fir-trees and
emerging, all unexpectedly, before a great, low, wide-spread building,
its many windows ablaze with lights and its long verandas outlined by
hundreds and hundreds of scarlet paper lanterns. A wave of fragrance and
music intermingled was wafted to us from where an orchestra was playing
dreamy music in the rose gardens above the lake, whose silent, sombre
waters reflected a luminous summer moon. Music and moonlight I have known
in many places—beneath the cypresses of Lago Maggiore, along the Canale
Grande, off the coasts of Africa, in the gardens of the Taj Mahal—but I
have never seen, nor do I ever expect to see, anything quite as beautiful
as that first night on Tahoe, when the paper lanterns quivered in the
night breeze, and the violins throbbed, oh, so softly, and the pale moon
shone down upon the snow-capped mountains and they in turn were reflected
dimly in the darkened waters of the lake.
IX
THE INLAND EMPIRE
“I watched the sun sink from the west,
I watched the sweet day die;
Above the dim Coast Range’s crest
I saw the red clouds lie;
I saw them lying golden deep,
By lingering sunbeams kissed,
Like isles of fairyland that sleep
In seas of amethyst.
...
“Then through the long night hours I lay
In baffled sleep’s travail,
And heard the outcast thieves in grey—
The gaunt coyotes—wail.
With seaward winds that wandering blew
I heard the wild geese cry,
I heard their grey wings beating through
The star-dust of the sky.
...
“Yet, with the last grim, solemn hour,
Stilled were the voices all,
And then, from poppied fields aflower,
Rang out the wild bird’s call;
The glad dawn, deep in white mists steeped,
Breathed on the day’s hushed lyre,
And far the dim Sierras leaped
In living waves of fire.”
IX
THE INLAND EMPIRE
Along in January, after the holiday festivities are over, and the
youngsters have gone back to school or college, and the Christmas
presents have been paid for, Mr. American Business Man and his wife, to
the number of many thousands, escape from the inclemency of an Eastern
winter by “taking a run out to the coast.” They usually choose one of the
southern routes—the trip being prefaced by an animated family discussion
as to whether they shall go via the Grand Cañon or New Orleans—getting
their first glimpse of the Golden State at San Diego. After taking
a shivery dip in the breakers at Coronado so as to be able to write
the folks back home that they have gone in bathing in midwinter, they
continue their leisurely progress northward by the _table-d’hôte_ route,
picking oranges at Riverside, taking the mountain railway up Mount Lowe
from Pasadena, stopping off at Santa Barbara to see the mission and the
homes of the millionaires at Montecito, playing golf and whirling round
the Seventeen Mile Drive at Del Monte, visiting Chinatown, the Cliff
House, and the Barbary Coast in San Francisco, and returning to the East
in the early spring via Salt Lake City or the “C. P. R.,” having, as
they fondly believe, seen pretty much everything in California worth the
seeing.
They turn their faces homeward utterly unconscious of the fact that
they have only skirted along the fringe of the State; that of the great
country at the back, which constitutes the real California, they have
seen absolutely nothing. To them Sacramento, Stockton, Merced, Fresno,
Bakersfield, Lake Tahoe, the San Joaquin, the Big Trees, the Yosemite,
the High Sierras are but names. They do not seem to appreciate, or it may
be that they do not care, that the narrow coast zone dedicated to the
amusement of the winter tourist is no more typical of California than
the Riviera is typical of France. Though it is true that the Californian
hinterland has no million-dollar “show places” and no huge hotels with
tourists in white shoes and straw hats taking tea upon their terraces,
it has other things which are more significant and more worth seeing.
The visitor to the back country can see the orchards which supply the
breakfast-tables of half the world with fruit and the vineyards which
supply the dinner-tables of the other half with grapes and wine and
raisins; he can see flocks of sheep so large that the hills on which they
are grazing seem to be covered with snow; he can see oil-fields which
produce enough petroleum to keep all the lamps in the world alight until
the crack of doom. And, if this is not sufficient inducement, he can
motor along the foot of the highest mountain range in America, he can
visit the most beautiful valley in all the world, he can picnic under
the biggest trees in existence. A country of big things: big distances,
big mountains, big trees, big ranches, big orchards, big crops, big pay,
big problems—that’s the hinterland of California.
Now, that you may the more easily follow me in what I have to say, I
will, with your permission, refer you to the map of the regions described
in this volume. (See end of book.)
The mountain systems, as you see, form a gigantic basin which comprises
about three fifths of the total area of the State. The eastern rim
of this basin is formed by the Sierra Nevada and the western rim by
the Coast Range, these two coming together at the northern end of
the basin in the great mountain wall which separates California from
Oregon, while to the south they sweep inward in the form of a gigantic
amphitheatre, being joined by a minor range known as the Tehachapis.
Reaching Mexicoward is the continuation of the Coast system known as
the San Bernardino Range, forming, as it were, a sort of handle to the
basin. The only natural entrance to the basin is the Golden Gate, through
which the two great river systems—the San Joaquin and Sacramento—reach
the sea. Lying between the Coast Range and the Pacific is that narrow
strip of pleasure land, with its orange groves, its silver beaches, its
great hotels and splendid country houses, which is the beginning and
end of California so far as the tourist is concerned. The northern part
of the great basin, which is drained by the Sacramento River, is called
the Sacramento Valley, while its southern two thirds, whose streams
run into the San Joaquin River, is commonly known as “the San Joaquin,”
the whole forming the Great Valley of California. “Valley” is, however,
a misnomer. One might as fittingly call Mount McKinley a hill, or Lake
Superior a pond. It is a plain rather than a valley; a plain upon whose
level reaches Belgium would be lost and Holland could be tucked away in
the corners. From the rampart of the Sierra Nevada on the east to the
wall of the Coast Range on the west the rich brown loam has an average
width of half a hundred miles. North and south it extends upward of
four hundred miles—as far as from Pittsburg to Chicago. What Rhodesia
is to South Africa, what its prairie provinces are to Canada, the Great
Valley, with its millions of incredibly fertile acres, level as a floor
and checker-boarded with alfalfa, fruit, and vine, is to California—the
storehouse of the State.
Before the railway builders came the Great Valley was one of the most
important cattle-ranges in the West, and hundreds of thousands of
longhorns grazed knee-deep in its lush grass. With the railway came the
homesteaders, who, despite the threats of the cattlemen, drove their
stakes and built their cabins and started to raise wheat. Then a dry
year came, and on top of that another, a heart-breaking succession of
them, and the ruined wheat growers sold out to the cattle barons. In
such manner grew up the big ranches—holdings ranging all the way from
ten thousand to half a million acres or more—a few of which still remain
intact. But a drought that will kill wheat will kill cattle, too, and
after one terrible year a hundred thousand horned skeletons lay bleaching
on the ranges. And so the cattlemen evacuated the valley in their turn
and their places were taken by the diggers of ditches. Now the Lord
evidently built the Great Valley to encourage irrigation. He filled it
with rich, alluvial loam, tilted it ever so slightly toward the centre,
brought innumerable streams from the mountains and glaciers down to the
edge of the plain, ordered the rain and the blizzard to stay away and
the sun to work overtime. All this he did for the Great Valley, and
the ditch did the rest—or, rather, the ditch allied to hard work, for
without sweat-beaded brows, calloused hands, aching backs, the ditch is
worthless. A social as well as an agricultural miracle was performed
by the watering of the thirsty land. The great ranches were subdivided
into farms and orchards. Settlers came pouring in. Communities of hardy,
industrious, energetic folk sprang up everywhere and these grew into
villages and the villages became towns and the towns expanded into
cities. School bells clanged their insistent summons to the youth of the
countryside, church spires pointed their slender fingers toward the sky,
highways stretched their length across the plain, and before this onset
of civilisation the moral code of the frontier crumbled and gave way. The
gun-fighter took French leave, the gambler silently decamped between two
days, and in many communities the saloon-keeper tacked a “For Sale” sign
on his door and took the north-bound train. Civilisation had come to the
Great Valley, not with the dust of hoofs or beat of train, but with the
gurgle of water in an irrigating ditch—and it had come to stay.
Of the effect produced by this spreading of the waters we saw many
evidences as we fled southward from Sacramento across the oak-studded
plain. Throwing wide the throttle, the car leaped forward like a live
thing. The oiled road slipped away from our wheels like an unwinding
bolt of grey silk ribbon. The grain-fields were wide, the houses few.
Constables there were none. Vineyards and orchards, trim rows of
vegetables, neatly fenced farms alternated with seas of barley undulating
in the wind. Such a country, however prosperous, offers little to detain
a motorist, and we went booming southward at a gait that made the
telegraph poles resemble the palings in a picket fence. Occasionally a
torpedo-shaped electric car, a monstrous thing in a dull, hot red, the
faces of its passengers grotesquely framed by the circular port-holes
which serve as windows, tore past us with the wail of a lost soul. Whence
it came or whither it went was a matter of small moment.
The factory whistles were raucously reminding the workers that it was
time to take the covers off their dinner pails when we swung into the
plaza of the city whose name perpetuates the memory of the admiral who
added California to the Union and drew up before the entrance of the
Hotel Stockton. If you should chance to go there, don’t let them persuade
you into lunching in the restaurant with its fumed oak wainscotting
and the Clydesdale furniture which appears to be inseparable from the
mission style of decoration, but insist on having a table set on the
roof-garden with its vine-hung pergola and its ramparts of red geraniums.
That was what we did, and the meal we had there, high above the city’s
bustle, became a white milestone on our highway of memories. Had it
not been for the advertisements of chewing-gum and plug tobacco which
stared at us from near-by hoardings, I would not have believed that we
were in the United States at all, so different was the scene from my
preconceived notions of the San Joaquin Valley. We might have been on the
terrace of that quaint old hotel—I forget the name of it—that overlooks
the Dam in Rotterdam. Stockton, you see, is at the head of navigation
on the San Joaquin River, and the hotel stands at the head of one of
the canal-like channels which permit of vessels tying up in the very
heart of the city, so that from the terrace on its roof you look down
on as animated and interesting a water scene as you will find anywhere:
pompous, self-important tugs, launches with engines spluttering like
angry washerwomen, stern-wheel passenger steamers, little sisters of
those upon the Mississippi, and cumbersome, slow-moving barges, their
flat decks piled high with bagged or barrelled products of the valley on
their way to San Francisco Harbour, there to be transshipped for strange
and far-off ports.
As a result of the Powers That Be at Washington having recently had a
change of heart in respect to motor-cars entering the Yosemite, every
valley town between Stockton and Visalia has announced itself as the one
and only “official gateway to the valley,” and has backed up its claims
with tons of maps and literature. As a matter of fact, the Department of
the Interior has announced that motorists desiring to visit the Yosemite
must enter and leave it by the Coulterville road, and this road can be
reached from any one of half a dozen valley towns with equal facility.
Coming, as we did, from the north, the most convenient route led through
Modesto. As a result of the sudden prosperity produced by a modern
version of the Miracle of Moses, water having been brought forth where
there was no water before by a prophet’s rod in the form of an irrigating
ditch, the little town is as up to date as a girl just back from Paris.
Its lawns and gardens have been Peter-Hendersonised until they look like
the illustrations in a seedsman’s catalogue; the architecture of its
schools and public buildings is so faithful an adaptation of the Spanish
mission style that they would deceive old Padre Serra himself; and its
roads would do credit to the genius of J. MacAdam.
If you will set your travelling clock to awake you at the hour at which
the servant-girl gets up to go to early mass you should, even allowing
for the five-thousand-foot climb, reach Crocker’s Sierra Resort, which
is the nearest stopping place to that entrance of the Yosemite assigned
to motorists, before the supper table is cleared off. It is necessary to
spend the night at Crocker’s, as the government regulations, which are
far more inflexible than the Ten Commandments, permit motorists to enter
the valley only between the hours of ten and one. Leaving Crocker’s at
a much more respectable hour than we did Modesto, we reached the first
military outpost at Merced Big Tree Grove shortly before ten, where a
very businesslike young cavalry officer put me through a catechism which
made me feel like an immigrant applying for admission at Ellis Island.
If your answers to the lieutenant’s questions correspond to those in the
back of the book and your car is able to do the tricks required of it—to
test the holding power of its brakes you are ordered to take a running
start and then throw the brakes on so suddenly that the wheels skid—you
are permitted the pleasure of paying five dollars for the privilege of
entering the jealously guarded portals. They stamp your permit with the
hour and minute at which you leave the big trees, and if you arrive at
the next military post, which is nine miles distant, at the foot of
the Merced River Cañon, in a single second under an hour and seventeen
minutes you are fined so heavily that you won’t enjoy your visit. I
remember that we sneered at these regulations as being unnecessary and
absurd—but that was before we had seen the Merced Cañon grade. As my
chauffeur remarked, it is a real hum-dinger. It is nothing more or less
than a narrow shelf chopped out of the face of the cliff.
“I wonder if those soldiers were quite as careful in examining our brakes
as they should have been?” anxiously remarked one of my companions,
glancing over the side of the car into the dizzy gorge below and then
looking hurriedly away again.
“Oh, there are some perfectly lovely wild flowers!” suddenly exclaimed
the Lady, who had been choking the life out of the cushions. “If you
don’t mind I’ll get out and pick them ... and please don’t wait for
me, I’ll walk the rest of the way down. Yes, indeed, I’m very fond of
walking.”
It is only fair to warn those who propose to follow in our tire
tracks that, entering the Yosemite by automobile, you do not get one
of those sudden and overwhelming views which cause the beholder to
“O-o-o-oh-h-h-h-h!” and “A-a-a-ah-h-h-h-h!” like the exhaust of a
steam-engine. On the contrary, you sneak into the famous valley very
unostentatiously indeed, along a winding wood road which might be in New
England. Nor are you permitted to tear about the floor of the valley
whither you list, for no sooner do you reach the Sentinel Hotel than a
khaki-clad trooper steps up and orders you to put your car in the garage
and keep it there until you are ready to leave.
The Yosemite is not, properly speaking, a valley. That word suggests a
gentle depression with sloping sides, a sort of hollow in the hills,
which have been moulded by the fingers of ages into flowing and
complaisant lines. The Yosemite is nothing of the sort. It is a great
cleft or chasm, hemmed in by rocky walls as steep as the prices at a
summer hotel and as smooth as the manners of a confidence man. It is
the exact reverse of that formation so characteristic of the Southwest
known as a mesa: it is a precipice-walled plain. One might imagine it
to be the work of some exasperated Titan who, peeved at finding the
barrier of the Sierras in his path, had driven his spade deep into the
ridge of the range and then moved it back and forth, as a gardener does
in setting out a plant, leaving a gash in the mountains eight miles
long and a mile deep. When flocks of wild geese light in the Yosemite,
so John Muir tells us, they have hard work to find their way out again,
for, no matter in which direction they turn, they are soon stopped by the
wall, the height of which they seem to have an insuperable difficulty in
gauging. They must feel very much like a fish in an aquarium which is for
ever battering its nose against the glass walls of its tank. The wall
looks to be only about so high, but when they should be far over its top,
northward or southward according to the season, back they find themselves
once more, beating against its stony face, and it is only when, in their
bewilderment, they chance to follow the downward course of the river,
that they hit upon an exit.
Standing in the centre of the valley floor, on the banks of the winding
Merced, is the Sentinel Hotel, which, barring several camps, is the only
hostelry in the valley. It is a cosy, homelike, old-fashioned place,
the fashion in which the rooms open onto the broad verandas which run
entirely around both the lower and the upper stories recalling the
old-time taverns of the South. As there are neither dance pavilions
nor moving-picture houses in the Yosemite, the young women employed as
waitresses at the Sentinel Hotel frequently find their unoccupied time
hanging heavy on their hands, this tedium occasionally leading them
into exploits calculated to make the hair of the observer permanently
pompadour. One of these girls, a slender, willowy creature, anxious to
outdare her companions, climbed to Glacier Point and on the insecure
and scanty foothold afforded by the Overhanging Rock, which juts from
the face of the sheer cliff, three thousand two hundred feet above the
valley floor, proceeded to dance the tango! Evidently feeling that this
exhibition, which had sent chills of apprehension up the spines of the
beholders, was too tame, she balanced herself on one foot on the ledge’s
very brink and extended the other, like a _première danseuse_, over three
fifths of a mile of emptiness.
An unobtrusive but interesting feature of the Yosemite which may well
escape the notice of the casual tourist is the little settlement of
Indians, who dwell in a collection of wretched shacks at the base of the
valley’s northern wall. Like all the California Indians, this remnant
of the Yosemite tribe are entirely lacking in the picturesqueness of
dress and bearing which characterises their kinsmen of the Southwest.
Their presence in the Yosemite possesses, however, a certain romantic
interest, for, had it not been for them, it may well be that the famous
valley would still remain unfound. Their story is an interesting and
pathetic one. As a result of the injustices and outrages committed
upon the peaceful Californian Indians by the settlers who came flocking
into the State upon the discovery of gold, the tribes were driven to
revolt, and in 1851 the government found itself with a “little war” upon
its hands. The trouble ended, of course, by the complete subjugation
of the Indians, who were transferred from their hereditary homes to a
reservation near Fresno. The Yosemites proved less tractable than the
other tribes, however, and, instead of coming in and surrendering to
the palefaces, they retreated to their fastnesses in the High Sierras,
and it was while pursuing them that a troop of cavalry discovered the
enchanted valley which bears their name. They were captured and carried
to Fresno, but the humid climate of the lowlands wrought such havoc among
these mountain-bred folk that the survivors petitioned the government for
permission to return to their old home. Their petition was granted, and
during the half century which has passed since their return to the valley
which was the cradle of their race they have never molested the white man
and have supported themselves by such work as the valley affords and by
basket weaving.
[Illustration: THE YOSEMITE—AND A LADY WHO DIDN’T KNOW FEAR.
“She balanced herself on one foot on the ledge’s very brink and extended
the other, like a _première danseuse_, over three fifths of a mile of
emptiness.”]
It was quite by chance that I stumbled upon these copper-coloured
stragglers from another era. While riding one afternoon along the foot
of the sheer precipice which hems the valley in, my eye was caught by
three strange objects standing in a row. They resembled—as much as they
resembled anything—West African voodoo priests in the thatched garments
which they wear on ceremonial occasions. Upon questioning the Indian
woman who appeared, however, I elicited the information that they were
_chuck-ahs_, and were built to store acorns in. The Yosemite _chuck-ah_
looks like a huge edition of the hampers they use in the lavatories
of hotels to throw soiled towels in, thatched with fir branches and
twigs, covered with a square of canvas to shed the rain, and mounted on
stilts so as to place its contents beyond the reach of rodents. As the
Yosemites, who are bitterly poor, largely subsist upon a coarse bread
made from meal produced by pounding the bitter acorn, the _chuck-ah_ is
as essential to their scheme of household economy as a flour barrel is to
ours. The copper-coloured lady who painstakingly explained all this to
me in very disconnected English told me that her name was Wilson’s Lucy.
Whether she was married to Wilson or whether she was merely attached,
like her name, I did not inquire. Flattered by my obvious interest in her
domestic affairs, she disappeared into the miserable hut which served as
home, to reappear an instant later carrying what at first glance I took
for a small-sized mummy, but which, upon closer inspection, proved to be
a very black-haired, very bright-eyed, very lusty youngster, bound to
a board from chin to ankle with linen bandages which served the double
purpose of making him straight of body and keeping him out of mischief.
“What’s his name?” I inquired, proffering a piece of silver.
“My name Wilson’s Lucy,” the mother giggled proudly. “He name Woodrow
Wilson.”
So, should the President see fit to present a silver spoon to his
copper-coloured namesake, he can address it care of Yosemite Valley
Post-Office, California.
[Illustration: In midwinter, when the Yosemite is deep in snow, skis
and sledges provide the only means of giving the baby an airing.
“What’s his name?” I inquired. The mother giggled proudly: “He name
Woodrow Wilson.”
YOSEMITE YOUNGSTERS, WHITE AND RED.]
* * * * *
Of the Yosemite, Herr Karl Baedeker, to whose red guide-books every
travelling American clings as tenaciously as to his letter of credit,
and whose opinions he accepts as unreservedly as a Mohammedan accepts
the Koran, has said: “No single valley in Switzerland combines in so
limited a space such a wonderful variety of grand and romantic scenery.”
Aside from its unique scenic beauties, the chief attraction of the
Yosemite, to my way of thinking, is the altogether unusual variety of
recreation which it affords. Excursions afoot, ahorseback, or acarriage
to a dozen points of charm in the valley and its environs; trail rides
along the dizzy paths which the government has built to skirt the cañon’s
rim; fishing in the icy mountain streams, in whose shaded pools half a
dozen varieties of trout—Steelheads, Speckled, Brook, Rainbow, Dolly
Varden, and others—await the fly; _al fresco_ luncheons in the leafy
recesses of the Happy Isles, with the pine-carpeted earth for a seat, a
moss-covered boulder for a table, and the mingled murmur of waterfalls
and wind-stirred tree tops for music; it is days spent in such fashion
which makes of a visit to the Yosemite an unforgettable memory.
A half-day’s journey south by stage from the Yosemite brings one to
the lovely Sierran meadow of Wawona, above which are marshalled that
glorious company of Sequoias known as the Mariposa Big Tree Grove. Just
as Ireland has its lakes, and Switzerland its mountains, and Norway its
fiords, so California has its Sequoias, and in many respects they are
the most wonderful of all. The Big Trees, as they are called, are of
two _genera_: the _Sequoia gigantea_, found only in the lower ranges of
the high Sierras, and the _Sequoia sempervirens_, which are peculiar to
the region lying between the Coast Range and the sea. There is no more
fascinating trip on the continent than that from the Yosemite to the Big
Trees of Mariposa, the road, which in the course of a few miles attains
an elevation of six thousand five hundred feet, commanding magnificent
retrospects of the Bridal Veil Falls, El Capitan, Cathedral Spires, and
Half Dome, then plunging into the depths of a forest of cedar, fir,
and pine, crossing the south fork of the brawling Merced, passing the
hospitable verandas of the Wawona Hotel, and ending under the shadow of
the redwood giants, traversing, en route, a tunnel cut through the heart
of a living Sequoia. In their exploitation of the Big Tree groves, the
railway companies have had the rather questionable taste to advertise
these monarchs of the forest by means of pictures showing six-horse
coaches being driven through them, or troops of cavalry aligned upon
their prostrate trunks, or good-looking young women on horseback giving
equestrian exhibitions upon their stumps. To me this sort of thing
smacks too much of the professional showman; it is like making a Bengal
tiger jump through a paper hoop or a lion sit up on his hind legs and
beg like a trick dog. The Sequoias are too magnificent, too awesome to
thus cheapen. When once you have stood in their solemn presence and have
attempted to follow with your eye the course of the great trunks soaring
skyward, higher than the Flatiron Building in New York, half again the
height of the shaft on Bunker Hill; when you have made the circuit of
their massive trunks, equal in circumference to the spires of Notre
Dame; when you have examined their bark, thicker than the armour of the
dreadnought _Texas_; you will agree with me, I think, that the Big Trees
of California need no circus performances to emphasise their proportions
and their majesty.
According to the rules promulgated by the government, motorists are
permitted to leave the Yosemite only between the hours of six and
seven-thirty in the morning. After I had crawled out of a warm bed into
the shiveryness of a Sierran dawn—for the early mornings are bitterly
cold in the High Sierras—I felt inclined to agree with Madame de
Pompadour that “travelling is the saddest of all pleasures.” But when we
were sandwiched in the tonneau of the car again, with the long and trying
grade by which we had entered the valley safely behind us and the river
road to Merced stretching out in long diagonals in front, we soon forgot
the discomforts of the early rising, for the big car leaped forward like
a spirited horse turned loose upon the countryside, and the crisp, clear
air dashed itself into our faces until we felt as buoyant and exhilarated
as though we had been drinking champagne. After “checking out” at the
Big Tree military outpost, we turned down the road which leads through
Coulterville to Merced, the walls of the cañon gradually becoming less
precipitous and the rugged character of the country merging into orchards
and these in turn to farms and vineyards as we debouched into the San
Joaquin again.
Leaving Merced in the golden haze behind us, we swung southward, through
the land of port wine and sherry, to Madera, the birthplace of the
American raisin, and so down the splendid Kearney Boulevard—fifteen miles
of oiled delight running between hedges of palms and oleanders—to Fresno,
the geographical centre of California and the home of the American raisin
and sweet-wine industry, which in little more than a dozen years has
elbowed Spain out of first place among the raisin growers of the world
and has caused ten thousand homes to spring up out on the sandy plain.
Unleashing the power beneath the throbbing bonnet, we tore southward and
ever southward, at first through growing grain-fields and then across
vast barren stretches, waiting patiently for reclamation. Draped along
the scalloped base of the moleskin-coloured foot-hills, where they rise
abruptly from the plain, was a bright green ribbon—the citrus belt of the
San Joaquin, where the orange groves nestle in the sheltered coves formed
by the Sierras’ projecting spurs. In the region lying between Visalia
and Porterville frost is an almost negligible quantity and, as a result,
it is threatening the supremacy of the Riverside-Pasadena district as a
producer of the golden fruit.
Visalia is the starting-point for the Sequoia and General Grant Big Tree
Groves, which have recently been opened to automobilists. The route to
the Sequoia Park lies through Lemon Cove and then over a moderately good
road, extremely dusty in summer, to Rocky Gulch, on the Giant Forest
Road, where the motorist is halted by a cavalry patrol and the customary
five-dollar admittance fee to national parks exacted. From Visalia to
Camp Sierra, in the heart of the Sequoia, is fifty-five miles, to cover
which, allowing for the mountain grades, the indifferent condition of
the roads, and the delay at the park boundary, will require a full
half day. The monarch of the Sequoia Grove is the redwood known as
“General Sherman,” two hundred and eighty feet in height and ninety-five
feet in circumference. Taking height and girth together, the “General
Sherman” is, I believe, the largest tree in the world, though in the
little-visited Calaveras Grove, the northernmost of the Californian
groups of big trees, the “Mother of the Forest” is three hundred and
fifteen feet high and the prostrate “Father of the Forest” is one hundred
and twelve feet in circumference. If, however, the size of a tree is
gauged by its girth only, there are several trees larger than any of the
Californian Sequoias—the gigantic cypress near Oaxaca, in Mexico, known
as the “Great Tree of Tule,” whose trunk measures one hundred and sixty
feet in circumference but whose height is barely more; the great banyan
in the botanical garden at Calcutta, and the “Chestnut Tree of a Hundred
Horses”—said to be the largest tree in the world—at the foot of Mount
Etna. I do not know whether these bald figures convey anything to you,
but they certainly do not to me and I am not going to burden you with
more of them. I have done my duty in giving you the dimensions of the
largest of the Sequoias, which, I might add, is almost the exact height
of the Flatiron Building. A vast deal of nonsense has been written about
the age and other features of the Californian redwoods. It is not enough
for the visitor to learn that the oldest Sequoia was probably a sapling
when Rameses drove the Israelites out of Egypt, but the guide must needs
draw upon his imagination and add another six or seven thousand years on
top of that. The Sequoia, the noblest living thing upon our continent
to-day, would appear, even at the age of five-and-twenty centuries, to
be capable of much added lustre, for I was gravely assured that it was
probably from these very groves that Solomon obtained the pillars for his
temple.
It is in the neighbourhood of fourscore miles from Visalia to the delta
of the Kern, most southerly of the Sierra’s golden streams, along whose
banks rise the gaunt, black skeletons of the oil-derricks. So vast is
the extent of the Great Valley of California that, though it contains
the greatest petroleum fields in all the world, the traveller may
zigzag through it for many days without seeing a sign of the industry
which lights the lamps and provides the motive power for trains, boats,
and motor-cars from the Straits of Behring to the Straits of Magellan.
It is not an attractive region. Hungry and bare are the tawny hills,
viscous the waters of the stream that meanders between them, weird and
gibbet-like the forest of derricks which crowns them. There is a smell
of coal-oil in the air, and the few habitations we passed were, by their
very ugliness, obviously connected with this, the unloveliest of the
earth’s products.
Bakersfield marks the virtual end of the Great Valley, a few miles south
of it the converging ranges of fawn-coloured plush being linked by the
Tehachapi, which is the recognised boundary between central and southern
California. Bakersfield owes its abounding prosperity to the adjacent
oil-fields, its streets being lined by the florid residences and its
highways resounding to the arrogant _honk honk_ of the high-powered
motor-cars of the “oil barons,” as the men who have “struck oil” are
termed. I like these oil barons because with their loud voices and their
boisterous manners and the picturesqueness of their dress they typify a
phase of life in the “Last West” which is rapidly disappearing. There
is something rough-and-ready and romantic about them; something which
recalls their get-rich-quick fellows in Dawson and Johannesburg and Baku.
Most of them have acquired their wealth suddenly; most of them have
worked up from the humblest beginnings; and most of them believe in the
good old proverb of “Easy come, easy go—for there’s more where this came
from.” Red-faced, loud-voiced, with a predilection for broad-brimmed hats
and gaudy ties, you can see them playing poker for high stakes in the
back rooms of the saloons or leaning over the hotel bars in boisterous
conversation. After I had watched them for a time I no longer doubted
the assertion that Bakersfield buys more spittoons than any city in the
country.
Although from the gilded cupola of Bakersfield’s truly beautiful
court-house you can look out across a quarter of a million irrigated
acres, though you can see a solid block of alfalfa covering forty squares
miles and fattening twenty-five thousand head of steers a year, these
form but a patch of green on the yellow floor of the valley’s gigantic
amphitheatre. As a matter of fact, the development of the country around
Bakersfield has been seriously retarded by the enormous holdings of two
or three great landowners who neither improve their properties nor sell
them. One of these great landlords, who numbers his Californian acres
alone in the millions and who boasts that his cow-punchers can drive
a herd of his steers from the Mexican frontier to the Oregon line and
camp on his own land every night, obtained his enormous holdings near
Bakersfield long years ago under the terms of the Swamp and Drowned Lands
Act, which provided that any one who applied could obtain title to any
land which he had gone over in a boat. So he put a boat on a wagon and
had it hauled over hundreds of thousands of acres which he has since
reclaimed. He was an ingenious fellow.
[Illustration: A “gusher” near Bakersfield spouting two and a half
million gallons of oil a day.
The Kern River oil fields, near Bakersfield, Cal.
THE GREATEST OIL FIELDS IN THE WORLD.]
You will need to journey far to find a region more desolate and
forbidding than that lying between Bakersfield and the summit of the
Tehachapi. Never shall I forget the deadly monotony of that long,
straight road along which we pushed in the teeth of a buffeting wind,
with its whistling telegraph-poles, its creaking iron windmills at
regular intervals, and its barbed-wire fences all converging to a
vanishing-point which looked to be perhaps five miles ahead but at which
we never seemed to arrive. There are no trees to obstruct the view of
the barren hills which rim the distance, and for many miles there is not
enough cover to hide a grasshopper, for the soil is poisoned by alkalis
and the poor, thin grass dies of a broken heart. But as the car panted
its tortuous way from the floor of the valley up the face of the mountain
wall which hems it in, the scenery became more varied and interesting.
Great patches of the mountainside were clothed with masses of lupin of
the coldest, brightest blue you ever saw. Once we ran through a forest
of tree yuccas whose spiked, fantastic branches looked as though they
were laden with hedgehogs. Sometimes the road would dip quite suddenly
into a charming little hollow in the hills, shaded by venerable live-oaks
and with a purling brook running through it, only to emerge again and
zigzag along the face of the mountain, clinging to the bare rock as a
fly clings to the ceiling. Several times we had to stop for flocks of
sheep—thousands and thousands of them—moving to pastures new, driven
by shaggy, bright-eyed sheep-dogs which hung upon the flanks of the
flock and seemed to anticipate every order of the Basque shepherds. I
noticed that all these herdsmen wore heavy revolvers at their hips and
had Winchesters slung at the pommels of their saddles, for the ancient
feud between cattlemen and sheepmen still exists upon these Sierran
ranges, and there is many a pitched battle between them of which no news
creeps into the columns of the papers. The frequency of these flocks
considerably delayed our progress, for the road is narrow and to have
driven through the woolly wave which at times engulfed the car would have
meant driving scores of sheep over the precipice to death on the rocks
below.
[Illustration: “We ran through a forest of tree-yuccas whose spiked,
fantastic branches looked as though they were laden with hedgehogs.”
“Our progress was frequently delayed by woolly waves which at times
engulfed the car.”
OVER THE TEHACHAPIS.]
The change in scenery as we emerged from the mouth of the pass at Saugus
was almost startling in its suddenness. Gone were the dreary, wind-swept
plains; gone was the endless vista of telegraph-poles; gone the dun and
desolate hills. We found ourselves, instead, at the entrance to a valley
which might well have been the place of exile of Persephone. Symmetrical
squares of bay-green oranges, of soft gray olives and of yellowing vines
turned its slopes into chessboards of striking verdure. Rows of tall,
straight eucalyptus trees made of the highway a tunnel of blue-green
foliage. The mountains, from foot to summit, were clothed with lupins of
a blue that dulled the blue of heaven. The oleanders and magnolias and
palms and clumps of bamboo about the ranches gave to the scene an almost
tropical luxuriance. This was the vale of Santa Clara—not to be confused
with the valley of the same name farther north—perhaps the richest and
most prosperous agricultural region for its size between the oceans and
certainly the least advertised and the least known. Unlike the residents
of other parts of California, its residents issue no enticing literature
depicting the surpassing beauties and attractions of their valley as
a place of residence, for the very good reason that they do not care
to sell, unless at prohibitive prices. They have a good thing and they
intend to keep it. Less than twoscore miles in length, the Santa Clara
Valley, which begins at Saugus and runs westward to Ventura-by-the-Sea,
comes nearer to being frostless than any region in the State, save only
the Imperial Valley. But its industries are by no means restricted to
the cultivation of citrus fruits, for the walnuts it produces are finer
than those of England, its figs are larger than those of Smyrna, and its
olives more succulent than those grown on the hills of Greece.
As with engines droning like giant bumblebees we sped down the
eucalyptus-bordered highway which leads to Santa Paula, the valley was
flooded with the rare beauty of the fleeting twilight of the West. The
sky, a moment before a dome of lapis lazuli, merged into that exquisite
ashes-of-roses tint which is the foremost precursor of the dark, and
then burst, all unexpectedly, into a splendid fiery glow which turned
the western heavens into a sheet of rosy coral. But, like most really
beautiful things, the Californian sunsets are quick to perish. A few
moments only and the rose had dulled to palest lavender and this to
amethyst and this in turn to purple and then, at one bound, came the
night, and our head lamps were boring twin holes in the velvety,
flower-scented darkness. Before us the street lights of Santa Paula burst
into flame like a diamond necklace clasped about the neck of a lovely
woman.
* * * * *
The region of which Lake Tahoe is the centre is difficult to describe;
one is drawn illusively into over-praising it. Yet everything about
it—the height of the surrounding mountains, the vastness of the forests,
the size of the trees, the beauty of the wild flowers, the grandeur of
the scenery, the colourings of the lake itself—is so superlative that,
to describe it as it really is, one must, perforce, lay himself open to
the charge of exaggeration. There is no lake in Switzerland or, for that
matter, anywhere else in Europe which is Tahoe’s equal. To find its peer
you will need to go to Lake Louise, in the Canadian Rockies, or, better
still, to some of the mountain lakes of Kashmir. Here, set down on the
very ridge-pole of the High Sierras, is a lake twenty-two miles long by
ten in width, the innumerable pleasure craft whose propellers churn its
translucent waters into opaline and amaranthine hues being nearly a mile
and a quarter above the surface of the Pacific. To attempt to describe
its ever-changing and elusive colourings is as futile as to describe
the colours of a sunset sky, of a peacock’s tail, of an opal. Looked at
from one point, it is blue—the blue of an Ægean sky, of a baby’s eyes,
of a turquoise or of a sapphire—but an hour later, or from another
angle, it will be green: a gorgeous, glorious, dazzling green, sometimes
scintillating like an emerald of incredible size, sometimes lustreless
as a piece of jade. In the bays and coves and inlets which corrugate its
shores its waters become even more diverse in colouring: smoke grey,
pearl grey, bottle green, Nile green, yes, even apple green, lavender,
amethyst, violet, purple, indigo, and—believe me or not, as you choose—I
have more than once seen Tahoe so rosy in the reflected _alpenglow_ of
twilight that it looked for all the world like a sheet of pinkest coral.
Its shores are as diverse as its colourings, pebbly beaches alternating
with emerald bays; pine-crowned promontories; snug coves on whose silver
beaches bathers disport themselves and children gambol; moss-carpeted
banks shaded by centenarian trees; cliffs, smooth as the side of a house,
rising a thousand feet sheer above the water; and, here and there, deep
and narrow inlets so hemmed in by vertical precipices of rock that to
find their like you would have to go to the Norwegian fiords. Completely
encircling the lake, like watchful sentinels, rise the snow peaks—not
the domesticated mountains of the Adirondacks or the Alleghenies, but
towering monsters, ten, twelve, fifteen, thousand feet in height and
white-mantled throughout the year—the monarchs of the High Sierras.
From the snow-line, which is generally about two thousand feet above the
surface of the lake and ten thousand feet above the level of the sea,
the coniferous Sierran forests—the grandest and most beautiful in the
world—clothe the lower slopes of the mountains in mantles of shaggy green
which sweep downward until their hems are wet in the waters of the lake.
One of the most distinguishing and pleasing characteristics of these
Sierran forests is their inviting openness. The trees of all the species
stand more or less apart in groves or in small, irregular groups,
enabling a rider to make his way almost anywhere, along sun-bathed
colonnades and through lush, green glades, sprinkled with wild flowers
and as smooth as the lawns of a city park. Now you cross a forest garden
ariot with wild flowers, now a mountain meadow, now a fern-banked,
willow-shaded stream, and ever and anon emerge upon some granite pavement
or high, bare ridge commanding superb views of majestic snow-peaks rising
grandly above the intervening sea of evergreen. Every now and then you
stumble upon mountain lakes tucked away in the most unexpected places,
gleaming amid the surrounding forest like sapphires which a jeweller
has laid out for inspection upon a green plush cloth. The whole number
of lakes in the Sierras is said to be upward of fifteen hundred, not
counting the innumerable smaller pools and tarns. Another feature of the
High Sierras are the glacier meadows: smooth, level, silky lawns, lying
embedded in the upper forests, on the floors of the valleys, and along
the broad backs of the ridges at a height of from eight to ten thousand
feet above the sea. These mountain meadows are nearly as level as the
lakes whose places they have taken and present a dry, even surface, free
from boulders, bogs, and weeds. As one suddenly emerges from the solemn
twilight of the forest into one of these dreamy, sunlit glades, he looks
instinctively for the dainty figures of Watteau shepherdesses or for the
slender forms of sportive nymphs. The close, fine sod is so brightly
enamelled with flowers and butterflies that it may well be called a
meadow garden, for in many places the plushy turf is so thickly strewn
with gentians, daisies, ivesias, forget-me-nots, wild honeysuckle, and
paint-brush that the grass can scarcely be seen.
In certain of these mountain meadows I noticed a phenomenon which I
have observed nowhere else save in Morocco: the flowers, instead of
being mixed and mingled in a huge bouquet, grew in distinct but adjacent
patches—a square of blue forget-me-nots here, a blanket of white daisies
there, a strip of Indian paint-brush over there, and beyond a dense clump
of wild lilac—so that from a little distance the meadow looked exactly
like a great floral mosaic. It was very beautiful. On the higher slopes
the scarlet shoots of the snow-plant dart from the soil like tongues
of flame. Around it hangs a pretty native legend. Two young braves,
so the legend runs, made desperate love to an Indian princess, who at
length chose the one and turned away the other. On the marriage day
the rejected lover ambushed himself in the forest, and, as his rival
went riding past to claim his bride, sent an arrow twanging into his
breast. But, though wounded unto death, the lover clung to his horse and
raced through the forest to die in the arms of his bride. As he sped his
heart’s blood, welling forth, left a trail of crimson splotches on the
ground behind him. And wherever a drop of blood fell, there a blood-red
flower sprang into bloom. If you doubt the story you can see and pick
them for yourself.
Set high on the western shore of Tahoe, and so appropriately designed
that it seems to be a part of the forest which encircles it, is Tahoe
Tavern—a long, low hostelry of shingles, stone, and logs, its deep
verandas commanding an entrancing view of the lake and of the mountainous
Nevada shore, for the California-Nevada boundary runs down the middle
of the lake. Just as the smart set along the Atlantic seaboard flock
to Newport, Narragansett, and Bar Harbour in the summer, so the
corresponding section of society upon the Pacific Coast may be found at
Tahoe from July to September. A narrow-gauge railway, leaving the main
line of the Southern Pacific at Truckee, two hundred miles or so east of
San Francisco, hugs the brawling Truckee to the Tavern, a distance of a
dozen miles, whence steamers convey the visitor to the numerous hotels,
camps, and cottages which dot the shores of the lake. The summers are
never warm on Tahoe, nor, for that matter, ever uncomfortably cool,
while the air is as crisp and invigorating as extra-dry champagne. From
the first of July to the first of October it almost never rains. And yet
ninety-nine Easterners out of a hundred pity the poor Californians who,
they imagine, are sweltering in semitropic heat.
One never lacks for amusement at Tahoe. Lean power-boats tear madly from
shore to shore, their knife-like prows ploughing the lake into a creamy
furrow. Hydroplanes hurtle by like leaping tunas. There is angling both
in Tahoe and the maze of adjacent lakes and lakelets for every variety
of trout that swims. There is bathing—if one doesn’t mind cold water.
At night white-shouldered women and white-shirted men dip and hesitate
and glide on the casino’s glassy floor to the impassioned strains of
“Get Out and Get Under” and “Too Much Mustard.” But trail riding is the
most characteristic as it is the most exciting, diversion of them all.
It is really mountaineering on horseback—up the forested slopes, across
the gaunt, bare ridges, and so to the icy summits, on wiry ponies which
are as sure-footed as mountain-goats and as active as back-yard cats.
The narrowness of many of the trails, the slipperiness of ice and snow,
the giddiness of the sheer cliffs, the thought of what would happen if
your horse _should_ stumble, combine to make it an exciting amusement.
You can leave the shores of the lake, basking in a summer climate, with
flowers blooming everywhere, and in a two hours’ ride find yourself amid
perpetual snow. It is a novel experience, this sudden transition from
July to January, and not to be obtained so readily anywhere else that I
know, unless it be in a cold-storage plant. On the Fourth of July, for
example, after a late breakfast, the Lady and I waved _au revoir_ to our
white-flannelled friends on the Tavern’s veranda and before noon were
pelting each other with snowballs on a snow-drift forty feet deep, with
Lake Tahoe, gleaming beneath the sun like a gigantic opal, three thousand
feet below us. There may, of course, be more enchanting vacation places
than this Tahoe country—higher mountains, grander forests, more beautiful
lakes, a better climate—but I do not know where to find them.
X
“WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON”
“I hear the far-off voyager’s horn;
I see the Yankee’s trail—
His foot on every mountain pass,
On every stream his sail.
...
“I hear the mattock in the mine,
The axe stroke in the dell,
The clamour from the Indian lodge,
The Jesuit chapel bell!
“I see the swarthy trappers come
From Mississippi’s springs;
And war-chiefs with their painted brows
And crests of eagle wings.
“Behind the scared squaw’s birch canoe
The steamer smokes and raves;
And city lots are staked for sale
Above old Indian graves.
...
“Each rude and jostling fragment soon
Its fitting place shall find—
The raw material of a State,
Its muscle and its mind.”
X
“WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON”
With a rattle of wheels and a clickety-clack of hoofs the coach bore down
upon us, its yellow body swaying drunkenly upon its leathern springs.
It was a welcome sight, for since early morning we had been journeying
through a region sans sign-posts, sans houses, sans people, sans
everything. I threw up my hand, palm outward, which is the recognised
halt sign of the plains, and in obedience to the signal the sombreroed
driver pulled his wheelers back on their haunches and jammed his brakes
on hard. Half a dozen bearded faces peered from the dim interior of the
vehicle to ascertain the reason for the sudden stop.
“Are we right for the Columbia?” I asked.
“You betcha, friend,” said the driver, squirting a jet of tobacco juice
with great dexterity between the portals of his drooping moustache. “All
ye’ve got to do is keep ’er headed north an’ keep agoin’. You’re not more
nor sixty mile from the river now. How fur’ve ye come with that there
machine, anyway?”
“From Mexico,” I replied a trifle proudly.
“The hell you say!” he responded with open admiration. “An’ where ye
bound fur, ef I might make so bold’s to ask?”
“As far north as we can get,” I answered. “To Alaska, if the roads hold
out.”
“Waal, don’t it beat the Dutch what things is acomin’ to anyway,” he
ejaculated, “when ye kin git into a waggin like that there an’ scoot
acrost the country same’s ye would on a railroad train? I’ve druv this
old stage forty year come next December, but the next thing ye know
they’ll be wantin’ an autermobile, an’ me an’ the critters’ll be lookin’
fer another job. But that’s progress, an’ ’tain’t no manner o’ use tryin’
to buck it. These old Concords hev done a heap toward civilisin’ the
West, but their day’s about over, I reckon, an’ the autermobile will come
along an’ take up the job where they left off. Come to think on it, it’s
sorter ’s if the old style was shakin’ hands an’ sayin’, ‘Glad tew meet
you’ to the new. But I’ve got your Uncle Sam’l’s mail to deliver an’ I
can’t be hangin’ ’round here gossipin’ all day.”
He kicked off his brake, and his long whip-lash, leaping forward like a
rattlesnake, cracked between the ears of his leaders. “Get to work there,
ye lazy, good-fer-nothin’ sons o’ sea-cooks, you!” he bellowed.
“S’long, friend, an’ good luck to ye,” he called over his shoulder. The
whip-lash cracked angrily once more, wheelers and leaders settled into
their collars, and the coach tore on amid a rolling cloud of dust.
[Illustration: THE OVERLAND MAIL.
“With a rattle of wheels and a clickety-clack of hoofs the coach bore
down upon us.”]
“That was perfectly wonderful,” said the Lady, with a little gasp of
satisfaction. “That was quite the nicest thing we’ve seen since we left
Mexico. I didn’t know that that sort of thing existed any more outside of
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.”
“It won’t exist much longer,” said I. “This Oregon hinterland is the last
American frontier, but the railway is coming and in a few more years the
only place you will be able to see a Concord coach like the one we just
met will be in a museum or on a moving-picture screen. The old fellow was
perfectly right when he said that our meeting typified the passing of the
old and the coming of the new.”
“I’m awfully sorry for them,” remarked the Lady abstractedly.
“Sorry for whom?” I asked.
“Why,” she answered, “for the people who can only see this wonderful West
on moving-picture screens.”
* * * * *
We took the back-stairs route to Oregon. When we turned the bonnet of
the car northward from Lake Tahoe, we had the choice of two routes to
the Columbia. One of these, which we would have taken had we followed
the advice of every one with whom we talked, would have necessitated our
retracing our steps across the High Sierras to Sacramento, where we would
have struck the orthodox and much-travelled highway that runs northward
through the Sacramento Valley, via Marysville and Red Bluff and Redding,
enters the Siskiyous at Shasta and leaves them again at Grant’s Pass, and
keeps on through the fertile and thickly settled valleys of the Rogue,
the Umpqua, and the Willamette, to Portland and its rose gardens. The
other route, which is ignored by the road-books and of which those human
road-books who run the garages seemed to be in total ignorance, strikes
boldly into the primeval wilderness that lies to the north of Tahoe,
parallels for close on two hundred miles the western boundary of Nevada,
crosses the Oregon border at Lower Klamath Lake, and then, hugging the
one hundred and twenty-second parallel like a long-lost brother, climbs
up and up and up over the savage lava beds, through the country of the
Warm Springs Indians, across the fertile farm lands of the Inland Empire,
and so down the Cañon of the Deschutes to where the rocky barrier of The
Dalles says to the boats upon the Columbia: “You can go no further.”
This is the famous Oregon Trail, which lies like a long rope thrown idly
on the ground, abandoned by the hand that used it. Though the people
with whom we talked urged us not to take it, prophesying long-neglected
and impassable roads and total lack of accommodation and all manner of
disaster, we stubbornly persisted in our choice, lured by the romantic
and historic memories that hover round it; for was it not, in its day,
one of the most famous of all the routes followed by mankind in its
migrations; was it not the trail taken by those resolute frontiersmen who
won for us the West?
We were warned repeatedly, by people who professed to know whereof
they spoke, that, if we persisted in taking this unconventional and
therefore perfectly ridiculous route, we would experience great
difficulty in crossing the mountains, and, as some of our informants
cheeringly observed, it was dollars to doughnuts that we wouldn’t be
able to cross them at all. But as we had had experiences with these
brethren of calamity howlers while motoring in Rhodesia and in Grande
Kabylie and in the Anti-Lebanon, their mournful prognostications did not
trouble us in the least. In fact, they but served to whet our appetites
for the anticipated adventures. As a matter of fact, throughout the
entire thousand miles that our speedometer recorded between Tahoe and
The Dalles, not once did we cross any mountains worthy of the name, for
our route, which had been carefully selected for its easy gradients
long years before our time by men who traversed it in prairie-schooners
instead of motor-cars and whose motive power was oxen instead of engines,
lay along the gently rolling surface of that great mile-high plateau
which parallels the eastern face of the Cascade Range and comes to a
sudden termination in the precipitous cliffs which turn the upper reaches
of the Columbia into a mighty gorge.
Turning our tonneau upon Truckee and its brawling trout-stream, we
struck into the forest as the compass needle points, with Susanville
one hundred and fifty miles away, as our day’s objective. (Who Susan
was I haven’t the remotest idea, unless she was the lady that they
named the black-eyed daisies after.) For hour after hour the road wound
and turned and twisted through the grandest forest scenery that can
be found between the oceans. To our left, through occasional breaks in
the giant hedge of fir and spruce and jack-pine, we caught fleeting
glimpses of Pilot Peak, whose purple summit has doubtless served as a
sign-post for many an Oregon-bound band of pioneers. To us, who had seen
only the tourist California and the highly cultivated valleys of the
interior, these Californian highlands proved a constant source of joy
and self-congratulation. We felt as though we were explorers and, so far
as motoring for pleasure in that region is concerned, we were. But the
greatest revelation was the road. We had expected to need the services
of an osteopath to rejoint our dislocated vertebræ and, to modify the
anticipated jolts, I had had the car equipped with shock-absorbers and
had taped the springs. We could, however, have gone over that road
with no great discomfort in a springless wagon, for, upon a roadbed
undisturbed for close on half a century by any traffic worthy of the
name, had fallen so thick and resilient a blanket of pine-needles that we
felt as though a strip of Brussels carpet had been laid for our benefit,
as they do in Europe when royalty has occasion to set foot upon the
ground. The sunbeams, slanting through the lofty tree tops, dappled the
tawny surface of the road with golden splotches and fleckings, squirrels
chattered at us from the over-arching boughs; coveys of grouse, taken
unaware by the stealth of our approach, rocketed into the air, wings
whirring like machine guns, only to settle unconcernedly as soon as we
had passed; an antlered stag bounded suddenly into the road, stood for
an instant motionless as though cast from iron, with wide-open, startled
eyes, and disappeared in panic-stricken flight; once, swinging silently
around a turning, we came upon a black bear gorging himself at the
free-lunch counter that the wild blackberries provide along the road;
but before we could get our rifles out of their cases he had crashed
his way into underbrush too dense for us to follow. Nor did we have any
great desire to follow. The smoothness and silence of the road were too
enchanting. Hour after hour we sped noiselessly along without a glimpse
of a human being or a human habitation. There were no sign-posts to point
the way and we wanted none.
But all good things must end in time, and our pine-carpeted road
debouched quite unexpectedly into the loveliest valley that you ever saw.
Perhaps it is because its sylvan serenity is undisturbed as yet by the
jeering screech of the locomotive, but you will need to use much gasoline
and wear out many tires before you will happen upon anything more idyllic
than those cloistered and incredibly fertile acres that sweep down from
the summit of the Iron Hills to the margin of Honey Lake. The trim white
farmhouses that peep coquettishly, like bashful village maidens, from
amid the fragrant orchards at the passer-by; the fields green-carpeted
with sprouting grain; the barns whose queer hip-roofs made them look as
though they were aburst with stored-up produce, as, indeed, they are;
the sleek cattle, standing knee-deep in a lake as clear as Circe’s
mirror—all these things spell p-r-o-s-p-e-r-i-t-y so plainly that even
those who whirl by, as we did at forty miles an hour, may read.
Susanville, which is built on a hill at the end of Honey Lake Valley,
very much as the Italian hill towns command the tributary countryside,
is a quiet rural community that has been stung by the bee of progress
and is running around in circles in consequence. When we were there a
railroad was in course of construction for the purpose of tapping the
wealth of this rich but hitherto unexploited region, and the main street
of the town, which we reached on a Saturday evening, was alive with
farmers who had come in to do their week-end shopping, cow-punchers in
gaudy neckerchiefs and Angora chaps, fresh from the ranges, engineers in
high-laced boots and corduroy trousers, sun-tanned labourers from all
four corners of Europe and the places in between. As a result of this
week-end influx, the only hotel that Susanville possessed was filled to
the doors.
“I can’t even fix you up with a pool-table, gents,” said the
shirt-sleeved proprietor, mopping the perspiration from his forehead with
a violent-hued bandana; “and what’s more, every blame boardin’-house in
town’s just as full up as we are.”
“But we _must_ find some place to sleep,” I asserted positively. “We’ve a
lady with us, you see, and she can’t very well sleep in the open—or on a
pool-table either, can she?”
“A lady? God bless my soul! Why didn’t you say so? Well, now, that’s too
durned bad. But hold on a minute, friends. I wouldn’t be s’prised if Bill
Dooling, the barber, could fix you up. He’s got a cottage down the road a
piece and I’ll send a boy along with you to show you where he lives.”
Bill the barber and his family, which consisted of his wife, his
mother—known as granmaw—nine children who had reached the age of
indiscretion, and a baby, dwelt in a vine-clad cottage as neat as the
proverbial beeswax and about as roomy as a limousine.
“Sure,” said he cordially, when I had explained our predicament, “we’ve
got slathers of room. We’ll fix you up and welcome. You and the lady can
have Rosamond Clarissa’s room, and your friend here can have the boys’
room across the hall, and your showfer can sleep in Ebenezer’s bed. Me
and the wife’ll fix ourselves up on the porch, and granmaw she’ll go
acrost the street to a neighbour’s, and Abel and Absalom and David and
Rosamond Clarissa and Ebenezer and Elisha and Gwendoline Hortensia and
Hiram and Isaiah’ll sleep in the tent. Sure, we’ve got all the room you
want.”
“You must have almost as much trouble in finding names for your
children,” the Lady remarked, “as the Pullman Company does in naming its
sleeping-cars.”
“Well, it’s this way, ma’am,” he explained. “Me and maw have a sort of an
agreement. She names the girls and gets the names out of the magazines.
I name the boys and get the names out of the Bible. She hoped that the
baby’d be a girl so’s she could name her Patricia Penelope, but seeing as
it’s a boy it’s up to me, and I haven’t been able to make up my mind yet
between Jabez, Josiah, and Jeremiah.”
Barring the fact that we were awakened at a somewhat unseasonable hour
by a high-voiced discussion between Rosamond Clarissa and Gwendoline
Hortensia as to which should have the privilege of washing the baby, we
were very comfortable indeed—very much more so, I expect, than if we
had been able to obtain quarters at the hotel—and, after a breakfast
of berries with cream that was not milk incognito, and coffee, and hot
cakes, and eggs that tasted as though they might have originated with a
hen instead of a cold-storage vault, we rolled away with the hospitable
barber and his brood waving us Godspeed from the doorstep.
It is in the neighbourhood of two hundred and fifty miles from Susanville
to the Oregon line, the earlier portion of the journey taking us through
a forest that had evidently never known the woodsman’s axe. North of
Dry Lake Ranch, which is the only place in between where a motorist can
count on finding a bed to sleep in or a bite to eat, a grazing country of
remarkable fertility begins, much of it having been taken up by Czechs
from Bohemia: a stolid, sturdy, industrious folk who work themselves and
their patient families and the ground unremittingly and whose prosperity,
therefore, passes that of their more shiftless neighbours at a gallop.
This fringe of farming communities, although in California, really mark
the beginning of that great, rich agricultural region comprising the back
country of Oregon which, because of its prosperity, its extent, and its
wealth of resources, is known as the Inland Empire.
A few miles beyond these Bohemian settlements we caught our first glimpse
of Lower Klamath Lake, whose low and marshy shores, which lie squarely
athwart the boundary between California and Oregon, forming a spring
and autumn rendezvous for untold thousands of wild fowl, the government
having set it aside as a sort of natural aviarium.
“Look!” suddenly exclaimed the Lady, pointing. “The shores of the lake
are covered with snow!”
But what looked for all the world like an expanse of snow suddenly
transformed itself, as we drew near, into a cloud of huge, ungainly
birds with perfectly enormous bills, creating a racket like a thousand
motor-cars with the beating of their wings.
“Pelicans, by Jove!” exclaimed my friend, and that is what they
were—thousands, yes, tens of thousands of them. The pelican, as we
learned later, is the symbol, as it were, of all this Klamath country,
the really beautiful hotel at Klamath Falls being named The White
Pelican, “perhaps,” as the Lady observed, “because of the size of its
bill.” However this may be, it is a very excellent hotel, indeed, and
if you ever chance to find yourself in that part of the country I would
advise you to spend a night there, if for no other reason than to enjoy
the novel experience of staying in a hostelry which would do credit to
Fifth Avenue and looking out of your window on a frontier town. This,
mind you, is casting no aspersions on Klamath Falls, which is a very
prosperous and wide-awake little place indeed, although ten years ago you
would have had some difficulty in finding it on the map, its mushroom
growth being due to the development of the immense lumber territory of
which, since the completion of the railway, it has become the centre. As
a matter of fact, the hotel was not built so much for the convenience
of the traveller as it was for the comfort of the handful of Eastern
capitalists whose great lumber interests necessitate their spending a
considerable portion of the year in Klamath Falls and who demanded the
same luxuries and conveniences in this backwoods town that they would
have on Broadway. That explains why it is that in this remote settlement
in the wilderness you can get a room furnished in cretonne and Circassian
walnut, with a white porcelain bathroom opening from it, and can sit down
to dinner at a red-shaded table in a gold-and-ivory dining-room. I know a
man who keeps a private orchestra of thirty pieces, year in and year out,
for his own amusement, but these Oregon lumber kings are the only men I
have ever heard of who have built a great city hotel purely for their
personal convenience.
[Illustration: Crater Lake: “It looks like a gigantic wash-tub filled
with blueing.”
A flock of young pelicans on the shores of Lower Klamath Lake.
IN THE OREGON HINTERLAND.]
The late E. H. Harriman, knowing the continent and having the continent
to choose from, built a shooting lodge on the shores of Upper Klamath
Lake, to which he was wont to retreat, after the periodical strikes and
railroad mergers and congressional investigations which punctuated his
career, for rest and recreation. After the death of the great railway
builder the lodge was purchased by the same group of men who built The
White Pelican Hotel and has been converted into a sort of sporting resort
_de luxe_. They call it Pelican Bay Lodge, and I know of nothing quite
like it anywhere. It consists of perhaps a dozen log cabins, externally
as rough as any frontiersman’s dwelling, but steam-heated, luxuriously
furnished, and liberally bathtubised.
Pelican Bay Lodge is the most convenient starting-point for that mountain
mystery known as Crater Lake, which lies forty miles to the north of it
and six thousand feet above it, in the heart of the Cascade Range. It
took us five hours of steady running to cover those forty miles, and we
didn’t stop to pick wild flowers either. The road is a very beautiful
one, winding steadily upward through one of the finest pine forests on
the continent. The last mile is more like mountaineering than motoring,
however, for the road, in order to attain the rim of the lake, suddenly
shoots upward at a perfectly appalling angle—I think they told me that at
one place it had a grade of thirty-eight per cent—and more than once it
seemed to us who were sitting in the tonneau that the car would tip over
backward, like a horse that rears until it overbalances itself. Crater
Lake is one of those places where the most calloused globe-trotter, from,
whom neither the Pyramids nor the Taj Mahal would wring an exclamation
of approval, gives, perforce, a gasp of real astonishment and admiration.
Part of this is due, no doubt, to the startling suddenness with which you
come upon it and to its dramatic situation; the rest to its surpassing
beauty and its extraordinary colour. The lake, which occupies the crater
of an extinct volcano the size and height of Mount Shasta, is almost
circular, half a mile deep, five miles in circumference, and nearly a
mile and a half above sea-level, the rocky walls which surround it being
in places two thousand feet high and as sheer and smooth as the side of
an upright piano. But its outstanding feature is its colour, for it is
the bluest blue you ever saw or dreamed of: as blue as lapis lazuli,
as a forget-me-not, as an Italian sky, as a baby’s eyes (provided, of
course, that it is a blue-eyed baby), or as a Monday morning. It looks,
indeed, like a gigantic wash-tub, filled with bluing, in which some weary
colossus has been condemned to wash the clothing of the world.
Nothing that we had seen since leaving Mexico so profoundly stirred my
imagination as that portion of our road which stretched northward from
Crater Lake, through Crescent and Shaniko, to The Dalles. Every few miles
we passed groups of dilapidated and decaying buildings, with sunken roofs
and boarded windows, which must once have been busy road-houses and stage
stations, for near them were the remains of great barns and tumble-down
corrals, now long since disused—melancholy reminders of those days, half
a century agone, when down this lonely road that we were following
plodded mile-long wagon-trains, the heads of women and children at
every rent and loophole of the canvas tops, the men, rifle on shoulder,
marching in the dust on either hand. Few, indeed, of these pioneers were
rich in anything save children, affluent except in expectations; yet
weather, roads, fare, mishaps—nothing daunted them, for they were “going
West.”
Roughly speaking, it is a hundred miles from Shaniko to The Dalles, over
a road most of which is back-breakingly rough and all of which is so
intolerably dusty that we felt as though we were covered with sandpaper
instead of skin. But the scenery of the last half dozen miles caused us
to forgive, if not to forget, the discomforts and the monotony of those
preceding, for in them we dropped down through the wild and winding
gorge which the Deschutes follows on its way to join hands with its big
sister, the Columbia. The nearer we drew to the mighty river the higher
our expectations grew, and every time we topped a rise or swung around
a granite shoulder we searched for it eagerly, just as our migrating
predecessors must have done. But, owing to the high, sheer cliffs that
wall it in, we caught no glimpse of it whatever until, our road emerging
from the cañon’s mouth upon the precipice’s brink, we suddenly found
ourselves looking down upon it as it lay below us in all its shimmering
and sinuous beauty, its silvery length winding away, away, away: eastward
to its birthplace in the country of the Kootenai: westward to Astoria and
its mother, the sea. Far below us, so far below that it looked like the
little wooden villages you see in the windows of toy stores, the white
houses of The Dalles were clustered upon the river’s banks.
* * * * *
The highroad, which had been palpably ailing for some time, took a sudden
turn for the worse a few miles south of The Dalles, so that, when it
found the great, peaceful, silent-flowing Columbia athwart its path, the
temptation became too great to resist and it ended its misery in the
river, leaving us, its faithful friends, who had borne it company all the
way from Mexico, disconsolate upon the bank. Thus it befell that we were
compelled to put the car and ourselves aboard a boat and trust to steam,
instead of gasoline, to bear us over the ensuing section of our journey.
It was a humiliating thing for motorists to have to do, of course—but
what would you? There were no more roads. We were in the deplorable
position of the man who told his wife that he came home because all the
other places were closed. And think how keenly the veteran car—
“Me that ’ave been what I’ve been,
Me that ’ave gone where I’ve gone,
Me that ’ave seen what I’ve seen”
—must have felt the disgrace of being turned over to a crew of stevedores
and a ruffianly, tobacco-chewing second mate, who unceremoniously
sandwiched it between a pile of milk-cans and a crate of cabbages on the
lower deck of a chug-achug-chugging stern-wheel river boat.
But before the rickety deck chairs had ceased their creaking complaints
about the burden we had imposed on them we were congratulating ourselves
on the circumstance that had forced us to exchange a hot and dusty
highroad for a cool and silent waterway. To me there is something
irresistibly fascinating and seductive about a river. I always find
myself wondering where it comes from, and what strange things it has
seen along its course, and where it is going to, and I invariably have a
hankering to take ship and keep it company. And the greater the stream,
the greater its fascination, because, of course, it has travelled so much
farther. Now the Columbia, as that friend of our boyhood, Huck Finn,
would have put it, is no slouch of a river. If its kinks and twists were
carefully straightened out it would reach half-way across the continent,
or as far as from New York to Kansas City. It is somewhat disturbing for
one who visits the valley of the Columbia for the first time, with the
purpose of writing about it, to have these facts suddenly thrown, as it
were, in his face, particularly if, like myself, he has been brought up
in that part of the country where the Hudson is regarded as the only real
river in America—doubtless because it washes the shores of Manhattan—and
where all other waterways are looked upon as being not much better than
creeks. I felt like apologising to somebody, and when, on top of all
this, I was told that the Columbia and its tributaries drain a region
equal in area to all the States along our Atlantic seaboard put together,
I had a sudden desire to go ashore at the next landing and take a train
back home.
Though of British birth, for it has its source above the Canadian
line in the country of the Kootenai, the Columbia emends this
unfortunate circumstance by becoming naturalised when it is still a
slender stripling, dividing its allegiance, however, between Oregon
and Washington, for which it serves as a boundary for upward of four
hundred miles. It is not only the father of Northwestern waters, but it
is the big brother of all those streams, from the Straits of Behring
to the Straits of Magellan, which call the Pacific Ocean “grandpa.” By
white-hulled river steamer, by panting power-boat, by produce-laden
barge, by bark canoe, by the goatskin raft called _kelek_, I have
loitered my leisurely way down many famous rivers—the St. Lawrence, the
Hudson, the Mississippi, the Fraser, the Skeena, the Rio Balsas, the
Rhine, the Danube, the Volga, the Euphrates, the Ganges, the Zambesi,
the Nile—and I assert, after having duly weighed my words, that in the
continuity and grandeur of its scenery the Columbia is the superior of
them all. If you think that I am carried away by enthusiasm you had
better go and see it for yourself.
It was Carlyle—was it not?—who remarked that all great works produce an
unpleasant impression on first acquaintance. It is so with the Columbia.
We saw it first on a broiling August day from the heights above
Celilo—the great, silent, mysterious river winding away into the unknown
between banks of lava as sinister and forbidding as the flanks of Etna,
and with a sun beating down upon it from a sky of molten brass. There
were no grassy banks, no trees, no flowers, no vegetation of any kind,
none of the things that one usually associates with a river. But when the
steamer bears you around the first of those frowning cliffs that rise
sheer from the surface of the river below The Dalles—ah, well, that is
quite another matter.
Since Time began, the sheets of lava which give The Dalles its name,
by compressing the half-mile-wide river into a channel barely sixscore
feet across, have effectually obstructed continuous navigation upon the
Upper Columbia. But, as towns multiplied and population increased along
the upper reaches of the great river and its tributaries in Washington
and Oregon, in Montana and Idaho, this hinderance to the navigation of
so splendid a waterway became intolerable, unthinkable, absurd. At last
the frock-coated gentlemen in Congress were prodded into action, and the
passage of a bill for the construction of a canal around The Dalles,
at Celilo, was the result. Came then keen-eyed, self-reliant men who,
jeering at the obstacles which Nature had heaped in their path, proceeded
to slash a canal through eight miles of shifting sands and basalt rock,
so that hereafter the fruit growers and farmers and ranchers as far
inland as Lewiston, in Idaho, can send their produce down to the sea in
ships.
“The trouble with the Columbia,” complained the Lady, “is that it’s all
scenery and no romance. It’s too big, too prosaic, too commercial. It
doesn’t arouse any overwhelming enthusiasm in me to be told that this
river irrigates goodness knows how many thousand square miles of land,
or that the top of that mountain over there is so many thousand feet
above the level of the sea, or that so many thousand barrels of apples
were grown last year in the valley we just passed and that they brought
so many dollars a barrel. Facts like those are all well enough in an
almanac, because no one ever reads almanacs anyway, but they don’t
interest me and I don’t believe that they interest many other visitors,
either. If a river hasn’t any romance connected with it, it isn’t much
better than a canal. Don’t you remember that rock in the Bosphorus, near
Scutari, to which Leander used to swim out to see Hero, and how when we
passed it the passengers would all rush over to that side of the deck,
and how the steamer would list until her rail was almost under water, and
how the Turkish officers would get frightened half to death and shove the
people back? You don’t see the passengers on this boat threatening to
capsize it because of their anxiety to see something romantic, do you?
I should say not. Do you remember Kerbela, that town on the Euphrates,
where all Persians hope to be buried when they die, and how, long before
we reached there, we could smell the Caravans of the Dead which were
carrying the bodies there from across the desert? And those crumbling,
ivy-covered castles along the Rhine, with their queer legends and
traditions and superstitions? That’s what I mean by romance, and you know
as well as I do that there is nothing romantic about apple orchards and
salmon canneries and sawmills. Is there?”
“Pardon me, madam,” said a gentleman who had been seated so close to us
that he could not help overhearing what she said and who had been unable
to conceal his disagreement with the views she had expressed, “but do
you see that island over there near the Washington shore? The long, low
one with the little white monument sticking up at the end of it. That is
Memaloose—the Island of the Dead. It is the Indian Valhalla. Talk about
the Persians whose bodies are borne across the desert to be buried at
Kerbela! Did you happen to know that on the slopes of that island are
buried untold thousands of Chinooks, whose bodies were brought on the
backs of men hundreds of miles through the wilderness or in canoes down
long and lonely rivers that they might find their last resting-places
in its sacred soil? And the monument that you see marks the grave of a
frontiersman who was as romantic a character as you will find in the
pages of Fenimore Cooper. His name was Victor Trevet; he knew and liked
the Indians; and he asked to be buried on Memaloose that his bones might
lie among those of ‘honest men.’ Is it legend and tradition that you say
the river lacks? A few miles ahead of us, at the Cascades, the river was
once spanned, according to the Indian legend, by a stupendous natural
bridge of rock. The Indians called it the Bridge of the Gods. The great
river flowed under it, and on it lived a witch woman named Loowit, who
had charge of the only fire in the world. Seeing how wretched was the lot
of the fireless tribes, who had to live on uncooked meats and vegetables,
she begged permission of the gods to give them fire. Her request was
granted and the condition of the Indians was thus enormously improved.
So gratified were the gods by Loowit’s consideration for the welfare
of the Indians that they promised to grant any request that she might
make. Womanlike, she promptly asked for youth and beauty. Whereupon she
was transformed into a maiden whose loveliness would have caused Lina
Cavalieri to go out of the professional beauty business. The news of
her beauty spreading among the tribes like fire in summer grass, there
came numberless youths who pleaded for her hand, or, rather, for the
face and figure that went with it. Among them were two young chieftains:
Klickitat from the north and Wiyeast from the west. As she was unable
to decide between them, they and their tribesmen decided to settle the
rivalry with the tomahawk. But the gods, angry at this senseless waste of
lives over a pretty woman, put Loowit and her two gentlemen friends to
death and sent the great bridge on which she had dwelt crashing down into
the river. But as they had all three been good to look upon in life, so
the gods, who were evidently æsthetic, made them good to look upon even
in death by turning them into snow peaks. Wiyeast became the mountain
which we palefaces call Mount Hood; Klickitat they transformed into the
peak we know as Mount Adams; while Mount Saint Helens is the beautiful
form taken by the fair Loowit. Thus was the wonderful Bridge of the Gods
destroyed and the Columbia dammed by the débris which fell into it. In
a few minutes we will be at the Cascades and you can see the ruins of
the bridge for yourself. And, if you still have any lingering doubts as
to the truth of the story, why, there is Klickitat in his white blanket
rising above the forests to the right, and Wiyeast is over there to your
left, and ahead of us, down the river, is the Loowit lady disguised as
Mount Saint Helens. So you see there is no room for doubt.
“You assert that the Columbia is lacking in romance because, forsooth,
no Leander has swum across it to see a Hero. Good heavens, my dear young
lady, I can tell you a story that has more all-wool-and-a-yard-wide
romance in it than a dozen such Hellespontine fables. Did you never hear
of Whitman the missionary, who, instead of crossing a measly strait to
win a woman, crossed a continent and won an empire?
“In the early forties Whitman established a mission station near the
present site of Walla Walla. Hearing rumours that our government was
on the point of accommodatingly ceding the Valley of the Columbia to
England in return for some paltry fishing rights off the banks of
Newfoundland—the government officials of those days evidently preferred
codfish to salmon—he rode overland to Washington in the dead of winter,
through blinding snow-storms, swimming icy rivers, subsisting on his
pack-mules and his dogs when his food ran out, facing death by torture at
the hands of hostile Indians. Gaining admission to the White House in his
dress of furs and buckskin, with his feet and fingers terribly frozen,
he so impressed President Tyler and Secretary of State Webster by his
vivid description of the richness and fertility of the region which they
were on the point of ceding to England that he saved the entire Pacific
Northwest to the Union. If that isn’t sufficient romance for you, then
I’m afraid you’re hard to please.”
“I surrender,” said the Lady. “Your old Columbia has plenty of romance,
after all. The trouble is that tourists don’t know these interesting
things that you’ve just been telling us and they _do_ know all about the
Danube and the Rhine.”
“That’s easily remedied,” said I. “I’ll tell them about it myself.”
And that, my friends, is precisely what I have just been trying to do.
* * * * *
“Next stop Hood River!” bawled the purser.
“That’s where the apples come from,” remarked our deck acquaintance,
who had turned himself into a guide-book for our benefit. “In some of
the orchards up the valley you’ll find apples with paper letters pasted
on them: ‘C de P’ for the Café de Paris, you know, and ‘W-A’ for the
Waldorf-Astoria, and ‘G R & I’ for Georgius Rex et Imperator—which is
_not_ the name of the restaurant. They paste the letters on quite
carefully when the apples are still green upon the tree, and when they
ripen the paper is torn off, leaving the yellow initials on the bright
red fruit. Those are the apples that they serve at royal banquets
and that they charge a dollar apiece for in the smart restaurants in
Europe. I don’t mean to imply that all of the Hood River apples are thus
initialled to order, but some of them are. The average value of the land
in that valley, cultivated and uncultivated, is three hundred and forty
dollars an acre, and if a man wanted to purchase an orchard in bearing
he would have to pay at least four thousand dollars an acre for it. Some
people think that it was the original Garden of Eden. If it was, I don’t
blame Eve for stealing the apple. I’d steal a Hood River apple myself if
I got the chance.”
Had the second mate been a little more obliging, and had there not
been so formidable a barricade of crates and milk cans about the car,
I would have had it run ashore then and there and would have taken a
whirl through the famous apple orchards which cover the lower slopes of
Mount Hood and have kept on up the zigzag mountain road as far as the
cosy little hostelry called Cloud Cap Inn, which some public-spirited
Portlander has built upon the snow-line. Perhaps it was just as well we
didn’t, however, for I learned afterward that the famous valley is only
about twenty miles long, so, if we had not put on the emergency brake
before we started, we would have run through it before we could have
stopped and would not have seen it at all. Nowhere in Switzerland do I
recall a picture of such surpassing splendour as that which stood before
us, as though on a titanic easel, as, from the vantage of the steamer’s
upper deck, we looked up the vista formed by this fragrant, verdant
valley toward the great white cone of Mount Hood. It is, indeed, so
very beautiful that those Americans who know and love the world’s white
rooftrees can find scant justification for turning their faces toward
the Alps when here, in the upper left-hand corner of their own country,
are mountains which would make the ghost of the great Whymper moan for
an alpenstock and hobnailed boots. This startlingly sudden transition
from orchards groaning with fruit to dense primeval forests, and from
these forests to the stately, isolated snow peaks, is very different
from Switzerland, of course. Indeed, to compare these mountains of the
Pacific Northwest with the Alps, as is so frequently done, seems to me
to be a grave injustice to them both. The Alps form a wild and angry
sea of icy mountains, and we have nothing in America to which they can
be fittingly compared. The Cascades, on the other hand, form a great
system of lofty forest-wrapped ranges surmounted by the towering isolated
peaks of snowy volcanoes, and Europe contains nothing to equal them. I
am perfectly aware, of course, that the very large number of Americans
who spend their summers in the ascent of the orthodox Swiss peaks—more
often than not, if the truth were known, by means of funicular railways
or through telescopes on hotel piazzas—look with scorn and contumely
upon these mountains of the far Nor’west, which they regard as home-made
and unfashionable and vulgar and not worth bothering about. Perhaps they
are not aware, however, that no less an authority on mountaineering than
James Bryce (I don’t recall the title that he has taken now that he has
been made a peer, and no one would recognise him if I used it) said not
long ago, in speaking of these sentinels that guard the Columbia:
“We have nothing more beautiful in Switzerland or Tyrol, in Norway or
the Pyrenees. The combination of ice scenery with woodland scenery of
the grandest type is to be found nowhere in the Old World, unless it be
in the Himalayas, and, so far as we know, nowhere else on the American
continent.”
Which but serves to point the truth that foreigners are more appreciative
of the beauties and grandeurs of our country than we are ourselves.
* * * * *
At the Cascades the Columbia takes a drop of half a hundred feet and
we had, perforce, to bide our time in the locks, by means of which the
rapids have been circumvented, until the waters found their level. It
is not until the Cascades are passed that the scenery for which the
Columbia is famous begins in all its sublimity and grandeur. The Great
Artist has painted pictures more colourful, more sensational, perhaps, as
the Grand Cañon, for example, the Yellowstone, and the Sahara, but none
which combines the qualities of strength and restfulness as this mighty
river, flowing swiftly, silently between the everlasting hills. From the
shores the orchards and the gardens rise, terrace above terrace, until
they become merged in the forest-covered ranges, and above the ranges
rise the august snow peaks, solitary, silent, like a line of sentries
strung along the horizon. At times, particularly in the early morning and
again at sunset, these snow mountains present that singular appearance
familiar to the traveller in the Himalayas and the Cordilleras, when
the snowy cone seems to be floating ethereally upon a sea of mist which
completely shrouds the hills and forests at its base. Immediately below
the Cascades commences the series of waterfalls for which the lower
reaches of the Columbia are famous, the granite cliffs which, for nearly
twoscore miles border the Oregon shore with a sheer wall of rock, being
scored at frequent intervals by what seem, from a distance, to be ribbons
of shining silver. As the boat draws nearer, however, you see that what
looked like ribbons are really mountain streams which are so impatient to
join their mother, the Columbia, that, instead of taking the more sedate
but circuitous route, they fling themselves tempestuously over the brink
of the sheer cliff into the arms of the parent stream. First come the
Horsetail Falls, whose falling waters, blown by the wind into silvery
strands, are suggestive of the flowing tail of a white Arab; then, in
quick succession, the Oneonta Falls, at the end of a narrow gorge which
penetrates the cliffs for a mile or more; the nine-hundred-feet-high
Multnomah, the highest falls in all the northwest country if not, indeed,
on the entire Pacific Coast; the Bridal Veil, as radiantly beautiful as
its namesake of the Yosemite; and finally, just below the great monolith
rising from the river known as Rooster Rock, the Falls of Latourelle. On
the opposite shore the mighty promontory known as Cape Horn rises five
hundred feet above the surface of the river, and, a few miles farther
up-stream, Castle Rock, whose turreted crags bear a striking resemblance
to some stronghold of the Middle Ages, attains to twice that height. By
the time the steamer reaches the mighty natural gateway known as the
Pillars of Hercules, the traveller is actually surfeited with grandeur
and is quite ready for the simple, friendly, pastoral scenes again, just
as one after a season of Wagnerian opera welcomes the simple airs and the
old-fashioned songs.
[Illustration: “WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON.”
The Columbia from Saint Peter’s Dome, with Mount Adams in the distance.
“The Great Artist has painted pictures more colorful, more sensational,
perhaps, but none which so combine the qualities of strength and
restfulness as this mighty river.”]
As I do not chew popcorn, peanuts, gum, or candy, nor munch dripping
ice-cream cones, and as I have an unconquerable aversion to other
people doing those unpleasant things in my immediate vicinity, I left
the others, who did not seem to mind such minor annoyances, among the
excursionists upon the upper deck and made my way below. After clambering
over great piles of crates, sacks, and barrels filled with Columbia River
produce, I finally succeeded in finding a secluded spot in the vessel’s
bows, whence I could watch, undisturbed by sticky-fingered youngsters or
idle chatter, the varied commerce of the mighty water road. Stern-wheel,
twin-funnelled passenger boats zigzagged from shore to shore to pick up
the passengers and freight that patiently awaited their coming; rusty
freighters scuttled down-stream laden with fruit for the coast towns
and salmon for the Astoria canneries; spick-and-span pleasure craft,
with shining brass work and graceful, tapering spars, daintily picked
their way through the press of river traffic as a pretty girl picks
her way along a crowded street; grimy fishing craft, their sails as
weather-beaten as the faces of the men that raise them, danced by us,
eager for home and supper and the evening fire; great log rafts wallowed
by, sent down by the forests to propitiate the greedy sawmills, whose
sharp-toothed jaws devour the sacrifice and scream for more.
Perhaps the most interesting and characteristic feature of the landscape
along the lower Columbia are the fish-wheels—ingenious contrivances,
twenty to forty feet in diameter and six to eight feet across, which
look like pocket editions of the passenger-carrying Ferris wheel at the
Chicago Exposition. The wheels, which are hung in substantial frameworks
close to the banks, where the salmon run the thickest, are revolved by
the current, which keeps the wire-meshed scoops with which each pair of
spokes are fitted for ever lifting from the water. The great schools
of salmon are guided toward the wheel by means of a lattice dam which
reaches out into the river like the arm of a false friend, and, before
the unsuspecting fish know what has happened to them, they are hoisted
into the air in the wire scoops and dumped into an inclined trough, down
which they slide into a fenced-in pool, where the fishermen can get them
at their leisure. They are then strung on wires and attached to a barrel
which acts as a buoy, the barrel, sometimes with a ton of fish trailing
behind it like the tail to a kite, floating down-stream to the nearest
cannery, where a man in a launch is on the lookout and tows them ashore.
Months later, in Pekin or Peoria, in Rome or Rumford Falls, or wherever
else you may happen to be dining, you will see the item “Columbia River
Salmon” on the hotel menu.
As I hung over the steamer’s bow, with the incomparable landscape
slipping past me as though on Burton Holmes’s picture screen, and no
sound save the muffled throbbing of the engines and the ripple of
the water running aft along the hull, I unconsciously yielded to the
Columbia’s mystic spell. I closed my eyes and in a moment the surface
of the river seemed peopled with the ghosts of the history makers.
Nez Percés, in paint and feathers, slipped silently along, in the
shadow of yonder wooded bank, in their barken war canoes. Two lean and
sun-bronzed white men, clad in the fringed buckskin of the adventuring
frontiersman, floated past me down the mighty stream which they had
trekked across a continent to find. Half-breed trappers, chanting at
the paddles, descended with precious freights of fur. A square-rigged
merchantman poked its inquisitive bowsprit around a rocky headland,
and as she passed I noted the words _Columbia, of Boston_, in raised
gilt letters on her stern, and I remembered that it was from this same
square-rigged vessel that the river took its name. A warship, flying the
flag of England and with the black muzzles of guns peering from its rows
of ports, cautiously ascended, the leadsmen in the shrouds sounding
for river bars. Log forts and trading-posts and mission stations once
again crowned the encircling hills. Forgotten battles blew by on the
evening breeze. A yellow dust cloud rose above the river bank and out
of it emerged a plodding wagon-train. The smoke of pioneer camp-fires
spiralled skyward from those rich valleys where in reality the cattle
browse and the orchards droop with fruit. From the vantage of a rocky
promontory a ghostly war party peered down upon me—a paleface—taking a
summer’s holiday along that mighty stream upon whose bosom of old went
forth the bepainted fighting men. The furtive twilight slipped behind
night’s velvet curtain. The mountains changed from jade to coral, from
coral to sapphire, from sapphire to amethyst. The snow peaks gleamed
luminously, like sheeted ghosts, against the purple velvet of the sky.
The night-breeze rose and I shivered. The steamer swung silently around
a bend in the river and, all suddenly, the darkness ahead was sprinkled
with a million blinking fireflies. At least they looked like fireflies.
“Portland!” shouted a raucous voice, far off somewhere, on the upper
deck. “Portland! All ashore!”
I felt a hand upon my shoulder. It was the Lady.
“Where on earth have you been?” she asked. “We have been hunting for you
everywhere.”
“I’ve been on a long journey,” said I.
XI
A FRONTIER ARCADY
“Oh, woods of the West, I am sighing to-day
For the sea songs your voices repeat,
For the evergreen glades, for the glades far away
From the stifling air of the street.
“And I long, ah, I long to be with you again,
And to dream in that region of rest,
Forever apart from this warring of men—
Oh, wonderful woods of the West.”
XI
A FRONTIER ARCADY
“_Arcady—the home of piping shepherds and coy shepherdesses, where rustic
simplicity and plenty satisfied the ambition of untutored hearts and
where ambition and its crimes were unknown._”
Some pamphlet writer with a gift for turning phrases has called
Oregon “The Land That Lures.” And, so far as home and fortune seekers
are concerned, it is. Whether it is the spirit of romance that our
people have always associated with the great Northwest; whether it is
the glamour of its booming rivers and its silent, axe-ripe forests
or the appeal of its soft and balmy climate; or whether it is the
extraordinary opportunities it offers for the acquirement of modest
fortunes before one is too old to enjoy them, I do not know, but the
undeniable fact remains that no region between the Portlands exercises
so irresistible a fascination for the man who knows the trick of coaxing
a fortune from the soil as this great, rich, hospitable, unfenced,
forest-and-mountain-and-stream, meadow-and-orchard-and-home land that
stretches from the Columbia south to the Siskiyous. It may be that
California holds more attractions for the man who has already made his
fortune, but certainly Oregon is the place to make the fortune in. No
Western State is essentially less “Western” in the accepted sense of
the term. This is due in part, no doubt, to the fact that it has been
longer settled by Americans than any other portion of the Pacific Coast.
Portland was a thriving city, remember, when St. Paul and Minneapolis
were little more than trading-posts on the frontier. Settlers from the
Atlantic seaboard and from the Middle West find themselves, upon reaching
Oregon, in the midst of “home folks” and all the friendly, kindly,
homely things that the term implies: ice-cream sociables and grange
meetings and church picnics and literary societies and debating clubs and
county fairs. The name of the State capital is inseparably associated
with Puritan New England, one of its largest cities is named after the
Massachusetts town which gave its name to rum, and I can show you a
score of towns whose peaceful, elm-shaded streets and white-porticoed,
red-brick houses might almost—but hot quite—deceive you into thinking
that you are in Cooperstown, N. Y., or Newburyport, Mass., or Biddeford,
Me. Almost, as I have said, but not quite, for all of these Oregonian
towns, despite the staidness and sobriety of their appearance, are
animated by an enthusiasm, an up-to-dateness, by an unshakable faith in
their future, that is essentially a characteristic of the West.
The orthodox way of entering Oregon from the south is by way of Ashland,
Medford, and Grant’s Pass, and so northward, through Roseburg and
Eugene and Albany and Salem, to Portland. But, as I have related in the
preceding chapter, we deliberately chose the back-stairs route, crossing
the California-Oregon line at Klamath Lake and motoring northward, along
the trail of the Lewis and Clark expedition, via Crater Lake and the
valley of the Deschutes to The Dalles, and thence down the Columbia to
Portland. We prided ourselves on having thus obtained an extraordinarily
comprehensive idea of the State and its resources, not to mention having
traversed a region which is quite inaccessible to the tourist unless he
travels, as we did, by motor-car, but when we came to talk with some
people from western Oregon we found that we didn’t know nearly as much
about the State as we thought we did.
“How did you find the roads in the Willamette Valley?” inquired a friend
with whom we were dining one night in Portland.
“We haven’t seen the Willamette Valley,” I explained. “You see, we came
round the other way.”
“I suppose you’ve been down to Salem, though—nice city, Salem.”
“No,” I was forced to admit, “we haven’t been to Salem.”
“What did you think of the Marble Halls? Many people claim they’re finer
than the Mammoth Cave.”
“The Marble Halls? Where are they? What are they? I never heard of them.”
“I suppose you had some fine fishing in the Grant’s Pass country. I hear
that the trout are running big down there this season.”
“No, we didn’t come through Grant’s Pass.”
“Well, you surely don’t mean to tell me that you didn’t visit the Rogue
River Valley—the apple-cellar of the world?”
“Sorry to say we didn’t.”
“Nor the valley of the Umpqua?”
“No.”
“Well,” after a long and painful pause, “what in the name of Heaven
_have_ you seen?”
“I think,” said I, turning to the others, “that the thing for us to do is
to turn the car south again and see Oregon. Else we shall never be able
to hold up our heads and look an Oregonian in the eye. The thousand miles
or so of the State that we’ve just come through apparently don’t count.”
Though I made the remark facetiously, it contained a good-sized germ
of truth. Just now the back country of Oregon, the hinterland, as our
Teutonic friends would call it, doesn’t count for very much. It is going
to count tremendously, mind you, in the not far distant future, when
the railroads now under construction have opened it up to civilisation
and commerce and when it is settled by the European hordes that will
pour into it through the gateway of Panama. As things stand at present,
however, the wealth and prosperity of Oregon are concentrated in that
comparatively narrow but incredibly fertile zone which lies between the
sea and the mile-high mountain wall formed by the Cascades, and whose
farms and orchards are watered by the Willamette, the Umpqua, and the
Rogue.
It was one of those autumn days so characteristic of the Pacific
Northwest, which seem to be a combination of an Italian June and a
Devonshire September, when we slipped out of Portland’s rush and bustle
and turmoil and turned our front tires toward the south and the open
country. For a dozen miles or more our road, built high on the hill slope
above the broad reaches of the lower Willamette, commanded as entrancing
a vista of beautiful homes as I have ever seen. For six solid miles south
of Portland the banks of the Willamette are bordered by country houses of
shingle, stone, and stucco, rising from the most beautiful rose gardens
this side of Persia (Portland, you know, is called “The City of Roses”)
and with shaven lawns sweeping gently down, like unrolled carpets, to the
river’s edge. Through gaps in the screen of shrubbery which lines the
highway we caught fleeting glimpses, as we whirled past, of vine-covered
garages housing shiny motor-cars, while along the river front were moored
lean power-boats, every line of them bespeaking speed, for those who are
fortunate enough—and wealthy enough—to own homes upon the Willamette are
able to run in to their offices in the city either by road or river.
Far in the distance the Fujiyama-like cone of Mount Saint Helens rose
above the miles of intervening forest, and, farther to the southward,
the hoary head of Mount Hood. About this portion of residential Portland
which lies along the banks of the Willamette there is a suggestion of
the Thames near Hampton Court, a hint of the Seine near Saint Cloud, a
subtle reminder of those residences which have been built by the rich
of Budapest along the Danube, but most of all it recalls Stockholm. This
is due, I suppose, to the proximity of the forests which surround the
city, to the snow-capped mountains which loom up behind them, and to the
ever-present scent of balsam in the air.
It is fifty miles or thereabout from Portland to Salem, which is the
capital of the State, and when the roads are dry you can leave one city
after an early dinner and reach the other before the theatre curtains
have gone up for the first act. After a rain, however, it is a different
matter altogether, for the roads, which leave a great deal to be desired,
are for the most part of red clay, and so slippery that a car, even with
chains on all four wheels, slips and slides and staggers like a Scotchman
going home after celebrating the birthday of Robert Burns. Salem is
as pleasing to the eye as a certified cheque. It is asphalted and
electric-lighted and landscaped to the very limit. Though the residential
architecture of the city shows unmistakable traces of the influence of
both Queen Anne and Mary Anne, their artistic deficiencies are more than
counter-balanced by the pleasant, shady lawns and the broad, hospitable
piazzas, which seem to say to the passer-by: “Come right up, friend,
and sit down and make yourself to home.” That’s the most striking
characteristic of the place—hospitality.
The gates of the State Fair were thrown open the same day that we
arrived in Salem, though I do not wish to be understood as intimating
that the two events bore any relation to each other. Now, a fair is
generally a pretty reliable index to the agricultural condition of a
region. The first thing that strikes the visitor upon entering the
gates of a New England fair is the extraordinary number of ramshackle,
mud-stained, “democrat” wagons lined up along the fence, the horses
munching contentedly in their nose-bags. The first thing that struck me
as we entered the grounds of the Oregon State Fair was the extraordinary
number of shiny new automobiles. Save en route to a Vanderbilt Cup
Race, I don’t recall ever having seen so many motor-cars on one stretch
of road as we encountered on our way to the fair-grounds. They made a
noise like the droning of a billion bumblebees. Though there was, of
course, a preponderance of little cars, there were also any number of big
six-cylinder seven-passenger machines, for your Oregonian is nothing if
not up to the minute. Instead of jogging in from the farm in rattletrap
wagons, they came tearing down the pike in shiny, spick-and-span
automobiles; pa at the steering-wheel, hat on the back of his head and
whiskers streaming, ma in her new bonnet sitting proudly beside him,
and grandma and the youngsters filling up the tonneau. It did my heart
good to see them. There is an intangible something about a motor-car
that seems to give the most hidebound old farmer in the community a new
lease of life. A year or so ago a weekly magazine published a picture of
a group of cars at some rural gathering in the Northwest, and unwisely
labelled it: “Where the old cars go to.” It elicited a wave of indignant
letters from automobile dealers and automobile owners in that section
of the country that made the editor feel as though he had stepped on a
charged wire. That gentleman learned, at the cost of several cancelled
subscriptions, that, wherever else the second-hand cars go, they
certainly do not go to the Northwest, whose people might well take as
their motto: “The best is none too good for us.”
Your Oregonian farmer, unlike his fellows in the older, colder States,
is neither hidebound nor conservative. He has no kinship with the
bewhiskered, bebooted, by-gum and by-gosh hayseed made familiar by the
comic papers and the bucolic dramas. Instead of shying from a new-fangled
device as a horse does from a steam roller, he promptly gives it a trial
and, if it makes good, he adopts it. He milks his cows and makes his
butter by electricity, orders his groceries from the nearest town and
asks for the baseball score by telephone, goes to church and to market
in his motor-car, and passes his evenings with the aid of a circulating
library, a pianola, and a phonograph. It did not take me long to find
out that Oregon is as progressive agriculturally as it is politically.
If the farmer does not succeed in Oregon it is because he has been
hypnotised by those siren sisters, Obstinacy and Laziness; for if he is
ignorant, the State stands ready to educate him; if he is perplexed, it
stands ready to advise him; and if he gets into trouble, it stands ready
to assist him. In other words, it wants him to make good, and it isn’t
the fault of the State if he does not. For this purpose it maintains, in
addition to the State Agricultural College at Corvallis, which is one of
the most completely equipped institutions of its kind in the world, six
experimental farms which are geographically distributed so as to meet
practically every condition of agriculture found in Oregon. Two extensive
demonstration farms are maintained, moreover, by business interests, and
there is an enormous amount of agricultural co-operative work among the
farmers themselves, so that if a man is in doubt as to whether he had
better go in for Jerseys or Holsteins, for White Wyandottes or Plymouth
Rocks, for Spitzenbergs or Newtown Pippins, all he has to do to obtain
expert advice is to ask for it.
It is an undeniable fact that at most fairs in the
East, and at a great many in the West, for that matter,
the wheel-of-fortune, the ring-and-cane, and the
three-balls-for-a-dime-and-your-money-back-if-you-hit-the-coon
concessionaires, the fat woman, the living skeleton, the bearded
lady, and the wild man from Borneo, to say nothing of the
raucous-voiced venders of ice-cold-lemonade-made-in-the-shade and
red-hot-coney-islands-only-a-nickel-half-a-dime, serve to distract both
the attention and the shekels of the rural visitors from the legitimate
exhibits. It seemed to me that the farmers and fruit growers who came
pouring into the Salem fair were there for purposes of education rather
than recreation. They seemed to take the fair seriously and with the
idea of obtaining all the information and suggestions that they could
from it. Eager, attentive groups surrounded the lecturers from the State
Agricultural College and constantly interrupted them with intelligent,
penetrating queries as to soils, grafting, fertilisers, insect sprays,
and the like, while out in the long cattle sheds the men who are growing
rich from milk and butter talked of Aaggie Arethusa Korndyke Koningen
Colantha Clothilde Netherland Pietertje’s Queen of the Dairy IV and of
Alban Albino Segis Pontiac Johann Hengerveld’s Monarch of the Meadows
(the bearer of this last resonant title proving, upon investigation, to
be a wabbly-kneed three-weeks-old calf) as casually as a New Yorker would
refer to Connie Mack or Caruso or John Drew.
We went to the fair, as I have already intimated, for the primary
purpose of getting a line on rural conditions as they exist in
Oregon; but that did not prevent us from doing things which visitors
to county fairs have done ever since county fairs began. We tossed
rings—three-for-a-dime-step-right-this-way-and-try-your-luck-ladies-and-
gents—over a bed of cane heads so temptingly thick that it seemed it
would be only by a miracle that you could miss one, and after spending
a dollar in rings the Lady won a bamboo walking-stick which she could
have bought for ten cents almost anywhere and which she didn’t have the
remotest use for, anyway. We tried our luck at breaking clay pipes in
the shooting-gallery, and, in spite of the fact that the sights on my
rifle had been deliberately hammered a quarter of an inch out of line, I
succeeded in winning three dubious-looking cigars, to the proprietor’s
very great astonishment. Had I smoked them I should not have survived
to write this story. Then we leaned over the pig-pens and poked the
pink, fat hogs with the yard-sticks which some enterprising advertiser
had forced upon us; in the art department we gravely admired the
cross-stitched mottoes bearing such virtuous sentiments as, “Virtue Is
Its Own Reward,” and “There’s No Place Like Home,” and the water-colour
studies of impossible fruit perpetrated “by Jane Maria Simpkins, aged
eleven years.” Then we went over to the race-track and hung over the rail
and became as excited over the result of the 2.40 free-for-all as we used
to be in the old days at Morris Park before the anti-racing bill became
a law. In fact, I surreptitiously wagered a dollar with an itinerant
book-maker on a sixteen-to-one shot, on the ground that, as the horse had
the same name as the Lady, it would surely prove a winner—and lost. Not
until dark settled down and the lights of the homeward-bound cars had
turned the highway into an excellent imitation of the Chicago freight
yards did we climb into the tonneau again, sticky and dusty and tired,
and tell the driver to “hit it up for the nearest hotel.”
From Salem to Eugene, down the pretty and well-wooded valley of the
Willamette, is seventy odd miles as the motor goes, and the scenery
throughout every mile of the distance looks exactly like those pictures
you see on bill-boards advertising Swiss chocolate or condensed milk—I
forget which: black cows with white spots, or white cows with black
spots, grazing contentedly on emerald hillsides, with white mountains
sticking up behind; rivers meandering through lush, green meadows; white
farmhouses with red roofs and neat, green blinds peering out between the
mathematically arranged orchard rows. But always there are the orchards.
No matter how wide you open your throttle, no matter how high your
speedometer needle climbs, you can’t escape them. They border the road on
both sides, for mile after mile after mile, and in the spring, when they
are in blossom, the countryside looks as though it had been struck by a
snow-storm—and smells like Roger & Gallet’s perfumery works.
When I visited the Southwest the horny-handed farmer folk would meet me
when I stepped from the train and whirl me incredible distances across
the desert to show me a patch of alfalfa—“the finest patch of alfalfa,
by jingo, in the whole blamed State!” In Oregon they did much the same
thing, except, instead of showing me alfalfa they showed me apples.
Up north of the Siskiyous, they’re literally apple drunk. They talk
apples, think apples, dream apples, eat apple dumplings and apple pies,
drink apple cider and apple brandy and applejack. Even their women are
apple-cheeked. You can’t blame them for being a trifle boisterous about
their apple crops, however, when you see what the apple has done for
Oregon. I was shown one orchard of forty-five acres whose crop had sold
the preceding year for seventy-five thousand dollars. Another orchard
of but eight acres brought its owner sixteen thousand dollars. Five
hundred trees yielded another man five thousand dollars. And I could
repeat similar instances _ad infinitum_. They assured us in Medford that
the apple cellars at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle always contain
barrels stencilled “Grown in Oregon”—which is, I believe, a fact—and,
though they didn’t say so in so many words, they intimated that when
King George feels the need of a bite after a court ball or some equally
arduous function, he lights a candle and shuffles down the cellar stairs
in his dressing-gown and slippers and gropes about until he finds an
Oregon-grown Northern Spy or a big, green Newtown Pippin.
Oregon’s success in apple growing—a success that has headed the pioneer
northwestward as the gold craze of ’49 started the frontiersman
Californiaward—is the joint product of work and brains. Where New England
has given up all thought of saving her orchards, Oregon, by tincturing
labour with scientific knowledge, has founded an industry which is
doing for the State what wheat did for the Dakotas, what gold did for
California. What happened to the orchards all through New England? There
was enough hard work put into them, Heaven knows. The old New England
farmer and his wife slaved to the bone and were eventually trundled away
to the insane asylum or the cemetery from overwork, from devotion to the
arid soil. The orchards of New England have been watered with blood and
sweat and fertilised with blasted hopes. The young men were away in the
universities acquiring scientific knowledge and learning how to apply
that knowledge on the farms, and it never occurred to the old men that
the wearied soil needed some encouragement, some strengthening, some
vivifying, even as their spirits did, to bring material and spiritual
prosperity. And Oregon has taken to heart and is profiting by the
pathetic example of the New England farmer.
It is approximately four hundred miles as a motor goes from the Columbia
to the California line and, as our object was to see the country, we
spent upward of a week upon the journey, stopping as our fancies dictated
to cast for trout in the swirling rivers, to gossip with village folk and
farmers, and sometimes just to lie on our backs on inviting hillsides and
smoke and chat and throw pebbles at inquisitive squirrels and watch the
sunbeams filter through the foliage of the trees. That’s where the true
joy of motoring comes in: to be able to stop when and where you please,
without the necessity of having to give any why or wherefore, and, when
you grow weary of one place, flying on again until you find another that
tempts you. I have never been able to comprehend why those speed maniacs
who tear through the country so fast that the telegraph-poles look like
palings in a picket fence bother with automobiles at all; they could
travel quite as fast in a train and ever so much more comfortably.
From Eugene our course lay south, due south through a bountiful and
smiling land. We tore down yellow highroads between orchard rows as
precisely placed and uniform as ranks of Prussian grenadiers; we flashed
past trim farmhouses overshadowed by huge hip-roofed barns which seemed
to be bursting with produce, as, in fact, they were; we rolled through
villages so neat and clean and happy that they might have served as
models for the street-car advertisement of Spotless Town; we spun along
the banks of sun-flecked rivers whose waters were broken by trout jumping
hungry for the fly; we boomed down forest roads so dim and silent that we
felt as though we were motoring down a cathedral nave; Diamond Peak and
the white-bonneted Three Sisters came into view and disappeared again;
until at last, churning our way up the tortuous road that climbs the
Umpqua Range, we looked down upon the enchanted valley of the Rogue.
Imagine a four-hundred-thousand-acre valley, every foot of which is
tilled or tillable, protected on every side by mountain walls—on
the east by the Cascades, on the west by the Coast Range, on the
north by the Umpqua chain, and on the south by the Siskiyous; and
meandering through this garden valley, watering its every corner, the
winding, mischievous, inquisitive Rogue. It is indeed a beckoning
land. But mind you, it is not a get-rich-quick land. It is a
work-like-the-devil-and-you’ll-become-prosperous country. The soil and
the climate will do as much for the farmer, perhaps more, than anywhere
else in the world, but he must do his share. And no one should buy a
ticket to Oregon expecting to find immediate employment in any line.
Jobs are not lying loose on the streets, waiting for some one to come
along and pick them up, any more than they are in Chicago or New York.
I doubt very much, indeed, if the workingman with no other capital than
his two hands has much to gain by emigrating to Oregon. Large projects,
it is true, require many labourers, and these openings often present
themselves; but the means of bringing in workmen are just as cheap and
rapid as in other sections of the country, so it need not be expected
that there would be any great difference in wages. The chief advantages
that Oregon offers to labouring people without sufficient accumulations
to give them a start are: a mild and equable climate, an absence of
damaging storms, a certainty of crops, and opportunities as good, though
perhaps no better, than any other State. If, however, he has been able
to accumulate anywhere from a thousand to three thousand dollars, he is
then in a position to avail himself of the innumerable opportunities
which exist for men of small capital. Such men will find their best
opportunities in buying a few acres of land, building a modest home upon
it, and then “going in,” as the English say, for fruit growing or poultry
raising or dairying or market-gardening. As sawmills are as plentiful in
Oregon as pretty women are on Fifth Avenue, and as the State contains
one fifth of all the standing timber in the country (you didn’t know
that, did you?) lumber is extraordinarily cheap, the cost of the material
for a comfortable four-room farmhouse, for example, not running to more
than one hundred and fifty dollars. It is a mistake for the intending
emigrant to count on getting a farm under the terms of the Homestead Act,
for, though the total government lands open to homestead entry in Oregon
are greater in area than the entire State of West Virginia, they are,
for the most part, in the least desirable portions of the State and the
settler who occupied them would have to pay the price incident to life
in a remote and semicivilised region. On the other hand, excellent land,
within easy reach of towns and railroads, can be had in the valleys of
western Oregon all the way from fifty to one hundred and fifty dollars an
acre, and this would, I am convinced, prove the best investment in the
end.
There is no space to dwell at any length on the towns of western
Oregon—Salem, Eugene, Roseburg, Drain, Grant’s Pass, Medford, Ashland.
All of these towns have paved streets lined with comfortable and
homelike residences and remarkably well-stocked shops; up-to-the-minute
educational, lighting, and sewage systems; about double the number of
parks, hotels, garages, and moving-picture houses that you would find
in towns of similar size in the East; and boards of trade and chambers
of commerce with enough surplus energy and enthusiasm to make a booster
out of an Egyptian mummy. In most of these towns prohibition reigns,
and, though, to be quite truthful, I am not accustomed to raise an
admonishing hand when some one uncorks a gilt-topped bottle, I repeatedly
remarked the fact that they were cleaner, quieter, more orderly—in
short, pleasanter places to live—than those whose streets are dotted
by the familiar swinging half-doors. That prohibition has done no harm
to business is best proved by the fact that the very merchants who in
the beginning were its most bitter assailants have become its most
ardent advocates. After comparing the “dry” towns of Oregon to the “wet”
ones—say, in the vicinity of Bakersfield, in California—it seems to me
that, so far as the smaller rural communities are concerned, at least,
there is only one side to the prohibition question.
Thirty miles from Grant’s Pass, in the fastnesses of the Siskiyous, are
the recently discovered mammoth caves, which some genius in the art of
appellation has christened “The Marble Halls of Oregon.” It needed an
inspiration to conceive a name like that! Such a name would induce one
to make a trip to see a hole in a sand-bank. As a matter of fact, these
Oregonian caverns are decidedly worth the journey. Though they are very
far from having been completely explored, sufficient investigations have
been made to prove conclusively that they are much superior, both in
size and beauty, to the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky, a visit to which was
considered as essential for every well-travelled American half a century
ago as to have seen the Virginia Natural Bridge and Niagara Falls.
[Illustration: Trout fishing in the high Sierras.
Salmon fishing in a Northwestern river.
WHERE RODS BEND DOUBLE AND REELS GO WHIR-R-R-R.]
* * * * *
Oregon, with its fish-filled streams, its game-filled forests, and
its coast-line rich in bays and coves and beaches, possesses all the
requisites for one of the world’s great playgrounds, but some years must
pass before it will possess the luxuries demanded by that class of
summer vacationists who travel with wardrobe trunks. With less than one
fifteenth of its sixty odd million acres under cultivation, it is still
to a great extent a frontier region, with many of a frontier’s crudities
and discomforts and, for a man who knows and loves the open, with all
of a frontier country’s charm. I am perfectly aware, of course, that
the farmers who are growing such amazing quantities of big, red apples
in the valleys of the Hood and the Rogue and the real-estate boosters
who are so frantically chopping town sites out of the primeval forest
within cannon-shot of Portland will resent the statement that this is
still a frontier country; but it is, nevertheless, and will be for a
number of years to come. Barring the system which parallels the coast
from north to south and the one which cuts across its northeast corner,
there are no railways in Oregon; the scantiness of population and the
peculiarly savage nature of a great portion of the country having offered
few inducements to the railroad builders. This condition is changing
rapidly, however, for the transcontinental systems which enter the
State are working overtime to give it population, cities and towns and
villages are springing up like mushrooms along its many waterways, the
vast grants held by the railway and trading companies and by the pioneers
are gradually being cut up into small farms, and a rural situation is
being slowly created which is bound to effect a marked change in the
conditions which have heretofore prevailed. But it has not yet, thank
Heaven, reached that stage of civilisation which is characterised by
summer hotels with miles of piazzas and acres of green lawns and oceans
of red-and-white striped awnings. Taking the place of these sophisticated
and ostentatious summer resorts are the unpretentious inns and camps and
summer colonies which are sprinkled along the Oregon shore from the mouth
of the Columbia to the California line.
The easiest way to reach this summer land is to take the little
jerk-water railroad which meanders eastward from Hillsboro, a main-line
townlet fifty miles or so south of Portland, through Tillamook County
to the sea. For many miles the train follows the tumultuous Nehalem,
stopping every now and then, as the fancy seems to strike it, at
shrieking sawmills or at groups of slab-walled loggers’ shacks set down
in clearings in the forest, where bearded, flannel-shirted men come out
and swap stories and tobacco with the engineer. After a time the woods
begin to dwindle into tracts of stumps and second-growths, and these
merge gradually into farms, with neat white houses and orderly rows of
fruit-trees and herds of sleek cattle grazing contentedly in clover
meadows. Quite soon Nehalem Bay comes in sight and the lush meadows give
way to wire-grass and the wire-grass runs out in beaches of yellow sand
so much like those which border Cape Cod and Buzzard’s Bay that it is
hard to believe that one is not on the coast of New England. From the
names of the towns and from the types of faces that I saw, I gathered
that much of this country was settled by New Englanders, who must have
found in its hills and forests and fertile farm lands and alternate
stretches of sandy beach and rock-bound shore much to remind them of
home. Oregon is, as a glance at the map will show you, in exactly
the same latitude as the New England States and has the same cool,
invigorating summer weather that one finds in Maine, though its winters,
thanks to the warm Japan current which sweeps along its shores, are
characterised by rains instead of snow. From Nehalem to Tillamook the
railroad hugs the coast. On one side the bosom of the Pacific rises and
falls languorously under a genial sun; on the other the line of rugged
hills, in their shaggy mantles of green, go up to meet the sky. Here
and there some placid lake mirrors the crags and wind-bent trees, or a
river, complaining noisily at the delay to which it has been subjected,
finds a devious way through the hindering hill range to the waiting
ocean. Nor are the attractions of the Tillamook country those of the sea
alone, for within a dozen miles of the coast bear, panther, wildcats,
deer, partridge, pheasant, duck, and geese are to be found, while the
mountain streams are alive with trout waiting to be lured by the fly.
It is a storied region, too, for thousands of moccasined feet have trod
the famous Indian trail which was once the only route from the wilds of
southern Oregon to the fur-post which the first Astor established at
the mouth of the Columbia and which still bears his name, and here and
there along the coast are the remains of the forts and trading stations
which the Russians, in their campaign for the commercial mastery of
the Pacific half a century ago, pushed southward even to the Bay of San
Francisco. The lives led by those who summer along this shore would
delight such rugged apostles of the simple life as John Muir and John
Burroughs and Colonel Roosevelt, for there is a gratifying absence of
fashionable hotels and luxurious camps and cottages, though there is an
abundance of unpretentious but comfortable tent colonies and inns. The
people whom I met in Portland and elsewhere apologised profusely for
Oregon’s deficiencies in this respect and assured me very earnestly that
in two or three years more the State would have a complete assortment
of summer hotels “as good as anything you’ll find at Atlantic City
or Narragansett Pier, by George.” All I have to say is that when
their promises are realised, Oregon’s chiefest and most distinctive
charm—its near-to-nature simplicity—will have disappeared, and, so far
as the traveller and the pleasure seeker are concerned, it will be
merely an indifferent imitation of the humdrum and prosaic East. At
present, however, it is still a big, free, unfenced, keep-on-the-grass,
do-as-you-please, happy-go-lucky, flannel-shirt-and-slouch-hat land.
Even as I write I can hear its insistent, subtle summons in my ears: the
whisper of the forests, the chatter of the rivers, the murmur of the
ocean, the snarling of the sawmills, the chunk-a-chunk of paddles, the
creak of saddle gear, all seeming to say: “Cut loose from towns and men;
pack your kit and come again.” And that’s precisely what I’m going to do.
XII
BREAKING THE WILDERNESS
“They rise to mastery of wind and snow;
They go like soldiers grimly into strife
To colonise the plain. They plough and sow,
And fertilise the sod with their own life,
As did the Indian and the buffalo.”
XII
BREAKING THE WILDERNESS
When white men in Africa make long desert journeys on camel-back, they
follow the example of the Arabs and wind themselves tightly from chest
to hips with bandages like those with which trainers wrap the legs of
race-horses. This, to put it inelegantly but plainly, is done to prevent
their bursting from the violent and sustained shaking to which they are
subjected by the roughness of the camel’s gait. When I said good-bye to
the Sudan, taking it for granted that I would have no further use for my
spiral corselet in the presumably civilised country to which I was going,
I left it behind me in Khartoum. How was I to know that I would need it
far more than I ever had in Africa while journeying in so essentially
Occidental a conveyance as a motor-car through a region where camels are
confined to circuses and Turkish-rug advertisements? But long before we
had traversed the forty atrocious miles which make the distance between
Portland, Ore., and Kalama, Wash., seem more like four hundred, I would
have given a good deal to have had my racked and aching body snugly
wrapped in it again. I have had more than a speaking acquaintance with
some roads so bad that they ought to have been in jail—in Asiatic Turkey
and in Baja California and in other places—but to the Portland-Kalama
road I present the red-white-and-blue championship ribbon. Roll down
a rocky hillside in a barrel; climb into an electric churn and tell
the dairyman to turn on the power; ride a bicycle across a railroad
trestle and you will have had but the caviare course of the dinner of
discomfort that was served to us. As, after five hours of this sort of
thing, we bumped our way down a particularly vicious bit of hill road,
every joint and bolt in the car squealing in agonised complaint, I saw a
prosperous-looking farmer in his shirt-sleeves leaning comfortably over
the front gate, interestedly watching our progress.
“St-t-t-op a m-m-m-inute,” I chattered to the chauffeur, as we jounced
into the thank-ye-marms and rattled over the loose stones, “I w-w-want to
t-t-t-t-ell this m-m-m-an-n-n w-what I think of the r-r-r-oad.”
As we drew up in front of the gate, the farmer, taking a straw out of his
mouth, drawled:
“Say, stranger, you might like to know that you’ve just come over the
most gol-damnedest piece of road north o’ Panama.”
So, unless the gentlemen who have the say in this portion of the State of
Washington have repaired the road since we passed over it, I would advise
those automobilists who are Seattle-bound to keep on the Oregon side
of the Columbia as far as Goble (I think that is the name of the tiny
hamlet), where they can put their car on a barge and hire the ferryman to
tow them across the river to Kalama. This will cost them five dollars,
but it’s worth it.
[Illustration: A road near the Columbia as it was.
A road near the Columbia as it is.
WHAT THE ROAD-BUILDERS HAVE DONE IN WASHINGTON.]
Were one to prejudge a country by the names of its villages and towns
and counties he would form a peculiar conception of Washington, for I do
not recall ever having heard anything quite so outlandish as the names
which some one—the Siwash aborigine, presumably—has wished upon it. How
would you like to get this sort of a reply to your question as to some
one’s antecedents? “Me? Oh, I was born near Wahkiacus, down in Klickitat
County, and I met my wife, whose folks live up Snohomish way, in Walla
Walla, and later on we moved to Puyallup, but I’ve a sort of notion of
goin’ into the cannery business at Skamokawa, over in Wahkiakum County,
though the wife, she’s been a-pesterin’ me to buy an apple orchard up in
the Okanogan.” Still, it’s more interesting to motor through a country
like that, always wondering what bizarre, heathenish name is going to
turn up next, than to tour through a region sprinkled with Simpson’s
Centres and Cranberry Crossroads and New Carthages and Hickory Hollows
until you feel as though you were an actor in “The Old Homestead.”
Throughout our trip through Washington we were caused untold annoyance,
and in several instances were compelled to travel many weary and needless
miles, because of the wanton destruction of the sign-posts by amateur
marksmen. Up in that country every boy gets a gun with his first pair
of pants, and, when there is nothing else to shoot, he makes a target
of the enamelled guide-posts which have been erected for the benefit of
tourists. More than once, coming to a crossroads in the forest, we found
these placards so riddled with bullets that we were compelled to guess
which road to take—and we usually guessed wrong. “I wish to goodness,”
said my friend in exasperation, after we had gone half a dozen miles out
of our way on one of these occasions, “that they would declare a close
season on sign-posts, just as they have on elk, and then give the man the
limit who is caught shooting them.”
It would be a grave injustice to place undue emphasis upon the crudities
and inconveniences which annoy the traveller in certain portions of
Washington, for, when you get down to bed-rock facts, its farmers are
still wrestling with the wilderness—and in most instances they have had
to put up a desperate resistance to keep the wilderness from shoving
them off the mat. We passed through many a community, far removed from
the railway (for the railway builders have done little more than nibble
at the crust of the Washington pie) where the people were living under
conditions almost identical with those which confronted the Pilgrim
settlers of New England. Many a farmstead that we passed was chopped
out of the virgin forest, the house being built from the trees that had
grown upon its site. Cleared land, as an Eastern or Middle Western farmer
knows the term, seemed almost non-existent. Black and massive stumps
rose everywhere, like gravestones to the dead forest. “There’s so danged
many stumps in this country,” one of these pioneer farmers remarked,
“that sometimes I think that the Lord never intended for it to be cleared
at all.” The problem of getting rid of these stumps is one of the most
perplexing with which the Northwestern farmer has to contend, the expense
of clearing land averaging in the neighbourhood of seventy-five dollars
an acre. So inimical to colonisation has the question of land clearing
become, indeed, that the State has found it necessary to step in and
finance the stump-pullers in districts established in accordance with
recent legislation. Though Washington is a country of hustle and hard
work, no one who spends any length of time in it can fail to be impressed
with the belief that it has a promising future. The climate is, as a
whole, attractive. Though the cold is never extreme, the climate does not
lack vigour, and, as a result of the Oregon mists, there is plenty of
moisture. “We call ’em Oregon mists,” a farmer explained to me, “because
they missed Oregon and hit here.” They are really more of a fog than a
rain, and no one pays the slightest attention to them, even the womenfolk
scorning to use umbrellas. These mists, taken with the verdancy of the
vegetation and the pink-and-white complexions of the women, constantly
reminded me of Ireland and the south of England. In striking contrast
to the _arroyos secos_ to which we became accustomed in many parts of
California are the streams of Washington, which flow throughout the year,
enough water-power going to waste annually to run a plant that would
supply the nation.
As the Pacific Highway goes, it is close to a hundred and fifty
miles from Portland to Tacoma, but we made a slight detour so as to
see Olympia, which is the capital of the State. Beyond its rococo
State-house, which is surmounted by a statue of a female—it might be
Justice and it might be Mrs. Pankhurst in her peignoir—there is nothing
to distinguish Olympia from any one of a score of other pretty little
towns whose back doors open onto the primeval forest. Because there was a
moon in the heavens as big and yellow as a Stilton cheese, we decided to
push on to Tacoma, which is thirty miles from Olympia, that night. I’ll
not soon forget the beauty of that ride. With our engines purring like a
contented cat we boomed down the radiant path that our headlights cut out
of the darkness; the night air, charged with balsamic fragrance, beat in
our faces; the black walls of the forest rose skyward on either hand, the
tree tops bordering with ghostly hedges a star-sprinkled lane of sky. I
wish you might have been there ... it was so enchanting and mysterious.
The theatres were vomiting their throngs of playgoers when we rolled
under the row of electric arches which turns Tacoma’s chief thoroughfare
into an avenue of dazzling light and drew up beneath the grotesque and
towering totem-pole in the square in front of our hotel. Tacoma is as
up-and-doing a city as you will find in a week’s journey through a busy
land. It does not need to be rapped on the feet with a night-stick to be
kept awake. Magnificently situated on a series of terraces rising above
an arm of Puget Sound, its streets, instead of defying the steepness
of the hills, as do those of San Francisco and Seattle, sweep up them
in long diagonals, like the ramps at the Grand Central Terminal in New
York. Tacoma is peculiarly fortunate in being girdled by a series of
so-called natural parks, a zone ten miles in width in which the landscape
architect has not been permitted to improve on the lakes and woods and
wild-flower-carpeted glades provided by the Creator. But Tacoma’s chief
boast and glory is, of course, a mountain whose graceful, snow-capped
cone, which bears an astonishing resemblance to Fujiyama, rises like
an ermine-mantled monarch above the encircling forest. The name of the
mountain is Rainier or Tacoma, according to whether you live in Seattle
or Tacoma, an acrimonious dispute having been in progress between the
people of the two cities over the question for some time, the citizens
of Seattle claiming that the mountain is far too beautiful to be used as
an asset in Tacoma’s municipal advertising campaign, while the people
of the latter city assert that, as the British Admiral Rainier, for
whom the peak was originally named, fought against the Americans in the
Revolution, he does not deserve to have his name tacked onto an American
mountain.
For thirty miles or more the road from Tacoma to Mount Rainier (for that
is the name to which the Federal Government has given its approval)
strikes across a wooded country as level as the top of a table, until,
reaching the base of the mountain, it sweeps upward in long and graceful
spirals which were laid out by army engineers, for the region has been
taken over by the government under its new and admirable policy of
protecting the beauty-spots of the country through the formation of
national parks. Nowhere, not even in the Alps, have I driven over a
finer mountain road, the gradients being so gradual and the curves so
skilfully designed that one scarcely appreciates, upon reaching National
Park Inn, in the heart of the reservation, that he has climbed upward
of five thousand feet since leaving tide-water at Tacoma. We spent the
night at the Inn, a low-roofed, big-fireplaced tavern which has an air of
cosiness and comfort in keeping with the surroundings. Everything about
it reminded us of hotels we knew in the Alpine valleys, and when I drew
up the shade in the morning the illusion was complete, for the great
peak, its snow-clad flanks all sparkling in the morning sunlight, towered
above us, just as Mont Blanc towers above Chamonix, dazzling, majestic,
sublime. Leaving the Inn after an early breakfast, we motored up the
mountain road as far as the snout of the great Nisqually Glacier, which
is as far as automobiles are permitted to go. Take my word for it, this
glacier—the largest on the continent outside of Alaska—is one of the most
worth-while sights in all America. A river of ice, seven miles long and
half a mile wide, it coils down the slope of the mountain like a mammoth
boa-constrictor whose progress has been barred in other directions by
the encircling wall of forest. We left the car at the glacier’s snout,
and, after an hour’s hard climbing over loose rubble and slippery rock,
succeeded, in defiance of the danger signs, in reaching a flat shelf of
rock from which we could look directly down upon the ice torrent, and
there we ate the lunch that we had brought with us to the accompaniment
of the intermittent crashes which marked the glacial torrent’s slow
advance.
We descended to the road in time to catch the four-horse stage which runs
twice daily from the Inn to Paradise Valley, which the Lady insisted that
we must visit, “because,” she said, “there are snow-fields and fields of
wild flowers side by side.”
“But you’ve seen much the same sort of thing in Switzerland,” I objected.
“Don’t you remember that place above the Lake of Geneva, Territet, I
think it was, where people in furs were skating on one side of the hotel
and other people were having tea under big red parasols on the other?”
“I remember it, of course,” she answered, “but that was in Switzerland
and this is in my own country, which makes all the difference in
the world. Evidently you have forgotten that German baron we met at
Grindelwald, who asked us if we didn’t think that the view from Paradise
Valley was finer than the one from Andermatt, and we had to admit that we
didn’t know where Paradise Valley was. I’m not going to let that sort of
thing happen again. The next time I meet a foreigner I’m not going to be
embarrassed to death by finding that he knows more about my own country
than I know myself.”
So she had her way and, leaving the car behind us, we took the creaking
stage up the steep and narrow road to the valley, where we gathered
armfuls of wild flowers one minute and pelted each other with snowballs
the next, and peered through the telescope—at a quarter a look—at the
thirteen glaciers which radiate from the mountain’s summit, and aroused
perfectly shameless appetites for supper, and slept as only healthily
tired people can sleep, and the next morning, half intoxicated with the
combination of blazing sunlight and sparkling mountain air, we rattled
down again to the Inn and the waiting car.
The run from Rainier National Park, through Tacoma, to Seattle is as
smooth and exhilarating as sliding down the banisters of the front
stairs. Auto-intoxicated by the perfection of the roads, I stepped
on the accelerator and in obedience to the signal the car suddenly
leaped into its stride and hurtled down the highway at express-train
speed, while farmhouses and barns and fields and orchards swept by us
in an indistinguishable blur. It was glorious while it lasted. But
out of the distance came racing toward us a big white placard, “City
Limits of Seattle,” and I slowed down to a pace more conformable with
the law and rolled over the miles of trestles which span the swamps
and lowlands adjacent to Seattle as sedately as though a motor-cycle
policeman had his eye upon us. The builders of Seattle must have been
men of resource as well as courage, for those portions of the city that
have not been reclaimed from the tide-lands have been blasted out
of the rocky hillsides, so that the city gives one the impression of
clinging precariously to a slippery mountain slope midway between sea
and sky. Instead of propitiating the hills, as is the case in Tacoma,
the streets go storming up them at angles which give a motorist much the
same sensation a rider has when his horse rears and threatens to fall
over backward. Though Seattle is very big and very busy, with teeming
streets and huge department stores and miles of harbour frontage and
one of the tallest sky-scrapers in existence and a park and boulevard
system probably unequalled anywhere, it gave me the impression of being a
little crude, a trifle _nouveau riche_, and not yet entirely at home in
its resplendent garments. Between Seattle and Portland the most intense
rivalry exists, the two cities running almost neck-and-neck as regards
population, although this assertion will be indignantly denied by the
citizens of both of them. Standing at one of the world’s crossways, the
terminus of several transcontinental railways and several trans-Pacific
steamship lines, with a superb harbour and the recognised gateway to
Alaska, Seattle has a tremendous commercial advantage over her Oregonian
rival, but from a residential standpoint Portland, exquisitely situated
on the Willamette near its junction with the Columbia, with its milder
climate, its greater number of theatres and hotels, and its older
society, has rather a more metropolitan atmosphere, a more assured air
than its northern neighbour.
Seattle is the natural portal to the Puget Sound country, that
wilderness of mountains, glaciers, forests, lakes, lagoons, islands,
bays, and inlets which makes the upper left-hand corner of the map of the
United States look like a ragged fringe. It is not an easy country to
describe. Southward from the Straits of Juan de Fuca, an eighty-mile-long
arm of the Pacific penetrates the State of Washington—that is Puget
Sound. On its eastern shore are the cities of Seattle and Tacoma, at the
head of the sound is Olympia, the capital of the State, and bordering
the western shore rise the splendid peaks of the unexplored Olympic
Range. If your imagination will stand the further strain of picturing
an archipelago four times the size of the Thousand Islands, clothed
with forests of cedar, fir, and pine, and indented with countless bays,
harbours, coves, and inlets, dropped down in this body of water, you will
have a hazy conception of the island labyrinth of Puget Sound, which
is generally admitted, I believe, to be the most beautiful salt-water
estuary in the world. Despite the narrowness of many of its channels,
the water is so deep and the banks so precipitous that at many points a
ship’s side would touch the shore before its keel would touch the ground,
which, taken in conjunction with its innumerable excellent harbours,
makes it the most ideal cruising ground for power-boats on our coasts.
I can conceive, indeed, of no more enchanting summer than one spent
in a well-powered, well-stocked motor-boat cruising in and about this
archipelago, loitering from island to island as the fancy seized one,
dropping anchor in inviting harbours for a day or a week, as one pleased.
There are deer and bear in the forests and trout in the rivers and
salmon in the deeper waters, and, if those did not provide sufficient
recreation, one could run across to the mainland and get the stiffest
kind of mountain climbing on Mount Olympus or Mount Rainier. During the
summer months scores of small steamers, the “mosquito fleet,” ply out of
Seattle and Tacoma, hurrying backward and forward between the city wharfs
and the fishing villages, farming communities, lumber camps, sawmills,
and summer resorts that are scattered everywhere about the archipelago’s
inland waterways, so that the camper on their shores, seemingly far
off in the wilds, need never be without his daily paper, his fresh
vegetables, or his mail.
Let us give ourselves the luxury of imagining—for, to my way of
thinking, there is about as much enjoyment to be had in imagination as
in realisation—that we have a fortnight at our disposal on which no
business worries shall be permitted to intrude, that we have the deck of
a sturdy power-boat beneath our feet, and that the placid, island-dotted
waters of Puget Sound lie before us, asparkle on a summer’s morning.
Leaving Seattle, seated on her stately hills, astern, and the grim,
grey fighting ships across the Sound at the Bremerton Navy Yard abeam,
we will push the wheel to starboard and point the nose of our craft
toward Admiralty Inlet, the Straits of Juan de Fuca, and the open sea.
Our first port of call will be, I think, at Dungeness, whose waters
are the habitat of those Dungeness crabs which tickle the palates and
deplete the pocketbooks of gourmets from Vancouver to San Diego. At the
back of Dungeness is Sequim Prairie, whose seventy odd thousand acres of
irrigated lands produce “those great big baked potatoes” which are so
prominent an item on dining-car menus in the Northwest. It is nothing
of a run from Dungeness to Port Angeles, which is the most convenient
gateway to the unexplored Olympics. A score or so of miles southward
from Port Angeles by automobile, a portion of which is by ferry across
the beautiful mountain Lake Crescent, and over a road which is a marvel
of mountain engineering, are the Sol Duc Hot Springs, whose great
modern hotel is in startling contrast to the savagery of the region
which surrounds it. Laying our course from Port Angeles straight into
the setting sun, we coast along the rock-bound, heavily timbered shores
of the Olympic Peninsula to Neah Bay, where a crew of Macah Indians
will take us in one of their frail canoes close around the harsh face
of Cape Flattery, which is the extreme northwest corner of the United
States. Westward of Cape Flattery we may not go, for beyond it lies
the open sea; but, steering eastward again, we can nose about at will,
loitering through the romantic scenery of Deception Pass and Rosario
Straits, dropping in at Anacortes, whose canneries supply a considerable
portion of the world with salmon, and coming thus to Friday Harbour,
the county-seat of the San Juan Islands, which, despite the Robinson
Crusoe-ness of its name, looks exactly like one of those quaint,
old-fashioned seaport towns which dot the coast of Maine. The San Juan
Islands, which are a less civilised and more beautiful edition of the
Thousand Islands of the Saint Lawrence, like their counterparts on the
other side of the continent, lie midway between the American and the
Canadian shores. They were the scene of numerous exciting incidents in
the boundary dispute of the late fifties, being for a number of years
jointly occupied by British and American troops; but, though several
crumbling British blockhouses still rise above the island harbours,
the nearest British soil is Vancouver Island, across the Strait of
Georgia. That the Stars and Stripes, and not the Union Jack, fly to-day
over this picturesque archipelago is due, curiously enough, to the
Emperor Frederick, father of the present Kaiser, who was asked to act as
arbitrator between England and the United States and decided in favour of
the latter.
[Illustration: THE UNEXPLORED OLYMPICS.
A forest fire sweeping across the flanks of the Olympic range near Lake
Chelan. In the foreground is a sea of glacial ice.]
Did you ever, by any chance, drop into a sporting-goods store only
to find yourself so bewildered by the amazing number and variety of
implements for sports and recreations displayed upon its shelves that you
scarcely knew what to choose? Well, that is precisely the sensation I had
the first time I visited the Puget Sound country. I felt as though I had
been turned loose in a gigantic sporting-goods store with so many things
to choose from that I couldn’t make up my mind which to take first. And,
mark you, everything is comparatively close at hand. If a Londoner wants
to get some mountain climbing he has to go to Chamonix or Zermatt, which
means a journey of at least two days. If, getting his fill of precipices
and glaciers and crevasses, he wishes some bear shooting, he must turn
his face toward the Caucasus, to reach which will require seven or eight
days more. Should he suddenly take it into his head that he would like
some salmon fishing he will have to spend ten days and several hundred
dollars in recrossing Europe to reach the fishing streams of Norway—and
then pay a good round sum for the privilege of fishing in them when he
gets there. On the other hand, one can leave Tacoma by train or motor-car
and reach the slopes of the second highest peak in the United States,
a mountain higher and more difficult of ascent than the Jungfrau, as
quickly and as easily as one can go from New York to Poughkeepsie. From
Seattle one can reach the country of the big grizzlies as easily as a
Boston sportsman can reach the Maine woods. From Victoria, the island
capital of British Columbia, a gallon of gasoline and a road as smooth
as a billiard-table will take one to the banks of a stream where the
salmon are too large to be weighed on pocket scales in less time than a
Chicagoan spends in getting out to the golf-links at Onwentsia.
There is no other region of equal size, so far as I am aware, which
offers so many worth-while things in a superlative degree for red-blooded
people to do. Where else, pray, can you climb a mountain which is higher
than any peak in Europe save one (Mount Hooker, in British Columbia,
is only eighty feet lower than Mont Blanc, the monarch of the Alps,
while Mount Rainier, which, as I have remarked, is almost in Tacoma’s
front yard, is nearly a thousand feet higher than the Jungfrau); where
else can you look along your rifle barrel at such big game as grizzly,
elk, panther, mountain-sheep, and even the spotted bear, the rarest of
all North American big game; where else can you have your fly-rod bent
like a sapling in a storm and hear your reel whir like a sawmill by a
sixty-pound salmon or a six-pound trout; where else can you cruise, for
weeks on end, amid the islands of an archipelago more beautiful than
those of Georgian Bay and more numerous than those of the Ægean, without
the necessity of ever dropping anchor twice in the same harbour; where
else can you canoe by day and camp by night along rivers which have their
sources on the roof of a continent and, after taking their course through
a thousand miles of wilderness, empty into the greatest of the oceans;
where else can you throw open the throttle of your motor on a macadamised
highway which, in another year or two, will stretch its length across
twenty-five degrees of latitude, linking Mexico with Alaska? Where else
can you find such amusements as these, I ask? Answer me that.
* * * * *
Were it not for the complicated customs formalities that a motorist
has, perforce, to go through at the Canadian border, one could, by
getting an early start and not lingering over his lunch, make the
one-hundred-and-seventy-mile journey from Seattle to Vancouver between
dawn and dark of the same day. But the red tape which the American
officials insist upon unwinding before you can leave the land of the beef
trust and the home of the Pullman porter and the equal amount of red
tape which the Canadian officials wind up before you are permitted to
enter the dominions of his gracious Majesty King George make a one-day
trip out of the question; so we did it comfortably in two and spent the
intervening night in the seaport town of Bellingham. It’s a great place
for canneries, is Bellingham; indeed, I should think that the residents
would be ashamed to look a salmon in the face. Twenty miles farther on,
at a hamlet called Blaine, we were greeted by a huge sign whose staring
letters read: “International Boundary.” On one side the Stars and
Stripes floated over an eight-by-ten shanty; on the other side of this
imaginary but significant line the Union Jack flapped in the breeze over
a shanty a trifle larger. They are inquisitive, those British customs
officials, and when they had finished with our car there wasn’t much
they didn’t know about it. They inspected it as thoroughly as a Kaffir
is inspected when he knocks off work in a South African diamond mine.
Before entering Canada it is wise to obtain from the American authorities
at the border a certificate containing a description of your car and
all that it contains; otherwise you will be subjected to innumerable
formalities upon entering the country again, while the Canadian laws
require that a tourist desiring to remain more than eight days in the
Dominion must provide a bond to cover the value of his car and make in
addition a deposit of twenty-five dollars, both of which will be returned
to him when he leaves the country. There is a grocer in Blaine—I forget
his name, but he is a most obliging fellow—who makes a specialty of
providing bonds for motorists, and by going to him we saved ourselves
much trouble. It was all very informal. He simply called up the Canadian
customs house on the phone and said: “Say, Bill, there’s some folks
here that’s motorin’ into Canada. I ain’t got time to make out a bond
just now, ’cause there’s an old lady here waitin’ to buy some potatoes,
but you just let ’em skip through and I’ll fix it up the next time I
see you.” Careless and informal, just like that. So all they did was to
take the pedigree of the car for four generations, note the numbers of
the spare tires, inventory the extra parts, go through our belongings
with a dandruff comb, inquire where I was born, what the E. in my name
stood for, and was I unfortunate enough to have to pay taxes; and, after
presenting me with a list of the pains and penalties which I would incur
if I broke any of his Majesty’s orders in council, permitted us to enter
the territory of the Dominion.
[Illustration: WHERE THE SALMON COME FROM.
“It’s a great place for canneries, is Bellingham; I should think the
residents would be ashamed to look a salmon in the face.”]
I hope, for the sake of those who follow in our tire tracks, that the
fifty miles of highway between Blaine and Vancouver has been materially
improved since we went over it. Doubtless with the best intentions in
the world, they had constructed a “crowned” road, which, as its name
implies, is one that is rounded upward in the middle so as to drain the
more readily; but, as a result of the rains, the sloping sides were so
greasy that it was only with considerable difficulty that I kept the car
from sliding into the ditch. There is one thing that the motorist must
bear constantly in mind from the moment his front tires roll across the
Canadian border, and that is _keep to the left_. Barring New Brunswick
and Nova Scotia, British Columbia is the only Canadian province which
retains the English system of turning to the left and passing to the
right, and it takes an American some time to become habituated to it.
After seemingly endless miles of slippery going through dripping woods,
we entered the outskirts of New Westminster, a prosperous seaport near
the mouth of the Fraser and the oldest place in this region, as age is
counted in western Canada. A splendid boulevard, twenty-five miles long,
connects New Westminster with Vancouver, and the car fled along it as
swiftly as an aeroplane and as silently as a ghost. The virgin forest
dwindled and ran out in recently made clearings, where gangs of men were
still at work dynamiting and burning the stumps; and on the cleared land
neat cottages of mushroom growth appeared, and these changed gradually
to two-storied, frame houses, and these again to the increasingly ornate
mansions of the well-to-do, the wealthy, and the _rich_. Through the murk
beyond them the white sky-scrapers of Vancouver shot skyward—memorials to
the men who have roped and tied and tamed a savage land.
XIII
CLINCHING THE RIVETS OF EMPIRE
“Up along the hostile mountains where the hair-poised snowslide shivers—
Down and through the big fat marshes that the virgin ore bed stains,
Till I heard the mile-wide muttering of unimagined rivers
And beyond the nameless timber saw illimitable plains.
Plotted sites of future cities, traced the easy grades between ’em;
Watched unharnessed rapids wasting fifty thousand head an hour;
Counted leagues of water frontage through the axe-ripe woods that
screen ’em—
Saw the plant to feed a people—up and waiting for the power!”
XIII
CLINCHING THE RIVETS OF EMPIRE
Darkness had fallen on the Oregonian forest when our forward tire
exploded with a report which sounded in that eerie stillness like a
bursting shell. It was not a reassuring place to have a blowout—in the
heart of a forest as large as many a European kingdom, with the nearest
settlement half a hundred miles away and the nearest apology for a hotel
as many more. Between the cathedral-like columns of the pines, however,
I glimpsed a signal of human presence in the twinkling of a fire, and
toward it I made my way through underbrush and over fallen trunks,
while my chauffeur, blaspheming under his breath, busied himself at the
maddening task of fitting on another tire in the darkness.
I shall not soon forget the incongruity of the scene which greeted me
as I halted on the edge of a little clearing fitfully illuminated by a
roaring camp-fire. Within the circle of warmth—for the summer nights are
chilly in the north country—stood a canvas-topped wagon which appeared to
be a half-brother to a prairie-schooner, an uncle to an army ambulance,
and a cousin to a moving van. Its side curtains had been let down, so
that it formed a sort of tent on wheels, and seated beside it on an
upended soap box a plump little woman in a calico dress was preparing
six small youngsters for bed as unconcernedly as though she were in a
New England farmhouse, with the neighbours’ lights twinkling through the
trees, instead of in the middle of a primeval wilderness, a long day’s
journey from anywhere. The horses had been outspanned, as they say in
South Africa, and were placidly exploring the recesses of their nose-bags
for the last stray grams of oats. A lank, stoop-shouldered, sinewy-framed
man, who had been squatting beside the fire watching the slow progress
of a pot of coffee, slowly rose to his feet on my approach and slouched
forward with outstretched hand. He radiated good nature and hospitality
and an air of easy-going efficiency, and from the first I liked him.
“Howdy, friend,” he drawled, with the unmistakable nasal twang of the
Middle West. “I reckon you’ve had a little bad luck with your machine,
ain’t you? We heard you a-comin’ chug-chuggin’ through the woods, hell
bent for election, an’ all to once there was a noise ’s if some one had
pulled the trigger of a shotgun. ‘There,’ says I to Arethusa, ‘some pore
autermobile feller’s limpin’ ’round in the darkness on three legs,’ says
I, ‘an’ as soon ’s I get this coffee to boilin’ I reckon I’ll stroll over
with a lantern an’ see if I can’t give him some help.’”
“Just as much obliged,” said I, “but my man has the tire pretty well on
by now. But we could do with a cup or so of that coffee if you’ve some to
spare.”
[Illustration: This settler’s nearest neighbour was fifty miles away—
And he was a Swede farmer with a Siwash wife.
OUTPOSTS OF CIVILISATION.]
“That’s what coffee’s for, friend—to drink,” he said cordially, reaching
for a tin cup. “Where’ve you come from?” he added with polite curiosity.
“From the Mexican border,” said I, with, I suspect, a trace of
self-satisfaction in my voice, for fifteen hundred miles of desert,
forest, and mountains lay behind us. “And you?” I asked in turn.
“Us?” he answered. “Oh, we’ve come from Kansas.” (He said it as
unconcernedly as a New Yorker might mention that he had just run over to
Philadelphia for a day.) “Left Emporia thirteen weeks ago come Thursday
and have averaged nigh on twenty-five miles a day ever since. An’ the
horses ain’t in bad condition, neither.”
“And where, in the name of Heaven,” I exclaimed, “are you going?”
“Well,” was the reply, “we’re headed for British Columbia, but I reckon
we’ll have to winter somewheres in Washington and push on across the line
in the spring. You see, friend,” he continued, in his placid, easy-going
manner, in reply to my rapid fire of inquiries, “it was this way. I was
in the furniture business back in Kansas, furniture an’ undertakin’, but
I didn’t much care for the business ’cause it kept me indoors so much,
my folks always havin’ been farmers and such like. Well, one day a while
back, I picked up one of them folders sent out by the Canadian Gov’ment,
tellin’ ’bout the rich resources up in British Columbia, an’ how land
was to be had for the askin’. So that night when I went home I says to
Arethusa: ‘What’d you think of sellin’ out an’ packin’ up and goin’ up
British Columbia way, an’ gettin’ a farm where we can live out o’ doors
an’ make a decent livin’?’ ‘Sure,’ says she, ‘I’d like it fine. An’ it’ll
be great for the kids.’ ‘All right,’ says I,’ it’s all decided. I’ll
build a body for the delivery wagon that we can sleep in, an’ we’ll take
Peter an’ Repeater, the delivery team, an’ it won’t take us more than six
or eight months to make the trip if we keep movin’.’ You see, friend,” he
added, “my paw moved out to Kansas when there warn’t nothin’ there but
Indians an’ sage-brush, an’ hers did, too, so I reckon this movin’ on to
new places is sort of in the blood.”
“But why British Columbia?” I queried. “Why Canada at all? What’s the
reason that you, an American, don’t remain in the United States?”
“Well, I don’t know exactly, friend,” he answered, a little shamefacedly,
I thought, “unless it’s because it’s a newer country up there an’ a
man has a better chance. What with the Swedes an’ the Germans an’ the
Eyetalians, this country’s gettin’ pretty well settled an’ there ain’t
the chances in it there was once; but up British Columbia way it’s still
a frontier country, they tell me, an’ a man who’s willin’ to buckle down
an’ work can make a home an’ a good livin’ quicker’n anywhere else, I
guess. It’s fine land up in the middle o’ Vancouver Island, I hear, an’
in the Cariboo country, too, an’ they want settlers so darn bad that
they’ll give you a farm for nothin’. An’ it’s a pretty good country for a
man to live in, too. Here in the United States we do a heap o’ talkin’
’bout our laws, but up in Canada they don’t talk about ’em at all—they
just go right ahead an’ enforce ’em. I may be in wrong, of course, but
from all I hear it’s goin’ to be a great country up there one of these
days, when they get the railroads through, an’ me an’ Arethusa sorta got
the notion in our heads that we’d like to be pioneers, like our paws
were, an’ get in an’ help build the country, an’ let our kids grow up
with it. You’ve got to be startin’, eh? Won’t you have another cup o’
coffee before you go? Well, friend, I’m mighty glad to’ve met you. Good
luck to you.”
“Good luck to _you_,” said I.
[Illustration: “Chopping a path to To-morrow—” Frontiersmen clearing a
town site in the forests of British Columbia.
Law and order in the back country: the sheriff of the Cariboo—the only
law-officer for three hundred miles.
BREAKING THE WILDERNESS.]
* * * * *
Though I didn’t appreciate it at the time, my acquaintance of the forest
was a soldier in an army of invasion. This army had come from the south
quietly, unostentatiously, without blare of bugle or beat of drum, its
weapons the plough and the reaper, the hoe and the spade, its object the
conquest, not of a people but of a wilderness. Have you any conception,
I wonder, of the astounding proportions which this agricultural invasion
of Canada has assumed? Did you know that last year upward of one hundred
thousand Americans crossed the border to take up farms and carve out
fortunes for themselves under another flag? These settlers who are
trekking northward by rail and road are the very pick of the farming
communities of our Middle West. Besides being men of splendid character
and fine physique, and of a rugged honesty that is characteristic of
those closely associated with the soil, they take with them a substantial
amount of capital—probably a thousand dollars at least, on an average,
either in cash, stock, or household goods. Moreover, they bring what
is most valuable of all—experience. Coming from a region where the
agricultural conditions are similar to those prevailing in the Canadian
West, they quickly adapt themselves to the new life. Unlike the settlers
from the mother country and from the Continent, to whom everything
is strange and new, and who consequently require some time to adjust
themselves to the changed conditions, the American wastes not a moment
in contemplation but rolls up his sleeves, spits on his hands, and goes
hammer and tongs at the task of making a farm and building a home. He is
efficient, energetic, industrious, businesslike, adaptable, and quite
frankly admits that he has come to the country because it offers him
better prospects. So, though he may not sing “God Save the King” with the
fervour of a newly arrived Briton, he is none the less valuable to the
land of his adoption.
[Illustration: A heavy load but well packed.
Even the dogs have to carry their share.
A heavy load poorly packed.
PACK-HORSES AND A PACK-DOG.]
Ask your average well-informed American what he knows about British
Columbia, and it is dollars to doughnuts that he will remark rather
dubiously: “Oh, yes, that’s the place where the tinned salmon comes from,
isn’t it?” Take yourself, for example. Did you happen to be aware that,
though it has barely as many inhabitants as Newark, N. J., its area
is equal to that of California, Oregon, and Washington put together,
with Indiana thrown in to make good measure? Or, if the comparison
is more graphic, that it is larger than the combined areas of Italy,
Switzerland, and France? Westernmost of the eleven provinces comprising
the Dominion, it is bounded on the south by the orchards of Washington
and the mines of Idaho; eastward it ends where the cattle-ranges of
Alberta begin; to its north are the fur-bearing Mackenzie Territories
and the gold-fields of the Yukon; westward it is bordered by the heaving
Pacific and that narrow strip of ragged coast which forms the panhandle
of Alaska. Though clinging to its edges are a score of towns and two
great cities; though a transcontinental railway (the only one on the
continent, by the way, which runs from tide-water to tide-water under
the same management and the same name) hugs the province’s southern
border and another is cutting it through the middle; its vast hinterland,
larger than the two Scandinavian kingdoms, with its network of unnamed
rivers and its unguessed-at wealth in forests, fish, furs, and minerals,
contains thousands upon thousands of square miles which have never felt
the pressure of a white man’s foot or echoed to a white man’s voice.
Do you realise that, should you turn your horse’s head northwestward
from the Kootenai, on the Idaho border, you would have to ride as far
as from Lake Superior to the Gulf of Mexico before you could unsaddle
beneath the Stars and Stripes at White Pass, on the frontier of Alaska?
Did you know that the province contains the greatest compact area of
merchantable timber in North America, its forests being greater in extent
than those of the New England States, New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan,
Wisconsin, Minnesota, and the Blue Ridge combined? I have heard naval
experts and railway presidents and mining men talk ponderously of a
future shortage in the coal supply—but they need not worry, for British
Columbia’s coal measures are estimated to contain forty billion tons of
bituminous and sixty billion tons of anthracite (100,000,000,000, tons
in all, if so endless a caravan of ciphers means anything to you)—enough
to run the engines of the world until Gabriel’s trumpet sounds “Cease
working.” The output of its salmon canneries will provide those who order
fish on Fridays with most excellent and inexpensive eating until the
crack of doom. Its untouched deposits of magnetite and hematite are so
extensive that they bid fair to make the ironmasters of Pittsburg break
that commandment (I forget which one it is) which says: “Thou shalt
not covet thy neighbour’s goods.” The province has enough pulpwood to
supply the Hearst and Harmsworth presses with paper until the last “extra
special edition” is issued on the morning of judgment day. The recently
discovered petroleum deposits have proved so large that they promise to
materially reduce the income of the lean old gentleman who plays golf
on the Pocantico Hills. The area of agricultural and fruit lands in the
province is estimated at sixty million acres, of which less than one
tenth has been taken up, much less put under cultivation. And scattered
through the length and breadth of this great Cave-of-Al-ed-Din-like
territory is a total population of less than four hundred thousand
souls. Everything considered, it has, I suppose, greater natural
resources than any area of the same size on the globe. So I don’t see
how a young man with courage, energy, ambition, a little capital, and
a speaking acquaintance with hard work could do better than to drop
into the nearest railway ticket office and say to the clerk behind the
counter: “A ticket to British Columbia—and step lively, if you please. I
want to get there before it is too late to be a pioneer.”
Situated in the same latitude as the British Isles, sheltered from the
winter blizzards of the prairie provinces by the high wall of the Rocky
Mountains, its long western coast washed by the warm waves of the Japan
current, its air tinctured with the balsamic fragrance of millions of
acres of hemlock, spruce, and pine, British Columbia’s climate is, to
use the phraseology of the real-estate boosters, “highly salubrious”;
although, to be strictly truthful, I am compelled to add that it is
extremely wet during a considerable portion of the year. But it is a
misty, drizzly sort of rain to which no one pays the slightest attention.
You will see ladies without umbrellas stop to chat on the streets,
and men lounging and laughing in front of the clubs and hotels in a
rain which would make a Chicagoan hail a taxicab and a Bostonian turn
up his collar and seek the subway. When you speak about it they laugh
good-naturedly and say in a surprised sort of way: “Why, is it raining?
By Jove, it is a trifle misty, isn’t it? Really, you know, I hadn’t
noticed it at all.” Then they will go on to tell you that it is the
moistness of the climate which gives British Columbia its beautiful women
and its beautiful flowers. And I can, and gladly do, vouch for the beauty
of them both. They—particularly the women—are worth going a long way to
see.
You mustn’t confuse British Columbia, you understand, with the flat,
monotonous, grain-growing provinces which lie on the other side of the
Rockies. It isn’t that sort of a country at all. It is too mountainous,
too ravined, with many impassable chasms and nigh-impenetrable forests.
Its plateaus are eroded by lake and river into gorges which are younger
sisters of the Grand Cañon of the Colorado. From a little distance the
mountain slopes look as though they had been neatly upholstered in the
green plush to which the builders of Pullman cars are so partial, but,
upon closer inspection, the green covering resolves itself into dense
forests of spruce and pine. Thousands and thousands of brooks empty into
the creeks and hundreds of creeks empty into the big rivers, and these
mighty waterways, the Fraser, the Kootenai, the Skeena, the Columbia, go
roaring and booming seaward through their rock-walled channels, wasting
a million head of power an hour. Nowhere, that I can recall, are so
many picturesque and interesting scenes combined with such sensational
and impressive scenery as along the cañon of the Lower Fraser. Here the
mountains of the Coast Range rise to a height of nearly two miles above
the surface of the swirling, angry river, the walls of the cañon being
so precipitous and smooth that one marvels at the daring and ingenuity
of the men who built a railway there. As the cañon widens, the traveller
catches fleeting glimpses of Chinamen washing for gold on the river
bars; of bearded, booted lumberjacks guiding with their spike-shod poles
the course of mile-long log rafts; of Siwash Indians, standing with
poised salmon-spears on the rocks above the stream, like statues cast
in bronze. Then the outposts of civilisation begin to appear in the
form of hillsides which have been cleared and set out to fruit-trees,
of Japanese truck-gardens, every foot of which is tended by the little
yellow men with almost pathetic care, of sawmills, and salmon canneries;
and so through a region where neat hamlets alternate with stretches of
primeval forest, until in the distance, looming above the smoke pall, the
sky-scrapers of Vancouver appear.
[Illustration: The Upper Fraser: “Streams of threaded quicksilver hasten
through the valleys as though anxious to escape from the solitude that
reigns.”
“On the flanks of the ridges, massed in their black battalions, stand the
bleak, barbarian pines.”
IN THE GREAT, STILL LAND.]
The chief cities of the province are Vancouver, the commercial capital
and a port and railway terminus of great industrial importance, and
Victoria, the seat of government and the centre of provincial society.
There are also several smaller cities: New Westminster, at the mouth
of the Fraser and so close to Vancouver that it is almost impossible
for the stranger to determine where the one ends and the other begins;
Nanaimo, a coal-mining town of considerable importance on the eastern
shore of Vancouver Island, and Alberni, famous for its salmon fisheries,
at the head of an arm of the sea extending inland from the western coast;
Nelson, the _chef-lieu_ of the prosperous fruit-growing district of
the Kootenai, in the extreme southeastern corner of the province; Bella
Coola, on a fiord at the mouth of the Bella Coola River; Ashcroft, the
gateway to the hinterland, on the main line of the Canadian Pacific
Railway; Fort George, at the junction of the Fraser and Nechako Rivers;
and Prince Rupert, the remarkable mushroom city which the Grand Trunk
Pacific Railway has built, from the ground up, on the coast of British
Columbia, forty miles south of the Alaskan border, as the Pacific
Coast terminus for the transcontinental system which has recently been
completed.
Between Vancouver and Victoria the most intense rivalry exists. They are
as jealous of each other as two prima donnas singing in the same opera.
Vancouver is a great and prosperous city, with broad and teeming streets,
clanging street-cars, rumbling traffic, belching factory chimneys,
towering office-buildings, extensive railroad yards, excellent pavements,
and attractive residential suburbs. Of course there is nothing very
startling in all this, were it not for the fact that it is all new—twenty
years ago there was no such place on the map. It is a busy, bustling
place, where every one seems too much occupied in making fortunes
overnight to have much time to spare for social amenities. There was a
land boom on the last time I was in Vancouver—in fact, I gathered that
it was a perennial condition—and prices were being asked (and paid!) for
town lots not yet cleared of forest which would have made an American
real-estate agent admit quite frankly that he had not progressed beyond
the kindergarten stage of the game. I am perfectly serious in saying that
within the city limits of Vancouver lots are being sold which are still
covered with virgin forest. Within less than two miles of the city hall
you can see gangs of men clearing residential sites by chopping down the
primeval forest with which they are covered and blowing out and burning
the stumps. This real-estate boom, with its consequent inflation of land
values, has had a bad effect on the prosperity of Vancouver, however, for
many ordinarily conservative business men, dazzled by visions of sudden
wealth, have gone land mad; money is difficult to get, for Canadian banks
are prohibited by law from loaning on real estate; and, like so many
other towns which have been stimulated by artificial means, Vancouver is
already beginning to show the effects of the inevitable reaction.
Victoria, unlike Vancouver, is old, as oldness counts in the Dominion. It
was the seat of government when Vancouver was part jungle and part beach.
It is the residential city of western Canada, and is much in vogue as a
place of permanent abode for those who in any of the nearer provinces
“have made their pile,” for well-to-do men with marriageable daughters
and socially ambitious wives, and for military and naval officers who
have retired and wish to get as much as possible out of their limited
incomes. Victoria is as essentially English as Vancouver is American.
It is, indeed, a bit of England set down in this remote corner of the
empire. It has stately government buildings, broad, tree-shaded streets,
endless rows of the beam-and-plaster villas which one sees in every
London suburb, and one of the most beautiful parks I have ever seen. Its
people spend much of their time on the tennis-courts, cricket-fields,
and golf-links, and are careful not to let business interfere with
pleasure. That is the reason, no doubt, why in business Vancouver has
swept by Victoria as an automobile sweeps by a horse and buggy. Vancouver
might aptly be compared to a hustling, energetic business man who never
lets slip an opportunity to make a dollar and who is always on the job.
Victoria, on the contrary, is a quietly prosperous, rather sportily
inclined old gentleman who is fond of good living and believes that no
time is wasted that is devoted to sport. Each town has a whole-souled
contempt for the other. The Victorian takes you aside and says: “Oh, yes,
Vancouver is progressing quite rapidly, I hear, although, fact is, the
subject really doesn’t interest me. The people are so impossible, you
know. Why, would you believe it, my dear fellow, most of them came there
without a dollar to their names—fact, I assure you. Now they’re all bally
millionaires. Positively vulgar, I call it. Very worthy folk, no doubt,
but scarcely in our class. Look here, let’s have a drink and then motor
out and have a round of golf. What say, old chap? Right-o!”
The Vancouver man shoves his derby on the back of his head, sticks a
thumb in the armhole of his waistcoat, and with the other hand gives
you a resounding whack on the shoulder. “Victoria? Pshaw, no one takes
Victoria seriously. Nice little place to send the madam and the kids
for the summer. But it’s asleep—nothing doing—no business. Why, say,
friend, do you know what they do down there? _They drink afternoon tea!_
Believe me, Vancouver is the only real, growing, progressive, wide-awake,
up-and-doing burg this side of Broadway. Say, have you got an hour to
spare? Then just jump into my car here and I’ll run you out and show you
a piece of property that you can make a fortune on if you buy it quick.
Yes, sirree, you can get rich quick, all right all right, if you invest
your money in Vancouver.”
There are not more than ten harbours in the world, certainly not more
than a dozen at the most, that have a right to be spoken of in the
same breath with Victoria’s landlocked port. Picking her cautious way
through the long, narrow, curving entrance that makes the harbour of
Victoria resemble a chemist’s retort, our vessel swept ahead with
stately deliberation, while we leaned over the rail in the crispness of
the early morning and watched the scenes that accommodatingly spread
themselves before us. Slender, white-hulled pleasure yachts, dainty as a
débutante; impertinent, omnipresent launches, poking their inquisitive
noses everywhere and escaping disaster by the thickness of their paint;
greasy, hard-working tugboats, panting like an expressman who has carried
your trunk upstairs; whalers outfitting for the Arctic—you can tell
’em by the scarlet lookout’s barrel lashed to the fore masthead; rusty
freighters from Sitka, Callao, Singapore, Heaven knows where; Japanese
fishing-boats with tattered, weather-beaten sails such as the artists
love to paint; Siwash canoes manned by squat, shock-headed descendants
of the first inhabitants; huge twin-funnelled Canadian Pacific liners
outward bound for Yokohama or homeward bound for Vancouver, for Victoria
boasts of being “the first and last port of call”—take my word for it,
it’s a sight worth seeing, is Victoria Harbour on a sunny morning. We
forged ahead at half speed and the city crept nearer and nearer, until
we could make out the line of four-horsed brakes waiting to rattle those
tourists whose time was limited to the customary “points of interest,”
and the crowd of loungers along the quay, and the constables with their
helmet straps under their lower lips and blue-and-white-striped bands
on their sleeves, exactly like their fellows in Oxford Circus and
Piccadilly. At the right the imposing stone façade of the Parliament
buildings rose from an expanse of vivid lawn—as a result of the combined
warmth and moisture the vegetation of Victoria is unsurpassed in the
temperate zone; at the left the business portion of the city stretched
away in stolid and uncompromising brick and stone; squarely ahead of us
loomed the great bulk of the Empress Hotel. We would have run into it had
we kept straight on, but of course we didn’t, for the captain yanked a
lever on the bridge and bells jangled noisily in the engine room, and the
vessel, turning ever so deliberately, poked her prow into the berth that
awaited it like a horse entering its accustomed stall.
What I like about Victoria is that it is so blamed British. Unless
you are observing enough to notice that the date-lines of the London
papers in the Union Club are quite a fortnight old, you would never
dream that you were upward of six thousand miles from Trafalgar
Square and barely sixty from the totem-pole in Seattle. If you still
have any lingering doubts as to the atmosphere of the place being
completely and unreservedly British, they will promptly be dispelled
if you will drop into the lobby (they call it lounge) of the Empress
Hotel any afternoon at four o’clock and see the knickerbockered
sons of Albion engaged in the national diversion of drinking tea.
When an American is caught drinking afternoon tea he assumes an I-give-
you-my-word-I-never-did-this-before-but-the-ladies-dragged-me-into-it
air, but your Britisher does it with all the matter-of-courseness
with which a New Yorker orders his pre-dinner cocktail. One of the
earliest impressions one gets in Victoria is that all the inhabitants
are suffering from extraordinarily hard colds—brought on, you suppose,
by the dampness of the climate—but after a little it dawns on you that
they are merely employing the broad A that they brought with them from
the old country, along with their monocles and their beautifully cut
riding clothes. In Vancouver, on the contrary, you never hear the broad A
used at all unless by a new arrival with the brand of Bond Street fresh
upon him. They have no time for it. They are too busy making money. The
Victorians, on the other hand, never lie awake nights fretting about
the filthy lucre. _They_ are too busy having a good time. They have
enough money to be comfortable, and that seems to be all they want.
That’s the plan on which the place is run—comfort and pleasure. Most
of the Victorians, so I was told, are people with beer pocketbooks and
champagne thirsts. For a man with a modest income and an unquenchable
thirst for sport Victoria is the best place of residence I know. In
most places it needs a rich man’s income to lead the sporting life, for
game-preserves and salmon rivers and polo ponies run into a lot of money,
but in Victoria almost any one can be a sport, if not a sportsman, for
you can pick up a pony that can be broken to polo for sixty or seventy
dollars and a few miles back of the city lies one of the greatest fishing
and shooting regions in the world. The last time I was in Victoria I
found all the banks and business houses closed, and flags were flying
from every public building, and a procession, headed by mounted police
and a band, was coming down the street. “What’s going on?” I inquired of
a deeply interested bystander. “Is it the King’s birthday or is there
royalty in town, or what?” “Not on your life!” he answered witheringly.
“It’s the prime minister on his way to open the baseball season.”
If you want to go a-motoring in a foreign country without the expense
and trouble of an ocean voyage, I doubt if you could do better than
to put your car on a steamer at Seattle or Vancouver, with “Victoria”
pencilled on the bill of lading. Take my word for it, you will find
Vancouver Island as foreign (perhaps I should say as un-American) as
England; in many respects it is more English than England itself. Though
the aggregate length of the insular highways is not very great, for
civilisation has as yet but nibbled at the island’s edges, the roads that
have been built are unsurpassed anywhere. If roads are judged not only
by their smoothness but by the scenery through which they pass, then
the highways of Vancouver Island are in a class by themselves. They are
as smooth as the arguments of an automobile salesman; their grades are
as easy as the path to shame; they are bordered by scenery as alluring
as Scherezade. The spinal column of Vancouver’s highway system is the
splendid Island Highway, which, after leaving Victoria, parallels the
east coast, running through Cowichan, Chemainus, Ladysmith, Nanaimo, and
Wellington, to Nanoose Bay. Here the road divides, one fork continuing up
the coast to Campbell River, which is the northernmost point that can be
reached by road, while the other fork swings inland, skirting the shores
of Cameron Lake and through Alberni, at the head of Barclay Sound, to
Great Central Lake, which, as its name indicates, is in the very heart
of the island, upward of a hundred and fifty miles from Victoria as
the motor goes. The first twenty miles of the Island Highway are known
as the Malahat Drive, the road here climbing over a mountain range of
considerable height by means of a splendidly surfaced but none too wide
shelf, with many uncomfortably sharp turns, cut in the rocky face of
the cliff. This shelf gradually ascends until the giant firs in the
gloomy gorge below look no larger than hedge-plants, and the waters of
the sound, with its wild and wooded shores, like a miniature lakelet in
a garden. The Malahat is a safe enough road if you drive with caution.
But it is no place for joy riding. It is too narrow, in the first place,
and the turns are too sharp, and it is such a fearfully long way to the
bottom that they would have to gather up your remains with a shovel,
which is messy and inconvenient.
Throughout our tour on Vancouver Island we were impressed with the
universal politeness and good nature of the people we met, particularly
in the back country, and by the courteous wording of the signs along
the highways. The highway signs in the United States have a habit of
shaking a fist in your face, metaphorically speaking, and shouting at
you: “Go any faster if you dare!” But in Vancouver they assume that you
are a gentleman and address you as such. Instead of curtly ordering you
to “Go slow” without condescending to give any reason, they erect a sign
like this: “Schoolhouse ahead. Please look out for the children,” and,
a little way beyond, another which says, “Thank you”—a little courtesy
which costs nothing except a few extra strokes of the brush and leaves
you permeated with a glow of good feeling.
When we reached Nanaimo, which is a coal-mining centre of considerable
importance, we found one of the periodic strikes which serve to relieve
the tedium of life in the drab little colliery town in progress and a
militia regiment of Highlanders encamped in its streets. When we speak
of militia in the United States we usually think of slouch-hatted youths
in rather slovenly uniforms of yellow khaki, who meet every Wednesday
night for drill at the local armoury, spend ten days in an instruction
camp each summer, and parade down the main streets of their respective
towns on Decoration Day and the Fourth of July. But these Canadian
militiamen were something quite different. I don’t suppose that they are
a whit more efficient when it comes to the business of slaughter than
their cousins south of the border, but they are certainly a lot more
picturesque. But I ask you now, candidly, can you imagine several hundred
young Americans dressed in plaid kilts and plaid stockings, with an
interim of bare knees, jackets chopped off at the waist-line, and dinky
little caps with ribbons hanging down behind keeping the upper hand in a
strike-ridden American city? I can’t. These young men belonged, so I was
told, to a “Highland” regiment, though after talking with a few of them I
gathered that their acquaintance with the Highlands consisted in having
occupied seats in the upper gallery at a performance by Harry Lauder.
But, kilts or no kilts, there was no doubt that they were running the
show in Nanaimo and, from all indications, running it very well.
Decidedly the most worth-while thing on Vancouver Island, either from
the view-point of an artist or a motorist, is that portion of the Island
Highway between Nanoose Bay, on the Straits of Georgia, and Alberni,
at the head of Barclay Sound. When I first traversed it in the golden
radiance of an October day, I thought it was the most beautiful road I
had ever seen. And as I traverse it again in the motor-car of memory,
with a knowledge of most of the other beautiful highways of the world
to compare it with, I am still of the same opinion. So impressive is
the scenery, so profound the silence that we felt a trifle awed and
spoke in whispers when we spoke at all, as though we were in the nave
of a great cathedral. High above us the tree tops interlaced in a roof
of translucent green through which the sun-rays filtered, turning the
road into a golden trail and the moss on the rocks and the tree trunks
into old-gold plush. The meadowed hillsides were so thickly strewn with
lacy ferns and wild flowers that it seemed as though the Great Architect
had draped them in the dainty, flowered cretonne they use in ladies’
boudoirs; and scattered about, as might be expected in a lady’s boudoir,
were silver mirrors—with rainbow-trout leaping in them. Then there were
the mountains: range piled upon range, peaks peering over the shoulders
of other peaks like soldiers _en échelon_. They ran the gamut of the more
sober colours; green at the base, where the lush meadows lay, then the
dark green of the forest, then the rusty brown of scrub and underbrush,
the violet and blue and purple of the naked rock, and, atop of all, a
crown of dazzling white.
The versatile gentlemen who write those alluring folders that you find
in racks in railway offices and hotel lobbies very cleverly play on
the Anglo-Saxon love for sport by describing the region through which
their particular system runs as “a sportsman’s paradise.” It makes small
difference whether they are describing the New Jersey mud-flats or the
Berkshire hills, they are all “sportsman’s paradises.” But the northern
half of Vancouver Island is all that this much-abused term implies and
more. It is, I suppose, the finest and most accessible fish and game
country on the continent south of the Skeena. I am perfectly aware that I
may be accused of belonging to the Ananias Club when I say that certain
of the smaller streams in Vancouver Island (and also in northern British
Columbia) are at certain seasons of the year so choked with salmon
that they can be, _and are_, speared with a pitchfork, and that ruffed
grouse and Chinese pheasants are so plentiful and tame that they can be
knocked over with a long-handled shovel. It’s true, just the same. We
didn’t pitchfork any salmon ourselves, because it isn’t our conception
of sport, but we saw natives tossing them out of a stream north of
Alberni as unconcernedly as though they were pitchforking hay. Nor did
we assassinate any game-birds with a shovel; but more than once, during
the run from Nanoose Bay to Great Central Lake, we had to swerve aside to
avoid running down grouse, which were so tame that a Plymouth Rock would
be wild in comparison; and once, near Cameron Lake, we actually did run
over the trailing tail-feathers of a gorgeous Chinese cock pheasant that
insolently refused to get off the road.
Alberni and its bigger, busier sister, Port Alberni, occupy the
anomalous position of being in the middle of the island and at the same
time on its western coast. If you will take the trouble to look at the
map you will see that the arm of the sea called Barclay Sound reaches
into the very heart of the island, thus permitting deep-sea merchantmen
to tie up at Port Alberni’s wharfs and take aboard cargoes of lumber and
dried salmon. Alberni was one of the places that I should have liked to
linger in, so peaceful and easy-going is its Old-World atmosphere as
it dozes the sunny days away, the soft salt breath of the sea mingling
with the balsamic fragrance of the forest which surrounds it. Because
it is so comparatively little visited, and because the waters of the
sound are famous for their salmon runs, we expected that we would have
an opportunity to bend our rods off Alberni, but we were met with
disappointment, for the salmon with which these waters swarm were, for
strictly domestic reasons, not biting at the time we were there. So we
kept on to Great Central Lake, a dozen miles north of Alberni, through
the forest.
[Illustration: The Ark, on Great Central Lake. “Like its prototype of
Noah’s day, it is a floating caravansary.”
A wolverine caught in a trap in the forest at the northern end of
Vancouver Island.
SPORT ON VANCOUVER ISLAND.]
Even though you do not know a trout from a turbot, a fly from a spoon;
even though some of the finest scenery in the three Americas could not
elicit an “Oh!” of admiration or an “Ah!” of pleasure, I hope that some
day you will visit Great Central Lake, if for no other reason than to
experience the novelty of spending a night in its extraordinary hotel.
It is called The Ark, and, like its prototype of Noah’s day, it is a
floating caravansary. Briefly, it is a hotel of twenty bedrooms built on
a raft anchored in the lake. When the fishing becomes indifferent in the
neighbourhood, the proprietor hoists his anchors, starts up the engines
of his launch, and tows his floating hotel elsewhere. The fish have a
hard time keeping away from it, for it pursues them remorselessly. It
is patronised in the main by that world-wide brotherhood whose members
believe that no place is too remote or too difficult of access if their
journey is rewarded by the thrill of a six-pound trout on an eight-ounce
rod or by glimpsing a bighorn or a bear along a rifle barrel. For that
reason one is quite likely to run across some very interesting people at
The Ark. While we were there a party of English notabilities arrived.
There were the Earl of Something-or-Other and his beautiful daughter,
Lady Marjorie What’s-her-Name, and a cousin, the Honourable So-and-So,
and the earl’s mine manager, and one or two others. Now there isn’t
anything very remarkable about meeting British nobility in the Colonies,
for nowadays you find earls and marquises and dukes floating around
everywhere. In fact, as Mark Twain once remarked of decorations, you
can’t escape them. The remarkable thing about this particular party was
that they had tramped overland from the extreme northern end of the
island, where some mining properties in which the earl was interested
are situated, through unmapped and almost unknown forests, sleeping in
the open with no covering save the blankets they carried on their backs,
and with the Lady Marjorie for their cook. She was as slim and trim and
pretty a girl as one could ask for, and, with her curly hair creeping out
from under her soft hat, her Norfolk jacket snugly belted to her lissom
figure, her smartly cut knickerbockers and her leather stockings, she
might have stepped out of one of those novels by the Williamsons.
* * * * *
The chief factor in the colonisation of British Columbia and in the
development of its resources is the remarkable railway expansion which is
now taking place. No region in the world has witnessed such extraordinary
progress in railway construction during the past five years. Until the
spring of 1914 the “C. P. R.,” as the Canadian Pacific is commonly called
throughout the Dominion, enjoyed a monopoly of freight and passenger
transportation in the province, being scarcely less autocratic in its
attitude and methods than the Standard Oil Company before it was curbed
by Federal legislation. But when, early in 1914, the last rail of the
Grand Trunk Pacific was laid in the vicinity of Fort George and the last
spike driven, the “C. P. R.” suddenly found its hitherto undisputed
supremacy challenged by a rich, powerful, and splendidly equipped system,
which, owing to its more northerly route and easier gradients, is able
to make considerably faster running time from ocean to ocean than its
long-established rival. Moreover, another great transcontinental system,
the Canadian Northern, is already in partial operation and is rapidly
nearing completion, while the construction gangs have begun work on the
Pacific Great Eastern, a subsidiary of the Grand Trunk Pacific, over
whose rails the latter plans to reach tide-water at Vancouver, thus
invading territory which the Canadian Pacific has heretofore regarded as
peculiarly its own. In another year or so, therefore, British Columbia
will not only have a more complete railway system than either Washington
or Oregon, but it will be the terminus of three great transcontinental
systems, each of which will run from tide-water to tide-water, under the
same management and the same name.
If you will glance at the map at the back of this volume you will see
that the railway systems of British Columbia roughly resemble a gigantic
Z. The lower right-hand corner of the Z represents Kicking Horse Pass,
near Lake Louise, where the Canadian Pacific crosses the Rockies; the
lower left-hand corner may stand for Vancouver, which is the terminus
of the Canadian Pacific, the Canadian Northern, and the Pacific Great
Eastern; the upper right-hand corner of the Z we will designate as
Yellowhead (or Tête Jaune) Pass, where both the Grand Trunk Pacific and
the Canadian Northern cross the Rockies; while the upper left-hand corner
is the great terminal port which the Grand Trunk Pacific has built to
order at Prince Rupert. The lower bar of the Z approximately represents
the Canadian Pacific, the upper bar the Grand Trunk Pacific, and the
diagonal the Canadian Northern.
The main line of the Canadian Pacific enters the province at Kicking
Horse Pass and, dropping southward in a series of sweeping curves,
strikes the Fraser at Lytton and hugs its northern bank to Vancouver.
From the main line numerous branches straggle southward to the American
border, thus giving access to the rich country lying between the Kootenai
and the Okanogan. Entering British Columbia far to the northward, through
the Tête Jaune Pass, where the mountains are much lower, the Canadian
Northern lays its course southwestward in almost a straight line,
crossing the Thompson just above its junction with the Fraser and thence
paralleling the Canadian Pacific through the cañon of the Fraser, though
on the opposite side of the river, to Vancouver. The Canadian Northern
is, I might add, spending a large sum in the construction of railway
shops and yards at Port Mann, a place which it is building to order
amid the virgin forest, a few miles east of New Westminster. The Grand
Trunk Pacific likewise uses the Tête Jaune Pass as a gateway. Instead of
turning southward after crossing the mountains, however, it swings far
to the north, following the east fork of the Fraser to Fort George and
thence up the level and fertile valleys of the Nechako and the Bulkley
to New Hazelton and so down the Skeena to Prince Rupert. Recognising
the necessity of having a means of direct access to Vancouver, which
is the metropolis of western Canada, the Grand Trunk Pacific now has
under construction a subsidiary system, to be known as the Pacific Great
Eastern, which, leaving the main line at Fort George, will follow the
Fraser due southward to Lillooet and then strike directly across a virgin
country to Vancouver, thus giving the Grand Trunk Pacific two west-coast
terminals instead of one. The Grand Trunk Pacific engineers have also
drawn plans for a line running due north from New Hazelton toward the
Yukon, which would throw open to exploitation the rich coal-fields of the
Groundhog and the fertile prairies of northernmost British Columbia, the
idea being, of course, to ultimately effect a junction with the proposed
Federal railway in Alaska, thus bringing Alaska into direct railway
communication with the outside world.
[Illustration: Indians breaking camp.
Mr. Powell arriving at a frontier hotel in the Nechako country.
An Indian bridge near New Hazelton.
LIFE AT THE BACK OF BEYOND.]
Though enormously rich in timber and ore, Vancouver Island has not yet
had its share of railway expansion, its only system of transportation at
present being the Esquimault & Nanaimo Railway, which runs from Victoria
to Alberni, in the heart of the island. The Canadian Northern, however,
proposes to build a line from Victoria half-way up the west coast of the
island, while the Grand Trunk Pacific, going its rival one better, has
obtained a concession for building a railway from one end of the island
to the other, thus opening up its enormously rich fisheries, mines, and
forests. With this era of railway expansion immediately before them, it
seems to me that the British Columbians are quite justified in looking at
the future through rose-coloured glasses.
[Illustration: The bull train: the last on the continent.
The dog train: taking in supplies to the miners of the Groundhog
coal-fields.
TRANSPORT ON AMERICA’S LAST FRONTIER.]
Consider the cities, how they grow—Prince Rupert, for example. A city
literally made to order, just as a tailor would make a suit of clothes,
is something of a novelty even in an age which jeers at precedent and
slaps tradition in the face. “Rome was not built in a day,” but that
was because it had no transcontinental railway system to finance and
superintend and push forward its construction. If a Gaul, Transalpine,
& Pompeian Railway had been in operation, and its directors knew their
business, they would have turned loose their engineers, architects, and
builders and, after staking out and draining a town site beside the
Tiberian marshes, they would have run up the Eternal City and auctioned
off the building lots along the Via Appia as expeditiously as the Grand
Trunk Pacific Railway has brought into being the west-coast terminus
which it has named Prince Rupert after that adventurous Palatine prince,
nephew of Charles I, who was in turn a cavalry leader, a naval commander,
and the first governor of the Hudson Bay Company. Unless your family
atlas is of recent vintage (and I have regretfully observed that most
of them were purchased at about the period of Stanley’s explorations)
you will search it in vain for Prince Rupert, for this custom-made
municipality came into existence about the same time as the tango and
the turkey-trot. The easiest way to locate it, then, is to trace with
your finger parallel 54° 40′ North (the slogan “Fifty-four forty or
fight!” you will recall, once nearly brought on a war with England)
until it reaches the Pacific Coast of North America. There, five hundred
and fifty miles north of Vancouver, forty miles south of the Alaskan
border, on Kai-en Island, at the mouth of the Skeena River, set on a
range of hills overlooking one of the finest deep-water harbours in
the world, is Prince Rupert. It is in the same latitude as London and
has a wet and foggy climate which cannot fail to make a Londoner feel
very much at home. Probably never before have there been so much time
and money expended in the planning and preliminary work of a new city.
The town site was chosen only after a careful inspection of the entire
British Columbia coast-line and was laid out by a famous firm of Boston
landscape engineers with the same attention to detail which they would
have given to laying out a great estate. Experts who have studied the
plan on which Prince Rupert is built assert that in time it will be one
of the most beautiful cities on the continent. The site is a picturesque
one, for, from the six-mile-long shore-line which sweeps around the front
of the city, the ground rises abruptly, so that on clear days—which,
by the way, are far from common—a magnificent view may be had from the
heights of the forested and fiord-indented coast, of the island-studded
channel, of the Indian village of Metlakatla, known as the “Holy City,”
and, on rare occasions, of the mountains of Alaska. Unless one is
conversant with the development of the Pacific Coast; unless one has
seen its seaports—Victoria, Vancouver, Seattle, Tacoma, San Pedro, San
Diego—spring into being almost overnight, one cannot fully realise the
possibilities and potentialities of this new city with the unfamiliar
name. To begin with, the distance from Liverpool to Yokohama by way of
Prince Rupert is eight hundred miles shorter than via New York and San
Francisco; it is five hundred miles nearer the Orient than any other
Pacific port. Nothing illustrates more graphically the strategic value
of its position than the fact that a traveller bound, say, for New York
from China, Japan, or Alaska can board a train at Prince Rupert and be
as far as Winnipeg, or virtually half across the continent, before the
steamer from which he disembarked could reach Vancouver. In addition to
the shorter distance across the Pacific must be added the much faster
time that can be made by rail over the practically level grades (four
tenths of one per cent) that the Grand Trunk Pacific has obtained through
the lower mountains to the north, which will enable trains to be moved at
the rate of two miles for every one mile on the heavier grades of rival
systems. What is most important of all, however, Prince Rupert has at its
back probably the potentially richest hinterland in the world—a veritable
commercial empire waiting to be explored, developed, and exploited. The
mineral wealth of all this vast region, the forest products, the gold,
the coal, the copper, the iron ore of northern British Columbia and the
Yukon, the food products of the prairie provinces, and the fish and
fur of the far North—in short, all the westbound export wealth of this
resourceful region—will find its outlet to the sea at Prince Rupert as
surely and as true to natural laws as its rivers empty into the Pacific.
[Illustration: The pack-train: crossing the prairies of northern British
Columbia.
The wagon-train: a settler on his way into the interior over the Cariboo
Trail.
TRANSPORT ON AMERICA’S LAST FRONTIER.]
You of the sheltered life: you, Mr. Bank President, you, Mr. Lawyer,
you, Mr. Business Man, you, Mr. Tourist, who travel in Pullman cars
and sleep in palatial hostelries, have you any real conception of the
breed of men who are conquering this wilderness, who are laying these
railways, who are building these cities, who are making these new
markets and new playgrounds for you and me? Some of them have saved and
scrimped for years that they might be able to buy a ticket from the
Middle West, or from the English shires, or from the Rhine banks to this
beckoning, primeval, promiseful land. Others, taking their families and
their household belongings with them, have trekked overland by wagon,
just as their grandfathers did before them for the taking of the West,
trudging in the dust beside the weary horses, cooking over camp-fires in
the forest or on the open prairie, sleeping, rolled in their blankets,
under the stars. Some there are who have come overland from the Yukon,
on snowshoes, mayhap; their pitifully meagre possessions on their back,
living on the food which they killed, their only sign-posts the endless
line of wire-draped poles. There are the engineers, who, mocking at the
hostility of the countenance which this savage, untamed land turns toward
them, are pushing forward and ever forward their twin lines of steel,
cutting their way through well-nigh impenetrable forests, throwing their
spider spans across angry rivers and forbidding gorges, running their
levels and laying their rails and driving their spikes oblivious to
torrential rains or blinding snows, to blistering heat or freezing cold.
Then, too, there are the silent, efficient, quick-witted men who have
maintained law and order through the length and breadth of this great
province—travelling on duty through its wildest parts, amid dangers
and privations without end, at one time deep in the snows of the far
Nor’west, at others making their hazardous way on horseback along the
brink of precipices which make one sick and dizzy to look down; swimming
rapid rivers holding to the tails of their horses or journeying over the
frozen lands with teams of dogs; one month in the mining camps on the
uppermost reaches of the Fraser and the next carrying the fear of the law
to the wild tribes of the Kootenai. Such are the men who, in Britain’s
westernmost outpost, are clinching down the rivets of empire.
XIV
BACK OF BEYOND
“I hear the tread of pioneers,
Of millions yet to be;
The first low wash of waves where soon
Shall roll a human sea.
The elements of empire here
Are plastic yet and warm,
The chaos of a mighty world
Is rounding into form.”
XIV
BACK OF BEYOND
Most people—and by that I mean nine hundred and ninety-eight in every
thousand—have come to believe quite positively that, on this continent
at least, there is no longer any region that can truthfully be called
“The Frontier.” Therein they are wrong. Because the municipality of
Tombstone has applied to the Arizona Legislature for permission to change
its name, because the cow-puncher is abandoning the range for the more
lucrative occupation of cavorting before a moving-picture camera, because
the roulette ball clicks no longer behind open doors in any Western town
is no proof that the frontier is no more. As a matter of fact, it has
only been pushed back. There still exists a real frontier, all wool and
eight hundred miles wide, together with all the orthodox concomitants of
cowboys, Concord coaches, log cabins, prairie-schooners, pack-trains,
trappers, grizzly bears, and Indians. But it won’t last much longer.
This is the last call. If you would see this stage of nation building
in all its thrilling realism and picturesqueness you have need to
hurry. A few more years—half a dozen at the most—and store clothes will
replace the _chaparejos_ and sombreros; the mail-sacks, instead of being
carried in the boots of stage-coaches, will be flung from the doors of
flying trains; the motor-car will supplant the prairie-schooner and the
pack-train.
Answer me, now. If, at a moderate outlay of time, money, and exertion,
you could visit a region as untamed and colourful as was the country
beyond the Pecos forty years back and peopled by the hardiest breed of
adventurers that ever foreran the columns of civilisation, would you
give up for a time the comforts of the sheltered life and go? You would?
I hoped so. Get out the atlas, then, from its dusty place of exile and
open it to the map of North America that I may show you the way. In
the upper left-hand corner, stretching its scarlet bulk across eleven
degrees of printed latitude, is British Columbia, whose central and
northern portions contain thousands upon thousands of square miles that
have never felt the pressure of a white man’s foot or echoed to a white
man’s voice. Here is the last of the “Last West”; here the frontier
is making its final stand; here, fighting the battles and solving the
problems of civilisation, are to be found the survivors of that race of
rugged adventurers, now almost extinct, who replaced the forest with the
wheat-field—the Pioneers.
There are several routes by which one can reach the interior of the
province: from the made-to-order seaport of Prince Rupert up the
Skeena by railway to New Hazelton and Fort Fraser, for example; or
down the South Fork of the Fraser by river steamer from Tête Jaune
Cache to Fort George; or from the country of the Kootenai overland
through the Okanogan and Lillooet. These, however, are obscure side
entrances and more or less difficult of access. The front door to the
hinterland, and the logical way to enter it, is by way of Ashcroft, a
one-street-two-hotels-and-eight-saloons town on the main line of the
Canadian Pacific, eight hours east of Vancouver as the _Imperial Limited_
goes. At Ashcroft, which is the principal outfitting point for all this
region, begins the historic highway known as the Cariboo Trail, by which
you can travel northward—provided you are able to get a seat in the
crowded stages—until civilisation sits down to rest and the wilderness
begins.
What the Wells-Fargo Company, with its comprehensive system of mail,
passenger, and freight services, was to our own West in the days before
the railway came, the British Columbia Express Company, commonly known as
the “B. C. X.,” is to that vast region which is watered by the Fraser.
Nowhere that I can recall has travelling through a wild and mountainous
country been reduced to such a science. Although the company operates
upward of a thousand miles of stage lines, along which are distributed
more than three hundred horses at relay stations approximately sixteen
miles apart, its coaches, in spite of blizzards, torrential rains, and
ofttimes incredibly atrocious roads, maintain their schedules with the
rigidity of mail-trains. The company’s equipment is as complete in its
way as that of a great railway system, its rolling stock consisting
of everything from a two-horse thorough-brace “jerky” to a six-horse
Concord stage, to say nothing of automobiles and sleighs. In conjunction
with its system of vehicular transportation it operates a service of
river steamers, specially constructed for running the rapids, upon the
Upper Fraser and the Nechako.
The backbone of the “B. C. X.” system, and, indeed, of all transportation
in the British Columbian hinterland, is the Cariboo Trail, a government
post-road, three hundred miles long, which was built by the Royal
Engineers in the early sixties as a result of the rush to the gold-fields
on Williams Creek. Starting from Ashcroft, it runs due north for two
hundred and twenty miles to Quesnel, on the Upper Fraser, where it
abruptly turns westward and continues to its terminus at Barkerville,
once a famous mining-camp but now a quiet agricultural community in the
heart of the Cariboo. Scattered along the trail, at intervals of fifteen
miles or so, are rest-houses where the wayfarer can obtain surprisingly
well-cooked meals at a uniform charge of six bits—a “bit,” I might
explain for the benefit of the Eastern chechako, being equivalent to
twelve and a half cents. For the same price the traveller can get a clean
and moderately soft bed, although he must accept it as part and parcel
of frontier life should he find that the room to which he is assigned
already contains half a dozen snoring occupants. These rest-houses,
which, with their out-buildings, stables, and corrals, are built entirely
of logs, are often liberally coated with whitewash and occasionally
surrounded by stockades and constantly reminded me of the post stations
which marked the end of a day’s journey on the Great Siberian Road before
Prince Orloff and his railway builders came. During the summer months
the “up journey” of three hundred and twenty miles from Ashcroft to Fort
George is performed by a conjoined service of motor-cars, stage-coaches,
and river boats, and, if the roads are dry, is made in about four days.
As a one-way ticket costs sixty-five dollars, exclusive of meals, the
fare works out at a trifle over twenty cents a mile, thus making it
one of the most expensive journeys of its length in the world, being
even costlier, if I remember rightly, than the one by the Abyssinian
railway from Djibuti to Deré Dawa. It is worth every last penny of the
fare, however, for there is about it a novelty, a picturesqueness, an
excitement, which cannot be duplicated on this continent. From the moment
that you set your foot on the hub of the stage-coach in Ashcroft until
your steamer slips out of Prince Rupert Harbour, southward bound, you are
seeing with your own eyes, instead of through the unconvincing mediums
of the Western novel and the moving-picture screen, a nation in the
cellar-digging stage of its existence; you are transported for a brief
time to the Epoch of the Dawn.
In anticipation of the atrocious roads which we expected to encounter,
I had had the car fitted with shock-absorbers and had brought with me
from Vancouver an entire extra set of springs, and at Ashcroft we
selected an equipment with as great care as though we were starting on
an East African _safari_. A pick, a long-handled shovel, a pair of axes,
a block and tackle, four spare tires, and a dozen inner tubes comprised
the essentials of our outfit, to which was added at Quesnel a supply of
tinned foods, a small shelter tent, a set of rubber sheets, and three
of the largest-size Hudson Bay blankets. It’s a costly business, this
motoring in lands where motors have never gone before. The most important
thing of all, of course, is the gasoline, the entire success of our
venture depending upon our ability to carry a sufficient supply with
us to get us through the six hundred miles of uninhabited wilderness
between Quesnel and the Skeena. By reducing our personal belongings
to a minimum, we succeeded in getting eight five-gallon tins into the
tonneau of the car, in addition to the twenty gallons in the tank, thus
giving us a total of sixty gallons, which, theoretically at least, should
have sufficed us. As a matter of fact, it did not suffice to carry
us half-way to the Skeena, so slow was the going and so terrible the
condition of the road, and, had I not been so fortunate as to obtain an
order from a British development company on its agents at several points
in the interior, instructing them to supply us with gasoline from some
drums which had been taken in at enormous expense a year or so before
in a futile attempt to establish an automobile service, we should have
been compelled to abandon the car in the wilderness for lack of fuel.
Gasoline, like everything else, is expensive in the interior: at Ashcroft
I paid fifty cents a gallon, at Quesnel a dollar, and thereafter, until
we reached the end of steel at Moricetown, two dollars a gallon—which,
so I was assured, was exactly what it had cost the company to freight
it in. Briefly, our plan was this: to start from Ashcroft, a station on
the Canadian Pacific, two hundred miles from the coast, and follow the
Cariboo Trail northward to Quesnel, thence striking through the unsettled
and almost unexplored wilderness which reaches from the Fraser to the
Skeena, following the Yukon Telegraph Trail through Fort Fraser to New
Hazleton, on the Skeena, which is barely half a hundred miles south of
the Alaskan border. I asked every one I met in Ashcroft as to our chances
of getting through, and the more people to whom I talked the slimmer they
seemed to become.
One man assured us that there was no road whatever north of Fort Fraser
and that, if we wanted to get through, we would have to take the car
apart and pack it in on the backs of horses, as an automobile agent from
Seattle had done the year before; another told us that there were no
bridges and that we would be compelled to hire Siwash Indians to make
rafts to ferry us across the streams; still a third cheered us up by
assuring us that we could always get a team to haul us out.
“An eight-horse swing ought to haul you out in a fortnight,” he remarked
cheeringly.
“What would it cost?” I inquired.
“Oh,” he answered, “if you’re a good hand at bargaining you ought to get
the outfit for about a hundred dollars a day.”
That cheered us up tremendously, of course.
We started from Ashcroft early on an autumn morning. The air was like
sparkling Moselle, overhead was a sky of wash-tub blue, and before us the
gray ribbon of the Cariboo Trail stretched away, between dun and barren
hills, into the unknown. The entire population of the little town had
turned out to see us off, and as we moved away, with the long, low bonnet
of the car pointed northward, they gave us a cheer and shouted after
us, “Hope you’ll get through, fellows!” and “Good luck!” Before we left
Seattle I had bought a little silk American flag, and this we flew from
a metal rod at the front of the hood, and more than once, when we were
mired in the mud below the Nechako, and were utterly exhausted and ready
to quit, it was the sight of that bit of tricoloured bunting fluttering
bravely before us which spurred us on.
Were the Cariboo Trail in certain of the Eastern States it would be
described by the natives as “a fair to middlin’ road,” and it is all
of that and more—in the dry season. When we traversed it, in the early
fall, it had not yet been rutted by the torrential autumn rains and heavy
teaming and was as good a road as an automobile pioneer could ask for.
In that journey up the Cariboo Trail were concentrated all the glamour
and colour and panorama of that strange, wild border life which most
people think of as having passed with the pony express and the buffalo.
A stage-coach rattled past amid a rolling cloud of dust, its scarlet
body lurching and swaying on its leathern springs, its four horses
at a spanking trot, the driver cracking his whip-lash spasmodically
between the ears of his leaders, for he carried his Majesty’s mails and
must make his six miles an hour, hour in and hour out. Like a gigantic
boa-constrictor, a pack-train wound slowly past, the burdened mules
plodding by dejectedly, long ears to shaven tails. Scattered along the
line, like mounted officers beside a marching column, were the packers:
wiry, iron-hard fellows, their faces sun tanned to the colour of their
saddles; picturesque figures in their goatskin _chaparejos_, their vivid
neckerchiefs, and their broad-brimmed, rakish hats. Where they were bound
for, Heaven only knows: with supplies for the operators of the Yukon
Telegraph, perhaps, or the miners of the Groundhog, or, it might be, for
the lonely trading-posts on Great Slave Lake and the headwaters of the
Liard and the Peace. In the pack-train’s dusty wake would plod a solitary
prospector, dog dirty, his buckskin shirt glazed with grime, his tent,
pick, shovel, and his meagre store of food loaded upon a single patient
donkey. Occasionally we passed some Sguswap and Siwash ranchers—for the
Indian of British Columbia takes more kindly to an agricultural life than
do his brothers on the American side of the border—gaily clad squaws
and bright-eyed children peering curiously at our strange vehicle from
beneath the canvas covers of the wagons, driving into the settlements to
barter the produce of their holdings in the back country for cartridges,
red blankets, ginger ale, perhaps a phonograph.
But oftenest of all we met the freighters, their six and eight and twelve
horse teams straining at the huge, creaking, white-topped wagons—the
freight trains of the railroadless frontier. Though they bear a marked
resemblance to the prairie-schooners of crossing-the-plains days, the
British Columbian freight wagons are barely half as large as the enormous
scow-bodied vehicles in which the American pioneers trekked westward.
Their inferior carrying capacity is compensated for, however, by the
custom of linking them in pairs, experience having proven that to attempt
to negotiate the hairpin turns in the mountain roads with vehicles having
an unusually long wheel-base is but to invite disaster. In freighting
parlance, five wagons with their teams are called a “swing,” the drivers
are known as “skinners,” and the man in charge of the outfit is the
“swing boss.” To meet one of these wagon-trains on a road that was
uncomfortably narrow at the best and frequently bordered by a sheer cliff
was not a pleasant business, for, according to law, the freighter is
always permitted to take the inside of the road, so that more than once
we were compelled to pull so far to the outside, in order to give the
huge vehicles space to get by, that there was not room between our outer
wheels and the precipice’s brink for a starved greyhound to pass.
The deeper into the wilderness you push, the more infrequent become the
mails, until, north of the Fraser, the settlers receive their letters
and newspapers only once a month during the summer and frequently not for
many months on end when the rains have turned the trails into impassable
morasses. When we left Quesnel for Fort Fraser the mail was already two
weeks overdue, and the roads were in such terrible condition that the
driver of the mail-stage would not even hazard a guess as to when he
could start. At frequent intervals along the way men were camping in the
rain-soaked brush beside the road, with no protection save the scant
shelter afforded by a dog-tent or a bit of canvas stretched between two
trees. At the sound of our approach they would run out and hail us and
inquire eagerly as to whether we could tell them when the mail was likely
to be along. These men were settlers whose ranches lay far back in the
wilderness, and they had been waiting patiently beside that road for many
days, straining their ears to catch the rattle of the wheels which would
bring them word from the loved ones at home. One of them, a clean-cut,
clear-eyed young Englishman, who was camping beside the road in a little
shelter tent, told us that he had been there for fifteen days waiting for
the postman.
“I’ve got a little ranch about thirty miles back,” he explained, “and I
was so afraid that I might miss the mail that I tramped out and have been
sleeping here by the roadside waiting for it. My wife and the kiddies
are back in the old country, in Devonshire, waiting until I can get a
home for them out here. I haven’t had a letter from them now for going
on seven weeks. The last one that I had told me that my little girl was
sick, and I’m pretty anxious about her. It’s bad news that the coach
hasn’t started yet. I guess the only thing to do is to keep on waiting.”
To such men as these I lift my hat in respect and admiration. Resolute,
patient, persevering, facing with stout hearts and smiling lips all the
hardships and discouragements that such a life has to bring, they are
the real advance-guards of progress, the skirmishers of civilisation. In
Rhodesia, the Sudan, West Africa, New Zealand, Australia, Canada you find
them, wherever the flag of England flies, clamping down the rivets of
empire.
A great deal has been written about the brand of Englishman who goes by
the name of remittance-man. With a few pounds a month to go to the devil
on, he haunts the highways and byways of the newer lands, working when he
must, idling when he may. In Cape Town, Bulawayo, Johannesburg, Sydney,
Melbourne, Calgary you will find him, hanging over the polished bars,
or, if his remittances permit, in the local clubs. As his long-suffering
relatives generally send him as far from home as they can buy a ticket,
he has become a familiar figure in the western provinces of the Dominion
and particularly along the Pacific Coast. Dressed in well-cut tweeds or
flannels and smoking the inevitable brier, you can see him at almost any
hour of any day strolling aimlessly about the corridors of the Empress
Hotel in Victoria or dawdling about the Union Club. But you rarely
find him in the British Columbian bush. The atmosphere—and by this I
do not mean the climate—is uncongenial, for “he ain’t a worker” and in
consequence is cordially detested by the native-born no less than by
those industrious settlers whose mail from home brings them no monthly
cheques. In that country, if a man does not go out to his labour in
the morning he is counted an undesirable addition to the population.
Hence, though the hinterland is filled with the discards of the pack,
comparatively few of them bear the despised label of remittance-man.
[Illustration: A meeting of the old and the new.
“The freight trains of the railroadless frontier.”
“The rest-houses are built entirely of logs and occasionally surrounded
by stockades.”
SCENES ON THE CARIBOO TRAIL.]
But that is not saying that you do not find numbers of well-bred,
well-educated young Englishmen chopping out careers for themselves up
there in the forests of the North. We came across two such at a desolate
and lonely ranch midway between Quesnel and Blackwater, three hundred
miles from the nearest railway and thirty from the nearest house. We
stopped at their little cabin and asked for lunch, and they welcomed
us as they would a certified cheque. One of them, I learned after
considerable questioning, was the nephew of an earl and had stroked an
Oxford crew; the other, with a diffidence that was delightful, showed me
the picture of a rambling, ivy-covered manor-house in Hampshire which he
called home, and remarked quite casually that he had been something of
a cricketer before he came out to the Colonies and had played for the
Gentlemen of England. Yet here were these two youngsters, gently born
and cleanly bred, “pigging it,” as they themselves expressed it, in a
one-room cabin up here at the Back of Beyond. Good Heavens! how glad
they were to see us—not for our own sakes, you understand, but because
we were messengers from that great, gay world from which they had exiled
themselves. While one of them pared the potatoes, the other fried the
bacon—“sow-belly” they called it—in ill-smelling cottolene, and both of
them fired questions at us like shots from an automatic: what were the
newest plays, the latest songs, how long since I had been in London, was
the chorus at the Gaiety as good-looking as it used to be, was Winston
Churchill really making good in the cabinet or was he just a bally ass,
did we think that there was anything to this talk about the Ulstermen
revolting—and all the other questions that homesick exiles ask.
“What on earth induces you to stay on in this God-forsaken place?” I
asked, when at length they paused in their questioning for lack of
breath. “No neighbours, no theatres, no amusements, mails once a month
if you are lucky, rain six months out of the twelve, and snow for four
months more. Why don’t you try some place nearer civilisation? You can’t
do much more than make a bare living up here, and a pretty poor one at
that, eh?”
“Well,” said one of them apologetically, “we do a lot better up here than
you’d think. Why, last season we cut a hundred tons of hay and this year,
now that we’ve cleared some more land, we’ll probably get a hundred and
fifty.”
“A hundred tons of hay!” I exclaimed, with pity in my voice. “Heavens
alive, man, what does that amount to?”
“It amounted to something over ten thousand dollars,” he answered. “Up
here, you see, hay is a pretty profitable crop—it sells for a hundred
dollars a ton. Besides, we like the life jolly well. It’s a bit lonely,
of course, but we’re fond of the open and there’s all sort of fishin’ and
shootin’—there’s a skin of a grizzly that I killed last week tacked up
at the back of the house. And,” he added, with a hint of embarrassment,
“this life is a lot more worth while than loafin’ around London and doin’
the society-Johnnie act. We feel, y’ know, as though we were doin’ a bit
toward buildin’ up the country—sort of bally pioneers.”
Though they probably didn’t know it, those two young fellows in flannel
shirts and cord breeches, who had evidently left England because they
were tired of living _à la métronome_, because they had wearied of
garden-parties and club windows and the family pew, were members in good
standing of the Brotherhood of Nation Builders.
Though we had started from Quesnel with sixty gallons of gasoline, the
going had been so heavy that by the time we reached the telegraph hut
at Bobtail Lake, where the development company of which I have already
spoken had left the first of its drums of gasoline, our supply was
seriously diminished. These relay telegraph stations are scattered at
intervals of fifty miles or so along that single strand of copper wire,
two thousand miles long, which connects Dawson City with Vancouver. Many
of them are so remotely situated that the only time the operators see
a white man’s face or hear a white man’s voice is when the semiannual
pack-train brings them their supplies in the spring and fall. I can
conceive of no more intolerable existence than the lives led by these
men, sitting at deal tables within the lithograph-covered walls of their
log cabins, with no neighbours, no amusements, nothing under the sun
to do save listen to the ceaseless chatter of a telegraph instrument,
day after day, week after week, month after month the same. Imagine the
monotony of it! There were two young men at the Bobtail Lake hut, an
operator and a linesman, and when they saw the little flag of stripes and
stars fluttering from the bonnet of the car they waved their hats and
cheered madly. To you who lead sheltered lives in offices or factories
or stores, the flag may be nothing more than a bit of red-white-and-blue
bunting, but to those who live in the earth’s far corners, where it is
rarely seen, it stands for home and country and family and friends, and
is reverenced accordingly.
“It seems darned good to see the old flag again,” one of the young men
remarked a trifle huskily. “This is the first time I’ve laid eyes on
it in more’n two years. When we heard you coming through the woods we
thought we must be dreaming. We never expected to see an automobile up in
this God-forsaken hole.”
“You’re not a Canadian, then?” I asked.
“Not on your tintype. I’m from Tennessee. Used to be a train-despatcher
down in Texas, got tired of living in a box car with no trees but
sage-brush and no neighbours but coyotes, so I wandered up here. And
believe me, I wish I was back in God’s country again.”
That night we spent at a ranch on the Blackwater. The English owner and
his wife were absent in Vancouver, but the ranch hand in charge of the
place was only too willing to play the part of host. The ranch-house,
though built of logs, for up there there is nothing else to build with,
was considerably more pretentious than the general run of frontier
dwellings. Instead of the customary kitchen-living-dining-sleeping room,
it had a comfortable living-room with a hospitable stone fireplace and
the floor thickly strewn with bearskins, and two sleeping rooms, while
in front, in pathetic imitation of some old-country garden, was a tiny
plat set out to fuchsias and mignonette and geraniums and surrounded
by an attempt at a picket fence. The floor of the house was of planks
hand-hewn; cedar poles laid lengthwise and covered with shakes and sod
formed a roof impervious to snow or rain; the chinks in the log walls
were stuffed with moss and clay and papered over with illustrations torn
from the London weeklies. Like nearly all of the houses that we saw in
the interior of the province, its furniture was crude and obviously
home-made, with benches instead of chairs, for the freighters, who
charge thirty cents a pound for hauling merchandise in from the railway,
refuse to bother with anything so unprofitable as chairs, which require
space out of all proportion to their weight. Lying on the table in the
living-room, atop of a heap of year-old newspapers and magazines (for
in the north country printed matter of any description is something to
be read and reread and then read once again before it is passed on to a
neighbour) were two much-thumbed volumes. I picked them up, for I was
curious to see what sort of literature would appeal to people who lived
their lives in such a place. One was the “Discourses of Epictetus,”
the other “Manners and Social Usages”—with a book-mark at the chapter
entitled “The Etiquette of Visiting Cards”! And the nearest neighbour, a
Swedish rancher with a Siwash wife, lived fifty miles away.
If the food at Blackwater had been as good as the house, or only half as
good, there would have been little left to be desired. The ranch hand
who was in charge of the place and who did the cooking—he vouchsafed
the information that he had been a British soldier in India before
coming to Canada to seek his fortune and wished to God that he was
back in India again—made it a point, so he told us, to bake enough
soda-biscuits the first of every month to last until the next month came
round. As we were there about the twenty-eighth, the biscuits were quite
hard—like dog-biscuits, only not so appetising. Then we had a platter
of “sow-belly” swimming in an ocean of rancid grease; stone-cold boiled
potatoes, a pan of the inevitable stewed prunes, and mugs of evil-looking
coffee, which was really chicory in disguise. But what would you? This
was not Fifth Avenue; this was the Frontier.
I was particularly impressed throughout our journey across British
Columbia with the almost paternal interest the provincial government
takes in the welfare of the settlers. On trees and buildings everywhere
are posted crown-surmounted notices relating to everything from the
filing of homestead claims to the prevention of forest-fires. Rest-houses
are maintained by the government along certain of the less-travelled
routes; new roads are being cut through the wilderness in every
direction; forest-rangers and agricultural experts are constantly
riding about the province with open eyes and ears; in every settlement
is stationed a government agent from whom the settlers can obtain
information and advice on every subject under the sun. Law and order
prevail to an extraordinary degree. I was told that there are only
three police constables between Ashcroft and Fort George, a distance of
more than three hundred miles—and this in a savage and sparsely settled
country, where a criminal would have comparatively little difficulty
in making his escape. This remarkable absence of crime is due in large
measure, no doubt, to the rigid prohibition of the sale of alcoholic
liquor within a certain distance of a public work, such as the building
of a railway; in fact, the workman is debarred from intoxicants as
rigorously as the Indian. “No drink, no crime,” say the authorities, and
results have shown that they know what they are talking about. Not until
the railway is completed and the construction gangs have moved on are
the saloons permitted to throw open their doors. Although this policy
unquestionably makes for law and order, it is by no means popular with
the workmen, who refuse to consider any place deserving of the name of
town until it has obtained a licence. “Such and such a place is a hell
of a fine town,” I was frequently assured. “They’ve got a saloon there!”
Judged by this standard, Fort George, which is a division point on the
Grand Trunk Pacific, at the junction of the Fraser and Nechako Rivers,
and will unquestionably become in time a second Winnipeg or Calgary, is
a veritable metropolis, for it has considerably more than its share of
gin-palaces and booze joints. The poet has vividly described it in a
single couplet:
“The camp at the bend of the river, with its dozen saloons aglare,
Its gambling dens ariot, its gramophones all ablare.”
It is not surprising, therefore, that Fort George is a Mecca for the dry
of throat, who make bacchanalian pilgrimages from incredible distances
to its bottle-decorated shrines; for if a man is determined to “go on a
jag” no power on earth, not even a journey of a hundred miles or more,
can prevent him from gratifying his desires. Indeed, it is by no means
unusual for a man to work on a ranch or on the railway until he has
accumulated a half year’s wages, and then, throwing up his job, to tramp
a hundred miles through the wilderness to Fort George and blow every
last cent of his hard-earned money in one grand jamboree. What a sudden
falling off in intemperance there would be in a civilised community
if a man had to walk a hundred miles to get a drink! What? Yet this
proscription of alcohol has, in a way, defeated its own object, for the
men, being denied what might be described as legal liquors, resort to
innumerable more or less efficient substitutes. Red ink they will swallow
with avidity, for it contains a good percentage of low-grade alcohol, and
the colour, no doubt, completes the illusion. Another popular refreshment
is lemon extract, such as is commonly used in civilised households for
flavouring jellies and puddings. But the favourite beverage, which is to
all other alcoholic substitutes what vintage champagne is to all other
wines, is a certain patent medicine which contains _eighty per cent of
pure alcohol_. This is as common in the “end-of-steel” towns and the
construction camps as cocktails are in a New York club, both workmen and
Indians pouring it down like water. It is warranted to cure all pains,
and it does, for the man who drinks two bottles of it is dead to the
world for at least a day.
As a result of its popularity with the thirsty ones, Fort George might
truthfully be described as a very lively town. In one of its saloons
twelve white-aproned individuals are constantly on duty behind a bar of
polished oak; behind the cash-register sits a watchful man with a cocked
revolver on his knees; while mingling with the crowd in front of the bar
are three bull-necked, big-bicepsed persons known as the “chuckers-out.”
Instead of throwing a patron who becomes obstreperous into the street,
however, in which case he would stagger to the saloon opposite and get
rid of the balance of his money, he is thrown into the “cooler,” where
he is given an opportunity to sleep off the effects of his debauch,
after which he is ready to start in all over again. As a result of this
ingenious system of conservation, very little money gets away.
These frontier communities have handled the perplexing problem of the
social evil in a novel manner. The bedecked and bedizened women who
follow in the wake of the gold seekers and the construction gangs,
instead of being permitted to flaunt themselves within the town, are
forced to reside in colonies of their own well without the municipal
limits, sometimes half a dozen miles back in the bush. The miner who
wishes to see his light-o’-love is compelled, therefore, to expend a
considerable amount of time and shoe-leather, though I regret to add
that this did not appear to act as a serious deterrent, the deepest-worn
trails that I saw in the Northland being those which led from the
settlements to these colonies of easy virtue.
Shortly after we left Blackwater Ranch it began to rain—not a sudden
shower which comes and drenches and goes, but one of those steady,
disheartening drizzles, which in this region sometimes last for a week.
The road—I call it a road merely for the sake of politeness—which had
been atrocious from the moment we left the Fraser, quickly became worse.
It was composed of the decayed vegetable accumulations of centuries,
saturated with stagnant water, thus forming a very sticky and very
slippery material peculiar to British Columbia, known as “muskeg.”
Though it looks substantial enough, with its top growth of stubble and
moss, it combines the most unpleasant qualities of Virginia red clay,
Irish peat-bog, Mexican adobe, and New Orleans molasses. To make matters
worse, a drove of several hundred cattle had recently preceded us, so
that the road, which was inconceivably bad under any circumstances,
had been trampled into a black morass which no vehicle could by any
possibility get through. There was only one thing for us to do and that
was to corduroy the road, or at least the worst stretches of it. I have
heard veterans of the Civil War dwell on the difficulties of corduroying
roads for the guns to pass over in the swamps of the Chickahominy, but
I didn’t appreciate the truth of their remarks until I tried it myself.
While camping in various parts of the world I had used an axe in a
dilettante sort of way for cutting tent-poles and chopping fire-wood,
but there is a vast deal of difference between that sort of thing and
cutting down enough trees to pave a road. In an hour our hands were so
blistered that every movement of the axe helve brought excruciating pain;
but it was a question of corduroying that road or else abandoning the
car and making our way to civilisation afoot through several hundred
miles of forest. There was no garage to telephone to for assistance. At
noon we paused long enough to light a fire and cook a meal of sorts,
which we ate seated on logs amid a sea of slimy ooze, with rain pelting
down and swarms of voracious black flies and mosquitoes hovering about
us. Five hours more of tree felling and we decided that our corduroy
causeway was sufficiently solid to get over it with the car. As a matter
of fact, we doubted it in our hearts, but we had reached that stage of
exhaustion and desperation where we didn’t care what happened. If the car
stuck in the mud, well and good. She could stay there and take root and
sprout motor-cycles, so far as I was concerned. Backing up so as to get
a running start, our driver opened wide his throttle and the car tore
at the stretch of home-made corduroy like a locomotive running amuck.
Under the terrific impact logs as large as a man’s body were hurled a
dozen feet away. The snapping of the limbs and the deafening explosions
of the engines sounded like a battle in the Balkans. The car reeled and
swayed like a schooner in a squall, and every instant I expected it to
capsize; but our driver, clinging desperately to the wheel, contrived,
with a skill in driving that I have never seen equalled, to keep it
from going over, and, in far less time than it takes to tell it, we had
traversed the morass we had spent an entire day in corduroying, and the
car, trembling like a frightened horse, stood once again on solid ground.
The road over which we had passed looked as though it had been struck by
a combined hurricane, cyclone, and tornado.
It was nightfall when we reached the ranch owned by a Swede named Peter
Rasmussen. What the man at Blackwater had described as “a swell place”
consisted of two small cabins and a group of log barns set down in the
middle of a forest clearing. No smoke issued from the chimney, no dog
barked a welcome, there was not a sign of life about the place, and for a
few minutes we were assailed by the horrid fear that no one was at home.
Presently, however, we saw a fair-haired, raw-boned Swede, an axe upon
his shoulder, emerge from the forest and come swinging toward us across
the pasture. I hailed him.
“Are you Mr. Rasmussen?”
“Ay ban reckon ay am.”
“And can you put us up for the night?” I queried anxiously.
“Ay ban reckon ay can.”
A stone’s throw from the one-roomed log cabin in which Rasmussen and his
single ranch-hand, a stolid and uncommunicative Swede, slept and cooked
and ate and in the evenings read three-months-old papers by the light of
a guttering candle was the bunk house. A bunk house, I might explain, is
a building peculiar to the frontier, usually consisting of one large room
with two, and sometimes three, tiers of bunks built against the wall.
Here travellers may find a roof to shelter them and some hay on which
to spread their blankets, for in British Columbia every one carries his
bedding with him. From the musty odour which greeted us when Rasmussen
threw open the heavy door, this particular bunk house had evidently not
been occupied for some time. When we tried to go to sleep, however, we
found that the bunks were very much occupied indeed. But after Pete had
started a roaring fire in the little sheet-iron stove and when we had
spread our “five-point” Hudson Bay blankets on the five-cents-a-pound
hay which served in lieu of mattresses and had scrubbed off some of the
mud with which we were veneered and had changed our wet clothes for dry
ones, the complexion of things began to change from brunette to blonde.
Between the intervals of corduroying the road in the morning, I had shot
with my revolver half a dozen grouse that persisted in getting in our
way. They were almost as large as Plymouth Rocks and we handed them over
to Pete to pluck and cook for supper, which was still further eked out by
a mess of lake trout brought in by his ranch hand. Up in that region one
may have considerable difficulty in obtaining the every-day necessities,
such as salt and butter and bread, but he can surfeit himself on such
luxuries as venison and grouse and trout. We found that Rasmussen, like
so many other settlers in British Columbia, had come from the American
Northwest, lured by the glowing prospectuses issued by the provincial
government. But he, like so many others, had found that the appalling
cost of living had made it impossible, even with hay at a hundred dollars
a ton, for him to clear as much as he had in the United States. “So ay
ban tank ay go back an’ buy a farm in Minnesota,” he concluded, knocking
the ashes from his pipe. And that’s precisely what a great many other
discouraged Americans in western Canada are going to do.
For thirty miles or so after leaving Rasmussen’s the road was rough,
boggy, and exceedingly trying to the disposition, but it gradually
improved until by the time we reached Stony Creek we found ourselves
running along a short stretch of road of which a New England board of
supervisors need not have felt too much ashamed. The terrible condition
of the roads throughout the interior of British Columbia is largely due
to the fact that they run for great distances through dense forests where
the sun cannot penetrate to dry them up; this, taken with the abnormally
heavy rains, serving to make them one long and terrifying slough. At
Stony Creek there is a Siwash village consisting of some twoscore log
cabins clustered about a mission church whose gaudy paint and bulging
dome spoke of its proximity to Alaska and the influence of the Russians.
The interior tribes are known as “stick Indians,” referring, of course,
to the fact that they dwell in the forest, in contradistinction to
those living along the coast, who are known as “salt-chuck Indians.”
Squaws in vivid blankets and quill-embroidered moccasins sat sewing
and gossiping before their cabin doors, just as womenfolk, be their
skins white or black or bronze, sit and gossip the whole world over;
bright-eyed, half-naked youngsters gambolled like frisky puppies in the
street; bearskins were stretched on frames for drying, and at the rear
of every house was a cache for dried salmon, which forms the Siwashes’
staple article of food. Though only one of the braves, who had been out
into civilisation, had ever set eyes on a motor-car before, none of them
seemed to have any particular fear of it, although, strangely enough,
they became as shy as deer at sight of my camera, one picturesque old
squaw refusing consecutive offers of twenty-five cents, fifty cents,
and a dollar to come out from behind the door where she was hiding and
let us take her picture. The old lady’s daughter was willing enough to
take a chance, however, for she offered to pose for as many pictures as
we desired if we would give her a ride in the car, a proposal to which
I promptly acceded. I brought her down the stone-strewn street of the
village at a rattling clip, and she not only never turned a hair but
asked me to go faster. Given an opportunity, that Siwash maiden would
make a real road burner.
It is less than twenty miles from Stony Creek to Fort Fraser and the road
proved a surprisingly good one. You must bear in mind, however, that
when I speak of a British Columbian road being a good one, I am speaking
comparatively. The best road we encountered would, if it existed in the
United States, drive a board of highway commissioners out of office,
while the worst road we negotiated in a civilised community wouldn’t be
considered a road at all—it would be used for a hog-wallow or for duck
shooting. The mushroom settlement of Fort Fraser takes its name from the
old Hudson Bay post, which is three miles from the town on the shores
of Fraser Lake. When we were there the town consisted of half a hundred
log and frame buildings, a blacksmith shop, four or five general stores,
the branch of a Montreal bank, and the only hotel in the four hundred
miles between Quesnel and Hazelton. It was a real frontier town when we
were there, and was of particular interest to us because it represented
a phase of civilisation which in our own country has long since passed,
but now that the railway is in operation its picturesque log cabins will
doubtless be replaced by prosaic white frame houses with green blinds,
the boards laid along the edge of the road will give way to cement
sidewalks, and it will have street lamps and a town hall and its name
displayed in a mosaic of whitewashed pebbles on the station lawn and
will look exactly like any one of a hundred other towns scattered along
the transcontinental lines of railway. Some day, no doubt, I shall pass
through it again, this time from the observation platform of a Pullman,
and I shall remark quite nonchalantly to my fellow travellers: “Oh, yes,
I was up here in the good old days when this was nothing but a cluster of
log huts at the Back of Beyond.”
XV
THE MAP THAT IS HALF UNROLLED
“Have you gazed on naked grandeur where there’s nothing else to gaze on,
Set pieces and drop-curtain scenes galore,
Big mountains heaved to heaven, which the blinding sunsets blazon,
Black canyons where the rapids rip and roar?
Have you swept the visioned valley with the green stream streaking
through it,
Searched the Vastness for a something you have lost?
Have you strung your soul to silence? Then for God’s sake go and do it;
Hear the challenge, learn the lesson, pay the cost.”
XV
THE MAP THAT IS HALF UNROLLED
It wasn’t much of a chain as chains go—it really wasn’t. After a good
deal of poking about I had come upon its dozen feet of rusted links
thrown carelessly behind the forge in the only blacksmith shop in Fort
Fraser. Now, I had an imperative need for a chain of some sort, for our
skid chains, as the result of the wear and tear to which they had been
subjected on the journey from Quesnel, were on the point of giving out,
and it is not wise to attempt to negotiate what the settlers of northern
British Columbia, with an appalling disregard for the truth, call roads
unless you have taken all possible precautions against skidding. Up in
that country of two-mile-high mountains, and mountain roads as slippery
as the inside of a banana peel, a side-slip of only a few inches is as
likely as not to send car and occupants hurtling through half a mile of
emptiness. As the chain would answer our purpose after a fashion, and as
we could get nothing better, I told the smith to throw it in the car.
After he had attended to a few minor repairs I asked him how much I owed
him.
“Well,” he answered, figuring with his pencil on a chip of wood, “the
chain comes to sixteen dollars an’ forty cents, an——”
“Hold on!” I interrupted. “Please say that over again. It must be that
I’m getting hard of hearing.”
“Sixteen dollars and forty cents for the chain,” he repeated, unabashed.
I leaned against the door of the log smithy for support. “Not for
the chain?” I gasped unbelievingly. “Not for twelve feet of rusty,
second-hand, five-eighths-inch chain that I could get for half a dollar
almost anywhere?”
“Sure,” said he. “An’ I ain’t makin’ no profit on it at that. The freight
charges for bringin’ it in from the coast were eighteen cents a pound.
But lookee here, friend, I don’t want you to go away from Fort Fraser
with the idee in your head that things up here is high-priced, ’cause
they ain’t. I wanta do the right thing by you. I’ll tell you what I’ll
do—_I’ll knock off the forty cents_.”
* * * * *
Despite the assurances of the blacksmith, by no stretch of the
imagination could Fort Fraser be called a poor man’s town. Some of the
prices which were asked—and which we paid—in the local store where we
replenished our supply of provisions were as follows:
Flour 16 cents per pound
Sugar 25 cents per pound
Tea and coffee $1.00 per pound
Butter 75 cents per pound
Oatmeal 30 cents per pound
Dried fruits 25 cents per pound
Tinned fruits 75 cents to $1.00 per 2-pound tin
Bacon 50 cents per pound
Eggs (when procurable) $1.50 per dozen
(In winter they sell for 50 cents each.)
Potted meats 50 cents to $1.00 per tin
Bread 25 cents per 1-pound loaf
(Farther in the interior 50 cents per loaf is the standard price.)
Potatoes $3.00 per bushel
Chickens $4.00 each
It was my introduction to a scale of frontier prices to which I soon
became accustomed though not reconciled. It is only fair to say, however,
that this was before the completion of the railway. Now that Fort Fraser
is a station on a transcontinental system, the cost of living has
doubtless been materially reduced, though I have no doubt that the scale
of prices just quoted still obtains and will for a very long time to come
in the settlements to the north of the Skeena.
[Illustration: A Siwash lady going shopping.
Half-breeds of the Upper Skeena.
“Blackwater Kate.”
SOME LADIES FROM THE UPPER SKEENA.]
The population of Fort Fraser turned out _en masse_ to see us off, the
mothers—there were only eight white women in the town when we were
there—bringing their children to the cabin doors to see their first
motor-car. Did you ever stop to think of the deprivations suffered
by these women who dwell along “the edge of things”: no soda-water
fountains, no afternoon teas, no bargain sales, no moving-picture shows,
and the fashion papers usually six months late? It must be terrible.
We felt quite gay and light-hearted that morning, I remember, for we had
slept in beds instead of vermin-infested bunks or in blankets beside
the road, we had breakfasted on coffee, eggs, and porridge instead of
the customary chicory, “sow-belly,” and prunes, and a feeble sun was
doing its best to dry up the rain-soaked roads. Three miles out of Fort
Fraser the swollen Nechako lay athwart our path and our troubles once
more began, for the ferry was not built to carry three-ton motor-cars,
or, indeed, any motor-cars at all, and when it felt the sudden weight
of the big machine upon its deck it dipped so alarmingly that for a
moment it looked as though the car would end its journey at the bottom
of the river. Barring numerous short stretches where the treacherous
black mud was up to our hubs, several miles of bone-racking corduroy,
two torrential showers, any number of stumps which threatened to rip off
our pan and had to be levelled before we could pass, two punctures, a
blowout, and a broken spring, the journey from the banks of the Nechako
to Burns Lake was uneventful.
Darkness had long since fallen when we zigzagged down the precipitous
flank of a forest-clothed mountain, and the beams from our head lamps
illumined the cluster of tents, shacks, and cabins which compose the
settlement known as Burns Lake. Though the settlement boasted at the time
we were there the population of a fair-sized village, notwithstanding
the fact that there was not a woman or a child in it, it was nothing
more than a railway-construction camp, with its usual concomitants of
hash houses, bunk houses, and gambling dens. With the completion of
the railway it has doubtless disappeared as suddenly as it arose. Upon
inquiring for sleeping quarters, we were taken up a creaking ladder into
a loft above an eating-house, where fully twoscore labourers from the
south of Europe lay stretched on their backs on piles of filthy straw,
snoring or scratching or tossing, in an atmosphere so dense with the
mingled odours of garlic, fried pork, wet leather, and perspiration that
it could have been removed with a shovel. While we were debating as to
whether we should look for less impossible quarters or wrap up in our
blankets and spend the night in the car, an American, who, from his air
of authority, I gathered to be a foreman, addressed us:
“There’s no place here that’s fit to sleep in,” he said, “but I
understand that one of the contracting company’s barges is leaving for
Decker Lake at midnight. She’s empty, so they’d probably be willing to
carry you and your car. You’d have to sleep in the car, of course, and
it’s pretty cold on the water at this time of the year, but, believe me,
it’ll be a heap more comfortable than spending the night in one of these
bunk houses. There’s no road around the lake anyway, so you’ll have to go
by water if you go at all.”
Thanking him for his suggestion, we set out in quest of the manager of
the contracting company, whom we found in a log cabin at the entrance to
the roughly constructed wharf. It took but a few words to explain our
errand and complete arrangements for being transported down the lakes
by the barge which was leaving at midnight. Burns and Decker Lakes,
which are each approximately ten miles in length and whose shores are
lined with almost impenetrable forest, are connected by a shallow and
tortuous channel which winds its devious course through a wilderness of
swamps, lagoons, and bulrushes known as the Drowned Lands. The firm of
Spokane contractors engaged in the construction of the western division
of the Grand Trunk Pacific had availed itself of this devious waterway
for transporting its men, materials, and supplies to the front, using
for the purpose flat-bottomed barges drawing only a few inches of water.
Notwithstanding the fact that the pilots frequently lost their way at
night and the barges went aground in the shallow channel, the fortunate
circumstance of the two lakes being thus connected had saved the company
tens of thousands of dollars.
It will be a long time, a very long time, before my recollection of that
night journey down those dark and lonely lakes will fade. The deck of
the barge was but a few inches wider than the car, so that, as we sat
in our accustomed seats, wrapped to the eyes in blankets, it seemed as
though the car were floating on the surface of the water. The little
gasoline engine that supplied the barge’s motive power was aft of us,
and its steady throb, together with the twin swaths of light which our
lamps mowed out of the darkness, put the final touch to the illusion.
It was an eerie sensation—very. Though a crescent moon shone fitfully
through scudding clouds, its feeble light but served to emphasise the
darkness and mystery of the forest-covered shores, which were as black
as the grave and as silent as the dead. Once some heavy animal—a bear,
no doubt—went crashing through the underbrush with a noise that was
positively startling in that uncanny stillness. By the time we reached
the shallow channel that winds its devious course through the Drowned
Lands the moon had disappeared and a thick white fog had fallen on
everything, hiding the shores with its impalpable curtain and completely
nullifying the effect of our powerful lights. The only sound was the
laboured panting of the engine and the scraping of the bulrushes against
the bow. How the skipper found his way through that fog-bound channel I
can’t imagine, unless he smelt it, for he couldn’t see an object five
feet away. Day was breaking above the eastern forest when the barge
crunched against the timbers of the wharf at Decker Lake, and I breathed
a little prayer of thanksgiving for our safe arrival; for, truth to tell,
I had fully expected that the light of morning would find us hard and
fast aground in the middle of a swamp. Word of our coming had preceded us
and we found that the company’s local manager—an American—had cots and
blankets awaiting us in the log shanty that served him as an office. We
were shivering with the cold and heavy-eyed from weariness. My word, how
we slept! I can’t remember when I have so enjoyed a pillow.
Before leaving Decker Lake we acquired an addition to our party. His
name was Duncan and he was an axeman from the forests of Quebec. He had
the shoulders of a Clydesdale, the sinews of a mule, and could handle
an axe as an artist handles a brush. One of those restless spirits who,
with their worldly possessions on their backs, are here to-day and gone
to-morrow, he had worked on the railway grade just long enough to earn
a little money and, when we arrived, was setting out on foot for New
Hazelton, two hundred miles away, to spend it. He was only too glad to
work his passage and we were only too glad to have him along—he was so
extremely capable that his presence gave us a feeling of reassurance. It
was well that we took him along, for before we had left Decker Lake an
hour behind us we found ourselves at the beginning of as ugly a stretch
of road as I ever expect to set eyes on.
“That’s not a road,” said my companion disgustedly, as he stood looking
at the sea of slime. “That’s a lake, and if we once get into it we’ll
never see the car again.”
What he said was so obviously true that we decided that the only thing
to do was to avoid the road altogether and chop our way around it. This
involved cutting a path through three quarters of a mile of primeval
forest and the removal of scores of trees. There was nothing to be gained
by groaning over the prospect, so we rolled up our sleeves, spat on our
lacerated palms, and went at it with the axes. Did you ever see an expert
woodsman in action? No? Well, it’s a sight worth seeing, take my word
for it. Duncan would walk up to a forest giant that looked as big as the
Tower of Pisa and slam-bang into it with his double-bitted axe, amid a
perfect shower of chips, until he had chopped a hole in the base the size
of a hotel fireplace. A few more strokes at the right spot, a warning
shout of “Timber!” “Timber!” and the great tree would come crashing down
within a hand’s breadth of where he wanted it. A few minutes more of the
axe business and the prone trunk would be cut into sections and rolled
away. “She’s all jake, boys,” Duncan would bellow, and, putting on the
power, we would push the car a few yards more ahead. It took the four
of us eight hours of steady chopping to make our way around that awful
stretch of road, but we did get through finally with no more serious
mishap than crumpling up one of the forward fenders, caused by the car
swerving into a tree. While we were still congratulating ourselves on
having gotten out of the woods in more senses than one, we swung around
a bend in the road and came to a sudden halt before a hog-wallow which
stretched away, like a black and slimy serpent, as far as the eye could
see.
[Illustration: After the car had passed: a stretch of road south of the
Nechako.
Mired in muskeg on the Yukon Telegraph Trail.
Prying the car out of a swamp in the Blackwater country.
WHERE NO MOTOR-CAR HAD EVER GONE: SOME INCIDENTS OF MR. POWELL’S JOURNEY
THROUGH THE BRITISH COLUMBIAN WILDERNESS.]
“We’re up against it good and hard this time,” said our driver, grown
pessimistic for the first and only time. “I don’t believe the car can
make it. There’s too much of it and it’s too deep—the wheels simply can’t
get traction.”
As we were contemplating it in dismal silence we heard the welcome
rattle of wheels and clink of harness, and an empty freight wagon, drawn
by eight sturdy mules, pulled out of the forest behind us, the bearded
“mule-skinner” urging on his beasts with cracking whip and a crackle of
oaths. I waded toward him through the mire.
“Where’s the nearest place that we can eat and sleep?” I demanded.
“Waal,” he drawled with exasperating slowness, “I reckon’s how they
mought fix ye up fer the night at th’ Hunderd an’ Fifty Mile House.
Thet’s the only place I knows on, an’ it’s darned poor, too.”
“How far is it from here?” I asked.
“Waal, I calkilate it mought be a matter o’ two mile an’ a half or three
mile.”
“Good,” said I, “and what will you charge to haul us there? We can’t get
through this mud-hole alone, but the car’s got lots of power and with the
help of your mules we ought to make it all right.”
Instantly the man’s native shrewdness asserted itself. He cast an
appraising eye over my mud-stained garments, over the mud-bespattered car
and at the yawning sea of mud ahead.
“I’ll haul ye to th’ Hunderd an’ Fifty Mile House for fifteen dollars,”
he said.
“Fifteen dollars for a two-and-a-half-mile haul?” I exclaimed.
“Take it or leave it,” said the teamster rudely. “I ain’t got no time to
stand in the road bargainin’.”
I promptly capitulated, for I had no intention of letting our only hope
of rescue get away. “Hitch on to the car,” said I.
That was where the sixteen-dollar-and-forty-cent chain to which I
referred at the beginning of this story came in handy, for we had no rope
that would have stood the strain of hauling that car through those three
_perfectly awful_ miles. Night was tucking up the land in a black and
sodden blanket when the driver pulled up his weary mules at the roadside
post bearing the numerals “150,” which signified that we were still a
hundred and fifty miles from our journey’s end, and I counted into his
grimy paw the sum agreed upon in the greasy bank-notes of the realm. _It
had taken us just eleven hours to make fourteen miles._
Though we had not deluded ourselves into expecting that we would find
anything but the most primitive accommodation at the 150 Mile House,
we were none of us, unless it might have been Duncan, prepared for the
wholly impossible quarters that greeted us. Standing in a clearing in the
wilderness was a log cabin containing but a single room, in one corner
of which was a stove and in the other a rickety table piled high with
unwashed dishes. Such space as was left in the twelve-by-fourteen room
was occupied by a huge home-made bed which provided sleeping quarters for
the English rancher, his gaunt, starved-looking wife, and a veritable
litter of small children.
“We’ve nothing here that ’ud do for the likes of you, sir,” said the man
civilly, in reply to my request for accommodations. “The missis can fix
you up a meal, but there’s not a place that you could lay your heads,
unless ’twould be in the loft.”
“Good Heavens, man!” interrupted my companion, “We can’t sleep
out-of-doors on such a night as this. Let’s see the loft.”
Assuring us once more that “it was no place for the likes of us,” the
rancher pointed to a ladder made of saplings which poked its nose through
a black square in the ceiling directly above the family couch. Taking a
candle from the woman I ascended. The fitful light illuminated a space
formed by the ceiling of the room below and the steeply pitched roof
of the cabin, barely large enough for a man to enter on his hands and
knees. Its uneven floor, made of saplings, laid lengthwise, was strewn
with musty hay, upon which were thrown some tattered pieces of filthy
burlap bagging. One of these pieces of bedding seemed to move, but upon
looking at it more closely I saw it was fairly aswarm with vermin. I took
one glance and scrambled down the ladder. “Where’s the nearest ditch?” I
asked. “I’d rather sleep in a ditch any time than in that loft.”
But we did not have to do either, for Duncan, who had previous
acquaintance of the place, wasting no time in lamentation, had set to
work with his axe and in ten minutes a great fire was sending its hail of
sparks into the evening sky. It’s marvellous what wonders can be worked
in the wilderness with a sharp axe by a man who knows how to handle
it. By stretching the piece of sail-cloth we had with us between two
convenient trees and keeping it in place with saplings, in an amazingly
brief time Duncan had constructed a shelter which was proof against any
but a driving rain, and which, thanks to the camp-fire blazing in front
of it, was as warm as a steam-heated room in a hotel. Covering the soggy
ground with a layer of hemlock branches, and this in turn with a layer
of hay bought from the rancher at five cents per pound, and spreading on
top of the hay our rubber sheets and our blankets—behold, we were as
comfortable as kings; more comfortable, I fancy, than certain monarchs in
the Balkans. We lay side by side beneath the flimsy shelter like sardines
in a tin, while outside the rain fell drearily and the night wind soughed
in the tree tops, and the flickering flames of the camp-fire alternately
illumined and left in darkness everything.
We awoke the next morning to find that the sun, which is an infrequent
visitor to northern British Columbia in the autumn, had tardily come
to our assistance and was trying to make up for its remissness by a
desperate attempt to dry up the roads which, for the succeeding hundred
miles or so, lay across an open, rolling country bordered by distant
ranges of snow-capped mountains. Though the recollection of that day
stands out sharp and clear in my memory as the only one since leaving
Quesnel when we were not delayed by mud, our progress was hampered
by something much more inimical to the car—stumps. When the road was
constructed it evidently never entered into the calculations of its
builders that it would be used by a motor-car, so they sawed off the
trees which occupied the route at a height which would permit of their
stumps being cleared without difficulty by the axles of the high-wheeled
freight wagons, but which, had they been struck by the automobile, would
have torn the pan from the body and put it permanently out of business.
Along the stump-strewn stretches, therefore, our progress was necessarily
slow, for Duncan marched in advance, axe on shoulder, like a scout before
an advancing army, and whenever he found an enemy in the form of a stump
lying in wait to disable us he would destroy it with a few well-directed
blows of his axe. But it was a tiresome business. After a time, however,
the stump-dotted trail was supplanted by quite an excellent road of
gravel, and down this we spun for thirty miles with nothing to interrupt
our progress. When we started that morning we would have laughed
derisively if any one had told us that we could make Aldermere that
night, but, thanks to the unexpected blessing of good roads, we whirled
into that little frontier village at five o’clock in the afternoon,
ascertained from the open-mouthed loungers on the steps of the grocery
store that it was only thirty miles to Moricetown, which was at that time
the “end of steel,” and determined to push on that night. The good roads
soon died a sudden death, however, and it was late that night before
there twinkled in the blackness of the valley below us the bewildering
arrangement of green and scarlet lights which denote a railway yard all
the world over, and heard the familiar friendly shriek of a locomotive.
I don’t care to dwell on the night we spent at Moricetown. The
recollection is not a pleasant one. In a few years, no doubt, it will
grow into a prosperous country village, with cement sidewalks and street
lamps and rows of neat cottages, but when we were there it was simply
the “end of steel.” In other words, it was the place where civilisation,
as typified by the railway in operation between there and the coast,
quit work and the wilderness began. The “town” consisted of the railway
station, still smelling of yellow paint, two or three log cabins, a group
of hybrid structures, half house, half tent, and another building which,
if one had no regard whatever for veracity, might have been called a
hotel. Let me tell you about it. It was built of scantlings covered with
log slabs, and the partition walls consisted of nothing thicker than
tarred paper. In certain respects this had its advantages, for if you
needed more light or air in your room all you had to do was to poke your
finger through the wall. Because we had arrived by automobile and were
therefore fair game, we were given the _suite de luxe_. This consisted
of a six-by-eight room containing an iron bed with a dubious-looking
coverlet which had evidently passed through every possible experience
save a washing. There being no place in the room for a wash-stand, the
cracked wash-bowl was kept under the bed. Indeed, had not the door
opened outward we could never have gotten into the room at all. The
partitions were so flimsy that we were awakened every time the occupant
of the next room changed his mind. Outside our door was what, for want
of a better term, I will call the lobby: a low-ceilinged room warmed to
the suffocating point by a huge whitewashed stove, around which those
who could not get rooms sat through the night on rude benches, talking,
whispering, cursing, snoring, spitting, coughing, smoking. The place was
blue with the acrid fumes of Bull Durham. Dozing on the benches were all
the types peculiar to this remote corner of the empire: Montenegrin and
Croatian railway labourers, stolid and dirty; Canadian lumberjacks in
their moccasins and hooded parkas; Scandinavian ranchers from the back
country; a group of immigrants, fresh from England, their faces whitened
by the confinement of the long journey, who had left their rented farms
in Sussex or their stools in London counting-houses to come out to the
colonies to earn a living; even some pallid women with squalling children
in their arms, fretful from lack of sleep, who had come from the old
country to join their husbands and lead pioneer lives in the British
Columbian wild. The men snored sickeningly, the tired mothers scolded
their crying children, the clouds of tobacco smoke eddied toward the
ceiling, the army of insects that we found in possession of the bed
attacked us from all directions, the rain pattered dishearteningly upon
the tin roof, the air was heavy with the odours of grimy, sweat-soaked,
tired humanity. It was a _nuit du diable_, as our Paris friends would say.
It is only about five-and-twenty miles from Moricetown to New Hazelton,
the prefix “new” distinguishing it from the “old town,” which lies five
miles from the railway to the north. The road, so we were told, though
slippery after the rains and very hilly, was moderately smooth, and we
were as confident that we would eat our Sunday dinner in New Hazelton as
we were that the next day was Monday. But the best-laid plans of mice and
motorists, you know, “gang aft agley,” which, according to the glossary
of Scottish phrases in the back of the dictionary, means “to go off to
the side,” and that was precisely what we did, for when only five miles
from our destination our driver, in his eagerness to taste civilised
cooking again, took a slippery curve at incautious speed and the car
skidded over into the ditch and reclined against the shelving bank like
some mud-stained, weary monster. It took the better part of an hour to
get out the jacks and build a causeway of stones and pry her up. But at
last everything was ready and we shouted to the driver to throw on the
power. But there was no response from the engines to his pressure on the
throttle.
“By Jove!” he muttered despondently. “We’re out of gasoline!”
Sunday noon, a deserted mountain road, a ditched and helpless car, a sky
leaden with impending rain—and only five miles from our destination.
There was nothing for it but for some one to walk into New Hazelton,
rouse the local storekeeper from his Sunday nap, and bring us a tin of
gasoline. The choice unanimously fell on Duncan, who set off down the
middle of the muddy road at a four-miles-an-hour pace. Meanwhile, we set
about preparations for our Sunday dinner. While the driver skirmished
about with an axe in search of wood that was not too rain-soaked to burn,
my friend opened such of the tinned goods as were left, and I attempted
to wash the knives and forks and tin plates in a convenient mud puddle.
As we had neglected to clean them after our last meal in the open, on the
ground that we would have no further use for them, the task I had set
myself was not an easy one: it’s surprising how difficult it is to remove
grease from tin with nothing but a stick and some cold water. We achieved
a meal at last, however—tinned sausages, tinned spaghetti, mouldy bread
made palatable by toasting, and some week-old coffee which we found in
one of the thermos bottles and heated—and I’ve had many a worse meal,
too. Just as the rain began to descend in earnest, a horse and sulky
swung round the bend bearing Duncan and the precious tin of gasoline.
Thirty minutes later we were rolling between a double line of welcoming
townspeople down the muddy main street of New Hazelton. We were at our
journey’s end!
Though New Hazelton now boasts the most pretentious hotel in all the
North country, when we were there this hostelry was still in course of
construction, so we were compelled to look elsewhere for bed and board.
After some searching we found accommodation in the cabin occupied by the
operator of the Yukon Telegraph and ate our meals at the pie counter run
by an American known as “Black Jack” Macdonald. And it was good eating,
too. Our first question after reaching New Hazelton was, of course:
“Is there any chance of our getting through to the Alaskan border?”
“Not a chance in the world,” was the chorused answer. But we protested
that that was the answer we had received at Vancouver and Ashcroft and
Quesnel and Fort Fraser when we inquired as to the chances of getting
through to Hazelton.
“The boys are quite right, gentlemen,” said a bearded frontiersman named
“Dutch” Cline. “There isn’t a chance in the world. I’ve lived in this
country close on twenty years and I know what I’m talking about. It’s
only about forty miles in an air-line from here to the Alaskan boundary,
but I doubt if a pack-mule could get through, let alone a motor-car. You
would have to actually chop your way through forests that haven’t so
much as a trail. You would have to devise some way of getting your car
across no less than a dozen dangerous rivers. You would have to climb
to the very summit of a six-thousand-foot mountain range and then drop
down on the other side; and, finally, you would have to find some means
of crossing the Portland Canal, which separates British Columbia from
Alaska. Add to that the fact that winter is at hand and that you would
probably be snowed in before you had got a quarter of the way, and you
will understand just how utterly impossible it is.”
So we were forced to abandon regretfully the hope of hearing the Alaskan
gravel crunch beneath our tires and to content ourselves with the
knowledge that we had driven farther north than a motor-car had ever been
driven on this continent before: farther north than the Aleutian Islands,
farther north than Hudson Bay, farther north than the Peninsula of
Kamchatka, half a hundred miles farther north, in fact, than the southern
boundary of Alaska itself.
New Hazelton is in the very heart of northern British Columbia, where the
Skeena, the Babine, and the Bulkley meet, and in the same latitude as
the lower end of the Alaskan panhandle.
A collection of log cabins and weather-beaten shacks huddled on the river
bank at the foot of the Rocher de Boulé, whose cloud-wreathed summit,
seven thousand feet in height, seems to scrape the sky, it is one of
those boom towns with which the pioneer business men of the region are
shaking dice against fate. If they lose, the place will revert to the
primeval wilderness from which it sprang; if they win—and the coming
of the railway has made it all but certain that they will—they will
have laid the foundation of a future Winnipeg or Vancouver. Save only
in Constantinople during the stirring days which marked the end of the
Hamidieh régime, and at Casablanca with the Foreign Legion, I do not
recall ever having encountered so many strange and picturesque and
interesting figures as I did in this log town on the ragged edge of
things. Every evening after supper the men would come dropping into the
hut by twos and threes until there were a dozen or more gathered in a
circle about the whitewashed stove and the air was so thick with the
fumes of Bull Durham that you could have cut it with a knife. Talk about
the Arabian Nights! Those were the British Columbian Nights, and if the
Caliph of Bagdad had sat in that circle of frontiersmen and listened
to the tales that passed round with the black bottle in that cabin on
the banks of the Skeena he would have beheaded Scherezade in disgust.
Here, in the flesh, were the characters of which the novelists love to
write: men whom the wanderlust had lured from the Morris chairs of ease;
men who had gone the pace in England long ago; men who had left their
country between two days and for their country’s good; men who, in clubs
or regimental messes, had been caught with an ace too many; men who, on
nameless rivers or in strange valleys, had played knuckle down with Death.
The talk fest of anecdote and reminiscence would generally be opened
by “Dutch” Cline, a hairy, iron-hard pioneer who would have delighted
the heart of Remington. I remember that the first time I met him he
remarked that there would be an early winter, and when I asked him how
he knew he explained quite soberly it was because he was afflicted with
an uncontrollable desire to steal a dog. Cline was a Boer by birth—hence
his nickname of “Dutch”—and in his youth had fought in turn the Zulus,
the Basutos, and the Matabele, having, as he expressed it, lived on the
frontier ever since he was knee-high to a grasshopper. He was a born
raconteur and would hold us spellbound as he yarned of the days when
he sailed under Captain Hansen, “the Flying Dutchman,” and poached for
seals off the Pribilofs. Hansen, who was a Dane, evolved the ingenious
idea of having a ship built in Japan but owned by Americans and sailing
under the British flag, so that when he was overhauled by a gunboat,
whether American, British, Japanese, or Russian, and arrested for pelagic
sealing, it stirred up such an international rumpus with all the other
nations concerned that it was easier to let him go. He once gave his
vessel a coat of the grey-green paint used on the Czar’s warships,
uniformed his crew as Russian sailors, and, with guns of stovepipe
frowning from his decks and the flag of Saint Andrew flaunting from
his stern, bore majestically down on the sealing grounds, and when his
unsuspecting rivals cut their cables and fled seaward he helped himself
to the skins. Though a pirate and an outlaw whose hands were stained with
blood, he met his death not on deep water, as he would have wished, but
in a little harbour at the north end of Vancouver Island while trying to
save a little child. I remember that “Dutch” wiped his eyes as he told
the story, and no one smiled at his doing it, either; for, though these
men of the North have the hearts of vikings, they likewise often have the
tenderness of a woman.
Then there was Bob MacDonald, a red-headed man-o’-war’s man who had
served under Dewey at the taking of the Philippines and later on had
been a steam-shovel man at Panama. He needed no urging to reel off
tales of mad pranks and wild adventures on every seaboard of the world,
but when the deed for which he had been recommended for the Carnegie
medal was mentioned his face would turn as fiery as his hair. So, as
he could never be induced to tell the story, some one, to his intense
embarrassment, would insist on telling it for him. While prospecting
in that remote and barren region which borders on the Great Slave Lake
his only companion had gone suddenly insane. MacDonald bound the
raging madman hand and foot, placed him in a canoe which he built of
whip-sawed planks, and brought him down a thousand miles of unexplored
and supposedly unnavigable rivers, sometimes dragging his flimsy craft
across mile-long portages, sometimes hoisting it, inch by inch, foot by
foot, over rocky walls half a thousand feet in height, sometimes running
cataracts and rapids where his life hung on the twist of a paddle, living
on wild berries and such game as he could kill along the way, but always
caring for the gibbering maniac as tenderly as though he were a child. He
reached New Hazelton and its hospital with his charge at last, after one
of the most intrepid journeys ever made by a white man—and the next day
his comrade died. Yet when I exclaimed over his heroism, MacDonald was
genuinely abashed. “Hell,” he blurted, “what else was there for me to do?
You wouldn’t have had me go off and leave him up there to die, would you?
You’d do the same thing if your pal was took sick on the trail. Sure you
would.”
When his instrument would cease its chatter for a time, the telegraph
operator would chip in with stories of the men who sit in those lonely
cabins scattered along two thousand miles of copper wire and relay the
news of the world to the miners of the Yukon. In hair-raising detail he
told of that terrible winter when the pack-train with its supplies was
lost and the snow-bound operators had to keep themselves alive for many
months upon such scanty game as they could find in the frozen forests.
He told of the insufferable loneliness that drives men raving mad, of
the awful silence that seems to crush one down. He told, with the thrill
in the voice that comes only from actual experience, of how men run from
their own shadows and become frightened at the sound of their own voices;
of how each succeeding day is the intolerable same, only a little worse,
the messages that come faintly over the line being the sole relief from
the awful feeling that you are the only person left on all the earth.
Occasionally Eugene Caux, or Old Man Cataline as he is invariably called
because of his Catalonian origin, would join our conversazione. His
ninety odd years notwithstanding, he is a magnificent figure of a man,
six feet four in his elk-hide moccasins, with a chest like a barrel, his
mop of snowy hair in striking contrast to a skin which has been tanned
by sun and wind to the rich, ripe colour of a well-smoked meerschaum.
Cataline is the most noted packer in the whole North country, being, in
fact, the owner of the last great pack-train north of the Rio Grande.
So much of his life has been spent in the wild, with Indian packers
and French-Canadian trappers for his only companions, that his speech
has become a strange mélange of English, French, half a dozen Indian
dialects, and some remnants of his native Spanish, the whole thickly
spiced with oaths. When, upon his periodic visits to the settlements, he
is compelled to sleep under a roof, he strips the bed of its blankets
and, wrapping himself in them, spends the night in comfort on the
floor, his cocked revolver next his leg so that he can shoot through the
coverings in case a marauder should appear. It is a custom among those
who know him to invariably offer him a drink for the sake of enjoying the
unique performance that ensues. His invariable brand of “hooch” is Hudson
Bay rum, strong enough to eat the lining from a copper boiler. “Salue,
señores!” says the old Spaniard, and drains half his glass at a single
gulp. But he does not drink the other half. Instead, he pours it slowly
over his mop of tousled hair and carefully rubs it in. It is a strange
performance.
They tell with relish in the northern camps the story of how Old Man
Cataline, summoned to appear before the court sitting at Quesnel to
defend the title to some land that he had filed a claim on, strode into
the crowded court-room in the midst of a trial, and, shoving aside
the bailiffs, menacingly confronted the startled judge. “Je worka
pour that land, señor!” he thundered, shaking his fist and his whole
frame trembling with passion. “Je payez pour heem, mister! He belonga
to moi! Je killa any one who try tak heem away! Oui, by God, je killa
you, m’sieu!” and, drawing a hunting-knife from his belt, he drove its
blade deep into the top of the judge’s table. Leaving this grim memento
quivering in the wood, Cataline turned upon his heel and strode away. He
was not molested.
When the world was electrified by the news that gold had been discovered
on the Yukon, the authorities at Ottawa, anticipating the stampede of
the lawless and the desperate that ensued, rushed a body of troops to
the scene for the preservation of law and order. To Old Man Cataline
was intrusted the task of transporting the several hundred soldiers and
their supplies overland to the gold-fields by pack-train. The officer
in command was a pompous person, fresh from the Eastern provinces and
much impressed with his own importance, who insisted that the routine
of barrack life should be rigidly observed upon the long and tedious
march through the wilderness, the men rising and eating and going to bed
by bugle-call. The absurdity of this proceeding aroused the contempt
of Cataline, who would snort disgustedly: “Pour cinquante, soixante
year I live in the grand forêt. Je connais when it ees time to get
up. Je connais when I am hongry. Je connais when I am tired. But now
it ees blowa de bug’ to get up; blowa de bug’ to eat; blowa de damned
bug’ to sleep. Nom d’un nom d’un nom du chien! What t’ell for?” Within
twenty-four hours Cataline and the commanding officer were not on
speaking terms. But the expedition continued to press steadily forward,
the commander riding at the head of the mile-long string of soldiers on
mule back, and Cataline bringing up the rear. One day a heavily laden
pack-mule became mired in a marsh and, despite the orders of the officer
and the efforts of the soldiers, could not be extricated. As they were
standing in deep perplexity about the helpless animal Cataline came
riding up from the rear. Pulling up his mule, he sat quietly in his
saddle without volunteering any advice. At last the officer, at his wit’s
end, pocketed his pride.
“How would you suggest that we get this mule out, Mr. Cataline?” he asked
politely.
“Oh,” remarked the old frontiersman drily, “blowa de bug’.”
Nor will I readily forget Michael Flaherty, a genial Irish section boss
on the Grand Trunk Pacific, whose effervescent Celtic wit formed a
grateful relief to the grim stories of hardship and suffering. He had
a front tooth conveniently missing, I remember, and one of his chief
delights was to lean back in his chair and write patriotic “G. R.’s” and
“U. S. A.’s” in squirts of tobacco juice upon the ceiling. One day he
ordered out his hand-car in a hurry.
“And where moight yez be goin’, Misther Flaherty?” solicitously inquired
his assistant.
“To hell wid yer questions,” was the answer. “Did Napoleon always be
tellin’ his min where he was goin’?”
* * * * *
The Indians of British Columbia, doubtless because of their remoteness
from civilisation, have retained far more of their racial customs and
characteristics than have their cousins below the international boundary.
Though divided into innumerable clans and tribes, under local names,
they fall naturally, on linguistic grounds, into a few large groups.
Thus, the southern portion of the hinterland is occupied by the Salish
and the Kootenay; in the northern interior are to be found the Tinneh or
Athapackan people; while the Haidas, Tsimshians, Kwakiatles, and Nootkas
have their villages along the coast, though the white settlers speak
of them collectively as Siwashes, “Siwash” being nothing more than a
corruption of the French _sauvage_. These British Columbian aborigines
are strikingly Oriental in appearance, having so many of the facial
characteristics of the Mongol that it does not need the arguments of an
ethnologist to convince one that they owe their origin to Asia. Indeed,
it is a common saying that if you cut the hair of a Siwash you will find
a Japanese. They are generally short and squat of figure and, though
habitually lazy, are possessed of almost incredible endurance. One of
them was pointed out to me, a brave named Chickens, who packed a piece of
machinery weighing three hundred pounds over one hundred and eighty miles
of rough forest trails in twelve days. Some years ago the Indians of the
Hag-wel-get village constructed a suspension bridge of rope and timbers
across the dizzy chasm at the bottom of which flows the raging Bulkley.
This bridge is an interesting piece of work, for in building it the
Indians adopted the cantilever system, a form of construction generally
supposed to be beyond the comprehension of uncivilised peoples. But the
amazing feature of the structure is that the varying members are not
secured together by nails, bolts, or screws but simply lashed with willow
withes. It is a crazy-looking affair, and when you venture on it it
creaks, groans, and swings as if threatening to collapse. Even the weight
of a dog is sufficient to set it vibrating sickeningly. When it was
completed, the Indians were evidently in some doubt as to the stability
of their handiwork, for they tested it by sending a score of kloochmen
out upon the quivering structure. If it held, well and good—it was strong
enough to bear the weight of an Indian; if it gave way—oh, well, there
were plenty of other squaws where those came from.
[Illustration: “Some of the cemeteries look as though they were filled
with white-enamelled cribs.”
The grave-house of a chieftain near Kispiox.
“Over each grave is a house which is a cross between ... a Turkish kiosk
and a Chinese pagoda.”
SOME SIWASH CEMETERIES.]
The Siwashes bury their dead in some of the strangest cemeteries in
the world, over each grave being erected a grave house of grotesquely
carved and gaudily painted wood, which is a cross between a dog kennel,
a chicken-coop, a Chinese pagoda, and a Turkish kiosk. In these strange
mausoleums the personal belongings and gewgaws of the dear departed are
prominently displayed. It may be a trunk or a dressing-table, usually
bedecked with vases of withered flowers; from a line stretched across the
interior of the structure hang the remnants of his or her clothing, and
always in a conspicuous position is a photograph of the deceased. Though
sometimes several hundred dollars are expended in the erection of one of
these quaint structures, as soon as the funeral rites are over the tomb
is left to the ravages of wind and rain, not a cent being expended upon
its up-keep. Of recent years, however, those Indians who can afford it
are abandoning the old-time wooden grave houses for elaborate enclosures
of wire netting which gave the cemeteries the appearance of being filled
with enamelled iron cribs. Perhaps their most curious custom, however,
is that of potlatch giving. A potlatch is generosity carried to the nth
degree. Some of them are very grand affairs, the Indians coming in to
attend them from miles around. It is by no means unusual for an Indian to
actually beggar himself by his munificence on these occasions, a wealthy
chieftain who gave a potlatch recently at Kispiox piling blankets, which
are the Indians’ chief measure of wealth, around a totem-pole to a height
of forty feet.
The Siwash villages are usually built high on a bank above some navigable
stream, the totem-poles in front of the miserable cabins being so thick
in places as to look from a distance like a forest that has been ravaged
by fire. The Skeena might, indeed, be called the Totem-Pole River, for
from end to end it is bordered by Indian villages whose grotesquely
carven spars proclaim to all who traverse that great wilderness
thoroughfare the genealogies of the families before whose dwellings they
are reared. Though the Siwashes are accustomed to desert a village when
the fishing and hunting run out and establish themselves elsewhere, their
totem-poles may not be disturbed with impunity, as some business men of
Seattle once found out. A few years ago the Seattle Chamber of Commerce
arranged an excursion to Alaska, chartering a steamer for the purpose.
While returning down the British Columbian coast, the vessel dropped
anchor for a few hours at the head of a fiord, off a deserted Siwash
village whose water-front was lined with imposing totem-poles.
[Illustration: “Proclaiming ... the stories of the families before whose
dwellings they are reared.”
“The Skeena might be called the Totem Pole River.”
The base of a Siwash totem-pole—“the God of Love.”
HERALDRY IN THE HINTERLAND.]
“Say,” said an enterprising business man, “this place is deserted, all
right, all right. The Indians have evidently gotten out for good. So
what’s the matter with our chopping down that big totem-pole over there,
hoisting it on deck, and taking it back to Seattle? It’ll look perfectly
bully set up in Pioneer Square.”
Every one agreed that it was, indeed, a perfectly bully suggestion and
it was carried out, the purloined pole being erected in due time in the
heart of Seattle’s business section, where it stands to-day. The affair
received considerable notice in the newspapers, of course, and those
responsible for thus adding to the city’s attractions were editorially
patted on the back. A few weeks later, however, they were served with
papers in a civil suit brought against them by the Indians from whose
village, without so much as a by-your-leave, they had removed the pole.
At first they jeered at the idea of a handful of Siwash villagers
dwelling up there on the skirts of civilisation having any rights which
they could enforce in a court of law, but they soon found that it was
no laughing matter, for the Indians, backed by the British Columbian
Government, pressed their claim and it cost the gentlemen concerned four
thousand dollars for their Siwash souvenir.
Everything considered, British Columbia is, I believe, the finest game
country in the western hemisphere, bar none, for the sportsmen have as
yet barely nibbled at its edges. It is to America, in fact, what the
Victoria Nyanza country is to Africa: a veritable sportsman’s paradise,
to make use of a term which the writers of railway folders have taken
for their own. It is the sole remaining region south of Alaska where the
hunter can go with almost positive assurance that he will have a chance
to draw a bead upon a grizzly bear; mountain sheep and goat are seen
so frequently on the slopes of the Rocher de Boulé, at the back of New
Hazelton, that they do not provoke even passing comment; the islands off
the province’s ragged coast are the only habitat of that _rara avis_,
the spotted bear; musk-ox and wood-buffalo, among the scarcest big game
in existence, still graze on the prairies which are watered by the
headwaters of the Mackenzie and the Peace; elk, caribou, and mule-deer
are as common as squirrels in Central Park; wolves, wolverenes, lynxes,
and the fox in all its species, to say nothing of the beaver, the marten,
and the mink, still make the province one of the richest fur grounds in
the world. Wild fowl literally blacken its lakes and fiords in the spring
and autumn; grouse and pheasant, as I have previously remarked, are so
tame that they can be and are killed with a club; while salmon, trout,
and sturgeon fill the countless streams, sometimes in such vast numbers
that they actually choke the smaller creeks and rivers. When there is
taken into consideration the fact of its comparative accessibility (New
Hazelton can be reached from Seattle in a little more than three days)
and the healthfulness of its climate—for British Columbia, unlike most
of the other celebrated hunting-grounds, is distinctly a “white man’s
country”—it is almost incomprehensible why it has not attracted far
greater attention from the men who go into the wild with rod and gun.
[Illustration: The Rocher de Boulé from the Indian village of Awillgate.
The Upper Fraser at Quesnel. This is the head of steamer navigation and
the end of the Cariboo Trail.
The Babine Range from Old Hazelton.
A LAND OF SUBLIMITY AND MAGNIFICENCE AND GRANDEUR, OF GLOOM AND
LONELINESS AND DREAD.]
It is a land of immensity and majesty and opportunity, is this almost
unknown empire in the near-by North. It is a region of sublimity and
magnificence and grandeur, of gloom and loneliness and dread. It is as
savage as a grizzly, as alluring as a lovely woman. Its scenery is of
the set-piece and drop-curtain kind. Streams of threaded quicksilver,
coming from God knows where, hasten through deep-gashed valleys as though
anxious to escape from the solitude that reigns. On the flanks of the
ridges, massed in their black battalions, stand the bleak barbarian
pines, while above the scented pine gloom, like blanketed chiefs in
council under the wigwam of the sky, the snow peaks gleam in splendour,
and behind them, beyond them, the sun-god paints his canvas in the
West. Pregnant with the seed of unborn cities, potent in resources and
possibilities beyond the stranger’s ken, it lies waiting to be conquered:
“The last and the largest empire,
The map that is half unrolled.”
INDEX
Abbott, Judge, ranch-house of, 22.
Acoma, New Mexico, 22, 35, 40-55;
antiquity, 44;
costumes, 52, 53;
church, 48, 49;
customs, 44, 55;
dwellings, 46;
funeral, 51;
graveyard, 51;
houses, 45-47;
industries, 53, 54;
paths to, 42;
people of, 42;
picture of San José in, 49, 50;
police, 58;
site of, 40, 41, 45;
symbolic hair-dressing, 54, 55;
women, 53-55.
Agricultural College, Oregon, 315, 316.
Agriculture, United States Department of, 98.
Alaska, 381, 438, 439.
Alberni, B. C., 363, 375, 376.
Albuquerque, New Mexico, 13-16, 35;
agricultural possibilities, 14;
climate, 13;
commercial club, 14, 15;
university at, 15.
Alcatraz, prison at, 218.
Aldermere, B. C., 434.
Alejandro, Padre, 179.
Alfalfa raising, 9, 74, 75, 100, 260.
Algiers, 190.
Amargosa River, the, 174.
“American Alps,” the, 217.
“American Mentone,” the, 217.
American River, the, 229, 230.
American School of Archæology, 23, 25.
Anacapa Island, 151
Anacortes, 344.
Apple orchards, Oregon, 296, 297, 318, 319.
Archæological research in the United States, 22-25.
Architecture, California, 199, 200.
Arizona, 31;
admitted to the Union, 79;
cities, 80;
climate, 83-85;
contrasted with Egypt, 71;
copper output, 81;
desert, 72, 73;
early inhabitants, 77;
effects of civilization in, 63-65;
game-hunting, 85-87;
history of, 76-79, 91;
irrigation, 70, 88, 93, 94;
misconceptions concerning, 71, 74;
missions, 91-93;
organised as territory, 79;
people law-abiding, 88, 89;
pioneers, 67-69, 79;
prison system, 89, 90;
products of the soil, 74-76;
progress in, 66-69;
two distinct regions of, 87, 88.
Arizona Rangers, the, 89.
Ark, the, 376, 377.
Arroyo Hondo, 56.
Ashcroft, B. C., 391-6.
Ashland, Oregon, 323.
Automobiles, in Oregon, 313.
Avalon, Santa Catalina, 148-151.
Bakersfield, California, 259-261, 324.
Banning Company, the, 147.
Barbareños, 152, 153.
Barkerville, B. C., 392.
Barrancas, 56.
Bay of Monterey, the lost, 195.
Beaman, Judge, 150.
Bellingham, 348.
“Ben Hur,” 16.
Benedict, Judge Kirby, 50.
Benicia, California, 219, 220.
Bent, Governor, 21.
Big-game hunting, 85-87, 347, 451-3.
Big trees of California, 254, 255, 257, 258.
Bisbee, Arizona, 87.
Black Hills, 81.
Blackwater, B. C., 401, 405, 406.
Blaine, 348, 349.
Boar-hunting, 153.
Bobtail Lake, B. C., 403, 404.
Bohemian Club of San Francisco, the, 158, 202.
Bohemians in California, 282, 283.
Borax deposits, 174, 177.
Bradshaw Mountains, 82.
Bret Harte, 229, 230.
Bridge built by Indians, 448, 449.
Bridger, Jim, 56.
British Columbia, 209, 355 _et seq._;
area, 358, 359;
character of the country, 362, 363, 453;
cities of, 363, 364;
climate, 361;
corduroying roads in, 411, 412;
cutting path through forest, 428, 429;
freighters, 398;
frontier, 389 _et seq._, 421 _et seq._;
game-hunting, 451-3;
government’s interest in settlers, 407;
Indians, 415, 447-451;
“muskeg,” 410, 411;
pioneers in, 385, 386, 390, 397 _et seq._;
prohibition in, 407-9;
railways, 378-382;
resources, 359-361;
roads, 411, 415, 416, 433.
British Columbia Express Company, 391, 392.
Brussels, restoration of, 17.
Bryce, James, 299.
Bunk-houses, British Columbia, 413.
Bureau of Indian Affairs, 58.
Burlingame, California, 198, 199.
Burns Lake, B. C., 424, 425.
Busch Gardens, Pasadena, 141.
Cabbage-growing in New Mexico, 10.
Cabrillo, Juan Rodrigues, 147, 171, 172.
_Cabrillo_, the, 147, 149.
Caire estate, the, 152.
California Debris Commission, 226.
California, 160 _et seq._;
agriculture of, 218;
architecture, 199, 200;
Chinese in, 207;
climate, 157-9;
coast, 161, 162;
discovery of, 172;
dust, 159;
festivals, 201-3;
fogs, 159;
Great Valley of, 242-4;
hinterland, 240 _et seq._;
Japanese in, 207-210;
labour problems in, 206-8;
missions, 117-122, 179, 180, 183, 186, 195, 198;
orange groves, 125-8, 133-8;
popular misnomers, 216, 217;
rain, 158;
roads, 116, 132, 197, 198;
seaside resorts, 142-4;
summer climate, 157-160;
three distinct zones of, 157;
trees, 254-8.
Camels, wild, 86, 87.
Camino Real, El, 21, 108, 115, 122, 161, 178, 185, 197, 198.
Camp Sierra, 257.
Canada, agricultural invasion of, 357, 358;
motoring in, 348-350;
railways, 378-381.
Canadian Northern Railway, 378-381.
Canadian Pacific Railway, 378-380, 395.
Canal at Celilo, 291.
Cañon of the Macho, 21;
of the Santa Fé, 21.
Cañons, 21, 23.
Cañon’s Crest, 131.
Cape Flattery, 344.
Cape Horn, 232, 301.
Caravels, miniature, 171, 172.
Cariboo Trail, the, 391-9.
Carmel, mission of, 183.
Carpinteria, California, 166.
Carquinez Straits, the, 219.
Carson, Kit, 21, 56.
Casa Grande, ruins of, 91, 94;
irrigation, 110.
Cascade Range, the, 277, 285, 293, 295, 298-300, 310.
Casitas Pass, the, 166.
Casteñeda, 45.
Castle Hot Springs, Arizona, 81-83.
Castle Rock, 301.
Castro, General, 186.
Catalina Range, 85.
Cattle-raising in New Mexico, 26.
Caux, Eugene (Old Man Cataline), 444-7.
Cave-dwellers, 22-25.
Caves, painted, of Santa Cruz, 151;
Oregon, 324.
Celilo, canal at, 291.
Channel Islands, the, 146-154.
Charles the Second of Aragon, 49.
Chinese, in California, 207;
farming, 7, 8.
Church, adobe, at Acoma, 48-50.
Civil War, 79.
Clarksburg, California, 223.
Cline, “Dutch,” 439, 441.
Cloud Cap Inn, 297.
Coast Range, the, 241.
Colorado Desert, 98.
Colorado River, the, 99, 100.
Colton Hall, Monterey, 183.
_Columbia, of Boston_, the, 303.
Columbia River, the, 273 _et seq._;
Indian legend, 293-5;
length of, 289, 290;
romance of, 292-6;
salmon, 302;
scenery, 290, 299-301;
traffic, 301, 302;
waterfalls, 300, 301.
Commerce of the prairies, 20, 21.
Commercial Club in Albuquerque, 14, 15.
Contra Costa County, California, 219.
Copper mines, 32, 81.
Coronado, California, 103-7, 216;
hotel, 105-7;
Polo Club, 104;
Tent City, 112, 113.
Coronado, Don Francisco Vasquez de, expedition of, 45, 78, 115.
Coronados Islands, the, 146.
Cotton, Egyptian, 75, 76.
Coulterville, California, 256;
road, 246.
Crater Lake, 285, 286.
Crocker’s Sierra Resort, 246, 247.
Czechs, 282.
Dalton Divide, the, 21, 22.
Dams, Laguna and Roosevelt, 70, 88, 91, 93, 94;
Elephant Butte, 110.
Date, the Algerian, 75, 76;
the Deglet Noor, 100.
Death Valley, 83, 172-8;
borax deposits, 177;
climatic variation, 176;
effects of ultrararefied air, 175;
sand-storms, 176, 177.
Decker Lake, 425-8.
Del Mar, California, 117-9.
Del Monte, California, 184, 185.
Deming, New Mexico, 3-8, 13.
Denver, 21.
Depew, Chauncey, 84, 85.
Deschutes, the, 287.
Desert, Arizona, 72, 73;
Colorado, 98;
New Mexican, 36, 38, 39.
Dikes on the Sacramento, 226, 227.
Donner Lake, 233.
Donner party tragedy, story of, 233, 234.
Drain, Oregon, 323.
Drowned Lands, the, 426, 428.
Dry Lake Ranch, 282.
Duncan, woodsman, 427-433, 437, 438.
Dungeness, 344.
Easter pilgrimage, 129-131.
Egypt, 71, 72.
El Centro, 101, 102.
El Paso, 21.
Elephant Butte, dam at, 110.
Elkins, Stephen B., 21.
English in New Mexico, 12;
pioneers in the North, 399-403.
Erosion, Acoma, a striking example of, 41.
Eugene, Oregon, 317, 320, 323.
Fair, Oregon State, 312-7.
Farms, New Mexico, 7-11;
Oregon, 314, 315.
Feast of the Blossoms, the, 192, 193, 201.
Festivities, California out-of-door, 201-3.
Fishing, deep-sea, at Avalon, 149-151.
Fishing industry of the Sacramento, 220, 221.
Fish-wheels, 302.
Flaherty, Michael, 447.
Floral mosaic, 267.
Florence, Arizona, State penitentiary at, 89.
Folsom, California, 229.
Foot-hills Hotel, the, 164-6.
Forests, Sierran, 266.
Fort Fraser, B. C., 390, 395, 399, 416, 421-4;
cost of provisions in, 422.
Fort George, B. C., 393, 408, 409.
Fowl, wild, 220.
Fraser River, the, 391, 392, 398.
Freight wagons, British Columbian, 398.
Frémont, 115, 186, 228.
Fresno, California, 256.
Friday Harbour, 344.
Frontier, the last, 389 _et seq._, 421 _et seq._
Frontiersmen, British Columbian, 440-7.
Frost in the orange belt, 133, 257.
Fruit-growing, in Arizona, 75.
Fruit-packing industry, 205.
Funeral Range, the, 173, 174.
Furnace Creek, 174.
Gadsden Treaty, 79.
Gasoline, cost of in British Columbia, 394, 395.
Gaviota Pass, the, 178.
General Grant Big Tree Grove, 257.
Gila River, the, 9, 79, 83, 110.
Gilroy, California, 196.
Glacier meadows, 266, 267.
Globe, Arizona, 90.
Goat, wild, 153.
Gold discovery, California, 79, 173, 224.
Gold dredger, 230-2.
Golden Gate, the, 241.
Golf-links, California, 159, 185.
Grand Island, 227.
Grand Trunk Pacific Railway, 364, 378-382, 384, 408, 426.
Grant’s Pass, Oregon, 323, 324.
Great Central Lake, B. C., 220, 375, 376.
Great Valley of California, the, 242 _et seq._;
irrigation of, 243, 244;
petroleum fields, 258, 259.
Grove Play, Bohemian Club’s, 158, 202, 203.
Halleck, 183.
Harriman, E. H., 284.
Hawk’s Nest, the, 186.
Heenan, the “Benicia Boy,” 220.
High Sierras, the, 266.
Highways, 21, 102, 108, 114-8, 161, 166, 197, 198, 215, 229, 278.
Hillsboro, California, 198;
Oregon, 326.
Holland, waterways of, 215, 216.
Hollanders in New Mexico, 13.
Hollywood, California, 199.
Homestead and Desert Land Acts, 6, 323.
Honey Lake, 279, 280.
Hood River, 296, 297.
Hopi Indians, 16, 47, 53-59.
Horton, Alonzo, 108.
Hot Springs Junction, 81.
Hotel Arlington, 170, 171;
del Coronado, 105-7;
The Foot-hills, 164-6.
Hund, John, 6.
Hundred and Fifty Mile House, the, 430-2.
Hunt, Governor George W. P., 79, 89.
Hunting big game in Arizona, 85-87;
in British Columbia, 451-3;
in the Puget Sound country, 347.
Hydraulic mining, 226, 230.
Imperial Valley, the, 8, 97-102, 110, 194;
agricultural products, 100;
highway into, 102, 103;
irrigation of, 99;
soil expert’s report concerning, 98, 99;
towns in, 101.
Indian education, 47, 48;
legend of the Columbia, 293-5;
punishments, 58-60;
revolt of 1680, 19, 78;
settlement in the Yosemite, 250-2;
sheep-owners, 27.
Indians, Palatingwa, 120, 121;
Hopi, 16, 47, 53-59;
Siwash, 415, 447-451.
Invalids, in Albuquerque, 13.
Iron Hills, the, 279.
Irrigation, 5, 6, 8, 14, 30, 32, 70, 88, 93, 94, 99, 110, 225-7, 243,
246.
Isleton, California, 223.
Japanese in California, 207-210.
Jewellery, Indian, 53.
Kalama, 331, 332.
Katzimo, 40, 41.
Kearney Boulevard, the, 256.
Kearney, General, 19, 20.
King’s Highway. (See _Camino Real_.)
Kino, Jesuit Father, 91.
Klamath Falls, 283-5.
La Jolla, California, 117.
Labour problems in California, 206-8.
Laguna, New Mexico, 35, 37, 38, 49, 50;
dam, 70, 88.
Lake Chapala, 220.
Lake of Elsinore, 117.
Lake Tahoe, 228, 232, 235, 236, 264-270.
Larkin house, Monterey, 183.
Leland Stanford, Jr., University, 197.
Lick, James, 147.
Linda Vista grade, the, 114.
Lisa, Manuel, 56.
Long Beach, California, 143.
Los Angeles, California, 142-5, 209;
harbour, 144, 145;
name, 139.
Los Gatos, 191.
Los Olivos, inn at, 180, 181.
Lummis, Charles, 139.
Macdonald, “Black Jack,” 438.
MacDonald, Bob, 442, 443.
Machine shearing, 27.
Madera, California, 256.
Manzano Ranges, the, 14.
“Marble Halls of Oregon,” the, 324.
Marcos de Niza, 78.
Mare Island Navy Yard, 219.
Mariposa Big Tree Grove, 254, 255.
Mark Twain, 230.
Marshall, John, 229.
Matilija Valley, the, 162, 164.
Meadows, mountain, 266, 267.
Medford, Oregon, 319, 323.
Mediterranean Riviera, the, 161.
Memaloose, the Island of the Dead, 293.
Merced Big Tree Grove, 247, 256.
_Mesa Encantada, La_ (the Enchanted Mesa), 30-41.
Mexican War, 79.
Mexicans, in New Mexico, 28, 29.
Militiamen, Canadian, 372, 373.
Miller, Frank, 121.
Mimbres Valley, the, 6 _et seq._, 32;
climate, 8, 9.
Mining, 226, 230-2.
Miramar, California, 167.
Mission Inn at Riverside, 121, 127.
Mission Valley, 117.
Missions, Arizona, 91-93;
California, 117-122, 179, 180, 183, 186, 195, 198.
Modesto, California, 246.
Mojave City, Arizona, 87.
Montecito, California, 167, 199, 223.
Monterey, California, 159, 181-5, 195, 216;
historic interest of, 182, 183.
Morehouse, Colonel C. P., 150.
Moricetown, B. C., 434-6.
Motoring in British Columbia, 348-350, 372, 439;
in California, 113-8, 132, 166, 228, 261-4, 278, 279;
in Oregon, 320;
in the Yosemite, 246-8, 254.
Mount Adams, 295;
Hamilton, 191;
Hood, 295, 298;
Hooker, 346;
Lowe, 142;
Rubidoux, 128, 129;
Rainier, 337-340, 347;
Shasta, 160;
Saint Helens, 295;
San Jacinto, 160;
Tamalpais, 219;
Topotopo, 163.
Moving pictures taken in the West, 64, 90, 171.
Muir, John, 249.
Nanaimo, 363, 372, 373.
Napoleon, 182.
_Natalie_, the, 182.
Nechako River, the, 424.
Nehalem Bay, 326.
“Netherlands Route,” the, 217.
New Hazelton, B. C., 380, 381, 428, 436-440, 443, 452.
“New Helvetia,” 227.
New Mexico, annexation of, 19, 20;
changes in, 3 _et seq._;
character of the people, 31, 32;
climate of, 8, 9;
desert, 36, 38, 39;
dress, 10;
farming in, 7-11;
fuel, 11;
industries, 25-28;
Mexicans in, 28, 29;
mineral deposits, 32;
prosperity of, 31, 32;
religious fanaticism, 29, 30;
settlers in, 10-13;
social fabric, 28, 30;
Spanish spoken in, 29;
turquoise deposits, 32;
water discovery, 5, 6;
well-digging, 11;
white population, 30.
New Westminster, B. C., 350, 363.
Nisqually Glacier, the, 338-340.
Oak Knoll, California, 109.
Oceanside, California, 117-9.
Oil-fields, California, 258, 259.
Ojai Valley, the, 162-6.
Olympia, 336.
Oñate, Juan de, 19, 51.
Orange groves of California, 125-8, 133-8, 257.
Oregon, 307-328;
Agricultural College, 315;
apple orchards, 296, 318, 319;
caves, 324;
character of the country, 324-8;
charm of, 326-8;
climate, 327;
emigration to, 321-3;
farmer, 313-6;
a frontier country, 325;
hinterland, 275 _et seq._, 309, 310;
opportunities in, 322;
prohibition in, 323, 324;
railroad, 325-7;
State Fair, 312-7;
timber, 322;
towns, 308, 323, 324.
Oregon Trail, the, 276.
“Our Italy,” 216.
Pacific Great Eastern Railway, 379-380.
Pack-train on the Cariboo Trail, 397.
“Padre’s Path,” 42.
Pajarito National Park, 22-25.
Pala, San Antonia de, mission chapel, 117, 120.
Palatingwa tribe, the, 120, 121.
Palo Alto, 197, 198.
Panamint Range, the, 174.
Pasadena, California, 131-3, 138-142, 170, 201, 223;
Busch Gardens, 140, 141;
Mount Lowe, 140, 142;
Orange Grove Avenue, 140, 141.
Pecos, the, valley of, 9, 32;
Forest Reserve, 22.
Pelican Bay Lodge, 285.
Pelicans, 283.
Penitentes, the, 29, 30.
Petroleum fields, California, 258, 259.
Philip III, 147.
Phœnix, Arizona, 80, 83, 90, 91, 93, 110.
Pillars of Hercules, 301.
Pilot Peak, 278.
Pio Pico, 147.
Placerville, California, 228, 229, 232.
Plaza del Mar, Santa Barbara, 169, 171.
Point Loma, 103.
Polo Club at Coronado, 104.
Port Alberni, B. C., 376.
Port Angeles, 344.
Port Mann, B. C., 380.
Portland, Oregon, 202, 308, 331, 332, 341;
residences, 311.
Portola, Don Caspar de, 195, 210.
Prescott, Arizona, 80, 81.
Prince Rupert, B. C., 379-384, 390.
Prison system, Arizona, 89.
Prunes, California, 193.
Pueblo system of government, 58.
Puget Sound country, the, 341-7;
a trip through, 343-5;
variety of sports and recreations, 345-7.
Punishments, Indian, 58-60.
Quesnel, B. C., 392, 394, 395, 399, 401, 445.
Railways in British Columbia, 378-382.
Rainier National Park, 338, 340.
Raisin industry, 256.
_Ramona_, home of, 117.
Ranches, Californian, 242.
Rasmussen, Peter, 412-4.
Raton, New Mexico, 12.
Redlands, California, 131, 132.
Redondo, California, 143.
Remittance-man, the, 400, 401.
Rincon route, the, 166.
Rio Grande, the, 14, 23, 110.
Rito de los Frijoles, the, 23-25.
River gardens, 221, 222.
Riverside, California, 117, 120, 125-133, 136;
Easter pilgrimage, 129-131;
Mission Inn at, 121, 127.
Riviera, the Californian, 161, 216.
Rogue, valley of the, 321.
Roosevelt dam, 70, 88, 91, 93, 94, 110.
Roseburg, Oregon, 323.
Sacramento, 215, 224-8.
Sacramento River, the, 215-227, 233, 241;
dikes, 226, 227;
fishing industry, 220, 221;
homes along, 223;
house-boats, 224;
reclamation of banks, 225-7;
traffic, 222;
truck-gardens, 221.
Salem, Oregon, 312, 323.
Salmon fisheries, 302, 348, 375.
Salt River Valley, 93.
San Antonio de Pala, mission chapel of, 117, 120.
San Bernardino Range, the, 241.
San Buenaventura, 162.
San Carlos, Church of, Monterey, 183.
San Clemente, island of, 151.
San Diego, 97, 98, 102, 107-112, 117, 118;
advantages, 109, 110;
climate, 111, 112;
geography, 103;
growth of, 108;
highway, 102, 103;
history, 107, 108;
prospects, 109-111.
San Francisco, 215;
Portola Festival at, 201.
San Joaquin River, the, 221, 241, 242, 245, 256.
San José, California, 196, 200;
mission, 195.
San José, picture of, 49, 50.
San Juan Bautista, mission of, 186.
San Juan Islands, 343, 344.
San Luis Obispo, California, 172.
San Luis Rey, mission of, 117, 119, 120.
San Mateo, California, 198, 199;
New Mexico, 29.
San Pedro, harbour of, 144, 145.
_San Salvador_, the, 171.
San Xavier del Bac, mission of, 91-94.
Sand-storms in Death Valley, 176, 177.
Sangre de Cristo Range, the, 18, 22.
Santa Barbara, 166-172, 202, 217;
architecture, 170;
Arlington Hotel, 170, 171;
college, 170;
contrasts in, 167;
Old Town section, 168;
Plaza del Mar, 169;
State Street, 169, 170.
Santa Barbara Islands, the, 146, 151-3.
Santa Catalina Island, 146-151, 153.
Santa Clara Valley, the, 8, 190-210;
air in, 206;
blossom-time in, 192, 193;
climate, 200, 201;
land values, 204, 205;
productiveness of, 193-5;
schools in, 196;
ultrafashionable colonies of, 198.
Santa Clara Valley (southern), 262, 263.
Santa Cruz Island, 151-3.
Santa Fé, 16-21, 56;
governor’s palace, 16;
history, 19;
Mexicans in, 29;
name of, 19;
possibilities of, 17, 18;
scenery, 16.
Santa Fé, Prescott & Phœnix Railway, 81.
Santa Fé Trail, the, 18, 20.
Santa Monica, California, 143.
Santa Paula, California, 263, 264.
Santa Rita Mountains, 92.
Santa Ynez, inn near, 180;
mission of, 179.
Santa Ynez Range, the, 178, 216.
Saugus, California, 262, 263.
Scenic Highway, the, 21, 22.
Schoolhouses in the Santa Clara, 196.
Seals, of Santa Cruz, 151.
Seaside resorts, California, 142-4.
Seattle, 202;
compared with Portland, 340, 341, 346.
Sentinel Hotel, the, 249, 250.
Sequim Prairie, 344.
Sequoia trees, the, 254, 255, 257, 258.
Serra, Father Junipero, 108, 115, 121, 130, 180, 181, 183, 184, 195,
198, 210, 246.
Servilleta, 56.
Sespe Valley, the, 164.
Sheep-raising, 26-28, 262.
Sherman, 183.
Sierra Nevada Range, the, 160, 232, 241, 265-7.
Silver City, New Mexico, 32.
Siskiyous, the, 324.
Siwash Indians, 415, 416, 447-451.
Skeena, the, 390, 394, 395.
Skylanders, 42 _et seq._
Smiley Heights, California, 131.
Smith, Captain Jedediah, 56, 115, 210.
Smithsonian Institution, 40.
Sol Duc Hot Springs, 344.
Southern California, 97.
Spanish dominion in Mexico, overthrow of, 19.
Sprockets, John D., 109.
Stage-coaches, 90.
Stanford, Leland, 197, 210.
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 183.
Stockton, California, 244-6.
Stony Creek, B. C., 415, 416.
Studebaker, John, 229.
Suisun Bay, 220, 221.
Summerland, California, 167.
Summit, California, 232, 233.
Superstition Mountains, 93.
Susanville, 277, 280-2.
Sutler, John Augustus, 227, 228, 234.
Sutler’s Fort, 227, 228, 234.
Swamp and Drowned Lands Act, 260.
Tacoma, 336-8, 346.
Tahoe. (See _Lake Tahoe_.)
Tahoe Tavern, 268.
Tallac, California, 232.
Taos, New Mexico, 22, 55-58;
houses, 45, 57.
Tehachapi Range, the, 97, 241, 261.
Telegraph stations, frontier, 403, 404.
Tennis Club, Ojai Valley, 164.
Tent City, at Coronado, 112, 113.
Tête Jaune Pass, the, 379, 380.
The Dalles, Oregon, 276, 277, 286-8, 291.
Tiles, Spanish, 168.
Tillamook County, Oregon, 326, 327.
Tingley, Madame, 103.
Torrey pine, the, 118.
Trail riding, 260.
Trees, California Big, 254, 255, 257, 258.
Trevet, Victor, 293.
Truck-gardens, 221, 222.
Truckee, California, 233-5, 268, 269.
Tucson, Arizona, 80, 81, 92, 94.
Tucson Farms, 110.
Tuna Club, the, at Avalon, 150, 151.
Tuna fishing, 140-151.
Turquoise deposits, 32.
Tyler, President, 296.
Union Pacific Railroad, 21.
Universal Brotherhood, the, 103.
University of California, Greek Theatre at, 202.
University of New Mexico, the, 15.
Vallejo, California, 219, 220.
Vancouver, B. C., 116, 349, 350, 363-7, 369.
Vancouver Island, 345, 370-6, 442;
fish and game, 375;
Island Highway, 371-4;
motoring on, 372;
railway, 381;
scenery, 373, 374.
van Dyke, Dr. Henry, 130.
Vargas, De, 19.
Venice, California, 143, 144.
Ventura, California, 162.
Victoria, B. C., 346, 363-370;
Harbour, 367, 368.
Visalia, California, 246, 257, 258.
_Vittoria_, the, 171.
Vizcaino, 181.
Wagon-trains, 20, 21, 398.
Wah, the brothers, 7, 8.
Walla Walla, 295.
Wallace, General Lew, 16.
Washington, 331 _et seq._;
character of the country, 334, 335;
climate, 335;
land clearing, 334, 335;
names of towns, 333;
roads, 331, 332;
sign-posts, 333, 334;
water-power, 335.
Water discovery in the Mimbres Valley, 5, 6.
Waterfalls of the Columbia River, 300, 301.
Wawona, California, 254.
Webster, secretary of state, 296.
Well-digging in New Mexico, 11.
White Rock Cañon, 23.
Whitman, 295, 296.
Willamette River, the, 309-311, 317.
Wood, Mr., 150.
Wool industry, the, 26-28.
Yavapai Club, the, 81.
Yosemite Valley, the, 246-260;
Indian settlement, 250-2;
Sentinel Hotel, 249, 250;
variety of recreation, 253.
Yukon Telegraph Trail, 395.
Yuma, Arizona, 83-85, 97, 98, 102, 110.
[Illustration: MAP OF THE FAR WEST, FROM NEW MEXICO TO BRITISH COLUMBIA,
SHOWING THE ROUTE FOLLOWED BY THE AUTHOR]
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