Chapter XV: The Map That Is Half Unrolled 419 (7)

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.

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.

“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.”]