Chapter XV: The Map That Is Half Unrolled 419 (8)

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.

“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.

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.

“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.

“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.

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.”