[i]

# THE END OF THE TRAIL

From a photograph by H. A. Erickson, Coronado, Cal.

THE PROMISED LAND.

Looking southward to the Gulf of California—and Mexico.

## BOOKS BY E. ALEXANDER POWELL

Published by CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

THE LAST FRONTIER: The White Man’s War for Civilization in Africa. Illustrated. 8vo | net $1.50
GENTLEMEN ROVERS. Illustrated. 8vo | net $1.50
THE END OF THE TRAIL. Illustrated. 8vo | net $3.00

[ii]

[iii]

THE
END OF THE TRAIL

THE FAR WEST FROM
NEW MEXICO TO BRITISH COLUMBIA

BY
E. ALEXANDER POWELL, F.R.G.S.
AUTHOR OF “THE LAST FRONTIER,” “GENTLEMEN ROVERS,” ETC., ETC.

WITH FORTY-EIGHT FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS
AND A MAP

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1914

[iv]

Copyright, 1914, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

Published November, 1914

[v]

TO
MY FRIEND AND FELLOW-ADVENTURER
ALBERT C. KUHN
OF
RANCHO YERBA BUENA
IN “THE VALLEY OF HEART’S DELIGHT”

[vi]

[vii]

## FOREWORD

In the dim dawn of history the Aryans, forsaking the birthplace of the race upon the Caspian shore, poured through the passes of the Caucasus and peopled Europe. By caravel and merchantman adventuring Europeans crossed the western ocean and established a fringe of settlements along this continent’s eastern rim. The American pioneers, taking up the historic march, slowly but inexorably pressed westward, from the Hudson to the Ohio, from the Ohio to the Mississippi, from the Mississippi across the plains, across the Rockies, until athwart the line of their advance they found another ocean. They could go no farther, for beyond that ocean lay the overpopulated countries of the yellow race. The white man had completed his age-long migration toward the beckoning West; his march was finished; in the golden lands which look upon the Pacific he had come to the End of the Trail.

In the great march which substituted the wheat-field for the desert, the orchard for the forest, the work was done by the hardiest breed of adventurers that ever foreran the columns of civilisation—the Pioneers. And the pioneer has always lived on the frontier. Most people believe that there is no longer any quarter of this continent that can properly be[viii] called the frontier and that the pioneer is as extinct as the buffalo. To prove that they are wrong I have written this book. Though the gambler and the gun-fighter have vanished before the storm of public disapproval; though the bison no longer roams the ranges; though the express rider has given way to the express-train; in the hinterland of that vast region which sweeps westward and northward from the Pecos to the Skeena, and which includes New Mexico, Arizona, California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, frontier conditions still endure and the frontiersman is still to be found. In the unexplored and unexploited portions of this, “the Last West,” white-topped prairie schooners—full sisters of those which crossed the plains in ’49—creak into the wilderness in the wake of the home seeker; the settler chops his little farmstead from the virgin forest and rears his cabin of logs from the trees which grew upon the site; mile-long pack-trains wend their way into the northern wild; six-horse Concord coaches tear along the roads amid rolling clouds of dust, their scarlet bodies swaying drunkenly upon their leathern springs; out in the back country, where the roads run out and the trails begin, the cow-puncher still rides the ranges in his picturesque panoply of high-crowned Stetson and Angora chaps and vivid shirt. But this is the last call. It is the last chance to see a nation in the primeval stage of its existence. In a few more years, a very few, there will be no place on this continent, or on any continent, that can truthfully be called the frontier, and with it[ix] will disappear, never to return, those stern and hardy figures—the pioneer, the prospector, the packer, the puncher—who won for us the West.

The real West—and by the term I do not mean that sun-kissed, flower-carpeted coast zone, with its orange groves and apple orchards, its palatial mansions and luxurious hotels, its fashionable resorts and teeming, all-of-a-sudden cities, which stretches from San Diego to Vancouver and which to the Eastern visitor represents “the West”—cannot be seen from the terraces of tourist hostelries or the observation platforms of transcontinental trains. Because I wished to visit those portions of the West which cannot be viewed from a car-window and because I wished to acquaint myself with the characteristics and problems and ideals of the people who dwell in them, I travelled from Mexico to the borders of Alaska by motor-car—the only time, I believe, that a car has made that journey on its own wheels and under its own power. Because that journey was so crowded with incident and obstacle and adventure, and because the incidents and obstacles and adventures thus encountered so graphically illustrate the conditions which prevail in “the Last West,” is my excuse for having to a certain extent made a personal narrative of the following chapters.

Without entering into a tedious recital of distances and road conditions, I have outlined certain routes which the motorist who contemplates turning the bonnet of his car westward might follow with profit[x] and pleasure. With no desire to usurp the guide-book’s place, I have deemed it as important to describe that enchanted littoral which has become the nation’s winter playground as to depict that back country which the tourist seldom sees. Though I hold no brief for boards of trade and kindred organisations, I have incorporated the more significant facts and figures as to land values, soils, crops, climates, and resources which every prospective home-seeker wishes to know. But, more than anything else, I have tried to convey something of the spell of that big, open, unfenced, keep-on-the-grass, do-as-you-please, glad-to-see-you land and of the spirit of energy, industry, and determination which animates the kindly, hospitable, big-hearted, broad-minded, open-handed men who dwell there. They are the modern Argonauts, the present-day Pioneers. To them, across the miles, I lift my glass.

E. Alexander Powell.

[xi]

## CONTENTS

CHAPTER |  | PAGE
I. | Conquerors of Sun and Sand | 1
II. | The Skylanders | 33
III. | Chopping a Path to To-Morrow | 61
IV. | The Land of Dreams-Come-True | 95
V. | Where Gold Grows on Trees | 123
VI. | The Coast of Fairyland | 155
VII. | The Valley of Heart’s Delight | 187
VIII. | The Modern Argonauts | 211
IX. | The Inland Empire | 237
X. | “Where Rolls the Oregon” | 271
XI. | A Frontier Arcady | 305
XII. | Breaking the Wilderness | 329
XIII. | Clinching the Rivets of Empire | 351
XIV. | Back of Beyond | 387
XV. | The Map that is Half Unrolled | 419
| Index | 455

[xii]

[xiii]

## ILLUSTRATIONS

The Promised Land | Frontispiece
| FACING PAGE
A Desert Dawn in New Mexico | 4
Santa Fé: the Most Picturesque City between the Oceans | 18
Remains of an Ancient Civilisation | 24
The Land of the Turquoise Sky | 38
Acoma: Supposed Ancient Site and Present Site | 40
Acoma as It is To-Day | 44
Acoma Hunter Home from the Hunt | 48
Acoma Artisans | 50
“Dance Mad!” | 52
Young Acomans | 54
The Education of a Young Hopi | 56
The Pyramid-Pueblo of Taos | 58
The Passing of the Puncher | 64
Where the Roads Run Out and the Trails Begin | 72
The Trail of a Thousand Thrills | 88
Throwing the Diamond Hitch | 90
Scenes in the Motor Journey Through Arizona | 98
Not in Catalonia but in California | 120[xiv]
A Modern Version of the Sermon on the Mount | 130
Santa Barbara, a City of Contrasts | 168
The Mission of Santa Barbara | 170
Lake Tahoe from the Slopes of the High Sierras | 232
The Yosemite—and a Lady Who Didn’t Know Fear | 250
Yosemite Youngsters, White and Red | 252
The Greatest Oil Fields in the World | 260
Over the Tehachapis | 262
The Overland Mail | 274
In the Oregon Hinterland | 284
“Where Rolls the Oregon” | 300
Where Rods Bend Double and Reels Go Whir-r-r-r | 324
What the Road-Builders Have Done in Washington | 332
The Unexplored Olympics | 344
Where the Salmon Come from | 348
Outposts of Civilisation | 354
Breaking the Wilderness | 356
Pack-Horses and a Pack-Dog | 358
In the Great, Still Land | 362
Sport on Vancouver Island | 376
Life at the Back of Beyond | 380
Transport on America’s Last Frontier | 382
Transport on America’s Last Frontier | 384
Scenes on the Cariboo Trail | 400
Some Ladies from the Upper Skeena | 422[xv]
Where No Motor-Car Had Ever Gone: Some Incidents of Mr. Powell’s Journey Through the British Columbian Wilderness | 428
Some Siwash Cemeteries | 448
Heraldry in the Hinterland | 450
A Land of Sublimity and Magnificence and Grandeur, of Gloom and Loneliness and Dread | 452
Map of the Far West, from New Mexico to British Columbia, Showing the Route Followed by the Author | at end of volume

[1]

# THE END OF THE TRAIL

## I
CONQUERORS OF SUN AND SAND

[2]

“The song of the deed in the doing, of the work still hot from the hand;
Of the yoke of man laid friendly-wise on the neck of a tameless land.
While your merchandise is weighing, we will bit and bridle and rein
The floods of the storm-rocked mountains and lead them down to the plain;
And the foam-ribbed, dark-hued waters, tired from that mighty race,
Shall lie at the feet of palm and vine and know their appointed place;
And out of that subtle union, desert and mountain-flood,
Shall be homes for a nation’s choosing, where no homes else had stood.”

[3]

### I
CONQUERORS OF SUN AND SAND

“Isn’t this invigorating?” said a passenger on the Sunset Limited to a lounger on a station platform as he inhaled delightedly the crisp, clear air of New Mexico.

“No, sir,” replied the man, who happened to be a native filled with civic pride; “this is Deming.”

The story may be true, of course; but if it isn’t it ought to be, for it is wholly typical of the attitude of the citizens of the youngest-but-one of our national family. Indeed, I had not spent twenty-four hours within the borders of the State before I had discovered that the most characteristic and likeable qualities of its inhabitants are their pride and faith in the land wherein they dwell. And this despite the fact that their neighbours across the line in Arizona refer to New Mexico slightingly—though not without some truth—as a State “where they dig for water and plough for wood.”

Perhaps no region in the world, certainly none in the United States, has changed so remarkably in the space of a single decade. Ten years ago the only things suggested by a mention of New Mexico were cowboys,[4] Hopi snake-dances, Navajo blankets, and Harvey eating-houses. Five years ago Deming was as typical a cow-town as you could find west of the Pecos. Gin-palaces and gambling-hells were running twenty-four hours a day; cattlemen in Angora chaps and high-crowned sombreros lounged under the shade of the wooden awnings and used the sidewalks of yellow pine for cuspidors; wiry, unkempt cow-ponies stood in rows along the hitching rails which lined a street ankle-deep in dust. Those were the careless days of “chaps and taps and latigo-straps,” when writers of the Wild West school of fiction could find characters, satisfying as though made to their order, in every barroom, and groups of spurred and booted figures awaited the moving-picture man (who had not then come into his own) on every corner.

All southern New Mexico was held by experts—at least they called themselves experts—to be a waterless and next-to-good-for-nothing waste. Government engineers had traversed the region and, without considering it worth the time or trouble to sink test wells, had written it down in their reports as being a worthless desert; and the gentlemen who make the school geographies and the atlases followed suit by painting it a speckled yellow, like the Sahara and the Kalahari. Real-estate operators, racing westward to earn a few speculative millions in California, glanced from the windows of their Pullmans at the tedious expanse of sun-swept sand and, with a regretful sigh that Providence had been so careless as to forget the water, settled[5] back to their magazines and their cigars. So the cattlemen who had turned their longhorns in among the straggling scrub, to get such a living as they could from the sparse desert grasses, were left in undisturbed possession, and if their uniform success in finding water wherever they sank their infrequent wells suggested any agricultural possibilities they were careful to keep the thought to themselves.

From a photograph copyright by Fred Harvey.

A DESERT DAWN IN NEW MEXICO.

One day, however, one of the men in the Pullman, instead of leaning back regretfully, descended from the train, hired a horse, and rode out into the mesquite-dotted waste. He told the liveryman that he was a prospector, and, in a manner of speaking, he was. Being, incidentally, the manager of one of the largest and most profitable ranches in California, he was as familiar with the vagaries of the desert as a cowboy is with the caprices of his pony; and, moreover, he understood the science of irrigation from I to N. After a few days of quiet investigation he dropped into the commissioner’s office in Deming one morning and filed a claim for several hundred acres of land. Most of those who heard about it said that he was merely a fool of a tenderfoot who was throwing away his time and money and who ought to have a guardian appointed to take care of him, but some of the wise old cattlemen looked worried. Within a fortnight he had erected his machinery and was drilling for water. And wherever his wells went down, there water came up: fine, clear, sparkling water—gallons and gallons of it. It soused the thirsty desert and turned its good-for-nothing[6] sand into good-for-anything loam. The seeds which the far-seeing Californian planted, sprouted, and the sprouts became blades, and the blades shot into stalks of alfalfa and corn and cane—and the future of all southern New Mexico was assured.

The news of the discovery of water in the Mimbres valley and of the miracles that had been performed through its agency spread over the country as though by wireless, and sun-tanned, horny-handed men from half the States in the Union began to pile into Deming by every train, eager to take up the land while it was still to be had under the hospitable terms of the Homestead and Desert Land acts. It was in 1910 that the Californian, John Hund, sunk his first well; when I was in the office of the United States commissioner in Deming four years later I found that the nearest unoccupied land was sixteen miles from the city limits.

Should you ever have occasion to fly over New Mexico in an aeroplane you will have no difficulty whatever in recognising the Mimbres valley; viewed from the sky it looks exactly like a bright-green rug spread across one end of a vast hardwood floor. Most of the valley holdings were, I noticed, of but ten or twenty acres, comparatively few of them being more than fifty, for the New Mexican homesteader has found that his bank-account increases faster if he cultivates ten acres thoroughly rather than a hundred superficially. This lesson they have had hammered into[7] them not alone from experience but from observing the operations of a couple of almond-eyed brethren named Wah, hailing originally, I believe, from Canton, who own a twenty-three-acre truck-farm near Deming. Those vineyards on the slopes of Capri and those farmsteads clinging to the rocky hillsides of Calabria, where soil of any kind is so precious that every inch is tended with pathetic care, seem but crude and amateurish efforts in agriculture when compared with the efforts to which these Chinese brothers have carried their intensive farming. Though watered only by a small and primitive well, their farm graphically illustrates what can be accomplished by paying attention to those little things which the American farmer is accustomed contemptuously to disregard, as well as being an object-lesson in the remarkable variety of fruits and vegetables which the valley is capable of producing. These Chinamen make every one of their acres produce three crops of vegetables a year. Not a foot of soil is wasted. They even begrudge the narrow strips which are used for paths. Fruit-trees and grape-vines border the banks of the irrigation channels, and peas, beans, and tomatoes are grown between melon rows. A drove of corpulent porkers attend voraciously to the garden refuse and even the reservoir has had its usefulness doubled by being stocked with fish. Were the New Mexicans notoriously not lotus-eaters, the Brothers Wah would doubtless find still another use for their reservoir by raising in it the Egyptian water-lily. It is paying attention to such relatively insignificant[8] details as these which makes J. Chinaman, Esquire, the best gardener in the world. It pays, too, for they told me in Deming that the Wahs, from their twenty-three-acre holding, are increasing their bank-account at the rate of eight thousand dollars a year. After noting the cordiality with which they were greeted by the president of the local bank, I did not doubt it. I should like to have a bank president greet me the way he did them.

I have seen many remarkable farming countries—in Rhodesia, for example, and the hinterland of Morocco, and the Crimea, and the prairie provinces of Canada, not to mention the Santa Clara and the Imperial valleys of California—but I can recall none where soil and climate seemed to have combined so effectively to befriend the farmer as in the valley of the Mimbres. Imagine what a comfort it must be to do your farming in a region where you will never have to worry about how long it will be before it rains, nor to tramp about in the mud afterward. As the annual rainfall in this portion of New Mexico does not exceed eight inches, there is a generous margin left for sunshine. Instead of praying for rain, and then cursing his luck because it doesn’t come, or because it comes too heavily, the New Mexican farmer strolls over to his artesian well and throws over an electric switch which sets the pump agoing. When his fields are sufficiently irrigated he throws the switch back again. From the view-point of health it would be hard to improve upon the climate of the Mimbres valley, or, for that[9] matter, of any other portion of New Mexico, its elevation of four thousand three hundred feet, taken with the fact that it is in the same latitude as Algeria and Japan and southernmost California, giving it summers which are hot without being humid or oppressive and winters which are never uncomfortably cold.

Like their neighbours in other parts of the Southwest, the farmers of southern New Mexico have gone daft over alfalfa. To me—I might as well admit it frankly—one patch of alfalfa looks exactly like another, and they all look extremely uninteresting, but I suppose that if they were netting me from fifty to seventy-five dollars an acre a year, as they are their owners, I would take a more lively interest in them. I never arrived at a town in New Mexico, dirty, hungry, and tired, but that there was a group of eager boosters with a dust-covered automobile awaiting me at the station.

“Jump right in,” they would say. “We have an alfalfa field over here that we want to show you. It’s only about thirty miles across the desert and we’ll get you back before the hotel dining-room is closed.”

They’re as enthusiastic about a patch of alfalfa in New Mexico as the Esquimaux of Labrador are about a stranded whale.

If you have an idea that you would like to be a hardy frontiersman and wear a broad-brimmed hat and become the owner of a ranch somewhere in that region which lies between the Gila and the Pecos, it were well to disabuse yourself of several erroneous[10] impressions which seem to prevail about life in the Southwest. In the first place, you can dress just as much like the ranchmen whom you have seen depicted in the magazines as you wish—fleecy chaparejos and a horsehair hat band and a pair of spurs that jingle like an approaching four-in-hand when the wearer walks and all the rest of the paraphernalia—for they are a tolerant folk, are the New Mexicans, and have become accustomed to all sorts of queer doings by newcomers. In many respects they are the politest people that I know. When I was in New Mexico I carried a cane, and no one even smiled. But the newcomer must not imagine that he can gallop madly across the ranges, at least in the vicinity of the towns, for he is more likely than not to be hauled up before a justice of the peace and fined for trespassing on some one’s alfalfa field or cabbage patch. (Cabbages, though painfully prosaic, are about the most profitable crop you can grow in New Mexico; they pay as high as three hundred and fifty dollars an acre.) And the intending rancher must make up his mind that he must begin at the beginning. New Mexico is no place for the agriculturist de luxe who expects to sit on the piazza of his ranch-house and watch the hired men do the work. No, sirree! It is a roll-up-your-sleeves-spit-on-your-hands-and-pitch-in land where every one works and is proud of it. And there is always enough to do, goodness knows! This is virgin soil, remember, and first of all it has to be cleared of the piñon and mesquite and chaparral which cover it. This clearing and[11] grubbing costs on an average, so I was told, about five dollars an acre, but you get a supply of fire-wood in return—and there’s nothing that makes a cheerier blaze on a winter’s night than a hearth heaped with the roots of mesquite. In other countries you chop down your fuel with an axe; in New Mexico you dig it up with a hoe. Then there is the matter of well digging, which, including the cost of boring, machinery, and housing, works out at from fifteen to twenty-five dollars an acre. Since the construction of several large power-plants, the cost of pumping has been greatly reduced by the use of electricity. It is quite possible, of course, for the five or ten acre man to secure tracts close to town with all the preliminary work done for him, water being provided from a central pumping plant and his pro-rata share of the capitalised cost added to the price of his land, which may be purchased, like a piano or an encyclopedia, on the instalment plan. That will be about all, I think, for facts and figures.

One of the most interesting things about the settlers with whom I talked in southern New Mexico is that, so far as any previous knowledge of agriculture was concerned, most of them were the veriest amateurs. One man whom I met had taught school in Iowa for a quarter of a century, but along in middle life he decided that there was more money to be made in teaching corn and cabbages how to shoot than there was in teaching the same thing to the young idea. Another was a Methodist clergyman from Kentucky[12] who told me that he had never had a real conception of the hell-fire he preached about until he started in one scorching July morning to sink an artesian well in the desert. Still a third successful settler had been a physician in Oklahoma, while there are any number of “long-horned Texicans,” as the Texan cattlemen are called, who have moved over into New Mexico and become farmers. Scattered through the country are a few Englishmen; not of the club-lounging, bar-loafing, remittance-man type so common in Canada and Australia, but energetic, hard-working youngsters who are earnestly engaged in building homes for themselves in a new country and under an adopted flag. Not all of the Englishmen who have come out to New Mexico have proven so steady or successful, however, for a few years ago an English syndicate purchased a Spanish land grant of some two million acres in the vicinity of Raton and sent out a complete equipment of British managers, superintendents, foremen, butlers, valets, men servants, lodge keepers, gardeners, coachmen, and other functionaries, not to mention coaches, tandem carts, a pack of foxhounds, and other paraphernalia of the sporting life. A man who witnessed their detrainment at Raton told me that it was more fun than watching the unloading of the Greatest Show on Earth. It was a great life those Englishmen led while it lasted—tea at four every afternoon, evening clothes for dinner, and then a few rubbers of bridge—but it ended in the property being taken over at forced sale by a group of hard-headed[13] Hollanders, who harnessed the four-in-hands to ploughs, used the tandem carts for hauling wood, set the hounds to churning butter, and are making the big place pay dividends regularly.

Some two hundred miles north of Deming as the mail-train goes is Albuquerque, the metropolis of the State—if the term metropolis can properly be applied to a place with not much over twelve thousand inhabitants—set squarely in the centre of the one hundred and twenty-two thousand square mile parallelogram which is New Mexico. Albuquerque is a railway centre of considerable importance, for from there one can get through cars north to Denver and Pike’s Peak, south to the borders of Mexico and its revolutions, and west to the Golden Gate. One of the things that struck me most forcibly about Albuquerque—and the observation is equally applicable to all the rest of New Mexico—is that instead of having weather they enjoy climate. It is pretty hard to beat a land where the moths have a chance to eat holes in your overcoat but never in your bed blankets. Climate is, in fact, Albuquerque’s most valuable asset, and she trades on it for all she is worth—and it is worth to her several million dollars per annum. It is one of the few cities that I know of where they want and welcome invalids and say so frankly. They could not do otherwise with any consistency, however, for half the leading citizens of the town arrived there on their backs, clinging desperately to life, and were lifted out of the car window on a stretcher. These one-time invalids are[14] to-day as husky, energetic, up-and-doing men as you will find anywhere. Heretofore Albuquerque has been much too busy catering to the wants of the thousands of tourists and invalids who step onto its station platform each year to pay much attention to agricultural development; but bordering on the town are several thousand acres of as fine, healthy desert as you will find anywhere outside of the Sahara. They are enclosed, as though by a great garden wall, by the Manzano ranges, and the gentleman who whirled me across the billiard-table surface of the desert in his motor-car told me that the government now has an irrigation project under consideration which, by damming the waters of the Rio Grande, will reclaim upward of four hundred thousand acres of this arid land. And the great government irrigation projects now in operation elsewhere in the Southwest have shown that water can produce as many things from a desert as the late Monsieur Hermann could from a gentleman’s hat. So one of these days, I expect, the country around Albuquerque, from the city limits to the distant foot-hills, will be as green with alfalfa as Ireland is with shamrock.

They have a commercial club in Albuquerque that is a club. At first I thought I had wandered into a hotel by mistake, for, with its spacious lobby, its busy billiard-tables, its handsome rugs and furniture, and the mahogany desk with the solicitous clerk behind it, it is about as distantly related to the usual commercial club as one could well imagine. It gives[15] those men in the community who are doing things, and the others who want to be doing things or ought to be doing things, a place where they can meet and discuss, over tall, thin glasses with ice tinkling in them, the perennial problems of taxes, pavements, irrigation, crops, fishing, house building, automobiles, and the climate. I would suggest to the club’s board of governors, however, that it take steps to remove the undertaker’s establishment which flanks the entrance. When one drops into a place to get some facts regarding the desirability of settling there, it is not exactly reassuring to be greeted by a pile of coffins.

Whoever was responsible for the architecture of the University of New Mexico buildings, which stand in the outskirts of Albuquerque, deserves a metaphorical slap of commendation. New Mexico is a young State and not yet overly rich in this world’s goods, so that if, with their limited resources, they had attempted to erect collegiate buildings along the usual hackneyed lines, with Doric porticoes and gilded cupolas and all that sort of thing, the result would probably have looked more like a third-rate normal school than like a State university. But they did nothing of the sort. Instead, they erected buildings adapted from the ancient communal cliff dwellings, constructing them of the native adobe, which is durable, inexpensive, warm in winter and in summer cool. All the decorations, inside and out, are Indian symbols and pictures painted in dull colors upon the adobe walls. Thus, at a moderate cost, they have a group of buildings[16] which typify the history of New Mexico and are in harmony with its strongly characteristic landscape; which are admirably suited to the climate; and which are unique among collegiate institutions in that they are modelled after those great houses in which the Hopi lived and worked before the dawn of history on the American continent.

Santa Fé, the capital of the State, is, to my way of thinking, the quaintest and most fascinating city between the oceans. Very old, very sleepy, very picturesque, it presents more neglected opportunities than any place I know. I should like to have a chance to stage-manage Santa Fé, for the scenery, which ranks among the best efforts of the Great Scene Painter, is all set and the costumed actors are waiting in the wings for their cues. Give it the advertising it deserves and the curtain could be rung up to a capacity house. Where else within our borders is there a three-hundred-year-old palace whose red-tiled roof has sheltered nearly five-score governors—Spanish, Pueblo, Mexican, and American? (In a back room of the palace, as you doubtless know, General Lew Wallace, while governor of New Mexico, wrote “Ben Hur.”) Where else are Indians in scarlet blankets and beaded moccasins, their braided hair hanging in front of their shoulders in long plaits, as common sights in the streets as are traffic policemen on Broadway? Where else can you see groups of cow-punchers on sweating, dancing ponies and sullen-faced Mexicans in high-crowned hats and gaudy sashes, and dusty prospectors with[17] their patient pack-mules plodding along behind them, and diminutive burros trotting to market under burdens so enormous that nothing can be seen of the burro but his ears and tail?

Though at present it is only a sleepy and forgotten backwater, with the main arteries of commerce running along their steel channels a score of miles away, Santa Fé could be made, at a small expenditure of anything save energy and taste, one of the great tourist Meccas of America. To begin with, it is the only place still left in the United States where Buffalo Bill’s Wild West could merge into the landscape without causing a stampede. Those who know how much pains and money were spent by the municipality of Brussels in restoring a single square of that city to its original mediæval picturesqueness, whole blocks of brick and stone having to be torn down to produce the desired effect, will appreciate the possibilities of Santa Fé, where the necessary restorations have only to be made in inexpensive adobe. Desultory efforts are being made, it is true, to induce the residents to promote this scheme for a harmonious ensemble by restricting their architecture to those quaint and simple designs so characteristic of the country, the Board of Trade providing an object-lesson in the possibilities of the humble adobe by erecting a charming little two-room cottage, with an open fireplace, a veranda, and a pergola, at a total expense of one hundred dollars, but every now and then the sought-for architectural harmony is given a rude jolt by some one who could[18] not resist the attractions of Queen Anne gables or Clydesdale piazza columns or Colonial red-brick-and-green-blinds.

Set at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo Range, a mile above the level of the sea, with one of the kindliest all-the-year-round climates in the world, and with an atmosphere which is far more Oriental than American, Santa Fé has the making of just such another “show town” as Biskra, in southern Algeria, where Hichens laid the scene of “The Garden of Allah.” If its citizens would wake up to its possibilities sufficiently to advertise it as scores of Californian towns with not half of its attractions are advertised; if they would restore the more historically important of the crumbling adobe buildings to their original condition and erect their new buildings in the same characteristic and inexpensive style; if they would keep the streets alive with the colourful figures of blanketed Indians and Mexican venders of silver filigree; and if the local hotel would have the originality to meet the incoming trains with a four-horse Concord coach, such as is inseparably associated with the Santa Fé Trail, instead of a ramshackle bus, they would soon have so many visitors piling into the New Mexican capital that they could not take care of them. But they are a dolce far niente folk, are the people of Santa Fé, and I expect that they will placidly continue along the same happy, easy, sleepy path that they have always followed. And perhaps it is just as well that they should.

A dwelling.

A street.

From a photograph copyright by Jess Nusbaum.

Interior of a room.

SANTA FÉ: THE MOST PICTURESQUE CITY BETWEEN THE OCEANS.

“They call me Santa Fé for short,” the New[19] Mexican capital might answer if one inquired its name, “but my whole name is La Ciudad Real de la Santa Fé de San Francisco,” which, translated into our own tongue, means “The Royal City of the Holy Faith of Saint Francis.” It is some name—there is no denying that—but historically the town is quite able to live up to it. Fifteen years before the anchor of the Mayflower rumbled down off New England’s rocky coast, Juan de Oñate, an adventurous and gold-hungry gentleman of Spain, marching up from Mexico, had raised over the Indian pueblo which had occupied this site from time beyond reckoning the banner of Castile. In 1680 came the great Indian revolt; the Spanish soldiers and settlers were surprised and massacred and the brown-robed friars were slain on the altars of the churches they had built. For twelve years the Pueblos ruled the land. Then came De Vargas, at the head of a column of steel-capped and cuirassed soldiery and, after a ferocious reckoning with the Indians, retook the city in the name of his Most Catholic Majesty of Spain. With the overthrow of Spanish dominion in Mexico, the City of the Holy Faith became the northernmost outpost of the Mexican Republic, and Mexican it remained until that August morning in 1846 when General Kearney and his brass-helmeted dragoons clattered into its plaza and raised on the palace flagstaff a flag that was never to come down. That episode is commemorated by a marble shaft which rises amid the cottonwoods on the historic plaza. On its base are carved the words in which[20] General Kearney proclaimed the annexation of New Mexico to the United States:

“We come as friends to make you a part of the representative government. In our government all men are equal. Every man has a right to serve God according to his conscience and his heart.”

At the other end of the plaza another monument marks the end of the famous Santa Fé Trail, over which, in prairie-schooners and Concord coaches and on the backs of mules and horses, was borne the commerce of the prairies. Santa Fé was to the historic trail of which it was the end what Bagdad is to the caravan routes across the Persian desert. No sooner would the lead team of one of these mile-long wagon-trains top the surrounding hills than word of its approach would spread through Santa Fé like wildfire. “Los Americanos! Los Carros! La Caravana!” the inhabitants would call to one another as they turned their faces plazaward, for the coming of a wagon-train was as much of an event as is the arrival of a steamer at a South Sea island. By the time that the first of the creaking, white-topped wagons, with its five yoke of oxen, had come to a halt before the custom-house, every inhabitant of the town was in the streets. A necessary preliminary to any trading was for the chief trader to make a call of ceremony upon the Spanish governor and, after a laboured interchange of salutes and compliments, to pay him the enormous toll of five hundred dollars per wagon imposed by the Spanish government upon wagon-trains coming from[21] the United States. It came out of the pockets of the Spaniards in the end, however, for the American traders simply added it to the prices which they charged for their merchandise, which were high enough already, goodness knows: linen brought four dollars a yard, broadcloth twenty-five dollars a yard, and everything else in proportion. It is no wonder that the traders of the plains often retired as wealthy men. Stephen B. Elkins came to New Mexico, where he was to found his fortune, as bull-whacker in a wagon-train; one of the traders, Bent by name, came in time to sit himself in the governor’s palace in Santa Fé; and Kit Carson’s earlier years were spent in guiding these commercial expeditions. With the driving of the last spike in the Union Pacific Railroad, however, the importance of Santa Fé as a half-way house on the overland route to California vanished, and since then it has dwelt, contentedly enough, in its glorious climate and its memories of the past.

Up the Cañon of the Santa Fé, over the nine-thousand-foot Dalton Divide, and down into the Cañon of the Macho, several hundred gentlemen, in garments of a somewhat conspicuous pattern provided by the State, are building what will in time take rank as one of the world’s great highways. It is to be called the Scenic Highway, and when it is completed it will form a section of the projected Camino Real from Denver to El Paso. It promises to be to the American Southwest what the Sorrento-Amalfi Drive is to southern Italy and the famous Corniche Road is to the[22] south of France. By means of switchbacks—twenty-two of them in all—it will wind up the precipitous slopes of the great Dalton Divide, twist and turn among the snow-capped titans of the Sangre de Cristo Range, skirt the edges of sheer precipices and dizzy chasms, drop down through the leafy solitudes of the Pecos Forest Reserve, and then stretch its length across the rolling uplands toward Taos, the pyramid-city of the Pueblos.

Within a hundred-mile radius of Santa Fé are three of the most wonderful “sights” in this or any other country: the hill-city of Acoma, the pyramid-pueblo of Taos (both of which are described at length in the succeeding chapter) and the Pajarito National Park. The Pajarito (in Spanish, remember, the j takes the sound of h) provides what is unquestionably the richest field of archæological research in the United States, the remains of the inconceivably ancient civilisation with which it is literally strewn, bearing much the same relation to the history of the New World that the ruins of Upper Egypt do to that of the Old. To reach the Pajarito, where the ruins of the cave people exist, you can ride or drive or motor. As the distance from Santa Fé is only about forty miles, if you are willing to get up with the chickens you can make it in a single day. Comfortable sleeping quarters and excellent meals can be had at the hospitable ranch-house of Judge Abbott, or, if you prefer, you can take along a pair of blankets and some provisions and sleep high and dry in a cave once occupied by one of[23] your very remote ancestors. The very courteous gentlemen in charge of the American School of Archæology at Santa Fé are always glad to furnish information regarding the best way to enter the Pajarito. Twenty odd miles north of Santa Fé and, debouching quite unexpectedly upon the flat summit of a mesa, you look down upon the iridescent ribbon which is the Rio Grande as it twists and turns between the sheer, smooth walls of chalky rock which form the sides of White Rock Cañon. Coming into this great gorge at right angles are the smaller cañons—chief among them the one known as the Rito de los Frijoles—in whose precipitous walls the cave folk hewed their homes. Some of these smaller cañons are hundreds of feet above the bed of the Rio Grande, with openings barely wide enough to let the mountain streams fall through into the river below.

You must picture the Rito de los Frijoles as an immensely long and narrow cañon—so narrow that Rube Marquard could probably pitch a stone across—with walls as steep and smooth and twice as high as those of the Flatiron Building. Then you must picture the lower face of this rocky wall as being literally honeycombed by thousands—and when I say thousands I do not mean hundreds—of windows and doors and port-holes and apertures and other openings to caves hollowed from the soft rock of the cliffs. It is a city of the dead, silent as a mausoleum, mysterious as the lines of the hand, older than recorded history. This once populous city consisted of a single street,[24] twelve miles long, its cave-dwellings, which were reached by ladders or by steps cut in the soft tufa, rising above each other, tier on tier, like some Gargantuan apartment building. Such portions of the face of the cliff as are not perforated with doors and windows are embellished with pictographs, many of them in an extraordinary state of preservation, which, if the sight-seeing public only knew it, are as interesting and far more perplexing than the wall-paintings in the Tombs of the Kings at Thebes. On the floor of the valley the archæologists have laid bare the ruins of a circular community house which, when viewed from above, bears a striking resemblance to the ancient Greek theatre at Taormina, while on the Puyé to the north a communal building of twelve hundred rooms—larger than the Waldorf-Astoria—has been excavated. Farther down the Rito is the stone circle or dancing floor to which the prehistoric young folk descended to make merry, while their parents kept an eye on them from their houses in the cliff. (I doubt not that, when the sun began to sink behind the Jemez, some skin-clad mother would lean from the window of her fifth-story flat and shrilly call to her daughter, engrossed in learning the steps of the prehistoric equivalent of the tango on the dancing floor below: “A-ya, come up this minute! You hear me? Your paw’s just come home with a dinosaur and he wants it cooked for supper.”) Three miles up the cañon, half a thousand feet up the face of the cliff, is the arched ceremonial cave where, secure from prying eyes, this strange people performed their still stranger rites.[25] Thanks to the energy of the American Archæological Society, this cave has been restored to the same condition in which it was when prehistoric lodge members worked their mysterious degrees and made the quaking initiates ride the goat. Though it is the aim of the society to year by year restore portions of the Rito until the whole cañon has returned to its original condition, such difficulty has been experienced in obtaining the necessary funds that at the present rate of progress it will take a century to effect a complete restoration. Yet our millionaires pour out their wealth like water to promote the excavation and restoration of the ruins of alien peoples in other lands. Though carloads of pottery and utensils have been carted away to enrich museums and private collections, the surface of the Pajarito has been scarcely scratched, more than twenty thousand communal caves and dwellings remaining to tempt the seekers of lost cities. Where did the inhabitants of this strange city go—and why? What swept their civilisation away? When did the age-old silence fall? These are questions which even the archæologists do not attempt to answer. All that they can assert with any degree of certainty is that the caves which underlie the communal dwellings in the Pajarito yield ample evidence of having been occupied by human beings in the days of the lava flow, when the mastodon and the dinosaur roamed the land and the world was very, very young.

“The arched ceremonial cave where ... this strange people performed their still stranger rites.”

“The archæologists have laid bare the ruins of a circular community house.”

REMAINS OF AN ANCIENT CIVILISATION.

Of the three great elemental industries of New Mexico—cattle raising, sheep raising, and mining—cattle[26] raising was the first and, more than any other, gave colour to the country. The early Spanish and Mexican settlers were cow-men, and the old Sonora stock, “all horns and backbone,” may still be seen on some of the interior ranges, though they are now almost a thing of the past. Then came the great wagon-trains of Texans, California bound, many of whom, attracted by the wealth of pasturage, stopped off and turned their long-horned cattle out on the grass-grown desert. As Texas and the Middle West became fenced and civilised, the old-time cattlemen drove their herds farther and farther toward the setting sun. In those days there were no sheep to compete for the pasture; mountains and desert were clothed with grass so rich and long that they looked as though they were upholstered in green velvet; there was not a strand of barbed wire between the Pecos and the Colorado. New Mexico was indeed the cow-man’s paradise. Though the range has in many places been ruined by droughts and overstocking; though a woolly wave has encroached upon the lands which the cow-man had regarded as inalienably his own, there are, nevertheless, close to a million head of cattle within the borders of the State, by far the greater part of which are Herefords and Durhams, for the imported stock has increased the cow-man’s profits out of all proportion to the initial expense.

Feeding with equal right and freedom upon the same public domain are upward of five million head of sheep, for New Mexico is the home of the wool industry[27] in America. The early Spanish settlers kept large flocks of the straight-necked, coarse-wooled Mexican sheep in the country around Santa Fé, and from them the Navajos and Moquis, those industrious weavers of blankets and workers in silver, soon stole or bartered for enough to start a sheep business of their own, it being said that a third of all the sheep in the State are now owned by Indians. Unlike cattle, sheep, in cool weather, can exist without water for a month at a time; so, when the desert turns from yellow to green in the spring, they drift out over it in great flocks which look for all the world like fleecy clouds. Each flock, which usually consists of several thousand sheep, is attended by a herder and his “rustler,” who cooks, packs in supplies, and brings water in casks from the nearest stream for the use of the herder and his dogs, the juicy browse providing all the moisture that the sheep require.

Owing to its warm, dry weather, New Mexico is one of the earliest shearing stations in the world, the work beginning the latter part of January and lasting until the first of May. In this time enough wool is clipped to supply a considerable portion of the people of the United States with suits and blankets. Until quite recently the shearing of the wool was a long and tedious task, even the more expert hand shearers seldom being able to average more than sixty or seventy fleeces a day. When machine shearing was introduced into New Mexico a few years age, however, this daily average was promptly doubled. Sheep-shearers are[28] probably the best-paid and hardest-working class of men in the world, receiving from seven to eight and a half cents a head and averaging one hundred and twenty-five sheep a day. The best of them, however, shear from two to three hundred sheep in a single day, the record, I believe, being three hundred and twenty-five. As the shearing season only lasts through six months of the year, during which time they must travel from Texas to Montana, the unionised shearers demand and receive high wages, some of them making as much as twenty dollars a day. Yet, in spite of this and of the grazing fee of six cents a head for all sheep that feed on forest reserves, it is safe to say that the wool-growers are the most prosperous men in New Mexico.

The social fabric of New Mexico is a curious blending of Mexicans, Indians, and Americans. Of these elements the Mexicans are by far the most numerous, their customs, costumes, and language lending a decidedly Spanish flavour to the country. Living for the most part in scattered settlements along the mountain streams or in their own quarters in the towns, they enjoy a lazy, irresponsible, and not uncomfortable existence in return for their humble labour, not differing materially, either in their mode of life, manners, or morals, from their kinsmen below the Rio Grande. Shiftless, indolent, indifferently honest, the peons of New Mexico, like the South African Kaffirs and the Egyptian fellaheen, are nevertheless invaluable to the[29] welfare of the State, for they perform practically all the labour on the ranches, mines, and railways. Politically they are an element to be reckoned with, about seventy-five per cent of the population of Santa Fé being Mexicans, while sixty per cent of the State Legislature is from the same race. As a result of this Latin preponderance in the population, practically all Americans in New Mexico are compelled to have at least a working knowledge of Spanish, which is really the lingua franca of the country, it being by no means unusual to find one who speaks it better than the Mexicans themselves. Owing to the great influx of settlers during the last few years, the Mexican proportion of the population has been greatly reduced, as is confirmed by the increasing use of the English language and of English newspapers.

One of the strangest religious sects in the world—the Penitentes—are recruited from the Mexican element of the population. Although this dread form of religious fanaticism has its centre in the region about San Mateo, it permeates peon life in every quarter of the State. For the Penitente is not an Indian; he is a Mexican. The Indians of the Pueblos repudiate Penitente practices. Neither is the Penitente a Catholic, for the Church has fought his terrible rites tooth and nail, though thus far it has fought them in vain. He is really a grim survivor of those secret orders whose fanaticism and religious excesses became a byword even in the calloused Europe of the Middle Ages. The sect is divided into two branches: the Brothers of[30] Light—La Luz—and the Brothers of Darkness—Las Tinieblas. Though they hold secret meetings with more or less regularity throughout the year in their lodges or morados, they are really active only during the forty days of Lent. During that period both men and women flog their naked backs with scourges of aloe fibre, wind their limbs with wire or rope so tightly as to stop the circulation, lie for hours at a time on beds of cactus, make pilgrimages to mountain shrines with their unstockinged feet in shoes filled with jagged flints, stagger torturing miles across the sun-baked desert under the weight of enormous crosses, while on Good Friday this carnival of torture culminates in one of their number, chosen by lot, actually being crucified. It has been a number of years, however, since a Penitente has died on the cross, for, since the law came to New Mexico, they have found it wiser to fasten their willing victim to the cross with rope instead of nails. Though sporadic efforts have been made to break up the sect, they have thus far been unsuccessful, as it is no secret that many men high in the political life of New Mexico bear on their backs the tattooed cross which is the symbol of the order.

Though the growth of the white population has heretofore been slow, it has begun to increase by leaps and bounds with the development of irrigation. Though New Mexico now contains representatives from every State in the Union and from pretty much every country in the world, the average run of society exhibits a tendency toward high-crowned hats that[31] shows the dominating influence of Texas. They are, I think, the most hospitable folk that I have ever met; they are tolerant of other people’s opinions; have a tendency to ride rather than walk; are ready to fight at the drop of the hat; hate to count their money; lie only for the sake of entertainment; like a big proposition; and know how to handle it—there you have them, the gentlemen of New Mexico. But don’t go out to New Mexico, my Eastern friends, with the idea that you can butt into society with the aid of a good cigar—because you can’t. They are a free-born, free-living, free-speaking folk, are the dwellers out in the back country where the desert meets the mountains and the mountains meet the sky, and they don’t give a whoop-and-hurrah whether you come or stay away.

Such, in brief, bold outline, is the New Mexico of to-day. I have tried to paint you a picture, as well as I know how, of the progress, potentialities, and prospects of this, the youngest but one of the sisterhood of States. Though New Mexico, as a Territory, was willing enough to be a synonym for Indian villages and snake-dances and cavorting cowboys, the State of New Mexico stands for something very different indeed. Though it welcomes the tourists who come-look-see-spend-go, it prefers the settlers who are prepared to stay and make it their home. Unlike its sister State of Arizona, New Mexico does not suffer from that greatest of privations—lack of water—for the mountain-flood waters that now go to waste would store great reservoirs,[32] there is the flow of numerous streams and river systems, and below the surface are artesian belts of water waiting only to be tapped by the farmer’s well. That the soil, once watered, is very fertile is best proved by the orchards, gardens, and meadows which cover the valleys of the Mimbres and the Pecos. Ten years ago the cattlemen of New Mexico used to say that it took “sixty acres to raise a steer”; to-day, thanks to irrigation, a single acre of alfalfa does the business. In gold, silver, coal, and copper the State is very rich—the largest copper mine in the world is at Silver City—while its turquoise deposits surpass those of Persia. And the people are as big-hearted and broad-minded and open-handed as you will find anywhere on earth. Taking it by and large, therefore, a man with some experience, a little capital, plenty of energy and ambition, and an intimate acquaintance with hard work should go a long way in New Mexico. He would find down there a big, new, unfenced, up-and-doing country and a set of sun-bronzed, iron-hard, self-reliant men of whom any country might be proud. These men are the modern conquistadores, for they have conquered sun and sand. To-day they are only commonplace farmers, but, when history has granted them the justice of perspective, they will be called the Pioneers.

[33]

## II
THE SKYLANDERS

[34]

“Here still a lofty rock remains,
On which the curious eye may trace
(Now wasted half by wearing rains)
The fancies of a ruder race.
...
And long shall timorous Fancy see
The painted chief, and pointed spear,
And Reason’s self shall bow the knee
To shadows and delusions here.”

[35]

### II
THE SKYLANDERS

Six minutes after midnight the mail-train came thundering out of nowhere. With hissing steam and brakes asqueal it paused just long enough for me to drop off and then roared on its transcontinental way again to the accompaniment of a droning chant which quickly dropped into diminuendo, its scarlet tail lamps disappearing at forty miles an hour, leaving me abandoned in the utter darkness of the desert. The Casa Alvarado at Albuquerque, with its red-shaded candles and snowy napery, where I had dined only four hours before, seemed very far away. Some one flashed a lantern in my face and a voice behind it inquired:

“Are you the gent that’s goin’ to Acoma?”

“I am,” said I, “if I can get there.”

“Well, I reckon you’ll get there all right, seein’ as how the trader at Laguna’s sent a rig over for you. Bob made a little money on a bunch o’ cattle a while back and he’s been pretty damned independent ever since ’bout takin’ folks over to Acoma. Says it’s too hard on his horses. But when Bob says he’ll do a thing he does it. Hi, Charlie!” he shouted, “you over there?”

A guttural affirmative came out of the blackness. As the loquacious station agent made no offer to light[36] my footsteps, I cautiously picked my way across the rails, slid down a steep embankment into a ditch, scrambled out of it, and descried before me the vague outlines of a ramshackle vehicle drawn by a pair of wiry, unkempt ponies.

“How?” grunted the driver, who, as my eyes became accustomed to the darkness, I saw was an Indian, his hair, plaited in two long braids with strands of vivid flannel interwoven, hanging in front of his shoulders, schoolgirl fashion. I clambered in, the Indian spoke to his ponies, and, breaking into a lope, they swung off across the desert, the wretched vehicle lurching and pitching behind them.

It is an unforgettable experience, a ride across the New Mexican desert in the night-time. The sky is like purple velvet and the stars seem very near. The silence is not the peaceful stillness that comes with nightfall in settled regions, but the mysterious, uncanny hush that hangs over other ancient and deserted lands—Upper Egypt, for example, and Turkestan. Our way was lined with dim, fantastic shapes whose phantom arms seemed to warn or beckon or implore, but which, in the prosaic light of morning, resolved themselves into clumps of piñon, and mesquite, and prickly-pear. The ponies shied suddenly at a stirring in the underbrush—probably a rattlesnake disturbed—and in the distance a coyote gave dismal tongue. Slipping and sliding down a declivity so abrupt that the axles were level with the ponies’ backs, we rattled across the stone-strewn bed of an arroyo seco, as they[37] term a dried-up watercourse in that half-Spanish region, and clattered into a settlement whose squat, flat-roofed hovels of adobe, unlighted and silent as the houses of Pompeii, showed dimly on either hand.

“Laguna?” I inquired.

“Uh-huh,” responded my taciturn companion, pulling up his ponies sharply before a dwelling considerably more pretentious than the rest. “Trader’s,” he added laconically.

As, stiff, chilled, and weary, I scrambled down, the door swung open to reveal a lean figure in shirt and trousers, silhouetted by the light from a guttering candle.

“I’m the trader,” said he. “I reckon you’re the party we’ve been expectin’. We ain’t got much accommodation to offer you, but, such as it is, you’re welcome to it. I’m afeard my youngsters’ll keep you awake, though. I’ve got six on ’em an’ they’ve all got the whoopin’-cough, so me an’ my old woman hain’t had a chanct to shet our eyes for the last week.”

It wasn’t the cough-harassed children who kept me wide-eyed and tossing through the night, however. It was Sheridan, I think, who remarked that had the fleas of a certain bed upon which he once slept been unanimous, they could easily have pushed him out. Had the tiny hordes which were in possession of my couch had an insect Kitchener to organise and lead them, I should certainly have had to spend the night upon the floor. I learned afterward that the Indians of the neighbouring pueblos have a name for Laguna[38] which, in the white man’s tongue, means “Scratch-town.”

From Laguna to Acoma is a four hours’ drive across the desert. It is very rough and more than once I feared that I should require the services of an osteopath to rejoint my vertebræ. And it is inconceivably dusty, the ponies kicking up clouds of fine, shifting sand which fills your eyes and nose and ears and sifts through your garments until you feel as though you were covered with sandpaper instead of skin. The sun beats down until the arid expanse of the desert is as hot as the whitewashed base of a railway-station stove at white heat. Everything considered, it is not the sort of a drive that one would choose for pleasure, but it is a very wonderful drive nevertheless, for the New Mexican desert is a kaleidoscope of colour. It is a land of black rocks and orange sand, flecked with discouraged, hopeless-looking clumps of sage-green vegetation; of violet, and amethyst, and purple mountain ranges; and overhead a sky of the brightest blue you will find anywhere outside a wash-tub. The cloud effects are the most beautiful I have ever seen, great masses of fleecy cirrus drifting lazily, like flocks of new-washed sheep, across the turquoise sky. Everywhere the colours are splashed on with a barbaric, almost a theatrical, touch. It is a regular back-drop of a country; its scenery looks as though it should have been painted on a curtain. When a party of Indians, with scarlet handkerchiefs twisted about their heads pirate fashion, lope by astride of spotted[39] ponies, the illusion is complete. “You’re not really in New Mexico, you know,” you say to yourself. “This is much too theatrical to be real. You’re sitting in an orchestra chair watching a play, that’s what you’re doing.”

From a photograph by A. C. Vroman.

THE LAND OF THE TURQUOISE SKY.

“Great masses of fleecy cirrus drifting lazily, like flocks of new-washed sheep, across the turquoise sky.”

Swinging sharply around the shoulder of a sand-dune, a mesa—a table-land of rock—reared itself out of the plain as unexpectedly as a slap in the face. The driver pointed unconcernedly with his whip. “La Mesa Encantada,” he grunted. The Enchanted Mesa! Was there ever a name which so reeked with mystery and romance? Picture, if you can, a bandbox-shaped rock, almost flat on top and covering as much ground as a good-sized city square, higher than the Times Building in New York and with sides almost as perpendicular, set down in the middle of the flattest, yellowest desert the imagination can conceive. Seen from the distance, it suggests the stump of an inconceivably gigantic tree—a tree a thousand feet in diameter and sawed squarely off four hundred and thirty feet above the ground. On one side it is as sheer and smooth as that face of Gibraltar which looks Spainward, and when the evening sun strikes it slantingly it turns the monstrous mass of sandstone into a pile of rosy coral. It is one of the most impressive things that I have ever seen. Solitary, silent, mysterious, redolent of legend and superstition, older than Time itself, it suggests, without in any way resembling, those Colossi of Memnon which stare out across the desert from ruined Thebes.

[40]

Those disputatious cousins Science and Tradition seem to have agreed for once that the original Acoma stood on the top of the Mesa Encantada, or Katzimo, as the Indians call it, in the days when the world was very young. Ever since Katzimo first attracted scientific attention the archælogists have quarrelled like cats and dogs over this question of whether it had ever been inhabited, just as they are quarrelling in Palestine as to the site of Calvary. A few years ago the Smithsonian Institution, desirous of settling the controversy for good and all, despatched to New Mexico a gentleman of an inquiring turn of mind, who succeeded in performing the supposedly impossible feat of scaling the sheer cliffs which, from time beyond reckoning, have guarded the secret of the mesa. On the plateau at the top he found fragments of earthenware utensils, which would seem to prove quite conclusively that it had been inhabited in long-past ages by human beings, thus supporting the traditions which prevail among the Indians regarding this mighty monolith. Whether the Enchanted Mesa has ever been inhabited I do not know; no one knows; and, to tell the truth, it does not greatly matter. According to the legend current among the Pueblos, this island in the air was originally accessible by means of a huge, detached fragment leaning against it at such an angle that it formed a precarious and perilous ladder to the top. Its difficulty of access was more than compensated for, however, by its security from the attacks of enemies, whether on two feet or four, for Katzimo is[41] supposed to have echoed to human voices in those dim and distant days when the mastodon and the dinosaur roamed the land. The Indian legend has it that, while the men of the tribe were absent on a hunting expedition and the able-bodied women were hoeing corn in the fields below, some cataclysm of nature—most probably an earthquake—jarred loose the ladder rock and toppled it over into the plain, leaving the town on the summit as completely cut off from human help as though it were on another planet. The women and children thus isolated perished miserably from starvation, and their spirits, so the Indians will assure you, still haunt the summit of Katzimo. On any windy night you can hear them for yourself, moaning and wailing for the help that never came. That is why it were easier to persuade a Mississippi darky to spend a night in a graveyard than to induce an Indian to linger in the vicinity of the Enchanted Mesa after dark.

From a photograph by A. C. Vroman.

“A bandbox-shaped rock, higher than the Times Building in New York and with sides almost as perpendicular.”

From a photograph by A. C. Vroman.

“The mesa on which the modern Acoma is perched might be likened to a gigantic billiard-table three hundred and fifty-seven feet high.”

ACOMA: SUPPOSED ANCIENT SITE AND PRESENT SITE.

The survivors of the tribe chose as the site of their new town the top of a somewhat lower mesa, three miles or so from their former home. If the Enchanted Mesa resembles a titanic bandbox, the mesa on which the modern Acoma is perched might be likened to a gigantic billiard-table, three hundred and fifty-seven feet high, seventy acres in area upon its level top, and supported by precipices which are not merely perpendicular but in many cases actually overhanging. It presents one of the most striking examples of erosion in the world, does Acoma, the sand which has been hurled against it by the wind of ages,[42] as by a natural sand-blast, having cut the soft rock into forms more fantastic than were ever conjured up by Little Nemo in his dreams. Battlements, turrets, arches, minarets, and gargoyles of weather-worn, tawny-tinted rock rise on every hand. There are two routes to the summit and both of them require leathern lungs and seasoned sinews. One, called, if I remember rightly, the “Padre’s Path,” is little more than a crevasse in the solid rock, its ascent necessitating the vigorous use of knees and elbows as well as hands and feet, it being about as easy to negotiate as the outside of the Statue of Liberty. The other path, which is considerably longer, suggests the stone-paved ascent to some stronghold of the Middle Ages—and, when you come to think about it, that is precisely what it is—the resemblance being heightened by the massive battlements of eroded rock between which it winds and the strings of patient donkeys which plod up it, faggot-laden. Though of fair width near the bottom, it gradually narrows as it zigzags upward, finally becoming so slim that there is not room between the face of the cliff and the brink of the precipice for two donkeys to pass. It was at this inauspicious spot that I first encountered one of these dwellers in the sky—“skylanders” they might fittingly be called. He was a low-browed, sullen-looking fellow, with a skin the colour of a well-worn saddle and an expression about as pleasant as a rainy morning. His shock of coarse black hair had been bobbed just below the ears and was kept back from his eyes by the inevitable banda;[43] his legs were encased in chaparejos of fringed buckskin, and his shirt tails fluttered free. He came jogging down the perilous pathway astride of a calico donkey and, with the background of rocks and sand, cut a very striking and savage figure indeed. “He’ll make a perfectly bully picture,” I said to myself, and, suiting the action to the thought, I unlimbered my camera and ambushed myself behind a projecting shoulder of rock. As he swung into the range of my lens I snapped the shutter. It was speeded up to a hundredth of a second, but in much less time than that he had dismounted and was coming for me with a club. I have read somewhere that the Acomas are a mild-mannered, inoffensive folk. Well, perhaps. Still, I was glad that I had in my jacket pocket the largest-sized automatic used by a civilised people, and I was still gladder when Man-That-Wouldn’t-Have-His-Picture-Taken, glimpsing its ominous outline through the cloth, moved sullenly away, shaking his stick and muttering sentiments which needed no translation. He was an artist in the way he laid on his curses, was that Indian. An army mule-skinner would have taken off his hat to him in admiration.

Of all the nineteen pueblos of New Mexico, Acoma is the most interesting by far. Indeed, I do not think that I am permitting my enthusiasm to get the better of my discrimination when I class it with Urga, Khiva, Mecca, the troglodyte town of Medenine in southern Tunisia, and Timbuktu as one of the half dozen most interesting semicivilised places in existence.[44] Where else in all the world can you find a town hanging, as it were, between land and sky and reached by some of the dizziest trails ever trod by human feet; a town of many-floored but doorless dwellings, which have ladders instead of stairs and whose windows are of gypsum instead of glass; a town where the women build and own the houses and the men weave the women’s gowns; where the husbands take the names of their wives and the children the names of their mothers; where the belongings of a dead man are destroyed upon his grave and the ghosts are distracted so that his spirit may have time to escape; a town where religious mysteries, as incredible as those of voodooism and as jealously guarded as those of Lhasa, are performed in an underground chamber as impossible of access by the uninitiated as the Kaaba? Where else shall you find such a place as that, I ask you? Tell me that.

From a photograph by A. C. Vroman.

“The massive battlements of eroded rock between which it winds ... suggest the stone-paved ascent to some stronghold of the Middle Ages.”

From a photograph by A. C. Vroman.

“You gain access to the first floor of an Acoma dwelling precisely as you gain access to the hold of a ship.”

ACOMA AS IT IS TO-DAY.

Acoma has the unassailable distinction of being the oldest continuously inhabited town within our borders, though how old the archæologists have been unable to conjecture, much less positively say. Certain it is that it was ancient when the Great Navigator set foot on the beach of San Salvador; that it was hoary with antiquity when the Great Captain and his mail-clad men-at-arms came marching up from Vera Cruz for the taking of Mexico. One needs to be very close under its beetling cliffs before any sign of the village can be detected, as the houses are of the same color and, indeed of the same material as the rock[45] upon which they stand and so far above the plain that, as old Casteñeda, the chronicler of Coronado’s expedition in 1540, records, “it was a very good musket that could throw a ball as high.” The lofty situation of the town and the effect of bleakness produced by the entire absence of vegetation and by the cold, grey rock of which it is built reminded me of San Marino, that mountain-top capital of a tiny republic in the Apennines, while in the startling abruptness with which the mesa rears itself out of the desert there is a suggestion of those strange monasteries of Metéora, perched on their rocky columns above the Thessalian plain. The village proper consists of three parallel blocks of houses running east and west perhaps a thousand feet and skyward forty. They are, in fact, primeval apartment-houses, each block being partitioned by cross-walls into separate little homes which have no interior communication with each other. Each of these blocks is three stories high, with a sheer wall behind but terraced in front, so that it looks like a flight of three gigantic steps. (At the sister pueblo of Taos, a hundred miles or so to the northward, this novel architectural scheme has been carried even further by building the houses six and even seven stories high and terracing them on all four sides so that they form a pyramid.) The second story is set well back on the roof of the first, thus giving it a broad, uncovered terrace across its entire front, and the third story is similarly placed upon the second. In Acoma, which has about seven hundred people,[46] there are scarcely a dozen doors on the ground; and these indicate the abodes of those progressive citizens who, not satisfied with what was good enough for their fathers, must be for ever experimenting with some new-fangled device. Barring these cases of recent innovation, there are no doors to the lower floor, the only access to a house being by a rude ladder to the first terrace. If you are making a call on the occupants of the first story, you wriggle through a tiny trap-door in the floor of the second and literally drop in upon them—so literally that your hosts see your feet before they see your face. It is a novel experience ... yes, indeed. You gain access to the first floor of an Acoma dwelling precisely as you gain access to the hold of a ship—by climbing a ladder to the deck and then descending through a hatchway. If you wish to leave your visiting-card at the third-floor apartment or if you have a hankering to see the view from the topmost roof, you can ascend quite easily by means of queer little steps notched in the division walls. The ground floor is always occupied by the senior members of the family, the second terrace is allotted to the daughter first married, and the upper flat goes to the daughter who gets a husband next. If there are other married daughters they must seek apartments elsewhere or live with grandpa and grandma in the basement.

Most writers about Acoma seem to be particularly impressed with the cleanliness of its inhabitants and the neatness of their homes. I don’t like to shatter[47] any illusions, but it struck me that the much-vaunted neatness of these people consisted mainly in covering their beds with scarlet blankets and whitewashing their walls. I have heard visitors exclaim enthusiastically as they peered in through an open doorway: “Why, I wouldn’t mind sleeping there at all.” They are perfectly welcome to so far as I am concerned. As for me, I much prefer a warm blanket and the open mesa. All of the Pueblo Indians are as ignorant of the elements of sanitation as a Congo black. If you doubt it, visit one of these sky cities on a scorching summer’s day when there is no wind blowing. As an old frontiersman in Albuquerque confided to me: “Say, friend, I’d ruther have a skunk hangin’ round my tent than to have to spend a night to leeward o’ one of them there Hopi towns.”

Civilisation has evidently found the rocky path to Acoma too steep to climb, for when I was there not a soul in the place spoke a word of English. There was a daughter of the village who had been educated at Carlisle—Marie was her name, I think—but she was away on a visit. Perhaps she couldn’t stand the loneliness of being the only civilised person in the community. That is one of the deplorable features incident to our system of Indian education. A youth is sent to Carlisle or Hampton or Riverside, as the case may be, and after being broken to the white man’s ways is sent back to his own people on the theory that, by force of example, he will alter their mode of living. But he rarely does anything of the sort, for[48] his fellow tribesmen either resent his attempts to introduce innovations or treat him with the same contemptuous tolerance with which the hidebound residents of a country village regard the youth who is “college l’arned.” So, after a time, becoming discouraged by the futility of attempting to teach his people something that they don’t want to know, he either goes out into the world to earn his own livelihood as best he may or else he again leaves his shirt tails outside his breeches, daubs his face with paint on dance days, and, forgetting how to use a fork and napkin, goes back to the manners and usages of his fathers. But you mustn’t get the idea that Acoma is wholly uncivilised, for it isn’t. One household has an iron bed with large brass knobs, another boasts a rocking-chair, and a third possesses a sewing-machine. But the most convincing proof that these untutored children of the sky possess a strain of culture is in the fact that Acoma can boast no phonograph to greet the visitor with the raucous strains of “Every Little Movement” and “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.”

From a photograph copyright by Fred Harvey.

ACOMA HUNTER HOME FROM THE HUNT.

In many respects the most remarkable feature of Acoma is its immense adobe church, built upward of three centuries ago. It is remarkable because every stick and every adobe brick in it was carried up the heart-breaking, back-breaking trails from the plains three hundred feet below on the backs of patient Indians. There are timbers in that church a foot and a half square and forty feet long, brought by human muscle alone from the mountains a long day’s march[49] away. And it is no tiny chapel, remember, but a building of enormous proportions, with walls ten feet thick and sixty feet high, and covering more ground than any modern church in America. As a monument of patient toil it is hardly less wonderful than the Pyramids; it was as long in building as the Children of Israel were in getting out of the wilderness. Above its gaudy altar hangs a royal gift, the town’s most treasured possession—a painting of San José, presented to Acoma two centuries and a half ago by his Most Catholic Majesty Charles the Second of Aragon and Castile. Faded and time-dimmed though it is, that picture once nearly caused an Indian war. Some years ago the neighbouring pueblo of Laguna, suffering from drought and cattle sickness and all manner of disasters, looked on the prosperity of Acoma and ascribed it to the patronage of the painted San José. So Laguna, believing that if the saint could bring prosperity to one pueblo, he could bring it to another, asked Acoma for the loan of the picture, and, after a tribal council, the request was granted. Their confidence in the saint was justified, for no sooner had the picture been transferred to the walls of Laguna’s bell-hung, mud-walled mission church than the rains came and the crops sprouted, and the cattle throve, and the tourists, leaning from their car windows, bought more pottery and blankets than they ever had before. After a time, however, Acoma gently intimated to Laguna that a loan was not a gift and asked for the return of the picture. Whereupon the Lagunas[50] retorted that if possession was nine points of the law in the white man’s country, in the Indian country it was ten points—and then some, and that if the Acomas wanted the picture they could come and take it—if they could. For several weeks there was much sharpening of knives and cleaning of Winchesters in both pueblos, and at night the high mesa of Acoma resounded to those same war chants which preceded the massacre of Zaldivar and his Spaniards. But the saner counsels of the Indian agent prevailed, for these hill-folk are at heart a peaceable people, and they were induced to submit the dispute over the picture to the arbitrament of the white man’s courts. Perhaps it was well for the peace of central New Mexico that Judge Kirby Benedict, who heard the case, decided in favour of the plaintiffs and ordered the picture restored to Acoma forthwith. But when the messengers sent from Acoma to bring the sacred treasure back arrived at Laguna they found that the picture had mysteriously disappeared. But while riding dejectedly back to Acoma to break the news of the calamity they discovered under a mesquite bush, midway between the two pueblos—God be praised!—the missing picture. The Acomas instantly recognised, of course, that San José, released from bondage, had started homeward of his own volition and had doubtless sought shelter in the shade of the mesquite bush until the heat of the day had passed. He hangs once more on the wall of the ancient church, just where he did when he came, all fresh and shiny, from Madrid,[51] and every morning the hill people file in and cross themselves before him and mutter a little prayer.

From a photograph by A. C. Vroman. The pottery painter. | From a photograph by A. C. Vroman. The blanket weaver. | From a photograph by A. C. Vroman. The turquoise driller.

ACOMA ARTISANS.

In front of the church is the village graveyard, a depression in the rock forty feet deep and two hundred square, filled with earth brought on the backs of women from the far plain. It took them nearly forty years to make it. Is it any wonder that the patient, moccasined feet of centuries have sunk their imprint in the rock six inches deep? And the work was done by women! Imagine the New York suffragettes carrying enough dirt in sacks to the top of the Metropolitan Building to make a graveyard there. The bones lie thick on the surface soil, now literally a bank of human limestone. Dig down into that ghastly stratum and you would doubtless find among the myriads of bleached and grinning skulls some that had been cleft by sword-blade or pierced by bullet—grim reminders of that day, now three centuries agone, when Oñate’s men-at-arms carried Acoma by storm and put three thousand of its defenders to the sword, as was the Spanish custom. A funeral in Acoma’s sun-seared graveyard is worth journeying a long, long way to see. When the still form, wrapped in its costliest blanket, has been lowered into its narrow resting-place among the skeletons of its fathers; when upon the earth above it has been broken the symbolic jar of water; when the relatives have brought forth pottery and weapons and clothing to be broken and rent upon the grave that they may go with their departed owner; when all these weird rites have been performed the wailing mourners[52] file away to those desolate houses where the shamans are blinding the eyes of the ghosts that they may not find the trail of the soul which has set out on its four days’ journey to the Land That Lies Beyond the Ranges. It is a strange business.

American dominion has not yet resulted in destroying the picturesque costumes of the Acomas, and I hope to Heaven that it never will. Civilisation has enough to answer for in substituting the unlovely garments of Europe for the beautiful and becoming costumes of China and Japan. In Acoma the people always look as though they were dressed up for visitors, although, as a matter of fact, they are nothing of the sort. Like all barbarians, they are fond of colours. The tendencies of a man may be pretty accurately gauged by the manner in which he wears his shirt. If he lets it hang outside his trousers he is a dyed-in-the-wool conservative, and you can make up your mind that he has no glass in his windows or doors to his ground floor. But if he tucks it into his trousers, white-man fashion, it may be taken as a sign that he is a progressive, an aboriginal Bull Mooser, as it were, in which case he usually goes a step further by hiding the picturesque banda, with its suggestion of the buccaneers, beneath a sombrero several sizes too large. On dance days, however, liberals and conservatives alike discard their shirts and trousers for the primitive breech-clouts of their savage ancestors, streak and ring their lithe, brown bodies with red and yellow pigments, surmount their none too lovely features with[53] fantastic head-dresses, and transform themselves into very ferocious and repellent figures indeed. A Hopi in his dancing dress looks like the creature of a bad dream.

From a photograph by A. C. Vroman.

“DANCE MAD!”

“On dance days they streak and ring their lithe bronze bodies with red and yellow pigments, surmount their none too lovely features with fantastic head-dresses, and transform themselves into the creatures of a bad dream.”

The women wear a peculiar sort of tunic, somewhat resembling that worn by their cousins on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, which exposes the neck and one round, bronze shoulder. The garment is well chosen, for the Acomas have the finest necks and busts of any women that I know. This is due, no doubt, to the fact that they carry all the water used in their houses from the communal reservoir in tinajas balanced on their heads, frequently up a ladder and two steep flights of stairs, thus unconsciously developing a litheness of figure and a mould of form that would arouse the envy of Gaby des Lys. Over their shoulders is drawn a little shawl, generally of vivid scarlet. Then there is more scarlet in the kilts which reach from the waist to the knees and a contrast in the black stockings which come to the ankle, leaving bare their dainty feet—the smallest and prettiest women’s feet that I have ever seen. The feet of all these hill-folk are abnormally small, the result, doubtless, of the constant clutching of the uneven rock. The picturesqueness of the women’s costumes is enormously increased by the quantities of turquoise-studded silver jewellery which they affect, which tinkles musically when they walk. This jewellery, which they hammer out of Mexican pesos, obtaining the turquoises from the rich and highly profitable local mines, forms one of the[54] Acomas’ chief sources of revenue, for they sell great quantities of it to the agents of the curiosity dealers along the railway and these resell it to the tourists on the transcontinental trains at a profit of many hundred per cent. They make several other forms of decorative wares: blankets, for example—though the Hopi blankets are not to be spoken of in the same breath with the beautiful products of the looms of their unfriendly Navajo neighbours—and pottery jars which they patiently decorate in fine grey-black designs and burn over dung-fed fires. Everything considered, their work is probably the most artistic done by any Indians in America to-day.

But to return to the highway of narrative from which I find that I have inadvertently wandered. When a girl is old enough to get married, which is usually about the time that she reaches her twelfth birthday, she is expected to arrange her lustrous blue-black hair in two large whorls, like doughnuts, one on each side of her dainty head. The whorl is supposed to typify the squash blossom, which is the Hopi emblem of maidenhood. To arrange this complicated coiffure is a long day’s task, and after it is once made the owner puts herself to acute discomfort by sleeping on a wooden head-rest, so as not to disarrange it. When a girl marries, which she generally does very early in her teens, she must no longer wear the nash-mi, as the whorls are called. Instead, her hair is done up in two pendent rolls, symbolical of the ripened squash, which is the Hopi emblem of fruitfulness. And after[55] you have seen the litters of fat, brown babies which gambol like puppies before every door, and the rows of roguish children’s faces which peer down at you from every sun-scorched housetop, you begin to think that there must be some virtue in this symbolical hair-dressing after all.

From a photograph by A. C. Vroman. “When a girl is old enough to get married she is expected to arrange her lustrous, blue-black hair in two large whorls.” | From a photograph by A. C. Vroman. “Rows of roguish children’s faces which peer down at you from every sun-baked housetop.”

YOUNG ACOMANS.

Acoma is Mrs. Pankhurst’s dream come true. From time beyond reckoning the women have possessed the privileges and power for which their pale-faced sisters are so strenuously striving. Not only is Mrs. Acoma the ruler of her household but she is absolute owner of the house and all that is in it. In fact, a man is not permitted to own a house at all, and if his wife wishes to put him out of her house she may. Instead of a woman taking her husband’s name after marriage, he takes hers, and the children that they have also take the name of their mother. In other words, if Mr. Smith marries Miss Jones he becomes Mr. Jones and their children are the little Joneses. And the men accept their feminine rôles even to playing nursemaid while the women do the work, it being not the exception but the rule to see even the governors and war captains dandling squalling papooses on their knees or toting them up and down the main street on their backs. A comic artist couldn’t raise a smile in Acoma, for he would find that all his pet jokes are there accepted facts.

From a photograph copyright by Fred Harvey.

His first riding lesson.

From a photograph copyright by Fred Harvey.

The dancing lesson.

From a photograph copyright by Fred Harvey.

The history lesson.

THE EDUCATION OF A YOUNG HOPI.

Even more interesting than Acoma, from an architectural standpoint, is the pyramid pueblo of Taos (pronounced as though it were spelled “tous,” if you[56] please). This strange town—in many respects the most extraordinary in the world—is built on the floor of a mountain-girdled valley, some seventy miles due north from Santa Fé, and can best be reached by leaving the main line of the railway at Barrancas or Servilleta and driving out to the pueblo by wagon or stage. Though it is quite possible to reach Taos from Santa Fé in a single day, the journey is a very fatiguing one, it being much better to spend the night at the ranch-house at Arroyo Hondo and go on to the pueblo in comfort the next morning. There are really two towns—the white man’s and the Indian’s—four miles apart. White man’s Taos consists of little more than a sun-swept plaza bordered on all four sides by Mexican houses of adobe, while running off from the plaza are numerous dim and narrow alleys, likewise lined by humble dwellings of whitewashed mud, in one of which that immortal hero of American boyhood, Kit Carson, lived and died. For Taos, you must understand, was long the terminus of that historic trail by which the traders and trappers from Kansas and Missouri went down into the Southwest. Here, then, came such famous frontiersmen as Carson and Jim Bridger, and Manuel Lisa, and Jedediah Smith to barter beads and calico and rum for blankets and turquoises and furs. Save for a few greybeards who dwell in their memories of the exciting past, the frontiersmen have all passed round that dark turning from which no man returns, and Taos plaza hears the jingle of their spurs and the clatter of their high-heeled boots no[57] more. In their stead have come another breed of men, who carry palettes instead of pistols and who confront the Indian with brushes instead of bowie-knives; for Taos, because of its extraordinary wealth of sun and shadow, of yellow deserts and purple mesas, of scarlet blankets and white walls, has become the rendezvous for a group of brilliant painters who are perpetuating on canvas the red men of the terraced houses. Seen at dusk or in the dimness of the early dawn, Taos bears a striking resemblance to the low, squat pyramids at Sakkara, for it consists, in fact, of two huge pyramidal structures, one six the other seven stories high, with a stream meandering between. In their general construction the houses of Taos are like those of Acoma, but instead of being terraced only on the front, they are built in two huge squares which are terraced on all four sides, looking from a little distance like the pyramids which children erect with stone building-blocks. These two huge apartment houses together accommodate upward of eight hundred souls. Like other Hopi dwellings, they can only be entered by means of ladders, pulling up the ladder after him being the Pueblo’s way of bolting his door. Though it needs iron muscles and leathern lungs to reach the apartments at the top, the view over the surrounding country well repays the exertion. Taos presents, I suppose, the nearest approach to socialistic life that this country has yet known, for the houses are built and occupied communally, the truck-gardens, grain-fields, and grazing lands are held in common, and[58] if there is a surplus of hay or grain it is sold by the community.

The communal form of government existing among the Hopi has proven so successful in practice that the Bureau of Indian Affairs has long since adopted the policy of leaving well enough alone. Although these Indians of the terraced houses are wards of the nation, to use a term which has become almost ironic, the white man’s law stops short at the boundaries of their pueblos, for they make their own laws, enforce them with their own police, maintain their own courts of justice, and inflict their own peculiar punishments. In Taos, for example, the stocks are still used as a punishment for misdemeanours, though the Indians go the Puritans one better by clamping down the culprit’s head as well as his hands and feet. At the head of the Pueblo system of government is an elected governor, known as the cacique, whose word is law with a capital L. Associated with him is a council of wise men called mayores, whose powers are a sort of cross between those of a board of aldermen and a college faculty. The activities of this patriarchal council frequently assume an almost parental character, it being customary for it to advise the young men of the pueblo when to marry—and whom. If an Indian gets into a dispute with a white man the case is tried in the county court, but differences between themselves are settled according to their own time-honoured customs. Though the police force of Acoma consists of but a solitary constable, whose uniform is a gilt cord[59] around the crown of his sombrero, he takes himself quite as seriously as a member of the Broadway traffic squad, and, judging from his magnificent physique and the extremely businesslike revolver swinging from his hip, I doubt not that he would prove quite as efficient in an emergency.

From a photograph by A. C. Vroman.

THE PYRAMID-PUEBLO OF TAOS.

“At Taos the novel architectural scheme has been carried even further by building the houses five and even six stories high and terracing them on all four sides, so that they form a sort of pyramid.”

The Hopi are as stern and inflexible in the administration of those laws regulating the conduct of the community as were the Old Testament prophets. When a member of the tribe plays football with the public morals, as occasionally happens, he or she is tried by the mayores and, if found guilty, is expelled from the pueblo, bag and baggage. The system is as efficacious as it is inexpensive. As it chanced, I had an opportunity to see this novel form of punishment in operation. I was descending from the mesa at Acoma with my Laguna driver, who, in the absence of Carlisle-taught Marie, had served as my interpreter. He was a surly, taciturn fellow whose name, if my memory serves me faithfully, was Kill Hi. It should have been Kill Joy. As we reached the foot of the precipitous path my attention was attracted by a crowd, composed of the major portion of the pueblo’s population, which was stolidly watching four Indians—the constable and three others—loading a woman whose hands and feet were bound with ropes into a wagon. Despite her screams and struggles, they tossed her in as indifferently as they would a sack of meal.

“Who is she? What’s the matter?” I asked Kill Hi.

[60]

“Oh, nothin’ much,” was the indifferent answer. “She damn bad woman. They no want her here. They tell her to get out quick—vamoose. She no go. So they take her off in wagon like you see.”

“But what are they going to do with her?”

“Oh, I don’ know. Dump her out in desert, mebbe.”

“But what will happen to her?” I persisted. “Won’t she starve to death?”

“Oh, I don’ know,” said Kill Hi carelessly, cramping the buckboard so that I could get in. “Mebbe. P’raps. Acomas, they queer folks; not like other people.”

He was quite right—they certainly are not.

[61]

## III
CHOPPING A PATH TO TO-MORROW

[62]

“We’re the men that always march a bit before
Though we cannot tell the reason for the same;
We’re the fools that pick the lock that holds the door—
Play and lose and pay the candle for the game.
There’s no blaze nor trail nor roadway where we go;
There’s no painted post to point the right-of-way,
But we swing our sweat-grained helves and we chop a path ourselves
To To-morrow from the land of Yesterday.”

[63]

### III
CHOPPING A PATH TO TO-MORROW

They came bucketing into town at a hand-gallop, hat brims flapping, spurs jingling, tie-down straps streaming, their ponies kicking the dusty road into a yellow haze behind them. With their gay neckerchiefs and sheepskin chaps they formed as vivid a group as one could find outside a Remington. They pulled up with a great clatter of hoofs in front of the Golden West saloon and, leaving their panting mounts standing dejectedly, heads to the ground and reins trailing, went stamping into the bar. Having had previous experience with their sort, I made bold to follow them through the swinging doors; for more unvarnished facts about a locality, its people, politics, progress, and prospects, are to be had over a mahogany bar than any place I know except a barber’s chair.

“What’ll it be, boys?” sang out one of them, as they sprawled themselves over the polished mahogany. I expected to see the bartender matter-of-coursely shove out a black bottle and six small glasses, for, according to all the accepted canons of the cow country, as I had known it a dozen years before, there was only one kind of a drink ever ordered at a bar. So, when two of the party expressed a preference for ginger ale and the other four allowed that they would take lemonade,[64] I felt like going to the door and taking another look at the straggling frontier town and at the cactus-dotted desert which surrounded it, just to make sure I really was in Arizona and not at Chautauqua, New York.

It required scant finesse to engage one of the lemonade drinkers in amicable and illuminating conversation.

“Round-up hereabouts?” I inquired, by way of making an opening.

“Nope,” said my questionee. “Leastways not as I knows of. You see,” he continued confidentially, “we’ve quit cow-punching. We’ve tied up with the movies.”

“With the what?” I queried.

“The movies—the moving-picture people, you know,” he explained. “You see, the folks back East have gone plumb crazy on these here Wild West picture plays and we’re gratifying ’em at so much per. Wagon-train attacked by Indians—good-lookin’ girl carried off by one of the bucks—cow-punchers to the rescue, and all that sort of thing. It’s good pay and easy work, and the grub’s first-rate. Yes, sirree, it’s got cow-punching beaten to a frazzle. I reckon you’re from the East yourself, ain’t you?”

I admitted that I was, adding that my bag was labelled “New York.”

“The hell you say!” he exclaimed, regarding me with suddenly increased respect. “From what I hearn tell that sure must be some wicked town. Gambling joints runnin’ wide open, an’ every one packs[65] a gun, I hear, an’ shootin’ scraps so frequent no one thinks nothing about ’em. It ain’t a safe place to live, I say. Now, down here in Arizony things is different. We’re peaceable, we are. We don’t stand for no promisc’us gun-play and, barring one or two of the mining towns, there ain’t a poker palace left, and I wouldn’t be so blamed surprised if this State went dry in a year or two. Well, s’long, friend,” he added, sweeping off his hat, “I’m pleased to’ve made your acquaintance. The feller with the camera’s waitin’ an’ we’ve got to get out an’ run off a few miles of film so’s to amuse the people back East.”

THE PASSING OF THE PUNCHER.

“Cowboys cavorting in front of cinematographs instead of corralling cattle—that’s what civilisation has done for Arizona.”

I stood in the doorway of the Golden West saloon and watched them as they swung easily into their saddles and went tearing up the street in a rolling cloud of dust. Then I went on my way, marvelling at the mutability of things. “That’s what civilisation does for a country,” I said to myself. “Lemonade instead of liquor; policemen instead of pistol fighters; cowboys cavorting in front of cinematographs instead of corralling cattle.” At first blush—I confess it frankly—I was as disappointed as a boy who wakes up to find it raining on circus morning, for I had revisited the Southwest expecting to find the same easy-going, devil-may-care, whoop-her-up-boys life so characteristic of that country’s territorial days. Instead I found a busy, prosperous State, still picturesque in many of its aspects but as orderly and peaceful as Commonwealth Avenue on a Sunday morning.

It wasn’t much of a country, was Arizona, the first time I set foot in it, upward of a dozen years ago.[66] A howling wilderness is what the Old Testament prophets would have called it, I suppose, and they wouldn’t have been far wrong either. Certainly Moses and his Israelites could not have wandered through a region more forbidding. Sand and sage-brush and cactus; snakes and lizards and coyotes; grim purple mountains in the distance and, flaming in a cloudless sky, a sun pitiless as fate. Cattlemen and sheepmen still fought for supremacy on the ranges; faro players still drove a roaring business in the mining-camps and the cow-towns; men’s coats screened but did not altogether conceal the ominous outline of the six-shooter. As building materials adobe and corrugated iron still predominated. Portland cement, the barbed-wire fence, the irrigation ditch, and alfalfa had yet to come into their own. In those days—and they were not so very long ago, if you please—A-r-i-z-o-n-a spelled Frontier with a capital F.

I recall a little incident of that first visit, insignificant enough in itself but strangely prophetical of the changes which were to come. Riding across the most desolate and inhospitable country I had ever seen, a roughly written notice, nailed over the door of a ramshackle adobe ranch-house standing solitary in the desert, riveted my attention. The ill-formed letters, scrawled apparently with a sheep brush dipped in tar, read:

40 MILES FROM WOOD
40 MILES FROM WATER
40 FEET FROM HELL
GOD BLESS OUR HOME

[67]

As I pulled up my horse, fascinated by the grim humour of the lines, the rancher appeared in the doorway and, with the hospitality characteristic of those who dwell in the earth’s waste places, bade me dismount and rest. Such of his face as was not bearded had been tanned by sun and wind to the colour of a well-smoked brier; corduroy trousers belted over lean hips and a flannel shirt open at the throat accentuated a figure as iron-hard and sinewy as a mountain-lion. About his eyes, puckered at the outer corners into innumerable little wrinkles by much staring across sun-scorched ranges, lurked the humorous twinkle which suggested the Yankee or the Celt.

“I stopped to read your sign,” I explained. “If things are as discouraging as all that I suppose you’ll pull out of here the first chance you get?”

“Not by a jugful!” he exclaimed. “I’m here to stay. You mustn’t take that sign too seriously; it’s just my brand of humour. This country don’t look up to much now, I admit, but come back here in a few years, friend, and you’ll need to be introduced to it all over again.”

“But you’ve no water,” I remarked sceptically.

“We’ll have that before long. You see,” he explained eagerly, “the Colorado’s not so very far away and there’s considerable talk about the government’s damming it and bringing the water down here in diversion canals and irrigation ditches. If the government doesn’t help us, then we’ll sink artesian wells and get the water that way. Once get water on it and[68] this soil’ll do the rest. Why, friend, this land’ll raise anything—anything! I’m going to put in alfalfa the first year or two, until I get on my feet, and then I’m going to raise citrus fruits. There’s never enough frost here to worry about, and all we need is water to make this the finest soil for orange growing on God’s green earth. Just remember what I’m telling you,” he concluded impressively, tapping my knee with his forefinger to emphasise his words, “though things look damned discouraging just now, this is going to be a great country some day.”

As I rode across the desert I turned in my saddle to wave him a farewell, but he had already forgotten me. He was marking, in the bone-dry, cactus-dotted soil, the places where he was going to set out his orange-trees. Though our paths have not crossed again, I have always remembered him. Resolute, resourceful, optimistic, self-reliant, blessed with a sense of humour which jeers at obstacles and laughs discouragements away, with as fanatic a faith in the future of the land as has a Moslem in the Koranic paradise, he has typified for me those pioneers who, by their indomitable courage and unyielding tenacity, are converting the arid deserts of the Southwest into a veritable garden of the Lord.

Recently, after a lapse of little more than a decade, I passed that way again. So amazing were the changes which had taken place in that brief interim that, just as my optimist had prophesied, I needed a second introduction to the land. Where I had left a desert,[69] arid, sun-baked, forbidding, I found fields where sleek cattle grazed knee-deep in alfalfa, and groves ablaze with golden fruit. Stretching away to the foot-hills were roads which would have done credit to John Macadam, and scattered along them at intervals were prosperous looking ranch-houses of cement or wood; there was a post-office and a trim row of stores, and a schoolhouse with a flag floating over it; straggling cottonwoods marked the courses of the irrigation streams and in the air was the cheerful sound of running water. There were two things which had brought about this miracle—pluck and water.

Nowhere has the white man fought a more courageous fight or won a more brilliant victory than in Arizona. His weapons have been the transit and the level, the drill and the dredge, the pick and the spade; and the enemy which he has conquered has been the most stubborn of all foes—the hostile forces of Nature. The story of how the white man, within the space of less than thirty years, penetrated and explored and mapped this almost unknown region; of how he carried law and order and justice into a section which had never had so much as a speaking acquaintance with any one of the three before; of how, realising the necessity for means of communication, he built highways of steel across this territory from east to west and from north to south; of how, undismayed by the savageness of the countenance which the desert turned upon him, he laughed, and rolled up his sleeves, and spat on his hands, and slashed the face of the desert[70] with canals and irrigating ditches, and filled those canals and ditches with water brought from deep in the earth or high in the mountains; and of how, in the conquered and submissive soil, he replaced the aloe with alfalfa, the mesquite with maize, the cactus with cotton, forms one of the most inspiring chapters in our history. It is one of the epics of civilisation, this reclamation of the Southwest, and its heroes are, thank God, Americans.

Other desert regions have been redeemed by irrigation; Egypt, for example, and Mesopotamia, and parts of the Sudan, but the peoples of all those regions lay stretched out in the shade of a convenient palm, metaphorically speaking, and waited for some one with more energy than themselves to come along and do the work. But the Arizonians, mindful of the fact that God, the government, and Carnegie help those who help themselves, spent their days wielding pick and shovel and their evenings in writing letters to Washington with toil-hardened hands. After a time the government was prodded into action and the great dams at Laguna and Roosevelt are the result. Then the people, organising themselves into co-operative leagues and water-users’ associations, took up the work of reclamation where the government left off, and it is to these energetic, persevering men who have drilled wells and ploughed fields and dug ditches through the length and breadth of that great region which stretches from Yuma to Tucson that the metamorphosis of Arizona is due.

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More misconceptions are prevalent about Arizona than about any other region on the continent. The reclamation phase of its development has been so emphasised and advertised that among most of those who have not seen it for themselves the impression exists that it is a flat, arid, sandy, treeless country, a small portion of which has, miraculously enough, proved amenable to irrigation. This impression has been confirmed by various writers who, sacrificing accuracy for a phrase, have dubbed Arizona “the American Egypt,” which, to one who is really familiar with the physical characteristics of the Nile country and the agricultural disabilities under which its people labour, seems a left-handed compliment at best. Egypt—barring the swamp-lands of the Delta and a fringe of cultivation along the Nile—is a country of sun-baked yellow sand, as arid, flat, and treeless as an expanse of asphalt pavement. Arizona is nothing of the sort. In its most arid regions there is a small growth of green even in the dry season, while after the rains the desert bursts into a brilliancy and diversity of bloom incredible to one who has not seen it. How many people who have not visited Arizona are aware that within the borders of this “desert State” is the largest pine forest in the United States—six thousand square miles in area? Egypt, on the other hand, is, with the exception of the date-palm, virtually treeless. In Egypt there is not a hill worthy the name between Alexandria and Wady Halfa; Arizona has range after range of mountains which rise two[72] miles and more into the air. Egypt is not a white man’s land and never will be. Arizona will never be anything else. If it is necessary to drag in Egypt at all (save as concerns antiquities) then, for goodness sake, pay the Khedive’s country a real compliment by calling it “the African Arizona.”

From a photograph by H. A. Erickson, Coronado, Cal.

WHERE THE ROADS RUN OUT AND THE TRAILS BEGIN.

The Arizona desert: “It is more or less rolling country, corrugated by buttes and mesas and unexpected outcroppings of rock, its surface covered by a confused tangle of desert vegetation.”

The thing that surprised me most in Arizona was the desert. An Arab would not call it desert at all; a Bedouin would never feel at home upon it. I had expected to find a waste of sand, treeless, shrubless, plantless, incapable of supporting anything—yellow as molten brass, sun-scorched, unrelenting. That is the desert as one knows it in Africa and in Asia. The Arizona desert is something very different indeed. In the first place, it is not yellow at all but a sort of bluish-grey; “driftwood” is probably the term which an interior decorator would use to describe its peculiarly soft and elusive colouring. Neither is it flat nor has it the sand-dunes so characteristic of the Sahara. On the contrary, it is a more or less rolling country, corrugated by buttes and mesas and unexpected outcroppings of rock and sometimes gashed by arroyos, its surface covered with a confused tangle of desert vegetation so whimsical and fantastic in the forms it assumes that it looks for all the world like a prim New England garden gone violently insane. There is the cholla, for example, whose fuzzy white spines, so innocent-looking at a distance, might deceive the stranger into supposing that it was a sort of wildcat cousin of the gentle pussy-willow; the towering sajuaro, often[73] forty feet in height and bearing a striking resemblance to those mammoth candelabra which flank the altars of Spanish cathedrals; the octopus-like ocatilla, whose slender, sinuous branches, tipped with scarlet blossoms, seem to be for ever groping for something which they cannot find; the grotesque prickly pear, looking not unlike a collection of green pincushions, abristle with pins and glued together at the edges; the sombre creosote bush, the scraggy mesquite, the silvery grease-wood, the bright green paloverde. These, with the white blossoms of the yucca and the pink, orange, yellow, scarlet, and crimson flowers of the cacti, the brilliant shades of the rock strata, the purples and violets and blues of the encircling mountains, the fleecy clouds drifting like great flocks of unshorn sheep across an ultramarine sky, combine to form a picture as far removed from the desert of our imagination as one could well conceive. Less picturesque than these colour effects, the portrayal of which would have taxed the genius of Whistler, but more interesting to the farmer, are the fine indigenous grasses which spring up over the mesas after the summer rains (some of them being, indeed, extraordinarily independent of the rainfall) and furnish ample if not abundant pasturage for live stock. I am quite aware, of course, that those California-bound tourists who gather their impressions of Arizona from the observation platform of a mail-train while streaking across the country at fifty miles an hour are accustomed to dismiss the subject of its possibilities with a wave of the hand and the dictum:[74] “Nothing to it but sun, sand, and sage-brush.” Were those same people to see New York City from the rear end of a train they would assert that it consisted of nothing but tenements and tunnels. It is easy to magnify the barrenness of an arid region, and, that being so, I would respectfully suggest to the people of Arizona (and I make no charge for the suggestion) that they instruct their legislators to enact a law banishing any one found guilty of applying the defamatory misnomer “desert” to any portion of the State.

Though it were not well to take too literally the panegyrics of the soil and its potentialities which every board of trade and commercial club in the State print and distribute by the ton, there is no playing hide-and-seek with the fact that the soil of a very large part of Arizona is as versatile as it is productive. At the celebration with which the people of Yuma marked the completion of the Colorado River project, prizes were awarded for forty-three distinct products of the soil. To recount them would be to enumerate practically every fruit, vegetable, and cereal native to the temperate zone and many of those ordinarily found only in the torrid, for Arizona combines in an altogether exceptional degree the climatic characteristics of them both. This not being a seedsman’s catalogue, it is enough to say that the list began with alfalfa and ended with yams.

Everything considered, I am inclined to think that the shortest road to agricultural prosperity lies through an Arizona alfalfa field, for this proliferous crop, whose fecundity would put a guinea-pig to shame, possesses the admirable quality of making the land on which it[75] is grown richer with each cutting. They told me some prodigious alfalfa yarns in Arizona, but, as each district goes its neighbour’s record a few tons to the acre better, I will content myself with mentioning that, in certain parts of the State, as many as twelve crops of alfalfa have been cut in a year. I wonder what your Eastern farmer, who thanks his lucky stars if he can get one good crop of hay in a year, would think of life in a land like this?

Certain of the orange-growing sections of Arizona have been unwisely advertised as “frostless.” This is not true, for there is no place within our borders which is wholly free from frost. It is quite true, however, that the citrus groves of southern Arizona stand a better chance of escaping the ravages of frost than those in any other part of the country. The fruit ripens, moreover, considerably earlier, the Arizona growers being able to place their oranges, lemons, and grapefruit on Eastern dinner-tables a full month in advance of their Californian competitors.

Unless I am very much mistaken, two products hitherto regarded as alien to our soil—the Algerian date and Egyptian cotton—are bound to prove important factors in the agricultural future of Arizona. There is no tree which produces so large a quantity of fruit and at the same time requires so little attention as the date-palm when once it gets in bearing, date-palm groves in North Africa, where the prices are very low, yielding from five to ten dollars a tree per annum. They are, as it were, the camels among trees, for they thrive in soil so sandy and waterless that any other[76] tree would die from sheer discouragement. The date-palm has long since passed the experimental stage in Arizona—the heavily laden groves, which any one who cares to take the trouble can see for himself at several places in the southern part of the State, giving ocular evidence of the success with which this toothsome fruit can be grown under American conditions. The other crop which has, I am convinced, a rosy future in Arizona is Egyptian cotton, which will thrive on less water than any crop grown under irrigation. The fibre of the Egyptian cotton being about three times the length of the ordinary American-grown staple, it can always find a profitable market among thread manufacturers when our Southern cotton frequently goes unharvested because prices are too low to pay for picking, an average of about fifty-five million pounds of Egyptian cotton being imported into the United States each year. With the fertile soil, the warm, dry climate, and the water resources which are being so rapidly developed, the day is not far distant when the traveller through certain sections of Arizona will look out of the window of his Pullman at a fleeting landscape of fleecy white.

“That isn’t snow, is it, George?” he will ask the porter, and that grinning Ethiopian will answer:

“No, suh, dat ain’t snow—dat’s ’Gyptian cotton.”

This is no virgin, untried soil, remember. Centuries before the great Genoese navigator set foot on the beach of San Salvador, southern Arizona was the[77] home of a dense and prosperous population, skilled in agriculture and past masters in irrigation, the canals which they constructed, the ruins of which may still be seen, providing object-lessons for the engineers of to-day. It is peculiarly interesting to recall that when the crusaders were battling with the Saracens in Palestine, when the Byzantine Empire was at the height of its glory, when the Battle of Hastings had yet to be fought, when Canute of Denmark ruled in England, a remarkable degree of civilisation prevailed in this remote corner of the Americas. By civilisation I mean that the inhabitants of this region dwelt in desert sky-scrapers four, five, perhaps even six stories in height, that they possessed an organised government, that they had evolved a practical co-operative system not unlike the water-users’ associations of the Arizona of to-day, and that, by means of a system of dams, aqueducts, and reservoirs—the remains of which may still be seen—they had succeeded in reclaiming a by no means inconsiderable region. So great became the agricultural prosperity of this early people that it excited the cupidity of the warlike tribes to the north, who, in a series of forays probably extending over decades, at last succeeded in exterminating or driving out this agricultural population. Their many-storied dwellings crumbled, the canals and aqueducts which they constructed fell into disrepair, the soil once again dried up for lack of water and returned in time to its original state, the habitat of the cactus and the mesquite, the haunt of the coyote and the snake.

[78]

Centuries passed, during which migratory bands of Indians were the only visitors to this silent and deserted land. Then, trudging up from the Spanish settlements to the southward, came Brother Marcos de Niza in his sandals and woollen robe. He, the first white man to set foot in Arizona, after penetrating as far northward as the Zuñi towns, returned to Mexico, or New Spain, as it was then called, where he related what he had seen to one of the Spanish officials, Don Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, who promptly equipped an expedition and started northward on his own account. Followed by half a thousand Spanish horse and foot, a few hundred friendly Indians, and a mile-long mule train, the expedition wound across the burning deserts of Chihuahua, over the snow-clad mountains of Sonora, through rivers swollen into torrents by the spring rains, and so into Arizona, where, raising the red-and-yellow banner, he took possession of all this country in the name of his Most Catholic Majesty of Spain. This was in the year of grace 1540, when the ghost of Anne Boleyn still disturbed the sleep of Henry VIII and when Solyman the Magnificent was hammering at the gates of Budapest. By the beginning of the seventeenth century the country now comprising the State of Arizona was dotted with Spanish priests, who, in their missions of sun-dried bricks, devoted themselves to the disheartening task of Christianising the Indians. In 1680, however, came the great Indian revolt; the friars were slain upon their altars, their missions were ransacked[79] and destroyed, and the work of civilisation which they had begun was set back a hundred years.

The nineteenth century was approaching its quarter mark before the first American frontiersmen, pushing southward from the Missouri in quest of furs and gold, penetrated Arizona. Came then in rapid succession the Mexican War, which resulted in the cession to the United States of New Mexico, which then included all that portion of Arizona lying north of the Gila River; the discovery of gold in California, which, by drawing attention to the country south of the Gila as a desirable transcontinental railway route, resulted in its purchase under the terms of the Gadsden Treaty; and the outbreak of the Civil War, a Confederate invasion of Arizona in 1862 resulting in its organisation as a Territory of the Union. The early period of American rule was extremely unsettled; Indian massacres and the dangerous elements which composed the population—prospectors, cow-punchers, adventurers, gamblers, bandits, horse thieves—leading to one of the worst though one of the most picturesque periods of our frontier history. On February the 14th, 1912, the Territory of Arizona was admitted to the sisterhood of States, and George W. P. Hunt, its first elected governor, standing on the steps of the capitol, swung his hat in the air and called on the assembled crowd for three cheers as a ball of bunting ran up the staff and broke out into a flag with eight-and-forty stars.

Notwithstanding the fact that the area of Arizona[80] is greater than that of Italy, there are only three communities in the State—Phœnix, Tucson, and Prescott—which by any stretch of the census taker’s figures are entitled to be called cities. They are, however, as far removed from the whoop-and-hurrah, let-her-go-Gallegher cow-towns which most outlanders associate with the Southwest as a young, attractive, and well-poised college girl is from a wild-eyed and dishevelled, militant suffragette. Phœnix, the capital, I had pictured as consisting of a broad and very dusty main street bordered by houses of adobe and unpainted wooden shacks, its sidewalks of yellow pine shaded by wooden awnings, with cow-ponies tied to the railings and with every other place a temple to the goddesses of Alcohol or Chance. I was—I admit it with shame—as ignorant as all that, and this is my medium of apology. As a matter of fact, Phœnix is as modern and up-to-the-minute as a girl just back from Paris. Its streets are paved so far into the country that you wonder if the Venezuelan asphalt beds are likely to hold out. Its leading hotels are as liberally bathtubised as those of Broadway, and the head waiter in the Adams House café will hand you a menu which contains every gastronomic delicacy from caviare d’Astrachan to fromage de Brie. Gambling is as unfashionable as it is at Lake Mohonk, the municipal regulations being so stringent that such innocent affairs as raffles, church fairs, and grab-bags are practically prohibited, while the charge for a liquor licence has been placed at such a prohibitive figure that gentlemen[81] with dry throats are compelled to walk several blocks before they can find a place with swinging doors. Tucson, on the other hand, still retains many of its Mexican characteristics. It is a town of broad and sometimes abominably dusty streets lined with many buildings of staring white adobe, the sidewalks along its principal business thoroughfares being shaded by hospitable wooden awnings, which are a godsend to the pedestrian during the fierce heat of midsummer. It is a picturesque and interesting town, is Tucson, and, as the guide-book writers put it, will well repay a visit—provided the weather is not too hot and the visit is not too long. Prescott, magnificently situated on a mountainside in the Black Hills, is the centre of an incredibly rich mining region—did you happen to know that Arizona is the greatest producer of copper in the world, its output exceeding that of Montana or Michigan or Mexico? The feature of Prescott that I remember most distinctly is the “Stope” room in the Yavapai Club, an architectural conceit which produces the effect of a stope, or gallery in a mine—fitting tribute of the citizens of a mining town to the industry which gives it being.

Should you ever find yourself on the Santa Fé, Prescott & Phœnix Railway, which is the only north-and-south line in the State, forming a link between the Santa Fé and Southern Pacific systems, I hope that you will tell the conductor to let you off at Hot Springs Junction, which is the station for Castle Hot Springs, which lie a score or so of miles beyond the sound of[82] the locomotive’s raucous shriek, in a cañon of the Bradshaw Mountains. It is a dolce far niente spot—a peaceful backwater of the tumultuous stream of life. Hemmed in on every side by precipitous walls of rock is a toy valley carpeted with lush, green grass and dotted with palms and fig trees and innumerable varieties of cacti and clumps of giant cane. A mountain stream meanders through it, and on the hillside above the scattered buildings of the hotel, whose low roofs and deep, cool verandas, taken in conjunction with the subtropic vegetation, vividly recall the dak-bungalows in the Indian hills, are three great pools screened by hedges of bamboo, in which one can go a-swimming in midwinter without having any preliminary shivers, as the temperature of the water ranges from 115 to 122 degrees.

When I was at Castle Hot Springs I struck up an acquaintance with an old-time prospector who asserted that he was the original discoverer of the place.

“It was nigh on forty year ago,” he began, reminiscently. “I’d been prospectin’ up on the headwaters of the Verde. One day, while I was ridin’ through the foot-hills west o’ here a war party of ’Paches struck my trail, an’ the fust thing I knowed the hull blamed bunch was after me lickety-split as fast as their ponies could lay foot to ground. I was ridin’ a pinto that could run like hell let loose in a rainstorm, and as she was middlin’ fresh I reckoned I wouldn’t have much trouble gettin’ away from ’em, an’ I wouldn’t, neither, if I’d been tol’rable familiar with[83] the country hereabouts. But I warn’t; and by gum, friend, if I didn’t ride plumb into this very cañon! Yes, sirree, that’s just what I went an’ done! Its walls rose up as steep an’ smooth as the side of a house in front o’ me an’ to the right o’ me an’ to the left o’ me—an’ behind me were the Injuns, yellin’ an’ whoopin’ like the red devils that they were. I seen that it was all over but the shoutin’, for there warn’t no possible chanct to escape—not one!”

“And what happened to you?” interrupted an excited listener.

“What happened to me?” was the withering answer. “Hell, what could happen? They killed me, damn ’em; they killed me!”

From a climatic standpoint Arizona is really a tropic country modified in the north by its elevation. It has no summer or winter in the generally accepted sense, but instead a short rainy season in July and August and a dry one the rest of the year. In the spring and fall dust-storms are frequent—and if you have never experienced an Arizona dust-storm you have something to be thankful for—while in the summer it gets so hot that I have seen them cover the skylight of the Hotel Adams in Phœnix with canvas and keep a stream of water playing on it from sunup to sundown. The warmest part of the State, and, in fact, the warmest place north of the lowlands of the Isthmus—barring Death Valley—is the valley of the lower Gila in the neighbourhood of Yuma, where[84] the mercury in a shaded thermometer not infrequently climbs to the 130 mark. It should be said, however, that, owing to the extreme dryness of the air, evaporation from moist surfaces is very rapid, so that the high temperatures of southern Arizona are decidedly less oppressive than much lower temperatures in a humid atmosphere. As a result of this dryness and of the all-pervading sunshine, Arizona has in recent years come to be looked upon as a great natural sanitarium, and to it flock thousands of sufferers from catarrhal and tubercular diseases. Everything considered, however, I do not believe that Arizona is by any means an ideal sick-man’s country; for, particularly in advanced stages of tuberculosis, there is always the danger of overstimulation, the patient, buoyed up by the champagne-like quality of the air, feeling well before he is well and overexerting himself in consequence.

Perhaps the innate politeness of the Arizonians was never put to a severer test than it was a few years ago, when Mr. Chauncey Depew, then at the height of his fame as a speaker, utilised the opportunity afforded by changing engines at Yuma to address a few remarks to the assembled citizens of the place from the platform of his private car. Now Yuma, as I have already remarked, has the reputation of being the red-hottest spot north of Panama, and its residents are correspondingly touchy when any illusion is made to the torridness of their climate. Imagine their feelings, then, when Mr. Depew, in the course of his remarks, dragged in the bewhiskered story of the soldier[85] who died at Fort Yuma from a combination of sunstroke and delirium tremens. The following night his bunkie received a spirit message from the departed. “Dear Bill,” it ran, “please send down my blankets.” Now that story is hoary with antiquity. I have heard it told in the officers’ mess at Aden, and at Bahrein at the head of the Persian Gulf, and on the terrace of the club in Zanzibar, with its locale laid in each of those places, and I haven’t the least doubt in the world but that it evoked a yawn from King Rameses when it was told to him in Thebes. Yet the inhabitants of Yuma, with a politeness truly Chesterfieldian, not only did not yawn or groan or hiss when Mr. Depew saddled the ancient libel upon their town, but it is said that one or two of them even laughed hoarsely. The Arizonian heat is not of the sunstroke variety, however, and the thrasher gangs work right through it all summer from ten to fourteen hours a day; and this, remember, is only in the desert half of the State—the mountain half is as high and cool as you could wish, with snow-capped mountains and green grass and running water and fish and game everywhere.

Speaking of game, certain portions of Arizona still offer opportunities aplenty for the sportsman who knows how to ride and can stand fatigue. In the foot-hills of the Catalina Range mountain-lions are almost as common as are back-yard cats in Brooklyn. Patience, perseverance, and a pack of well-trained “b’ar dogs” rarely fail to provide the hunter with an opportunity to swing his front sights onto a black bear or a[86] cinnamon on the Mogollon Plateau. Spotted leopards, or jaguars, frequently make their way into the southern counties from Mexico and serve to furnish handsome rugs for the ranch-houses of the region. Though small herds of antelope are still occasionally seen, the law has stepped in at the eleventh hour and fifty-ninth minute and prevented their complete extermination. But if you want an experience to relate over the coffee and cigars that will make your friends’ stories of bear hunting in British Columbia and moose hunting in Maine sound as tame and commonplace as woodchuck shooting on the farm, why don’t you run down to that portion of Arizona lying along the Mexican border and hunt wild camels? I’m perfectly serious—there are wild camels there. They came about in this fashion: Along in the late seventies, if I am not mistaken, the Department of Agriculture, thinking to confer an inestimable boon on the struggling settlers of the arid Southwest, imported several hundred head of camels from Egypt, arguing that if they could carry heavy burdens over great stretches of waterless and pastureless desert in Africa, there was no reason why they could not do the same thing in Arizona, where almost identically the same conditions prevailed. But the paternalistic officials in Washington failed to take into account the prejudices of the packers. Now, the camel is a supercilious and ill-natured beast, quite different from the patient and uncomplaining burro, but the Arabs, who have grown up with him, as it were, make allowance for the peculiarities of his disposition[87] and get along with him accordingly. Not so the Arizona packer. He took a hearty dislike to the ship of the desert from the first and never let pass an opportunity to do it harm. As a result of this hostility and abuse, many of the poor beasts died and the remainder were finally turned loose in the desert to shift for themselves. If they have not multiplied they at least have not decreased and are still to be found in those uninhabited stretches of desert which lie along the Mexican frontier. They are not protected by law and are wild enough and speedy enough to require some hunting; so if you want to add to your collection of trophies a head that, as a cowboy acquaintance of mine put it, is really “rayshayshay,” you can’t do better than to go into the desert and bag a dromedary.

In speaking of Arizona it must be borne in mind that the State consists of two distinct regions, as dissimilar in climate and physiography as Florida and Maine. Theirs is the difference between plateau and plain, between sandstone and sand, between pine and palm. If you will take a pencil and ruler and draw a line diagonally across the map of the State, from Mojave City on the Colorado, to Bisbee on the Mexican border, you will have a rough idea of the extent of these two zones. That portion of the State lying to the north of this imaginary line is a six-thousand-foot-high plateau, mountainous and heavily forested, with green grass and running water and cold, dry winters,[88] and an annual rainfall which frequently exceeds thirty inches. To the south of this quartering line lies a tremendous stretch of arid but fertile land, broken at intervals by hills and mountain ranges, with a sparse vegetation and an annual rainfall which, particularly in the vicinity of the Colorado, often does not exceed three inches. It is in this southern portion, however, that the future of Arizona lies, for the success of the great irrigation projects at Roosevelt and Laguna (and which will doubtless be followed in the not far distant future by similar undertakings on the Santa Cruz, the San Pedro, the Agua Frio, the Verde, the Little Colorado, and the lower Gila) have given convincing proof that all that its arid soil requires is water to transform it into a land of farms and orchards and gardens, in which the energetic man of modest means—and it is such men who form the backbone of every country—can find a generous living and a delightful home.

THE TRAIL OF A THOUSAND THRILLS.

The road from Phœnix to the Roosevelt Dam—“its right angle corners and hairpin turns are calculated to make the hair of the motorist permanently pompadour.”

A grave injustice has been done to the people of the State by those fiction writers who have depicted Arizona society as consisting of cow-punchers, faro dealers, and bad men. The pictures they still persist in drawing of towns shot up by drunken cowboys, of saloons and poker palaces running at full blast, of stage-coaches and mail-trains held up and robbed, are as much out of date, if the reading public only knew it, as crinoline skirts and flowered satin vests. As a matter of fact, Arizona claims the most law-abiding population in the United States, and the claim is copper-riveted by the criminal records. The gambler and the[89] gun fighter have disappeared, driven out by the force of public disapproval. The Arizona Rangers, that picturesque body of constabulary which policed the country in territorial days, have been disbanded because there is no longer work for them to do. While it is not to be denied that a large number of the citizens, particularly in the range country, still carry firearms, it must not be inferred that crime is winked at or that murder is regarded with a whit more tolerance than it is in the East. The sheriffs and marshals of Arizona are famous as “go-gitters” and a very large proportion of the gentry whom they have gone for and gotten are promptly given free board and lodging in a large stone building at Florence, on the outer walls of which men pace up and down with Winchesters over the shoulders. The Arizona State Penitentiary at Florence is one of the most modern and humanely conducted penal institutions in the United States, being under the direct supervision of Governor Hunt, who is one of the foremost advocates of prison reform in the country. When I visited the penitentiary with the governor, instead of spending the night at the residence of the warden, he insisted on occupying a cell in “murderer’s row.” His experiment in introducing the honour system in the Arizona prisons has met with such pronounced success that roads and bridges are now being constructed throughout the State by gangs of prisoners in charge of unarmed wardens. In this connection they tell an amusing story of an English tourist who was getting his first[90] view of Arizona from the observation platform of a Pullman. As the train tore westward his attention was attracted by the conspicuous suits worn by a force of men engaged in building a bridge.

“I say,” he inquired, screwing a monocle into his eye and addressing himself to the Irish brakeman, “who are the johnnies in the striped clothing?”

“Thim’s som uv Guv’nor Hunt’s pets from th’ Sthate prison,” was the answer. “Most av thim’s murtherers too.”

“My word!” exclaimed the Briton, staring the harder. “Isn’t it jolly dangerous to have murderers running loose about the country like that? What?”

“Not at all,” the brakeman answered carelessly; “yez see, sorr, in most cases there was exterminating circumstances.”

The other day, when the promoters of Phœnix’s annual carnival wished to obtain a stage-coach to use in the street pageants, they could not find one in the State; they had all been bought by the moving-picture concerns. A stage still runs over the mountains from Phœnix to Globe, driven by a gentleman who chews tobacco and wears a broad-brimmed hat, but it has sixty-horse-power engines under it and the fashion in which the driver takes the giddy turns—he assured me that he went round them on two wheels so as to save rubber—is calculated to make the passengers’ hair permanently pompadour. Out in the back country, where the roads run out and the trails begin,[91] the cow-puncher is still to be found, but he, like the longhorns which he herds, is rapidly retreating before civilisation’s implacable advance.

From a photograph by H. A. Erickson, Coronado, Cal.

THROWING THE DIAMOND HITCH.

“Out in the back country ... the old, picturesque life of the frontier is still to be found.”

The history of Arizona divides itself into three epochs—the aboriginal, the exploratory, and the reclamatory, or, if you prefer, the Indian, the Spanish, and the American—and each of these epochs is typified by a remarkable and wholly characteristic structure: the ruins of Casa Grande, the Mission of San Xavier del Bac, and the Roosevelt Dam. Casa Grande—“the Great House”—or Chichitilaca, to give it its Aztec name, which rises from the desert some sixty miles southeast of Phœnix, is the most remarkable plain ruin in the whole Southwest and the only one of its kind in the United States. It is a four-storied house of sun-dried puddled clay, forming, with its cyclopean walls, its low doorways so designed that any enemy would have to enter on hands and knees, and its labyrinth of rooms, courtyards, and corridors, a striking and significant relic of a forgotten people. Already a ruin when discovered, in 1694, by the Jesuit Father Kino, how old it is or who built it even the archæologists have been unable to decide. Its crumbling ruins are emblematic of a race of sturdy red men, growers of grain and breeders of cattle, whose energy and resource wrested this region from the desert, and who were driven out of it by the greed of a stronger and more warlike people.

In the shadow of the foot-hills, where the Santa[92] Rita Mountains sweep down to meet the desert half a dozen miles outside Tucson, stands the white Mission of San Xavier del Bac. It is the sole survivor of that chain of outposts of the church which the friars of the Spanish orders stretched across Arizona in their campaign of proselytism three centuries ago. I saw it for the first time at sunset, its splendid, carved façade rose-tinted by the magic radiance of twilight, its domes and towers and minarets silhouetted against the purple of the mountains as though carved from ivory. Perhaps it is the dramatic effect produced as, swinging sharply around the corner of the foot-hills, one comes upon it suddenly, standing white and solitary and lovely between the desert and the sky, but I shall always rank it with the Taj Mahal, the Alhambra, and the Mosque of Sultan Hassan as one of the most beautiful buildings I have ever seen. If California had that mission she would advertise and exploit it to the skies, but they don’t seem to pay much attention to it in Arizona, being too much occupied, I suppose, with other and more important things. In fact, I had to inquire of three people in the hotel at Tucson before I could learn just where it was. Although the patter of monastic sandals upon its flagged floors has ceased these many years, San Xavier is neither deserted nor run down, for the sonorous phrases of the mass are still heard daily from its altar, serene and smiling nuns conduct a school for Indian children within the precincts of its white-walled cloisters, and at twilight the angelus-bell still booms its brazen summons and[93] the red men from the adjacent reservation come trooping in for evening prayer. The last of the Arizona missions, it stands as a fitting memorial to the courageous padres who first brought Christianity to Arizona, many of them at the cost of their lives.

Eighty miles north of Phœnix, at the back of the Superstition Mountains and almost under the shadow of the Four Peaks, is the great Roosevelt Dam—the last word, as it were, in the American chapter of Arizona’s history. Those who know whereof they speak have estimated that four fifths of the State is fitted, so far as the potentialities of the soil is concerned, for agriculture, but hitherto the lack of rainfall has reduced the available area to that which lay within the capabilities of the somewhat meagre streams to irrigate. This was particularly true of the region of which Phœnix is the centre. Came then quiet, efficient men who proceeded to perform a modern version of the miracle of Moses, for, behold, they smote the rock and where there had been no water before there was now water and to spare. Across a narrow cañon in the mountains they built a Gargantuan dam of sandstone and cement to hold in check and to conserve for use in the dry season the waters of the river which swirled through it. The great artificial lake, twenty-five square miles in area, thus created, holds water enough to cover more than a million and a quarter acres with a foot of water and assures a permanent supply to the two hundred and forty thousand acres included in the project. The farmers of the Salt River valley, which[94] comprises the territory under irrigation, forming themselves into an association, entered into a contract with the government to repay the cost of the dam in ten years, whereupon it will become the property of the landowners themselves; the water, under the terms of the agreement, becoming appurtenant to the land. Just as the crumbling ruins at Casa Grande serve as a reminder of a race long since dead and gone, and as the white mission at Tucson is a memorial to the Spaniards who came after them, so is the mighty dam at Roosevelt, together with its accompanying prosperity, a monument to the courage, daring, and resource of the American. It is a very wonderful work that is being done down there in Arizona, and to the toil-hardened, sun-tanned men who are doing it I am proud to raise my hat. Such men are pioneers of progress, carpenters of empire, and they are chopping a path for you and me, my friends, “to To-morrow from the land of Yesterday.”

[95]

## IV
THE LAND OF DREAMS-COME-TRUE

[96]

“It lies where God hath spread it,
In the gladness of His eyes,
Like a flame of jewelled tapestry
Beneath His shining skies;
With the green of woven meadows,
And the hills in golden chains,
The light of leaping rivers,
And the flash of poppied plains.
...
Sun and dews that kiss it,
Balmy winds that blow,
The stars in clustered diadems
Upon its peaks of snow;
The mighty mountains o’er it,
Below, the white seas swirled—
Just California stretching down
The middle of the world.”

[97]

### IV
THE LAND OF DREAMS-COME-TRUE

Because it is at the very bottom of the map and almost athwart the imaginary line which separates the Land of Mañana from the Land of Do-It-Now, the Imperial Valley seems the logical place to begin a journey through southern California. The term “southern California,” let me add, is usually applied to that portion of the State lying south of the Tehachapis, which would probably form the boundary in the event of California splitting into two States—an event which is by no means as unlikely as most outsiders suppose. No romance of the West—and that is where most of the present-day romances, newspaper, magazine, book, and film, come from—excels that of the Imperial Valley. These half a million sun-scorched acres which snuggle up against the Mexican boundary, midway between San Diego and Yuma, have proven themselves successors of the gold-fields as producers of sudden wealth; they are an agricultural Cave of Al-ed-Din. Now, the trouble with writing about the Imperial Valley is that if you tell the truth you will be accused of being a booster. But, to paraphrase Davy Crockett: “Be sure your facts are right, then go ahead.” And I am sure of my facts. You may believe them or not, just as you please.

Not much more than a decade ago two brothers,[98] freighting across the Colorado Desert from Yuma to San Diego, stumbled upon twelve human skeletons, white-bleached, upon the sand—grim tokens of a prospecting party which had perished from thirst. To-day the Colorado Desert is no more. Almost on the spot where those distorted skeletons were found a city has risen—a city with cement sidewalks and asphalted streets and electric lights and concrete office-buildings and an Elks’ Hall and moving-picture houses; a city whose municipal council recently passed an ordinance prohibiting the hitching of teams on the main business thoroughfare, “to prevent congestion of traffic,” as a local paper explained in breaking the news to the farmers. About the time that we changed the date-lines on our business stationery from 189- to 190- this was as desolate, arid, and hopeless-looking a region as you could have found between the oceans—and I’m not specifying which oceans either. Even the coyotes, as some one has remarked, used to make their last will and testament before venturing to cross it. In 1902 the United States Department of Agriculture sent one of its soil experts—at least he was called an expert—to this region to investigate its agricultural possibilities. Here is what he reported: “Aside from the alkali, which renders part of the soil practically worthless, some of the land is so rough from gullies or sand-dunes that the expense of levelling it is greater than warranted by its value. In the one hundred and eight thousand acres surveyed, 27.4 per cent are sand-dunes or rough land.... The remainder of the level[99] land contains too much alkali to be safe, except for resistant crops. One hundred and twenty-five thousand acres have already been taken up by prospective settlers, many of whom talk of planting crops which it will be absolutely impossible to grow. They must early find that it is useless to attempt their growth.” If the sun-bronzed settlers had followed this cock-sure advice, the Imperial would still be a waste of sun-swept sand. But pioneers are not made that way. Instead of becoming discouraged and moving away after reading the report of the government expert, they merely grinned confidently and went on clearing the sage-brush from their land—for sixty miles to the eastward, across a country as flat as a hotel piazza, the Colorado River, with its wealth of water, rolled down to the sea. And water was all that was needed to turn these thirsty sands into pastures and orchards and gardens. The government curtly declining to lend its aid, the settlers went ahead and brought the water in themselves. It took determination and perspiration, a lot of both, to dig a diversion canal across those threescore miles of burning desert, but by the end of 1902 the work was done, the valley was introduced to its first drink of water, and the first crops were begun. To-day the Imperial Valley, with its seven hundred miles of canals, is the greatest body of irrigated land in the world. In 1900 the government was offering land there for a dollar and a quarter an acre. In 1914 land was selling (selling, mind you, not merely being offered) for just a thousand times that sum.

How Mr. and Mrs. Powell saw Arizona.

“One comes upon it suddenly, standing white and solitary and lovely between the desert and the sky.”

SCENES IN THE MOTOR JOURNEY THROUGH ARIZONA.

[100]

Its soil is, I suppose, everything considered, the most fertile and versatile in the world. Its one hundred and twenty-five thousand acres of alfalfa yield twelve crops a year. I was shown a patch of thirty-three acres from which forty-five head of cattle are fed the year round. Later on another proud and prosperous husbandman showed me some land which had produced two and a half bales of long-staple cotton to the acre. Early in February the valley growers begin to export fresh asparagus; their shipments cease in April, when districts farther north begin to produce, and start again in the fall when asparagus has once more become a luxury. Pears ripen in December; figs are being picked at Christmas; grapes are sent out by the car-load in early June, six weeks before they ripen elsewhere save under glass. The valley is famous for its cantaloups, which are protected during their early growth by paper drinking cups. It would seem, indeed, as though Nature was trying to recompense the Imperial Valley for the unhappiness of her earlier years by giving her the earliest and the latest crops. A restricted region in the northeastern part of the valley is the only spot in the New World in which the Deglet Noor date—a variety so jealously guarded by the Arabs that few samples of it have ever been smuggled out of the remote Saharan oases of which it is a native—matures and can be commercially grown.

Barely a dozen years have slipped by since the Imperial Valley was wedded to the Colorado River. From that union have sprung five towns which are[101] now large enough to wear long pants—Imperial, El Centre, Calexico, Holtville, and Brawley—while several other communities are in the knickerbocker stage of development. Though scarcely a decade separates them from the yellow desert, they resemble frontier towns about as much as does Gary, Ind. The wooden shacks and corrugated-iron huts so characteristic of most new Western towns are wholly lacking in their business districts. The buildings are for the most part of concrete in the appropriate Spanish mission style; every building is designed to harmonise with its neighbours on either side; every building has its portales, or porticoed arcade, over the sidewalk, thus providing pedestrians with a welcome protection from the sun; for, though the valley boosters never cease to emphasise the fact that there is practically no humidity, they forget to add that in summer the air is like a blast from an open furnace door.

When I was in the valley I dined with a friend one night on the terrace of the very beautiful country club of El Centro. Pink-shaded candles cast a rosy glow upon the faultless napery and silver of our table and all about us were similar tables at which sat sun-tanned, prosperous-looking men in white flannels and women in filmy gowns. Silent-footed Orientals slipped to and fro like ghosts, bearing chafing-dishes and gaily coloured ices and tall, thin glasses with ice tinkling in them. When the coffee had been set beside us we lighted our cigars and, leaning back in great contentment, looked meditatively out upon the moonlit countryside.[102] Amid the dark patches of alfalfa and the shadow-dappled plots which I knew to be truck-gardens; through the ghostly branches of the eucalyptus, whose leaves stirred ever so gently in the night breeze, gleamed the cheerful lights of many bungalows.

“A dozen years ago,” said my host impressively, “that country out there was a howling wilderness. Its only products were cactus and sage-brush. Its only inhabitants were the coyote, the lizard, and the snake. The man who ventured into it carried his life in his hands. Look at it now—one of the garden spots of the world! It’s one of God’s own miracles, isn’t it?”

And I agreed with him that it was.

From El Centro to San Diego is something over a hundred miles, but until very recently it might as well have been three hundred, so far as freight or passenger traffic between the two places was concerned, that being the approximate distance by the roundabout railway route. Though a railway is now in course of construction which will eventually give the valley towns direct communication with Yuma and San Diego, the enterprising merchants of the latter city had no intention of waiting for the completion of the railway to get the rich valley trade. So they raised a quarter of a million dollars and with that money they proceeded to build a highway into the Imperial Valley. Over that highway, which is as good as any one would ask to ride on, rolls an unending procession of motor-trucks, bearing seeds and harness and farming implements[103] and phonographs and pianos and brass beds from San Diego stores to Imperial Valley ranches, and poultry and early fruit and grain from those ranches back to San Diego. That illustrates the sort of people that the San Diegans are. It is almost unnecessary to add that the road has already paid for itself with interest.

To understand the peculiar geography of San Diego, and of its joyous little sister Coronado, you must picture in your mind a U-shaped harbour containing twenty square miles of the bluest water you will find anywhere outside a bathtub. Strewn upon the gently sloping hillsides which form the bottom of the U are the chalk-white buildings and tree-lined, flower-banked boulevards which make San Diego look like one of those imaginary cities which scene-painters are so fond of painting for back-drops of comic operas. The right-hand horn of the U corresponds to the rocky headland known as Point Loma, where Madame Tingley and her disciples of the Universal Brotherhood theosophise under domes of violet glass; and in the very middle of the U, or, in other words, in the middle of San Diego harbor, on an almost-island whose sandy surface has been lawned and flower-bedded and landscaped into one of the beauty-spots of the world, is Coronado.

Coronado isn’t really an island, you understand, for it is connected with the mainland by a sandy shoe-string a dozen miles long and so narrow that even a duffer could drive a golf-ball across it. There is nothing[104] quite like Coronado anywhere. It may convey something to you if I say that it is a combination of Luxor, Sorrento, and Palm Beach. And then some. It is one of those places where, unless you have on a Panama hat and white shoes and flannel trousers (in the case of ladies I don’t insist on the trousers, of course), you feel awkward and ill-dressed and out of the picture. You know the sort of thing I mean. There are miles of curving, asphalted parkways, bordered by acres of green-plush lawns; and set down on the lawns are quaint stone-and-shingle bungalows with roses clambering over them, and near-Tudor mansions of beam and plaster, and the most beautiful villas of white stucco with green-tiled roofs, which look as if they had been brought over entire from Fiesole or the Lake of Como. Over near the shore is the Polo Club, which does not confine its activities to polo, as its name would imply, but, like the Sporting Club of Cairo, caters to the golfer and the tennis player, and the racing enthusiast as well. Every afternoon during the polo season tout le monde goes pouring out to the Polo Club in motors and carriages, on horseback, on street-cars, and afoot, to gossip along the side lines and swagger about in the saddling paddock and cheer themselves hoarse when eight young gentlemen in vivid silk shirts and white breeches and tan boots, and hailing from London or New York or San Francisco or Honolulu or Calgary, as the case may be, go streaking down the field in a maelstrom of dust and colour and waving mallets and flying hoofs. After it is[105] all over and the colours of the winning team have been hoisted to the top of the flagstaff and the losers have drunk the health of the victors from a Gargantuan loving-cup, every one goes piling back to the great hostelry, whose red-roofed towers and domes and gables rising above the palm groves form a picture which is almost Oriental as they silhouette themselves, black, fantastic, and alluring, against the kaleidoscopic evening sky.

There are certain hotels which, because of the surpassing beauty of their situation or their historic or literary associations or the traditions connected with them, have come to be looked upon as institutions, rather than mere caravansaries, which it is the duty of every traveller to see, just as he should see Les Invalides and the Pantheon and the Alcazar, and, if his purse will permit, to stop at. In such a class I put Shepheard’s in Cairo, the Hermitage at Monte Carlo, the Danieli in Venice, the Bristol in Paris, the Lord Warden at Dover, the Mount Nelson at Cape Town, Raffles’s at Singapore, the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, the Mission Inn at Riverside, the Hotel del Monte at Monterey, and the Hotel del Coronado. It is by no means new, is the Coronado, nor is it particularly up-to-date, and from an architectural standpoint it leaves much to be desired, but it shares with the other famous hotels I have mentioned that indefinable something called “atmosphere” and it stands at one of those crossways where the routes of tourist travel meet. To find anything to equal the brilliant[106] scene for which its great lobby is the stage you will have to go to the east coast of Florida or Egypt or the Riviera. From New Year’s to Easter its spacious corridors and broad verandas are thronged with more interesting types of people than any place I know save only Monte Carlo. Suppose we sit down for a few minutes, you and I, and watch the passing show. There are slim, white-shouldered women whose gowns bespeak the Rue de la Paix as unmistakably as though you could read their labels, and other women whose gowns are just as unmistakably the products of dressmakers in Schenectady and Sioux City and Terre Haute. There are well-groomed young men, well-groomed old men, and overgroomed men of all ages; men bearing famous names and men whose names are notorious rather than famous. There are big-game hunters, polo players, professional gamblers, adventurers, explorers, novelists, mine owners, bankers, landowners who reckon their acres by the million, and cattlemen who count their longhorns by the tens of thousands. There are English earls, and French marquises, and German counts; there are women of Society, of society, and of near-society; men and women whose features the newspapers and bill-boards have made as familiar as the faces of Dr. Woodbury and Mr. Gillette, and, mingling with all the rest, plain, every-day folk hailing from pretty much everywhere between Portland, Ore., and Portland, Me., and whose money it is, when all is said and done, which makes this sort of thing possible. They come here[107] for rest, so they take pains to assure you, but they are never idle. They bathe in the booming breakers when the people beyond the Sierras are shivering before their bathtubs; they play golf and tennis as regularly as they take their meals; they gallop their ponies madly along the yellow beach in the early morning; they fish off the coast for tuna and jewfish and barracuda; they take launches across the bay to see the flying men swoop and circle above the army aviation school; they watch the submarines dive and gambol like giant porpoises in the placid waters of the harbour; they play auction bridge on the sun-swept verandas or poker in the seclusion of the smoking-room; and after dinner they tango and hesitate and one-step in the big ballroom until the orchestra puts up its instruments from sheer exhaustion. At Coronado no one ever lets business interfere with pleasure. If you want to talk business you had better take the ferryboat across the bay to San Diego.

San Diego’s history stretches back into the past for close on four hundred years. Her harbour was the first on all that devious coast-line which reaches from Cape San Lucas to the Straits of Juan de Fuca in which a white man’s anchor rumbled down and a white man’s sails were furled. In her soil were planted the first vine and the first olive tree. The first cross was raised here, and the first church built, and beneath the palms which were planted by the padres in the valley that nestles just back of the hill on which the city sits the first lessons in Christianity were taught to the primitive[108] people who inhabited this region when the paleface came. Here began that remarkable chain of outposts of the church which Father Junipero Serra and his indomitable Franciscans stretched northward to Sonoma, six hundred miles away. And here likewise began El Camino Real, the King’s Highway, which linked together the one-and-twenty missions and which forms to-day the longest continuous highway in the world, and, without exaggeration, the most beautiful, the most varied, and the most interesting.

I don’t know the population of San Diego, because a census taken yesterday would be much too low to-morrow. The San Diegans claim that they arrive at the number of the city’s inhabitants by the simple method of having the census enumerators meet the trains to count the people when they get off. For, as they ingenuously argue, any one who once comes to San Diego never goes away again, unless it be to hurry back home and pack his things. In a country where both population and property values have increased like guinea-pigs, the growth of San Diego is spoken of with something akin to awe. In the year that Grant was elected President, a second-hand furniture dealer named Alonzo Horton closed his little shop in San Francisco and with the savings of a lifetime—some say two hundred and sixty dollars, some eight hundred—in a belt about his waist, took passage on a steamer down the Californian coast. With this money he bought, at twenty-six cents an acre, most of what is now San Diego. Some of those lots which the shrewd old[109] furniture dealer thus acquired could not now be bought for less than a cool half million! Two decades later came John D. Spreckels, bringing with him the millions he had amassed in sugar, and gave to San Diego a street-railway, electric lights, a water-system, one of the most beautiful theatres on the continent, and a solid mile of steel-and-concrete office-buildings of uniform height and harmonious design.

The people of San Diego are adamantine in their conviction that theirs is a city of destiny. They assert that within a single decade the name of San Diego will be as familiar on maps, and newspapers and bills of lading as New Orleans or Genoa or Yokohama or Calcutta or Marseilles. And they have some copper-riveted facts with which to back up their assertions. In the first place, so they will tell you, they have the harbour; sixteen miles long, forty to sixty feet deep, and protected from storms or a hostile fleet by a four-hundred-foot wall of rock. When the fortifications now in course of construction are completed San Diego will be as safe from attack by sea as though it were on the Erie Canal. Secondly, San Diego is the first American port of call for westbound vessels passing through the Panama Canal, and one of these days, unless the plans of the Naval Board of Strategy miscarry, it will become a great fortified coaling station and naval base, for it is within easy striking distance of the trans-Pacific lanes of commerce. Thirdly, it is the logical outlet for the newly developed sections of the Southwest, the grade between Houston and San[110] Diego, for example, being the lowest on the continent—and commerce follows the lines of least resistance. Fourthly (this sounds like a Presbyterian sermon, doesn’t it?), San Diego will soon have a rich and prosperous hinterland, without which all her other advantages would go for nothing, to supply and to draw from. Experts on agricultural development have assured me that the day is coming when the Imperial Valley, of which San Diego is already the recognised entrepôt, will support as many inhabitants as the Valley of the Nile. Nor is this assertion nearly as visionary as it sounds, for the zone of cultivation in the Nile country is, remember, only a few miles wide. Beyond the Imperial Valley lie the constantly spreading orchards and alfalfa fields which are the result of the Yuma and Gila River projects. East of Yuma is the great region, of which Phœnix is the centre, which acquired prosperity almost in a single night from the Roosevelt Dam. East of Phœnix again the Casa Grande irrigation scheme is converting good-for-nothing desert into good-for-anything loam. Beyond Casa Grande the great corporation known as Tucson Farms is redeeming a large area by means of its canals and ditches, while still farther eastward the titanic dam at Elephant Butte, which the government is building to conserve the waters of the Rio Grande, will snatch from the clutches of the New Mexican desert a region as large as a New England State. And these are not paper projects, mind you. Some of them are completed and in full swing; others are in course of construction,[111] so that by 1920 an almost continuous zone of irrigated, cultivated, and highly productive land will stretch from San Diego as far eastward as the Rio Grande. And, as the San Diegans gleefully point out, the settlers on these new lands will find San Diego nearer by from one hundred to two hundred miles than any other port on the Pacific Coast as a place to ship their products and to do their shopping. But the people of San Diego are such notorious boosters that before swallowing the things they told me I sprinkled them quite liberally with salt. In fact, I wasn’t really convinced of the genuineness of San Diego’s prospects until I happened to meet one evening on a hotel terrace a member of America’s greatest banking-house—a house whose credit and prestige are so unquestioned that its support is a hall-mark of financial worth.

“What do you think about this San Diego proposition?” I asked him carelessly, as we sat over our cigars. “Is it another Egyptian bubble which will shortly burst?”

“That was what I thought it was when I came out here,” he answered, “but since investigating conditions I have changed my mind. It looks so good to us, in fact, that we intend to back up our judgment by investing several millions.”

So far as attracting visitors is concerned, San Diego’s most valuable asset is her climate. Though the southernmost of our Pacific ports and in the same latitude as Syria and the North African littoral, it has the most equable climate on the continent, the[112] records of the United States Weather Bureau showing less than one hour a year when the mercury is above 90 or below 32. According to these same official records, the sun shines on three hundred and fifty-six days out of the three hundred and sixty-five, so that rain is literally a nine days’ wonder. San Diego’s climate is that of Alaska in summer and of Arabia in winter, and, if you don’t believe it, the San Diegans will prove it by means of a temperature chart, zigzagging across which are two lines, one bright red, the other blue, which denote summer and winter climates circling the globe and which converge at only one point on it—San Diego. As a result of these unique climatic conditions, San Diego, unlike most resort cities, has two seasons instead of one. The Eastern tourists have hardly taken their departure in the spring before the hotels and boarding-houses begin to fill up with people who have come here to escape the torrid heat of a Southwestern summer. Many of these summer visitors are small ranchers from Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah, and from across the line in Chihuahua and Sonora, to whom the rates charged at the hotels would be prohibitive. To accommodate this class of visitors there has sprung into being on the beach at Coronado a “tent city.” The “tents” consist for the most part of one or two room bungalows with palm-thatched roofs and walls and wooden floors and equipped with running water, sanitary arrangements, and cooking appliances. The Coronado Tent City contains nearly two thousand of these dwellings which can be rented[113] at absurdly low figures. For those who do not care to do their own cooking the management has provided a restaurant where simple but well-cooked meals can be had at nominal prices; there is a dancing pavilion for the young people, a casino on whose verandas the mothers can gossip and sew and at the same time keep an eye on their children playing on the sand, and a club house with pool-tables and reading-matter for the men. The place is kept scrupulously clean, it is thoroughly policed, hoodlumism is not tolerated, and, everything considered, it seemed to me a most admirable and inexpensive solution of the perennial summer-vacation problem for people of modest means.

Because I wanted to see something more than that narrow coastwise zone which comprises all that the average winter tourist ever sees of California; because I wanted to obtain a more intimate knowledge of the country and its people than comes from a car-window point of view; because I wanted to penetrate into those portions of the back country still undisturbed by the locomotive’s raucous shriek and eat at quaint inns and sleep in ranch-houses and stop when and where I pleased to converse with all manner of interesting people, I decided to do my travelling by motor-car. And so, on a winter’s sunny morning, when the flower vendors in the plaza of San Diego were selling roses at ten cents a bunch and the unfortunates who dwelt beyond the Sierras, rim were begging their janitors for goodness’ sake to turn on more steam, I[114] turned the nose of my car northward and stepped on her tail, and with a rush and roar we were off on a journey which was to end only at the borders of Alaska. As, with engines purring sweet music, the car breasted the summit of the Linda Vista grade our breath was almost taken away by the startling grandeur of the panorama which suddenly unrolled itself before us. At our backs rose the mountains of Mexico, purple, mysterious, forbidding, grim. Spread below us, like a map in bas-relief, lay the orchard-covered plains of California; to the left the Pacific heaved lazily beneath the sun; to the right the snow-crowned Cuyamacas swept grandly up to meet the sky, and before us the beckoning yellow road stretched away ... away ... away.

I have never been able to resist the summons of the open road. I always want to find out what is at the other end. It goes somewhere, you see, and I always have the feeling that, far off in the distance, where it swerves suddenly behind a wood or disappears in the depths of a rock-walled cañon or drops out of sight quite unexpectedly behind a hill, there is something mysterious and magical waiting to be found. About the road there is something primitive and imperishable. Did it ever occur to you that it has been the greatest factor in the making of history, in the spread of Christianity, in the march of progress? Some one has said, and truly, that the rate and direction of human progress has always been determined by the roads of a people. For a time the marvel of[115] modern inventions caused the road to be forgotten. The steamship sailed majestically away in contempt of the road upon the shore and the locomotive sounded its jeering screech at every crossing along its right of way. But still the road stayed on. But now the miracle of the motor-car has brought the road into its own again and started me ajourneying in the latest product of twentieth-century civilisation, with the strength of threescore horses beneath its throbbing hood, up that historic highway which has been travelled in turn by Don Vasquez del Coronado and his steel-clad men-at-arms, by Padre Serra in his sandals and woollen robe, by Jedediah Smith, the first American to find his way across the ranges, by Frémont the Pathfinder, by the Argonauts, by Spanish caballeros and Mexican vaqueros and American pioneers, by priests afoot and soldiers on horseback and peasants on the backs of patient burros, by lumbering ox-carts and white-topped prairie-schooners and six-horse Concord stages—and now by automobiles. In El Camino Real is epitomised the history and romance of the West. It is to western America what the Via Appia was to Rome, the Great North Road to England. It has been in turn a trail of torture, a course of conquest, a road of religion, a route to riches, a path of progress, a highway to happiness. He who can traverse it with no thought for anything save the number of miles which his indicator shows and for the comforts of the hotel ahead; who is so lacking in imagination that he cannot see the countless phantom shadows[116] who charge it with their unseen presence; who is incapable of appreciating that in it are all the panorama and procession of the West, had much better stay at home. The only thing that such a person would understand would be a danger-signal or a traffic policeman’s club.

I am convinced that if the several thousand Americans who go on annual motor trips through Europe, either taking their cars with them or hiring them on the other side, could only be made to realise that on the edge of the Western ocean they can find roads as smooth and well built as the English highways or the routes nationales of France, and mountains as high and sublimely beautiful as the Alps or the Pyrenees, and scenery more varied and lovely than is to be found between Christiania and Capri, and vegetation as luxuriant and hotels more luxurious than on the Côte d’Azur, and a milder, sunnier, more equable climate than anywhere else on the globe, they would come pouring out in such numbers that there wouldn’t be garages enough to hold their cars. In 1913 the legislature of California voted eighteen millions of dollars for the improvement of the roads, and that great sum is being so judiciously expended in conjunction with the appropriations made by the other coast states that by early in 1915 a motorist can start from the Mexican border and drive northward to Vancouver—a distance considerably greater than from Cherbourg to Constantinople—with as good a road as any one could ask for beneath his tires all the way.

[117]

It is very close to one hundred and forty miles from San Diego to Riverside if you take the route which passes the rambling, red-tiled, adobe ranch-house famous as the home of Ramona; dips down into Mission Valley, where from behind its screen of palms and eucalyptus peers the crumbling and dilapidated façade of the first of the Californian missions; swirls through La Jolla with its enchanted ocean caverns; climbs upward in long sweeps and zigzags through the live-oak groves behind Del Mar; pauses for a moment at Oceanside for a farewell look at the lazy turquoise sea, and then suddenly swings inland past Mission San Luis Rey and the mission chapel of Pala and the Lake of Elsinore. That is the route that we took and, though it is not the shortest, it is incomparably the most beautiful and the most interesting. We found by experience that one hundred and forty miles is about as long a day’s run as one can make with comfort and still permit of ample time for meals and for leisurely pauses at places of interest along the way. Once, in the French Midi, I motored with a friend who had chartered a car by the month with the agreement that he was to be permitted to run four hundred kilometres a day. It mattered not at all how fascinating or historically interesting was the region we were traversing, we must needs tear through it as though the devil were at our wheels. We couldn’t stop anywhere, my host explained, because if we did he wouldn’t be able to get the full allowance of mileage to which he was entitled. Some day, however, I’m going through[118] that same country again and see the things I missed. Next time I think that I shall go on a bicycle. With highways as smooth as the promenade-deck of an ocean liner it is a temptation to burn up the road, of course, particularly if your car has plenty of power and your driver knows how to keep his wits about him. But that sort of thing, especially in a country which has so many sights worth seeing as California, smacks altogether too much of those impossible persons who boast of having “done” the Louvre or the Pitti in an hour. Half the pleasure of motoring, to my way of thinking, is in being able to stop when and where you please—and stopping.

Between San Diego and Oceanside the road hugs the coast as though it were a long-lost brother. It is wide and smooth and for long stretches led through acres and acres of yellow mustard. This, with the vivid blue of the sea on one side and the emerald green of the wooded hillsides on the other, made the country we were traversing resemble the flag of some Central American republic. I think that the most beautiful of the little coast towns through which the road winds is Del Mar, perched high on a cypress-covered hill looking westward to Cathay. This is the home of the Torrey pine, which is found nowhere else in the world. In the springtime the mesas above the sea are all aflame with yellow dahlias and the hillsides at the back are as gay with wild flowers as a woman’s Easter bonnet. Del Mar is an interesting example of the rehabilitation of a down-and-out town. A few years ago it was little[119] more than a straggling, grass-grown street lined with decrepit, weather-beaten houses. A far-sighted corporation discovered the ramshackle little hamlet, bought it, subdivided it, laid out miles of contour drives and a golf course, and built a little gem of a hostelry, modelled and named after the inn at Stratford-on-Avon, on the hill above the sea. Now the place is awake, animated, prosperous. Bathers dot its ten-mile crescent of silver sand; artists pitch their easels beneath the shadow of the friendly live-oaks; on the flower-carpeted hill slopes have sprung up the villas and bungalows of the rich. A few miles farther up the coast you can lunch beneath the vine-hung pergolas of the quaint Miramar at Oceanside, nor does it require an elastic imagination to pretend that the hills behind, grey-green with olive groves, are those of Amalfi and that the lazy, sun-kissed sea below you is the Mediterranean instead of the Pacific.

Four miles inland from Oceanside, in a swale between low hills, stands all that is left of the Mission of San Luis, Rey de Francia, which, as its name denotes, is dedicated to Saint Louis, King of France. Begun when Washington was President of the United States and Alta California was still a province of New Spain, completed when the nineteenth century was but a two-year-old, and secularised by the Mexican authorities after the expulsion of the Spaniards in 1834, the historic mission has once again passed into the hands of the Franciscan Order which built it and is now a training-school for priests who wish to carry[120] the cross into foreign lands. The ruins of the mission—which, thanks to the indefatigable efforts of the priest in charge, are being restored to a semblance of their original condition as fast as he is able to raise the money—are among the most picturesque in California. We stopped there on a golden afternoon, when the sunlight, sifted and softened by the interlacing branches of the ancient olive trees, cast a veil of yellow radiance upon the crumbling, weather-worn façade and filtered through the arches of those cloistered corridors where the cowled and cassocked brethren of Saint Francis were wont to pace up and down in silent meditation, telling their beads and muttering their prayers.

Nestling in a hollow of the hills, twenty miles northeast of San Luis Rey, over a road which is comparatively little travelled and only indifferently smooth, is the asistencia or mission chapel of San Antonio de Pala. Even though it were not on the road to Riverside, it would be well worth going out of one’s way to see because of its picturesque campanario, with a cactus sprouting from its top, and the adjacent Indian village with its curious burial-ground. The little town, which centres, of course, about the chapel, the agency, and the trader’s, stands on the banks of the San Luis Rey River, with high mountains rising abruptly all around. Here, in sheet-iron huts provided by a paternal government and brought bodily from the East and set up in this secluded valley, dwell all that is left of the Palatingwa tribe—a living refutation of our boast that we have given a square deal to the Indian. Once[121] each year the Palatingwas are visited by their friends of neighbouring tribes, and for a brief time the mountain valley resounds to the barbaric clamour of the tom-toms and to the plaintive, pagan chants which were heard in this land before the paleface came. The mission chapel, after standing empty for many years, once more has a priest, and at sunset the bell in the ancient campanile sends its mellow summons booming across the surrounding olive groves and the copper-coloured villagers, just as did their fathers in Padre Serra’s time, come trooping in for evening prayer.

From a photograph by Avery Edwin Field. | From a photograph by Avery Edwin Field.

NOT IN CATALONIA BUT IN CALIFORNIA.

“A great hotel which combines the architectural features of the Californian missions—cloisters, patios, brick-paved corridors, bell-hung campaniles, ivy-covered buttresses—with an Old World atmosphere and charm.”

But of all the California missions, from San Diego in the south to Sonoma in the north, the one I like the best is the Mission Miller at Riverside—and any one who has ever stopped there will unhesitatingly agree with me. Its real name, you must understand, is the Mission Inn, and there is no hostelry like it anywhere else in the world. At least I, who am tolerably familiar with the hotels of five-score countries, know of none. In it Frank Miller, the Master of the Inn, as he loves to be called, has succeeded in commercialising romance to an extraordinary degree. He might be said, indeed, to have taken the cent from sentiment. In other words, he has built a great hotel which combines the architectural features of the most interesting of the Californian missions—cloisters, patios, quadrangles, brick-paved corridors, bell-hung campaniles, ivy-covered buttresses, slender date-palms with flaming macaws screeching in them—with an Old World atmosphere and charm, and in such a setting he dispenses the same[122] genial and personal hospitality which was a characteristic of the Spanish padres in the days when the travellers along El Camino Real depended on the missions for food and shelter.

[123]

## V
WHERE GOLD GROWS ON TREES

[124]

“Dost thou know that sweet land where the orange flowers grow?
Where the fruits are like gold and the red roses blow?”

[125]

### V
WHERE GOLD GROWS ON TREES

It was in the heyday of the Second Empire. The French army was at its autumn manœuvres and the country round about Rheims was aswarm with troopers in brass helmets and infantry in baggy red breeches. Louis Napoleon was directing the operations in person. Riding one day through a vineyard at the head of a brigade, he suddenly pulled up his horse and turned in his saddle.

“Halt!” he ordered. “Column right into line! Attention! Present ... arms!”

“But who are you saluting, sire?” inquired one of his generals in astonishment, spurring alongside.

“The grapes, mon général,” replied the Emperor; “for do they not represent the wealth and prosperity of France?”

It was the astonishing prosperity of the orange belt which brought the incident to mind. For an entire morning we had been motoring among the orange groves which make of Riverside an island in an emerald sea. The endless orchards whose shiny-leaved trees drooped under their burden of pumpkin-coloured fruit; the chalk-white villas and the blossom-smothered bungalows of which we caught fleeting[126] glimpses between the ordered rows; the oiled roads, so smooth and level that no child could look on them without longing for roller-skates; the motor-cars standing at almost every doorstep—all these things spelled prosperity in capital letters.

“It seems to me,” I remarked to the gentleman who was acting as our guide (these same orange groves had made him a millionaire in less than a decade), “that it would not be unbefitting if the people of Riverside followed the example of Louis Napoleon when he saluted the grapes”; and I told him the story of the Emperor in the vineyard.

“You are quite right,” said he. “Would you mind stopping the car?” and, standing in the tonneau very erect and soldierly, he lifted his hat.

“My Lady Citrona,” he said gravely, “I have the honour to salute you, for it is to you that the prosperity of southern California is chiefly due.”

What its harbour has done for San Diego, what its climate has done for Santa Barbara, its oranges have done for Riverside. Thirty years ago you could not have found it on the map. To-day it is the richest community per caput—which is the Latin for inhabitant—between the ice-floes of the Arctic and the Gatun Dam. At least that is what Mr. Bradstreet—the gentleman, you know, who publishes the large green volume which tells you whether the people you meet are worth cultivating—says, and he ought to know what he is talking about. Though it can boast few if any[127] “show-places” such as are proudly pointed out to the open-mouthed tourist in Pasadena and Santa Barbara, it is a pleasant place in which to dwell, is this happy, sunny, easy-going capital of the citrus kingdom. It is as substantial-looking as a retired banker; it is as spick and span as a ward in a hospital; it is as satisfying as a certified cheque—and, incidentally, it is as dry as the desert of Sahara. You are regarded with suspicion if you are overheard asking the druggist for alcohol for a spirit-lamp. It is, moreover, the only place I know that has foiled the exaggeratory tendencies of the picture post-card makers. Its oranges are so glaringly yellow, its trees so vividly green, its poinsettias so flamingly red, its snow-topped mountains so snowily white, its skies so bright a blue that the post-card artists have had to be truthful in spite of themselves.

I think that the spirit of Riverside is epitomised by two great wrought-iron baskets which flank the entrance to the dining-room of its famous hostelry, the Mission Inn. One of them is filled with oranges, the other with flowers. And you are expected to help yourself; not merely to take one as a souvenir, you understand, but to fill your pockets, fill your arms. “That’s what they’re there for,” the Master of the Inn will tell you. That little touch does more than anything else to make you feel that southern California really is a land of fruit and flowers and that they are not hidden behind the garden walls of the rich but can be enjoyed by everyone. It goes far toward counteracting the unfavourable[128] impression a stranger receives in a certain ornate hotel in Los Angeles where he is charged forty cents for a sliced orange!

Ciceroned by the orange millionaire, we motored up a zigzag boulevard, with many horseshoe bends and hairpin turns, to the summit of Mount Rubidoux, a domesticated and highly landscaped mountainette within the city limits. Moses and his footsore Israelites, looking down upon the Promised Land, could have seen nothing fairer than the view which greeted us on that winter’s Sunday morning. I doubt if there has been anything more peacefully enchanting than a Sunday morning in southern California in the orange season since a “To Let” sign was nailed to the gates of the Garden of Eden. It suggests, without in any way resembling, such a number of things: a stained-glass window in a church, for example; an Easter wedding; Italy in the springtime ... but perhaps you don’t grasp just what I mean.

From Rubidoux’s rocky base the furrowed orange groves, looking exactly like quilted comforters of bright-green silk, stretch away, away, until they meet just such a yellow arid desert as Riverside used to be before the water came, and the desert sweeps up to meet tawny foot-hills, and the foot-hills blend into amethystine mountain ranges and these rise into snowy peaks which gleam and sparkle against a sapphire sky. And from the orange groves rises that same subtle, intoxicating fragrance (for you know, no doubt, that orange-trees bear blossoms and fruit at the same time)[129] that you get when the organist strikes up the march from “Lohengrin” and the bride floats up the aisle. The significant thing about it all, however, is not the surpassing beauty and extraordinary luxuriance of the vegetation, but the fact that there is any vegetation here at all. No longer ago than when women wore bustles this region was a second cousin to the Sahara, dry as a treatise on mathematics, dusty as a country pike on circus day, but which now, thanks to the faith, patience, energy, and courage of a handful of horticulturists, has been transformed into a land which is a cross between a back-drop at a theatre and a fruit-store window.

Once each year, toward the close of the fasting month of Ramazan, the Arabs of the Sahara make a pilgrimage to a spot in the desert near Biskra, in southern Algeria. From a thousand miles around they come—by horse and by camel and on the backs of asses—for the sake of a prayer in the yellow desert at break of day. This “Great Prayer,” as it is called, is one of the most impressive ceremonies that I have ever witnessed, and I little thought that I should ever see its like again—certainly not in my own land and among my own people. Once each year the people of Riverside and the surrounding country also make a pilgrimage. They set out in the darkness of early Easter morning, afoot, ahorseback, in carriages, and in panting motor-cars, and assemble on the summit of Mount Rubidoux in the first faint light of dawn. They[130] group themselves, fittingly enough, about the cross which has been erected in memory of Padre Junipero Serra, that indomitable friar who first brought Christianity to the Californias, and who, on his weary journeys between the missions which he founded, not infrequently spread his blankets for the night at the foot of this same hill. Last year upward of six thousand people gathered under the shadow of the Serra cross to greet the Easter morn. As sunrise approached, a group of girls from the Indian School, standing on a rocky eminence, sang “He Is Risen,” and then, as a red glow in the east heralded the coming of the sun, the sweet, clear notes of a cornet rang out upon the morning air in the splendid bars of “The Holy City.” Just as the last notes died away a spark of light—brighter than the arc-lamps which still glared in the streets of the city below—appeared above the San Bernardino’s topmost rim and a moment later the full orb of the sun burst forth in all its dazzling glory, turning the purple mountains into peaks of glowing amethyst and the sombre valleys into emerald islands swimming in a sea of lavender haze. “Lord, Thou hast been my dwelling-place in all generations.... I will lift up mine eyes to the hills from whence cometh my help,” chanted the people in solemn unison. And then Dr. Henry van Dyke, fittingly garbed in a Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers, with a mammoth boulder for a pulpit, read his “God of the Open Air.” With the Amen of the benediction there ended the most significant and impressive service that I have[131] ever heard under the open sky and one which sharply refutes the frequent assertion that America is lacking in those quaint ceremonies and picturesque observances which make Europe so attractive to the traveller.

A MODERN VERSION OF THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT.

The Easter sunrise service on Mount Rubidoux, near Riverside, “sharply refutes the frequent assertion that America is lacking in those quaint ceremonies and picturesque observances which make Europe so attractive to the traveller.”

It is threescore miles from Riverside to Pasadena, provided you go via Redlands, Smiley Heights, and San Bernardino, and it is flowers and fruit-trees all the way. Just as every visitor to London asks to be directed to Kew Gardens, so every visitor to the orange belt asks to be shown Smiley Heights. Its late owner was a hotel proprietor of national fame who amassed a fortune by running his great summer hostelries at Lake Mohonk, N. Y., in conformance with the discipline of the Methodist Church, among the rules which the guests are required to observe being one which states that “visitors are not expected to arrive or depart on the Sabbath.” Smiley Heights is a remarkable object-lesson in the horticultural miracles which can be performed in California with water and patience. When bought by Mr. Smiley it was a barren, bone-dry mesa, whose entire six hundred acres did not have sufficient vegetation to support a goat, but which, by the lavish use of water, and fertilisers, and the employment of a small army of landscape architects and gardeners, has been transformed into a beauty-spot which is worth using several gallons of gasoline to see. In Cañon’s Crest, to give the place the name bestowed by its owner, is epitomised the story of all southern California, for on every side of this semitropic garden[132] of pines, palms, peppers, oranges, olives, lemons, figs, acacias, bamboos, deodars, and roses, roses, roses, stretches the sage-brush-covered desert from which it was snatched and to which, were it deprived of care and water, it would quickly return. If you will look from the right-hand window of your north-bound train, just before it reaches Redlands, you can see it for yourself: a flower-smothered, tree-covered table-land rising abruptly from an arid plain.

I wonder if other motorists get as much enjoyment from the signs along the way as I do. The notices along the Californian roads struck me as being more original and amusing than any that I had ever seen. Most of them were worded with an after-you-my-dear-Alphonse politeness which made acquiescence with their courteous requests a pleasure, though occasionally we were confronted with a warning couched in such threatening terms that it seemed to shake a metaphorical fist in our faces. Who, I ask you, would not cheerfully slow down to lawful speed in the face of the stereotyped request which is used on the roads between Riverside and Pasadena: “Speed limit thirty miles an hour—a reasonable compliance with this request will be deeply appreciated”? Another time, however, as we were humming along one of those stretches of oiled delight which make the speedometer needle flutter like a lover’s heart, we were greeted, as we swept into the outskirts of some Orangeburg or Citronville, by a great brusque placard which menaced us in staring black letters with the threat: “Fifty dollars[133] fine for exceeding the speed limit.” As a result we crept through the town as sedately as though we were following a hearse, which was, I suppose, the very effect the city fathers aimed to produce, but as we left the limits of the municipality our resentment was dispelled by a sign so placed as to catch the eye of the departing motorist. It read: “So long, friend! Come again.”

There is one word that you should never, never mention in the orange belt and that is—frost. That severe frosts are few and far between is perfectly true, as is attested by the fact that the road from Riverside to Pasadena runs through a vast forest of treasure-bearing trees. That there is another and less joyous side to the business of raising breakfast-table fruit was brought sharply home to me, however, by noting that the orchards I passed were dotted with hundreds, yes, thousands, of little cylindrical oil-stoves—the kind that they use in New England farmhouses to heat the bedroom enough to take a bath in on Sunday mornings. When the weather observer in Los Angeles flashes to the orange-growing centres a warning of an impending frost, the countryside turns out en masse as though to repel an invader, and soon the groves are dotted with myriad pin-points of flame as the orchardists wage their desperate battle with the cold, with stoves, braziers, smudge-pots, and bonfires for their weapons. Though at long intervals a frost comes which does wide-spread and incalculable damage, as in 1913, that they are infrequent is best proved by the fact that automobile, phonograph, and encyclopedia[134] salesmen find their most profitable markets in the orange belt.

The cultivation of citrus fruits has been so systematised of recent years that nowadays, if one is to believe the alluringly worded prospectuses issued by the concerns engaged in selling citrus lands, all the owner of an orange grove has to do is to sit in a rocking-chair on his veranda, watch his trees grow and his fruit ripen, have it picked, packed, and marketed by proxy, and pocket the money which comes rolling in. According to the specious arguments of the realty dealers, it is as simple as taking candy from children. You simply can’t lose. According to them, it works out something after this fashion. Prof. Nathaniel Nutt, principal of a school at Skaneateles, N.Y., decides that when his teaching days are over he would like to spend his carpet-slipper years on an orange grove under California’s sunny skies. Lured by the glowing advertisements, he invests in ten acres of land planted to young trees and piped for water. The price is five hundred dollars an acre, of which he pays one fifth down and the balance in four annual instalments. By the time that his grove is old enough to bear, therefore, it will be fully paid for. In its fifth year—according to the dealer, at least—Mr. Nutt’s grove will yield him fruit to the value of five hundred dollars an acre, so that it will pay for itself the very first year after it comes into bearing. Moreover, during the five years that must of necessity intervene before the trees can be expected to droop under their golden crop,[135] there is no real necessity for Mr. Nutt’s coming to California, for, by the payment of a purely nominal sum, he can have his grove cultivated, irrigated, and cared for under the direction of expert horticulturists while he continues to teach the Skaneateles youngsters their three R’s. As soon as the grove comes into bearing he will be notified, whereupon he will send in his resignation to the School Board, pack his grip, buy a ticket to California, and settle down as an orange grower with an assured income of five thousand dollars a year (ten acres multiplied by five hundred dollars, you see) for life. Simple, isn’t it? But let us suppose, just for the sake of argument, that about the time that Prof. Nutt’s trees come into bearing a devastating frost comes along and in a single night wipes his orchard out. Is it likely that he will be able to stand the financial strain of setting out another grove and irrigating it and fertilising it and caring for it for another five years? All of which goes to prove that orange growing is no business for people of limited means. Like speculating in Wall Street, it is an occupation which should only be followed by those who have sufficient resources to tide them over serious reverses and long periods of waiting. For such as those, however, there is no denying that gold grows on orange-trees.

Citrus growing, as I have already remarked, has been greatly simplified of late by the organisation of growers’ unions. These unions are a result of the long and bitter struggle the citrus growers have waged to oust the intrenched middlemen and speculators.[136] A few years ago the growers found themselves facing the alternatives of organisation or bankruptcy. They chose the former. The first to organise were the Riverside growers, who built a common packing-house, put a general manager in charge, and sent their fruit to it to be inspected, packed, sold, and shipped. So successful did the experiment prove that other districts soon followed Riverside’s example, until to-day there is no orange-growing section in the State that does not have its own packing-house. But the growers did not stop there. They soon found that, if they were to get the top-of-the-market prices for their fruit, some system must be devised for getting market quotations at the eleventh hour and fifty-ninth minute and then diverting their shipments to the highest market. Here is an example: a car-load of oranges from Redlands might arrive in the Milwaukee freight yards the same day as a car-load from San Bernardino, in which case the Milwaukee market would be glutted, while in Saint Paul there might be a shortage of the golden fruit. To meet this necessity the local packing-houses grouped themselves together in shipping exchanges, of which there are now in the neighbourhood of a hundred and thirty, handling sixty per cent of California’s citrus crop. But, as the industry grew, still another organisation was needed: a big central fruit exchange to handle problems of transportation, to gather information about the markets, and to supply daily quotations, and legal, technical, and scientific information. Thus there came into being the big central exchange, as a result of[137] which the growers have been enabled to market their own fruit regardless of the speculators. This central exchange keeps a salaried agent on every important market in the country. No commissions and no dividends are paid; there is no profit feature whatsoever. Against each box of fruit passing through the exchange is assessed the exact expense of handling, and the entire proceeds, less only this expense, are remitted to the grower. The local packing-house unions exist solely to pick, pack, and ship; the district unions exist solely to handle the local problems of the association; the central union exists for the purpose of gathering and supplying quotations and other information. Each of these unions is duly incorporated and has a board of directors, the growers electing the directors of the district union and these in turn electing the directors of the central union. Each union is a pure democracy—one vote a man, independent of his financial status or his acreage.

Few outsiders appreciate the enormous proportions to which California’s citrus industry has grown. Three of every four oranges grown in the United States come from Californian groves, which yield a fifth of the entire citrus production of the world. The orange and lemon groves of California now amount to approximately a quarter of a million acres and are increasing at the rate of twenty-five thousand acres a year, for, as it takes a grove five years to come into bearing and nine years to reach maturity, population multiplies faster than the groves can grow. Notwithstanding[138] this formidable array of facts and figures, it is open to grave doubt whether an orange grove is a safe investment for a person of modest means. Though a great deal of money has unquestionably been made in citrus growing, there is no denying the fact that it is a good deal of a gamble. One of the largest and most successful growers in California, a pioneer in the industry, said to me not long ago: “If the best friend I have in the world sent me a cheque for ten thousand dollars and asked me to invest it for him in citrus property, I would send it back to him unless I knew that there was plenty of money where that came from. I have made money in orange growing, it is true, but only because there has never been a time that I have not had ample resources to fall back on.” And here is the other side of the shield. We stopped for lunch one day at the rose-covered bungalow of a young widow whose husband had died a few years before, leaving her with two small children and twenty acres of oranges.

“These twenty acres,” she told me, as we sat on the terrace over the coffee, “pay for the maintenance of this house, for the education of my two youngsters, for the up-keep of my little motor-car, and for my annual trips back East. And I don’t have to economise by wearing cotton stockings, either.”

I have shown you both sides of the orange question; you can decide it for yourself.

Some one with a poetic fancy and an imagination that worked overtime has asserted that Pasadena[139] means “the Pass to Eden.” Though this is, to say the least, a decidedly free translation, it is, nevertheless, a peculiarly fitting one, for I doubt if there is any spot on earth where Adam and Eve would feel more at home than in the enchanting region of oak-studded foot-hills and poppy-carpeted valleys to which Pasadena is the gateway. What Cannes and Mentone and Nice are to Europe, Pasadena is to America: a place where the fortunate ones who can afford it can idle away their winters amid the same luxurious surroundings and under the same cielo sereno that they would find on the Côte d’Azur. Enclosed on three sides by a mountain wall which effectually protects it from the cold land winds, Pasadena nestles amid its subtropical gardens on the level floor of the San Gabriel Valley, ten miles from La Puebla de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles, to give the second city of California its full name. It is said, by the way, that the people of Los Angeles have twenty-three distinct ways of pronouncing the name of their city. Mr. Charles Lummis, the author, who is a recognised authority on the Southwest, has attempted to secure a correct and uniform pronunciation of the city’s name by distributing among his friends the following:

“My Lady would remind you, please,
Her name is not ‘Lost Angy Lees’
Nor Angy anything whatever.
She trusts her friend will be so clever
To share her fit historic pride,
The g should not be jellified;
Long o, g hard and rhyme with ‘yes’
And all about Los Angeles.”

[140]

It is a Spotless Town in real life, is Pasadena. It is as methodically laid out as a Nuremburg toy village; it is as immaculate as a new pair of white kid gloves. At the height of the season, which begins immediately after New York’s tin-horn-and-champagne debauch on New-Year’s Eve and lasts until Fifth Avenue is ablaze with Easter millinery, you can find more private cars side-tracked in Pasadena railway yards and more high-powered automobiles on its boulevards than at any pleasure resort in the world. It is much frequented by the less spectacular class of millionaires, to whom the frivolity of the Palm Beach life does not appeal, and more than once I have seen on the terrace of the Hotel Green enough men whose names are household words to form a quorum of the board of directors of the Steel Trust. Though dedicated to pleasure, Pasadena has an extraordinary number of large and beautiful churches, and, as their pulpits are frequently occupied by divines of international reputation, they are generally filled to the doors. In fact, I have counted upward of three hundred motor-cars parked in front of two fashionable churches in Colorado Street.

Just as the Eastern visitor to San Francisco is invariably shown three “sights”—Chinatown, Golden Gate Park, and the Cliff House, so, when he goes to Pasadena, he is shown Orange Grove Avenue, taken through the Busch Gardens, and hauled up Mount Lowe. Orange Grove Avenue is a mile-long, hundred-foot-wide stretch of asphalt bordered throughout its entire length by palms, pepper-trees, and plutocrats.[141] We drove along it quite slowly, taking a resident with us to point out the houses and retail any odds and ends of gossip about the people who lived in them, like the lecturers on the rubberneck coaches. It was almost as interesting as reading the advertising pages in the magazines, for most of the names he mentioned were familiar ones: we had seen them hundreds of times on soap and tooth-powder and ham and corsets and safety-razors. Then we motored over to the Busch Gardens, which were the hobby of the late St. Louis brewer and on which he lavished the profits of goodness knows how many kegs of beer. Though exceedingly beautiful in spots, they are too much of a horticultural pousse-café to be wholly satisfying. Roses and orchids and pansies and morning-glories and geraniums and asters are exquisite by themselves, but they don’t look particularly well crowded into the same vase. That is the trouble with the Busch Gardens. The profusion of subtropical vegetation is characteristically Californian; the sweeping greensward, overshadowed by gnarled and hoary live-oaks, recalls the manor parks of England; the prim, clipped hedges and the jets d’eau suggest Versailles; the gravelled promenades, bordered by marble seats and rows of stately cypress, bear the unmistakable stamp of Italy; while the cast-iron dogs and deer and gnomes which are scattered about in the most unexpected places could have come from nowhere on earth save the Rhineland.

The climax of a stay in Pasadena is the trip up[142] Mount Lowe. You can no more escape it and preserve your self-respect than you can go to Lucerne and escape going up the Rigi. From Rubio Cañon, near the city limits, a cable incline which in Switzerland would be called a funicular, climbs up the mountainside at a perfectly appalling grade. All the way up you speculate as to what would happen if the cable should break. When two thirds of the way to the summit the passengers are transferred to an electric car which, alternately clinging like a spider to the mountain’s precipitous face or creeping across giddy cañons by means of cobweb bridges, twists and turns its hair-raising way upward to the Alpine Tavern, a mile above the level of the valley floor. The far-flung orange groves with the sun shining upon them, the white villas of Pasadena and Altadena peeping coquettishly from amid the live-oaks, the rounded, moleskin-coloured foot-hills splotched with yellow poppies, the double rows of blue-grey eucalyptus (in Australia they call them blue-gums) and the white highways which run between them, in the distance the towering sky-line of Los Angeles beneath its pall of smoke, and, farther still, the islands of San Clemente and Santa Catalina rising, violet and alluring, from the sun-flecked sea, combine to form a picture the Great Artist has but rarely equalled.

Different people, different tastes. Those who prefer the whoop-and-hurrah of popular seaside resorts can gratify their tastes to the limit at any one of the long and beautiful beaches—Long Beach, Redondo, Santa[143] Monica, Venice—which adjoin Los Angeles. Here the amusements which await the visitor are limited only by his pocketbook and his endurance. The scenes along this coast of joy in summer beggar description. The splendid sands are alive with bathers; the promenades, lined with all the peripatetic shows of a popular seaside resort, swarm with good-natured, jostling, happy-go-lucky crowds. There is no rowdyism, as is the rule rather than the exception at similar resorts in the East, and there is amazingly little vulgarity, the boisterous element which prevails, say, at Coney Island, being totally lacking, this being due, no doubt, to the fact that several of the beaches have “gone dry.” At Long Beach the really beautiful Virginia, than which there are not half a dozen finer seaside hotels in the United States, provides accommodation for those who wish to combine the hurly-burly of Manhattan Beach with the more sedate pleasures of Marblehead or Narragansett. At Redondo you can risk your neck on the largest scenic railway in the world (they called them roller-coasters when I was a boy), or you can bathe in the largest indoor swimming pool in the world, or you can go down on the beach and disport yourself in the surf of the largest ocean in the world, though it is only fair to add that this last is not the exclusive property of Redondo. At Santa Monica you can sit on a terrace overlooking the sea and eat fried sand-dabs—a fish for which this portion of the Californian littoral is famous and which is as delicious as the pompano of New Orleans. At Venice you can[144] lean back in a gondola, while a gentleman of Italian extraction in white ducks and a red sash pilots you through a series of lagoons and canals, and, if you have a sufficiently vigorous imagination, you may be able to make yourself believe that you are in the city of the Doges. Though somewhat noisy and nearly always crowded—which is, of course, precisely what their promoters want—the Los Angeles beaches provide the cleanest amusements and the most wholesome atmosphere of any places of their kind that I know.

Though Los Angeles is fifteen miles from the sea as the aeroplane flies, and considerably farther by the shortest railway route, the Angelenos have done their best to mitigate this unfortunate circumstance by attempting to convert the indifferent harbour of San Pedro, twenty miles away, into a great artificial seaport. Everything that money can do has been done. The national government has dredged and improved the harbour and built a huge breakwater at enormous cost, and Los Angeles, which has extended her municipal limits so as to include San Pedro, has spent millions more in the construction of several miles of concrete quays and the installation of the most powerful and modern electric loading machinery. There is even under serious consideration a plan for digging a ship-canal from San Pedro to Los Angeles so that seagoing vessels can discharge and take on cargo in the heart of the commercial district. Though in time, as a result of the impetus provided by the completion of the[145] Panama Canal and the astounding growth of Los Angeles, which now has a population of considerably over half a million (in 1890 it had only fifty thousand), San Pedro will doubtless develop into a port of considerable importance for coastwise commerce, its limitations are not likely to permit of its ever becoming a dangerous rival of its great sister ports of San Francisco and San Diego. The attitude of the San Franciscans toward the laudable efforts of Los Angeles to get a harbour of her own is amusingly illustrated by a story they tell upon the coast. When the big breakwater was completed and San Pedro was ready to do business, Los Angeles celebrated the great event with a banquet, among the guests of honour being a gentleman prominent in the civic life of San Francisco. Toward the close of an evening of self-congratulation and of fervid oratory on Los Angeles’s dazzling future as one of the great seaports of the world, the San Franciscan was called upon to respond to a toast.

“I have listened with the deepest interest, gentlemen,” he began, “to what the speakers of the evening have had to say regarding your new harbour at San Pedro, and I have been impressed with a feeling of regret that this magnificent harbour, which you have constructed at so great an expenditure of money and effort, is not more easy of access from your beautiful city. Now it strikes me, gentlemen, that you could overcome this unfortunate circumstance by laying a pipe-line from Los Angeles to San Pedro. Then, if you would suck as hard as you have been[146] blowing this evening, you would soon have the Pacific Ocean at your front door.”

Strung along the coast of California, from Point Loma to Point Concepcion, are the Channel Islands. Counting only the larger ones, they number twelve: three Coronados, four Santa Catalinas, and five in the Santa Barbara group; but if you include them all, small as well as large, there are thirty-five distinct links in the island chain which stretches from wind-swept San Miguel to the Coronados. What the Azores, Madeira, and the Canaries are to Europe, these enchanted isles are to the Pacific Coast. They have the climatic charm of the Riviera without its summer heat; the delights of its winters without the raw, cold winds which sweep down from the Maritime Alps. With their palms and semitropic verdure they have all the appearance of the tropics, yet they have not a tropical climate, the winters having the crispness of an Eastern October and the summers being cooler than any portion of the Atlantic seaboard south of Nova Scotia.

Southernmost of the chain and not more than ten miles southwest from San Diego as the sea-gull flies is the group of rock-bound islets known as Los Coronados, which belong to Mexico. Though uninhabited and extremely rough, they are surrounded by forests of kelp and form famous fishing grounds for the big game of the deep. About a hundred miles to the northward, off the coast of Los Angeles County, is[147] the group of which Santa Catalina is the largest and the most famous. Though Santa Catalina is only twenty-seven miles from San Pedro, the port of Los Angeles, it takes the Cabrillo, owing to her tipsy gait and the choppy sea which generally prevails in the channel, nearly three hours to make the passage, which is as notorious for producing mal de mer as that across the Straits of Dover.

The prehistoric people who inhabited Santa Catalina during the Stone Age, and of whom many traces have been found in the kitchen-middens which dot the island, were first awakened to the fact that the world contained others than themselves when the Spanish sea-adventurer Cabrillo dropped the anchors of his caravels off their shores. Nearly a century passed away and then Philip III gave the island to one of his generals as a present. Some two hundred years were gathered into the past before Pio Pico, the Mexican governor of Alta California, sold the island for the price of a horse and saddle. In later years various other transfers took place from time to time, James Lick, who lies buried under his great telescope on Mount Hamilton, being for a period lord of the island. Later it was purchased as a prospective silver mine by an English syndicate, but the ore ran out and the disgusted Britishers were glad to dispose of it to the Banning Company, which is the present owner.

Santa Catalina, which is about twenty-seven miles long, is shaped, with great appropriateness, like a fish, the smaller portion, which corresponds to the[148] tail, being connected with the main body of the island by a sandy isthmus. The island is surrounded on all sides by a dense jungle of kelp and other marine plants, whose wonders visitors are able to view from glass-bottomed boats. The topography of the island is scarcely less striking than the sea gardens which surround it. From the mountain peaks which rise to a height of two thousand feet or more, V-shaped cañons, their ridges pitched like the roof of a Swiss chalet, sweep down, ever widening, to the silver beaches of the sea. On the southern slopes cactus and sage-brush, grim offspring of the desert, cling to the naked, sun-baked rocks; on the other, the cooler side, dense, growths of mountain lilac, manzanita, chaparral, elder and other flowering shrubs form a striking contrast. Most of the vast acreage of the island is a sheep ranch and wild-goat range, but one cañon at the eastern end is devoted to the visitor and filled by the charming town of Avalon with a winter population of seven or eight hundred, which in summer increases to that many thousand. Avalon is unlike any other place that I know. It is built on the shore of a crescent-shaped bay at the mouth of a deep cañon which almost bisects the island. At the upper end of this cañon a great wall formed by a mountain ridge protects the town from ocean winds and gives it what is probably the nearest approach in the world to the “perfect climate.” The quaint houses of the town, many of them of charming and distinctive design, cling to the rocky hillsides and dot the slopes of the cañons, adapting themselves, with[149] characteristic Americanism, to circumstances and conditions. Along the water-front are the large hotels, a concert pavilion, and the aquarium—which, by the way, has a larger variety of marine animals than the famous aquarium at Naples; farther up the beach is a large and handsome bath-house where hundreds bathe daily, and in the cañon at the back of the town are the picturesque and sporting golf-links and the tennis-courts. Though the island offers the visitor an extraordinary diversity of amusements, Avalon’s raison d’être is angling with rod and reel and everything is subservient to that. To it, as big-game hunters go to Africa, come fishermen from the farthermost corners of the world in quest of the big game of the sea. From the south side of the Bay of Avalon a long pier wades out into the water. Just as the bridge across the Arno in Florence is the resort of the gold and silver smiths, so this pier is the resort of the professional tuna boatmen. Along it, on either side, are ranged their booths or stands, each with its elaborate display of the paraphernalia of deep-sea fishing; a placard over each booth bears the owner’s name and his power-boat is anchored close by. At the end of the pier is a singular object which resembles a gallows. Beside it is a locked scales. On the gallows-like affair the great game-fish are hung and photographed, and on the scales all the fish taken in the tournaments are weighed by the official weighers of the Tuna Club.

If you will glance to starboard as the Cabrillo steams slowly into Avalon Harbour, you will notice a[150] modest, brown frame building, with a railed terrace dotted with armchairs, built on piles above the water. This is the Tuna Club, the most famous institution of its kind in the world. To become eligible to membership in this unique club one must take on a rod of not over sixteen ounces or under six feet and with a line of not more than twenty-four threads, a fish weighing over one hundred pounds. If elected one receives the coveted blue button, which is the angler’s Legion of Honour and to obtain which has cost many fishermen thousands of dollars and years of patience, while others have won it in a single day. The club holds organised tournaments throughout the fishing season, offering innumerable trophy cups and medals of gold, silver, and bronze for the largest tuna, albacore, sea-bass, yellowtail, and bonito caught by its members. I might mention, in passing, that the largest tuna ever taken was caught off Santa Catalina by Colonel C. P. Morehouse, of Pasadena, in 1899; when placed on the official scales the indicator registered two hundred and fifty-one pounds. I know of no more interesting way in which to pass an evening than to sit on the terrace of the Tuna Club, looking out across the moonlit bay, and listen to the tales told by these veterans of rod and reel: of Judge Beaman, who hooked a tuna off Avalon and was towed by the angry monster to Redondo, a distance of thirty miles, or of Mr. Wood, who played a fish for seven hours before it could be brought to gaff. I have yarned with professional elephant and lion hunters in the clubs at Mombasa and[151] Zanzibar, and I give you my word that their stories were not a whit more fascinating than the tales of battles with marine monsters which I listened to on the terrace of the Tuna Club at Avalon.

Santa Catalina’s nearest neighbour is San Clemente, twenty miles long, whose northern shore is a wonderland of grottoes, caves, and cliffs and on whose rolling upland pastures browse many thousand head of sheep. A hundred miles or so to the northward are the islands composing the Santa Barbara group: Anacapa, Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, and San Miguel. The coast of Anacapa—“the ever-changing”—is a maze of strange caverns gnawed from the rock by the hungry sea, one of them, of vast size, having once served as a retreat for the pirates who formerly plied their trade along this coast, and now for sea-lions and seals, a skipper from Santa Barbara doing a thriving business in capturing these animals and selling them for exhibition purposes, the seals of Santa Cruz being in demand by showmen all over the world because of their intelligence and willingness to learn. The island, which is arid and deserted, is a sheep ranch; the fact that there is little or no water on it apparently causing no discomfort to the sheep, as their coats become so soaked at night as a result of the dense fogs that by morning each animal is literally a walking sponge.

Barring Santa Catalina, Santa Cruz is by far the most interesting and attractive of the Channel Islands, being worthy of a visit if for no other reason than to see its painted caves, which have been worn[152] by the waves into the most fantastic shapes and dyed by the salts gorgeous and varied colors. Viewed from the sea, Santa Cruz appears to be but a jumble of lofty hills, sheer cliffs, and barren, purple mountains, gashed and scarred by cañons and gorges in all directions. But once you have crossed this rocky barrier which hems the island in, you find yourself in the loveliest Valley that the imagination could well conceive, with palms and oleanders and bananas growing everywhere and a climate as perfect and considerably milder than that of Avalon. The island is the property of the Caire estate; its proprietor is a Frenchman, and French and Italian labourers are employed exclusively on the ranch and in the vineyards which cover the interior of the island. When you set foot within the valley you leave America behind. The climate is that of southern France. The vineyard is a European vineyard. The brown-skinned folk who work in it speak the patois of the French or Italian peasantry. The ranch-houses, of plastered and whitewashed brick, with their iron balconies and their quaint and brilliant gardens, might have been transplanted bodily from Savoy, while the great flocks of sheep grazing contentedly upon the encircling hills complete the illusion that you are in the Old World instead of within a hundred miles of the newest metropolis in the New. There are two distinct seasons at Santa Cruz—the sheep-shearing and the vintage—when the French and Italian islanders are reinforced by large numbers of Barbareños, from Santa Barbara across the channel, who pick the grapes in September[153] and twice yearly shear the sheep. Though the surface of the island is cut in every direction by cañons, gulches, and precipices, the Barbareño horsemen, who are descended from the old Mexican vaquero stock, mounted on the agile island ponies, in rounding up the sheep, ride at top speed down precipitous cliffs and along the brinks of giddy chasms which an ordinary mortal would hesitate to negotiate with hobnailed boots and an alpenstock. It is a thrilling and hair-raising exhibition of horsemanship and nerve and, should you ever happen to be along that coast at shearing time, I would advise you to obtain a permit from the Caire family and go over to Santa Cruz to see it.

Sport in the Channel Islands is not confined to fishing, for there is excellent wild-goat shooting on Santa Catalina and wild-boar shooting on Santa Cruz. Though both goats and boars are doubtless descended from domestic animals introduced by the early Spaniards, they have lived so long in a state of freedom that they provide genuinely exciting sport. These wild pigs are dangerous beasts for an unmounted, unarmed man to meet, however, for they combine the staying qualities of a Georgia razor-back with the ferocity of a Moroccan boar and will charge a man without the slightest hesitation.

Taking them by and large, the Channel Islands are, I believe, unique. Where else, pray, within a half day’s sail of a city of six hundred thousand people, can one explore pirates’ caves, pick bananas from[154] the trees, shoot wild goat and wild boar, angle for the largest fish in existence, and, no matter what the season of the year, dwell in a climate of perpetual spring?

[155]

## VI
THE COAST OF FAIRYLAND

[156]

“All in the golden weather, forth let us ride to-day,
You and I together on the King’s Highway.
The blue skies above us, and below the shining sea;
There’s many a road to travel, but it’s this road for me.
...
It’s a long road and sunny, it’s a long road and old,
And the brown padres made it for the flocks of the fold;
They made it for the sandals of the sinner folk that trod
From the fields in the open to the mission-house of God.
...
We will take the road together through the morning’s golden glow,
And we’ll dream of those who trod it in the mellowed long ago;
We will stop at the Missions where the sleeping padres lay,
And we’ll bend a knee above them for their souls’ sake to pray.
We’ll ride through the valleys where the blossom’s on the tree,
Through the orchards and the meadows with the bird and the bee,
And we’ll take the rising hills where the manzanitas grow,
Past the grey tails of waterfalls where blue violets blow.
Old conquistadores, O brown priests and all,
Give us your ghosts for company when night begins to fall;
There’s many a road to travel, but it’s this road to-day,
With the breath of God above us on the King’s Highway.”

[157]

### VI
THE COAST OF FAIRYLAND

Following the example of the late J. Cæsar, Esquire, the well-known Roman politician, who districted Gaul into three parts, California might be divided into three provinces of pleasure: the Sierras, the Sequoias, and the Sands. Though nowhere separated by a journey of more than a single day at most, these three zones are as dissimilar in their physical and climatical characteristics and in the recreations they offer to the visitor as the coast of Brittany is from the Engadine, as the Black Forest is from the Italian Lakes, or, coming nearer home, as unlike each other as the White Mountains are unlike Atlantic City, as Muskoka is unlike Bar Harbour. Within the confines of a region five hundred miles long and barely two hundred wide may be found as many varieties of climate, scenery, and recreation as are provided by all the resorts of eastern America and Europe put together.

That California’s summer climate is even more delightful than its whiter climate is a fact which not one outlander in a hundred seems able to comprehend. Because the paralysing cold of an Eastern winter is equalised by a correspondingly sweltering summer, your average Easterner, who has heard all his life of[158] California’s winter climate, finds it impossible to disabuse himself of the conviction that a region which is so climatically blessed by Nature during one half of the year must, as a matter of course, be cursed with intolerable weather during the other half, so as to strike, as it were, an average. A climate which is equally inviting in January and in July is altogether beyond his comprehension. He fails to understand why Nature does not treat California as impartially as she does other regions, making her pay for balmy, cloudless winter days with summers marked by scorching heat and torrential rains. Summer in California is really equivalent to an Eastern June. The nights are always cool, and the blankets, instead of being packed away in moth balls, cover you to the chin. There is no humidity and the air, which in most summer climates is about as invigorating as lemonade, is as crisp and sparkling as dry champagne. Nor is there any rain. This is literal. There is, I repeat, no rain. Each August the Bohemian Club of San Francisco produces its famous Grove Play in a natural amphitheatre formed by the rocks and redwoods of the Californian forest. The cost of the production runs into many thousands of dollars and involves many months of effort, but the preparations are made with the absolute assurance that the performance will be unmarred by rain. In a quarter of a century the club members have not been disturbed by so much as a sprinkle. Did you ever plan a motor trip or a picnic or a fishing excursion during an Eastern summer only to be awakened on the morning of the[159] appointed day by the rain pattering on the roof? That sort of thing doesn’t happen in California any more than it does in Egypt. Pick out your midsummer day, no matter whether it is a week or a month or a year ahead, and on that morning you will find the weather waiting for you at the front door. This absence of rain is not an entirely unmitigated blessing, however, for it means dust. And such dust! I have never seen any region so intolerably dusty as is the Great Valley of California in midsummer except the Attic Plain. A jack-rabbit scurrying across the desert sends up a column of dust like an Indian signal-fire. Along the coast, however, the dust nuisance is ameliorated to some extent by the summer fogs which come rolling in from the sea at dawn, leaving the countryside as fresh and sparkling as though it had been sprinkled by a heavy dew. The farther up the coast you go, the heavier these fogs become, until, north of Monterey, they resemble the driving mists so characteristic of the Scottish highlands. For the benefit of golfers I might add that these moisture-laden fogs make possible the chain of splendid turf golf-links which begin at Monterey, the courses farther south, where there is but little moisture during the summer, being characterised by greens of oiled sand and fairways which during six months of the year are as dry and hard as a bone. Artists will tell you that the summer landscapes of California are far more beautiful than its winter ones, and I am inclined to believe that they are right, for in June the countryside, with its unnumbered[160] nuances of green and purple, is transformed, as though by the wave of a magician’s wand, into a dazzling land of russets and burnt oranges and chromes and yellows.

California may best be described as a great walled garden with one side facing on the sea. It is separated from those unfortunate regions which lie at the back of it by the most remarkable garden wall in all the world. This wall, which is, on an average, two miles high, is five hundred miles long, having Mount San Jacinto for its southern and Mount Shasta for its northern corner. At the back of the garden rises, peak on peak, range on range, the snow-clad Sierra Nevada. Gradually descending, the high peaks give way to lesser ones, the ranges dwindle to foot-hills, the foot-hills run out in cañons and grassy valleys, the valley slopes become clothed with forests, the forests merge into groves of gnarled, fantastic live-oaks, and these in turn to gorse-covered dunes which sweep down to meet the sea. The whole of this vast garden—mountain, forest, and shore—is dotted with accommodations for the visitor which are adapted to all tastes and to all purses and which range all the way from huge caravansaries which rival those of Ostend and Aix-les-Bains, of Narragansett and Lake Placid, to tented cities pitched beneath the whispering redwoods or beside the murmuring sea.

Unless you have seen the Lago di Garda at its bluest, unless you have loitered beneath the palms which line the Promenade des Anglais at Nice, unless[161] you have bathed on the white sands of Waikiki, unless you have motored along the Corniche Road, with the sun-flecked Mediterranean on the one hand and the dim blue outline of the Alps upon the other, you cannot picture with any degree of accuracy the beauties of this enchanted littoral. From Cannes, where the Mediterranean Riviera properly begins, to San Remo, where it ends, is barely one hundred miles, every foot of which is so built over with hotels and villas and straggling villages that you feel as though you were passing through a city, the impression being heightened by the gendarmes who stare at you suspiciously and by the admonitory notices which confront you at every turn. From Coronado, where the Californian Riviera begins, to the Golden Gate, where it ends, is six hundred miles, and every foot of that six hundred miles is through a veritable garden of the Lord. Along this coast date-palms and giant cacti give place to citrus groves ablaze with golden fruit and these, in turn, merge into the grey-green of the olive; the olive groves change to orchards of peach and apricot and prune, and these lose themselves in time in hillsides green with live-oaks, and the live-oaks turn to redwoods and the redwoods yield to pines. Bordering this historic coastal highway—El Camino Real, it is still called—are vast ranches whose hillsides are alive with grazing flocks and herds; great estates, triumphs of the landscape-gardener’s skill, with close-clipped hedges and velvet lawns from amid which rise Norman châteaux and Italian villas and Elizabethan manor-houses; quaint[162] bungalows with deep, cool verandas, half hidden by blazing gardens; and, of course, hotels—dozens and dozens of them, with roses tumbling in cascades of colour over stucco walls and cool terraces shaded by red-striped awnings. It is indeed an enchanted coast, and I, who had always boasted to myself that I had seen too many of the world’s beauty-spots to give my allegiance to any one of them, have—I admit it frankly—fallen victim to its spell.

Between Los Angeles and Ventura lies one of the most flourishing agricultural regions in the State, the districts through which we sped on the wings of the winter morning being variously noted for their production of hay, walnuts, olives, beets, and beans. Ventura is the railroad brakeman’s contraction of San Buenaventura—it is obvious that a trainman could not spare the time to enunciate so long a name—the picturesque coast town and county-seat owing its origin to the mission which the Franciscan padres founded here a year after the Battle of Yorktown and which is still in daily use. From Ventura we made a detour of fifteen miles or so for the purpose of visiting the Ojai Valley (it is pronounced “O-hi” if you please), a little place of surpassing beauty which not many people know about, like Thun in the Bernese Oberland, or Annecy, near Aix-les-Bains. The road to the Ojai strikes directly inland from the coast, following the devious course of the Matilija, climbing up and up and up, through forests of live-oaks and mountain[163] meadows carpeted with wild flowers, until it suddenly debouches into the valley itself. Because the Ojai is so very beautiful, and is at the same time so simple and sylvan and unpretending, it is a little difficult to give an accurate idea of it in words. Though Mount Topotopo, the highest of the peaks which hem it in, is not much over six thousand feet, it can best be compared, I think, to some of the Alpine valleys, such as Andermatt, for example, or the one below Grindelwald. I do not particularly like the idea of continually dragging in Europe as a standard of comparison for things American, but so many of our people have come to know Europe better than they do their own country that it is the only means I have of making them realise the beauties and wonders on which, with the coming of each summer, they habitually turn their backs.

To visualise the Ojai you must imagine a boat-shaped valley, ten miles long perhaps and a fifth of that in width, entirely surrounded by a wall of purple mountains. The floor of the valley is covered with lush green grass and dotted with thousands of gnarled and hoary live-oaks with venerable grey beards of Spanish moss. Through the trees peep the shingled, weather-beaten cottages of Nordhoff, which, with its leafy lanes, its shady blacksmith shop, its cosy inn, and its collection of country stores with the inevitable group of loungers chewing tobacco and whittling and settling the affairs of the nation in the shade of their wooden awnings, is as quaint and sleepy and[164] unspoiled a hamlet as you can find west of Cape Cod. The annual tournaments of the Ojai Valley Tennis Club, which for nearly twenty years have been held each spring on the pretty oak-fringed courts behind the inn, attract the crack players of the coast, and here have been developed no less than six national champions. As you ascend the mountain slopes the character of the vegetation abruptly changes, the oak groves giving way to orchards of orange, lemon, fig, and olive, which, taken in conjunction with the palms and the veritable riot of flowers, give to the sides of the valley an almost tropical appearance. The Ojai is said to have more varieties of birds and flowers than any place in the United States, and I think that the statement is doubtless true. It is like an aviary in a botanical garden. Snuggled away in the mountains at the back of the Ojai are two equally enchanting but much less frequented valleys: the Matilija and the Sespe—the latter accessible only on a sure-footed horse along a mountain trail which is precipitous in places and nowhere overwide. In the spring and summer the streams which tumble through these mountain valleys are alive with trout jumping-hungry for the fly. If you can accommodate yourself to simple accommodations and plain but wholesome fare you can eat and sleep and fish a very delightful vacation away at the rate of two dollars a day or ten a week.

High on the slopes of the Ojai, its brown shingles almost hidden by the Gold of Ophir roses which clamber over it, is a little hotel called The Foot-hills. It is an[165] unpretending little inn with perhaps forty rooms at most. But, shades of Lucullus and Mrs. Rorer, what meals they set before you! Brook-trout which that very morning were leaping in the Matilija, hot biscuits with honey from the Sespe, huge purple figs, grapefruit fresh-picked from the adjacent orchard, strawberries with lashings of thick yellow cream. I’ve never been able to decide which I like best about the Ojai, its scenery or its food. But as it becomes better known and more people begin to go there, I suppose the same thing will happen to it which happened to a dear little albergo in Venice which I once knew and loved. For many years it stood on the Guidecca, quite undiscovered by the tourist, and in their day had sheltered the Brownings and Carlyle. It was a sure refuge from the bustle and turmoil of the big hotels, and not infrequently I used to go there for a lunch of omelet and strawberries and Chianti served under a vine-clad pergola on the edge of the canal. The first time that I took Her to Venice, I said, as we were leaving the great caravansary where we were stopping:

“I know a place where we will lunch. I haven’t been there for years and I don’t remember its name, but I think that I can find it,” and I described it in detail to Angelo, our gondolier.

“Si, si, signor,” he assured me, and shoved off with his long oar.

Four times we rowed up and down the Guidecca without my being able to locate my beloved little hotel.

[166]

“This must have been the place you meant, signor,” Angelo said finally, pointing to a building which was rapidly being demolished and to a staring sign which read: “A new five-story hotel with hot and cold running water, electric lights, and all modern conveniences will shortly be erected on this site. Meals prix fixe or à la carte. Music every evening.”

And that, I suppose, is what will happen to my little hotel in the Ojai when the world comes to learn about it. So I beg you who read this not to mention it to any one.

Until quite recently the route from the Ojai to Santa Barbara led over the Casitas Pass by a precipice-bordered road so narrow and dangerous that the fear of it kept many motorists away. But now the Casitas is a thing of the past, for a highway has been built along the edge of the sea by what is known as the Rincon route, several miles of it lying over wooden causeways not unlike the viaducts for Mr. Flagler’s seagoing railway on the Florida keys. This portion of the coast is one long succession of barrancas, each with a rocky creek bed worn by the winter torrent at its bottom, so that the road builders had many obstacles with which to contend. It is a very beautiful highway, however, and reminds one at every turn of the Corniche Road along the Riviera, with the same lazy ocean on the one side and the same blue serrated mountains on the other. Through Carpinteria we ran, pausing in our flight just long enough to take a look at[167] a grape-vine with a trunk eight feet in circumference, which has borne in a single season, so its guardian assured us, upward of ten tons of grapes; through Summerland, where the forest of derricks and the reek of petroleum suggest the hand of Rockefeller; past Miramar, as smothered in flowers as the heroine of d’Annunzio’s play; through Montecito, with its marble villas and red-roofed mansions rising above the groves of cypress and cedar; down the splendid Ocean Drive, where the great rollers from the Pacific come booming in to break in iridescent splendour on the silver strand; and so into Santa Barbara, the Newport of the West, where buildings of stone and concrete jostle elbows with picturesque hovels of adobe.

Santa Barbara presents more curious contrasts, I suppose, than any place between the oceans. Drawn up beside the curb you will see a magnificent limousine, the very latest product of the automobile builder’s art, with the strength of fourscore horses beneath its sloping hood and as luxuriously fitted as a lady’s boudoir; a Mexican vaquero, sombreroed, flannel-shirted, his legs encased in high-heeled boots and fleecy chaps, fresh from the cattle-ranges on the other side of the mountains, will rein up his wiry mustang and dexterously roll a cigarette and ask the liveried chauffeur for a match—Muchas gracias, Señor. On State Street stands a huge concrete office-building, the very last word in urban architecture, with hydraulic elevators and cork-paved corridors and up-to-the-minute ventilating devices, and all the rest. A man can stand in[168] front of that building and toss an orange into the patio of a long, low, deep-verandaed dwelling whose walls of crumbling adobe show that it dates from the period when this land was ruled from Madrid instead of Washington. Though there are plenty of buildings dating from the Spanish era left, the observing stranger will note that few if any of them retain their original roofs of hand-made, moss-grown tiles. Why? Because the old Spanish tiles will bring almost any price that is asked for them, being in great demand for roofing the houses of the rich. In fact, I know of one Santa Barbara mansion which is roofed with tiles brought from the old cathedral at Panama. Nor have I the least doubt in the world that these plutocratic philistines would strip the historic mission which is Santa Barbara’s chiefest asset of its tiles and bells and crosses if the monks could be induced to sell them.

Over in the section known as the Old Town all the houses are Mexican in character, their walls tinted yellow, pink, bright blue. This, with the palm-trees and the cactus in the dusty, unkempt dooryards, the groups of brown-faced, black-eyed youngsters by the gates, and the Spanish names—Garcias, Ortegas, Oteros, Espinosas, De la Guerras—which one sees everywhere, makes one realise that Santa Barbara is still Latin in everything save cleanliness. Merely to read the street names—Cañon Perdido, Anapamu, Arellaga, Micheltorena, Pedragoso, Chapala, Salsipuedes—makes you feel that you are in some Castilian town and not in the United States of the twentieth[169] century at all. Why on earth, while they were about it, they didn’t call the town’s main thoroughfare La Calle del Estado instead of prosaic State Street, I fail to understand. This glaring inconsistency in nomenclature is almost compensated for, however, by the little square down on the ocean front which is called the Plaza del Mar. Here barelegged youngsters, guarded by anxious nurses, gambol upon the sands; here the old folks doze contentedly upon the green benches and look out to sea and listen to the music of La Monica’s band; here lovers sit silently, clasping hands beneath the palms, just as other children, other old folk, other lovers are doing in other plazas in Old Spain.

“Even the imposing façade of the Arlington, with its arches, cloisters, terraces, and campanarios, suggests a Spanish monastery.”

“A long, low, deep-verandaed dwelling whose pottery roof and walls of adobe show that it dates from the period when this land was ruled from Madrid instead of Washington.”

SANTA BARBARA. A CITY OF CONTRASTS.

To understand the charm of Santa Barbara as a place of residence, you should stroll down State Street on a winter’s morning. Like Bellevue Avenue in Newport, it is the meeting-place for all the town. Youths in tweed jackets and flannel trousers stand beside the curbs chatting with pretty girls in rakish, vivid-coloured motor-cars. Dowagers descend from stately limousines and enter the shops to order sweetbreads and cotillion favours and the latest novels. Young men astride of mettlesome ponies trot by on their way to polo practice. Prosperous-looking, well-groomed men of years, who look as though they might be bank presidents and railway directors and financiers and probably are, pause to discuss the wretched weather prevailing in the East and to thank their lucky stars that they are out of it and to challenge each other to[170] a game of golf. Slim young girls in riding-boots and beautifully cut breeches patronise the soda-fountains and hang over the fiction counters in the bookstore and chatter volubly about tennis and theatres and tango teas. It is one big reception, at which every one knows every one else and every one else’s business. Though there is a great deal of wealth and fashion in Santa Barbara, there is likewise a great deal of informality, which makes it a pleasant contrast to Pasadena, which is so painfully conscious of its millionaires that life there possesses about as much informality as a court ball.

The ancient mission, which with the climate is Santa Barbara’s chief attraction, provides the motif for the city’s architecture, and the citizens have made a very commendable effort to live up to it, or rather to build up to it, even the imposing façade of the Arlington, with its arches, cloisters, terraces and campanarios, suggesting a Spanish monastery far more than a great tourist hotel. It is the monks themselves, however, who have been the most flagrant offenders against the canons of architectural good taste, for within a stone’s throw of their beautiful old mission they have erected a college which looks for all the world like a shoe factory surmounted by a cupola and a cross. No matter from what point upon the encircling hills you look down upon the city, that atrocious college, as angular, uncompromising, and out of the picture as a New England schoolmarm at a thé dansant, comes up and hits you in the eye.

THE MISSION OF SANTA BARBARA.

“The sunlight, sifted and softened by the interlacing branches of the ancient sycamores, cast a veil of yellow radiance upon the crumbling, weather-worn façade.”

[171]

Perhaps you were not aware that about one out of every ten plays which flicker before your fascinated eyes on the motion-picture screen were taken in or near Santa Barbara, for the country round about the town is a moving-picture producer’s paradise and several companies have built their studios there and make it their permanent headquarters. Within a five-mile radius of the Plaza del Mar are settings in which can be enacted scenes laid anywhere between Cancer and Capricorn. There are sandy beaches which might have been made expressly for shipwrecks and buccaneering exploits and similar “water stuff”; there are Greek and Spanish villas hidden away in subtropical gardens which would provide backgrounds for anything from the “Odyssey” to “The Orchid-Hunter”; and back of them are tawny foot-hill ranges where bands of cow-punchers, spectacularly garbed, pursue horse thieves or valorously defend wagon-trains attacked by Indians, taking good care, however, to keep within the focal radius of the camera.

Of the many things in and about Santa Barbara which appeal to the imagination, I think that I liked best the miniature caravels which surmount the massive gate-posts at the entrance to the Arlington. To most visitors I suppose that they are only puppet vessels, quaintly rigged and strangely shaped, to be sure, but nothing more. But to me they stand for something very definite indeed, do those little carven craft. They represent the San Salvador and the Vittoria, the little caravels in which Juan Rodrigues Cabrillo,[172] the intrepid Portuguese sea adventurer who hired his sword and services to Spain, sailed up this storied coast upward of three centuries ago and whose anchors rumbled down off these very shores. From out the mist of fiction, romance, legend, and fairy-tale which beclouds the early history of California, the certain and authenticated voyage of this Portuguese sailor of fortune stands out sharp and clear as the one fact upon which we can rely. Though he never returned from the land which he discovered, though he has been overlooked by History and forgotten by Fame, his adventure has become immortal, for he put California on the map.

Were you to turn your back on the Pacific at some point between Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo and strike due eastward, you would find athwart your path, shortly before reaching the Nevada line, the crudest and most forbidding of the earth’s waste places—Death Valley. At the very back of California, paralleling the eastern boundary of Inyo County, sandwiched between the great wall formed by the High Sierras and the burning sands of the Colorado Desert, this seventy-five-mile-long gash in the earth’s surface—the floor of the valley is two hundred and ten feet below the level of the sea—is one of the most extraordinary regions in the world. It is a place of contrasts and contradictions. Though in summer it is probably the hottest place on earth, in winter the cold becomes so great that the thermometer cannot record it. Its[173] aridity is so extreme that men have died from lack of moisture with water at their lips. Though rain is virtually unknown, the lives of the inhabitants are frequently menaced by the floods which result from cloudbursts. A mountain range, whose rocks are of such incredibly vivid colours that even a scene-painter would hesitate to depict them as they are, is called the Funeral Range. Though nearly a score of lives were lost when the valley was christened, and though its history from that day to this has been one of hardship, peril, and death, with little to relieve its harshness, for fully half the year Death Valley is as healthy a spot as any on the continent. During the other half, however, it is a sample package of that fire-and-brimstone hell of which the old-time preachers were wont to warn us. Indeed, the hereafter could hold no terrors for a man who was able to survive a summer in Death Valley.

The valley first became known by the tragedy which gave it its name. The year following the discovery of gold in California a party of thirty emigrants, losing their heads in their mad lust for the yellow metal, left the well-travelled Overland Trail and struck south through this region in the hope of finding a short cut to the gold-fields. But they found a short cut to death instead, for they lost their way in the valley and eighteen of them perished horribly from thirst. The valley, which runs almost due north and south, is about seventy-five miles long, and at its lowest point, where the climate is the worst, it is not over eight miles[174] in width. To the west the Panamints reach their greatest altitude, while on the east the Funeral Range is practically one huge ridge, with almost a vertical precipice on the side next the valley. To the south another range, running east and west, shuts in the foot of the valley and turns it into a cul-de-sac. Seen from the summit of the Panamint Range, the valley looks for all the world like a huge grey snake marked with narrow bands of dirty white, which are the borax deposits. Far to the north, gleaming in the sunlight like a slender blade of steel, is the Amargosa River, while on either side of the valley the ranges rear themselves skyward in strata of such gorgeous colours that beside them the walls of the Grand Cañon would look cold and drab. The vegetation is scant, stunted, and unhappy; the thorny mesquite shrub takes on a sickly yellowish tinge; the sage-brush is the colour of ashes; even the cactus, which flourishes on the inhospitable steppes of the adjacent Mohave Desert, has given up the struggle to exist in Death Valley in despair. But, arid as the valley is, it has two streams running through it. One, the Amargosa, comes in at the north end, where it forms a wash that gives out volumes of sulphuretted hydrogen which poisons the air for miles around. The other is Furnace Creek, whose waters are drinkable though hot. Everything considered, it is not exactly a cheerful place, is Death Valley.

Weather Bureau officials would tell you, should you ask them, that when there is ninety per cent of humidity in the air the weather is insufferably oppressive;[175] that air with seventy per cent of humidity is about right; that sixty or fifty per cent, as when a room is overheated by a stove or furnace, will produce headaches; while, should the percentage be reduced to thirty, or even forty, the air would become positively dangerous to health. Imagine, then, what existence must be like in Death Valley in midsummer, when the air, raised to furnace heat by its passage over the deserts, is kiln-dried in the pit below sea-level until its percentage of moisture is less than one half of one per cent! Effects of this ultrararefied air are observed on every hand. Men employed in ditch digging on the borax company’s ranch were compelled to sleep in the running water with their heads on stones to keep their faces above the surface—and this was not in the hottest weather, either. Furniture built elsewhere is quickly and utterly ruined. Tables warp into fantastic shapes. Chairs split and fall apart. Water barrels incautiously left empty lose their hoops in an hour. Eggs are boiled hard in the sand. A handkerchief taken from the tub and held up in the sun will dry more quickly than it would before a red-hot stove. One end of a blanket that is being washed will dry while the other is still in the tub. Meat killed at night and cooked at six in the morning is spoiled by nine. A man cannot go without water for an hour without becoming insane. A thermometer, hung in the coolest place available, for forty-eight hours never dropped below 104, repeatedly registered 130, and occasionally climbed to 137. A borax driver died, canteen in hand,[176] atop his wagon. “He was that parched that his head cracked open over the top,” said a man who saw the body.

But in October, strange as it may seem, Death Valley becomes a dreamy, balmy, dolce far niente land, the home of the Indian summer. Later in the season snow falls in the mountains to the west to a depth of three feet or more. At the Teels Marsh borax works the thermometer has registered 120 in the shade of the house in August and yet before the winter was over the mercury froze and the temperature dropped to 50 below zero! There is no place on earth, so far as I am aware, where so wide a variation has been recorded. Though it rarely if ever rains in the valley, cloudbursts frequently occur amid the adjacent mountain tops—usually in the hottest weather and when least expected—and in the face of the roaring floods which follow the people in the valley fly to the foot-hills for their lives. More appalling than the floods, however, are the sand-storms which are a recognised feature of life (existence would be a better term) in Death Valley. A sand-storm sweeping down that vale of desolation is a never-to-be-forgotten sight. The wind shrieks by with the speed of an express train. A dense brown fog completely blots the landscape out. Sand augers rise like slender stems joining sand and sky, whirling madly hither and thither through the burning atmosphere like genii suddenly gone mad. The air is filled with flying pebbles, sand, and dust. It is like a Dakota blizzard with the grit of broken volcanic[177] rock in place of snow. These sand-storms commonly last for three days; then they end as suddenly as they began, leaving the desert swooning amid its shifting waves of heat. Mirages raise up spectral cities, groves, tree-bordered rivers, lush, green fields as though by the sweep of a magician’s wand. In the rarefied air the ruins of an adobe hut are magnified into a sky-scraper; arrow weeds become stately palms; a crow walking on the ground appears to be a man on horseback.

The borax deposits for which the valley is famous are exactly alike in their general appearance: a bowl-shaped depression hemmed in by barren hills and at the bottom of this bowl an expanse that looks like water or salt or dirty snow or chalk, according to the distance, but which is really the boracic efflorescence on the bed of a dried-up lake. Walking out upon the marsh, one finds it covered with a sandy-looking crust through which the feet generally break, clay or slime being found beneath. To reach the railway the borax has to be hauled half a hundred miles by wagon under a deadly sun. The wagons used are huge affairs with wheels seven feet in diameter and tires eight inches wide, each carrying ten tons. Two tremendous Percherons are harnessed to the pole and ahead of them, fastened by double-trees to a steel chain that stretches from the forward axle, are nine pairs of mules, the driver from his lofty seat controlling his twenty animals by means of a one-hundred-and-twenty-foot jerk line, a bucket of stones, and a complete assortment[178] of objurgations. The next time, therefore, that you chance to see a package of borax, stop and think what it has cost—insufferable heat, bitter cold, sand-storms, agonizing thirst, sunstroke—yes, sometimes even death.

From Santa Barbara, El Camino Real, ever glowing, ever luring, bids adios to the sea for a time and sweeps inland again through a land of oak groves and olive orchards and frequent outcroppings of rock, which, with the bleak purple mountains rising up behind it, bears so startling a resemblance to Andalusia that the homesick Spanish friars must have rubbed their eyes and wondered whether they were really in the New World after all. Our road, winding steadily upward under the shadow of giant oaks and sycamores, crossed the Santa Ynez Range by the Gaviota Pass (gaviota, I might note in passing, meaning sea-gull in the Spanish tongue), the car, its engines humming the monotone which is the motorist’s lullaby, taking the long, steep grades like a hunted cat on the top of a back-yard fence.

From the summit of the pass we dropped down the brush-clothed flanks of the mountains by a zigzag road into a secluded river valley whose peace and pastoral loveliness were as grateful, after the stirring grandeur of the Gaviota, as is the five-o’clock whistle to the workman after a busy day. By this same pass the trail of the padres ran when, a century ago, they walked between the missions, so that it was with peculiar[179] appropriateness that there rose before us, as we swung around a shoulder of the mountain, the Mission of Santa Ynez, its white colonnades gleaming like ivory in the morning sunlight, its pottery roof forming a splendid note of colour against the lush, green fields, its cross-surmounted campanile pointing heavenward, just as the fingers of its cassocked builders were wont to do. Thanks to the patience and perseverance of Padre Alejandro, the priest in charge, the famous mission, which was in a deplorable state of neglect when he came there a dozen years ago, has been reroofed and in a large measure restored, the south corridor, which runs the length of the convento’s front, where the brown-robed monks were wont to pace up and down in silent meditation, having been transformed into a sort of loggia, bright with sunshine and fragrant with flowers. It is a pleasing survival of the spirit of the old monastic days that no one, derelict, hobo, or tramp, who applies at the Mission Santa Ynez for food or shelter is ever turned away. I think the thing that brought home to me most vividly the hardships endured by the cowled and sandalled founders of these missions was a great umbrella of yellow silk, bordered with faded blue, which caught my attention in the sacristy.

“What was this umbrella used for, father?” I inquired.

“That, my son,” said Padre Alejandro, “was used by the padres to shield themselves from the sun on their journeys between the missions, for they were not[180] permitted to ride but were compelled by their vows to go always afoot. Though Father Serra was lame, and every step that he took caused him the extremest anguish, he not once but many times walked the six hundred miles which lay between San Diego and his northernmost mission at Sonoma.”

One would naturally suppose that the people of California would be inordinately proud of these crumbling missions which have played so great a part in the history of their State and would take steps to have them preserved as national monuments, just as the French Government preserves its historic châteaux. But, for some unexplainable reason, just the opposite is true, the priests in charge of several of the missions assuring me that they had the greatest difficulty in obtaining funds to effect even the most imperative repairs, depending very largely on the contributions of Eastern visitors. We Americans excuse ourselves for this unpardonable neglect by explaining that we are still a young people, which, of course, is true. It is equally true, however, that by the time we are old enough to appreciate their historic significance and value, there will be no missions left to preserve.

Should you who read this follow in our tire tracks, you should not fail to stop for luncheon at a hamlet, not far from Santa Ynez, called, from the olive orchards which surround it, Los Olivos. There is a little inn there kept by a Frenchman named Mattei—a Basque he is, if I remember rightly—who will serve you just such a meal as you can get at one of those wayside[181] fondas in the Pyrenees. The country adjacent to Los Olivos is noted for its fishing and shooting, so that instead of the roast-beef-mashed-potatoes-pie-and-coffee luncheon which the motorist learns to expect, we had set before us brook-trout fried in flour and bread-crumbs, ripe brown olives which had been soaked in garlic and oil, roast quail as plump as young chickens, an omelet à la Espagnole, and heaping bowls of wild strawberries, the whole washed down with a wine rarely seen in America—real white Chianti. It is the very unexpectedness of such meals which makes them stand out like white milestones along the gastronomical highway.

More Spanish in character and atmosphere even than Santa Barbara is Monterey, three hundred miles farther up this enchanted coast. Careless of the changes which are being wrought about it, it lazes on its sun-kissed hillside, its head shaded by groves of palm and live-oak, its feet laved by the tepid waters of the bay. The town is built on the slopes of a natural amphitheatre, looking down upon a U-shaped harbour containing the bluest water you ever saw. Rising steeply behind the town is the hill where the Spanish castillo used to stand, which is now surmounted by grim, black coast-defence guns and by the yellow barracks which house the garrison. At the foot of Presidio Hill is the sheltered cove where Vizcaino landed to take possession of this region in the name of his Most Catholic Majesty of Spain, and where, years later, Padre Serra also landed to take possession of it in the name of a far mightier King. Here, on clear[182] days, you can see on the harbour bottom the bleached and whitened bones of the frigate Natalia, on which Napoleon escaped from Elba. Down by the water-front, where the soiled and smelly fishing-boats with their queer lateen sails rub shoulders with the spotless, white-hulled yachts, the old custom-house stands in the shadow of a patriarchal cypress. It has looked on many strange and thrilling scenes, has this balconied building of whitewashed adobe; it has seen the high-prowed caravels swinging at anchor in this bay with the red-and-yellow flag of Spain drooping from their carven sterns; it has seen the swarthy Spanish governors reviewing their steel-capped and cuirassed soldiery in the sun-swept plaza; it has seen the fiestas and other merrymakings which marked the careless Mexican régime; and on that July day in 1846 it saw the marines in their leather chacoes and the blue-jackets in their jaunty hats land from the American frigates, saw them form in hollow square upon the plaza, saw their weapons held rigid in burnished lines of steel as a ball of bunting crept up the flagstaff, and heard the roar of cheers as it broke out into a flag of stripes and stars.

In historic interest and significance this little town of Monterey is to the West what Boston is to the East. Here was planned the conquest of California; here the first American flag was raised upon the shores of the Pacific; here was the first capital and here was held the first constitutional convention of California. Follow Alvardo Street up the hill, between[183] rows of adobe houses with pottery roofs and whitewashed walls set in gardens aglow with roses, fuchsias, and geraniums, to the group of historic buildings at the top. Here you will be shown the Larkin house, where dwelt the last American consul in California and in which were hatched the plots which led up to the American occupation; the picturesque home of the last Spanish governor of the Californias; Colton Hall, in which the first constitutional convention assembled on the day of California’s admission to the Union; the little one-roomed dwelling that Sherman and Halleck occupied when they were stationed here as young lieutenants and the other house where dwelt the beautiful señorita whom Sherman loved long years before he won imperishable fame beneath the eagles at Shiloh; and, by no means least in interest, the wretched dwelling where that immortal genius Robert Louis Stevenson lodged for a year or more, and the little restaurant where he took his meals, and the green pathways which he wandered.

In the edge of the town stands the church of San Carlos, one of the best preserved mission churches of California, whose sacristy contains the most precious religious relics in the State; for here the priest in charge will reverently show you Father Serra’s own chasuble, cope, and dalmatics and the altar service of beaten silver which was brought out for him from Spain. The padre-presidente preferred Carmel over the hill to all his other missions, however, and it was there, where the Carmel River ripples down between the[184] silent willows to its mother, the sea, that he came back to die. There, beneath the altar of the ancient mission, his ashes lie buried in the land which his labours transformed from a savage wilderness to a vineyard of the Lord.

From Monterey you may motor or drive or street-car or foot it to Del Monte, which is only a mile away. Whichever method you choose, I should take the longest way around if I were you, so as to approach the hotel through the glorious wild-wood by which it is enveloped. And after you have twisted and turned for a mile or more through a wilderness of bloom and foliage, like the children in the story-book in search of the enchanted castle, and after you have concluded that you have lost your way and are ready to abandon the quest, all unexpectedly you catch a glimpse of its red-roofed towers and spires and gables rising above the tree tops. Built in the Queen Anne style of thirty years ago, huge and rambling and not unpicturesque, surrounded by acres of lawn and the finest live-oaks I have ever seen, it bears a quite striking resemblance to the Gezireh Palace—now a hostelry for tourists—which the Khedive Ismail built on an island in the Nile. Del Monte suggests not one, but many places, however. Its lawns and live-oaks, the perfection of which is the result of more than a third of a century of care, in many respects recall the famous country-seats of England, though the vegetation, of course, is very different; the gardens, which offer a continual feast of colour, remind one of Cintra, outside of Lisbon, while the[185] cypress maze is a duplicate of that at Hampton Court. The artificial lake, surrounded by subtropical vegetation and approached by a palm-bordered esplanade, has about it a suggestion of a Damascus garden that I know, while from the golf-links—than which there are none better in the West—looking across the tree tops to where the white houses of Monterey overhang the bay, it is difficult to believe that you are not on the hill behind Mustapha Superieur, looking down upon the white buildings of Algiers. Although Del Monte is an enchanted garden at any time of the year, the “high season” is in July and August, when the golfing, polo-playing set flock down from Burlingame and San Mateo exactly as the corresponding section of society on the other side of the continent flocks to Newport and Bar Harbour. During these two months the polo field resounds to the thunder of galloping hoofs and the click of mallet and ball; the golf-links on the rolling downs above the sea are alive with players taking part in the great midsummer tournament which is the most important golfing fixture on the Pacific Coast; and in the evenings white-shouldered women and white-shirted men dip and whirl and glide to fervid music upon a glassy floor or stroll amid the gardens which the light of the summer moon and the fragrance of the flowers transform into a fairyland.

The logical way to follow El Camino Real is from south to north, as we did, for that was the way of the padres; so it was quite natural that our next stop after leaving Monterey and its Mission of Carmel should be[186] at the secluded and almost forgotten Mission of San Juan Bautista. San Juan Bautista—Saint John the Baptist—is just such a lazy, sleepy, pretty little hamlet as you can find at almost every turning of a Catalonian road. Along its lanes—they are too narrow and straggling to be dignified with the name of streets—stand quaint adobe houses smothered in jasmine and passion-vine, hedged in by fences of prickly pear, and shaded by cypress and untidy eucalyptus trees. Though the plaza up the hill, where the Spanish soldiery, and after them the Mexican, used to parade and where the fiestas used to be held, is weed-grown and lonely, it is not deserted, for the townsfolk still go flocking to mass in obedience to the summons of the mission bells, and, thanks to the renaissance of the rural districts caused by the ubiquitous motor-car, the dining-room of the hotel, once the barracks of the Mexican garrison, is nearly always filled with guests. Close by the hotel is the old adobe building which served as the headquarters of General Castro, the Mexican commander, and back of the town rises the hill known as the Hawk’s Nest, where Frémont and his handful of American frontiersmen fortified themselves and defied Castro and his soldiers to come and take them. San Juan Bautista is a place where I could have loitered for a week instead of a day, for who, with a spark of romance in his soul, could resist the appeal at the top of the hotel note-paper: “A relic of the distant past, when men played billiards on horseback and the trees bore human fruit”?

[187]

## VII
THE VALLEY OF HEART’S DELIGHT

[188]

“He touched my eyes with gladness, with balm of morning dews,
On the topmost rim He set me, ’mong the hills of Santa Cruz,
And I saw the sunlit ocean sweep, I saw the vale below—
The Vale of Santa Clara in a sea of blossomed snow.”

[189]

### VII
THE VALLEY OF HEART’S DELIGHT

I first heard about the place from the captain of a little coasting steamer in the Indian Ocean. It was moonlight, I remember, and we were leaning over the rail, watching the phosphorescent waves curl away from the vessel’s bow. We had both seen more than our shares of the world and we were exchanging opinions of what we had seen over the captain’s Trichinopoli cheroots. Perhaps it was the effect of the moonlight on the silent waters, but I am more inclined to think it was the brandy which his silent-footed Swahili steward had just served us, which caused him to grow confidential.

“A few more voyages and I’m going to quit the sea,” he remarked.

“Yes?” said I interrogatively. “And what will you do then? Get a berth as harbour master at Shanghai or port captain at Suez or somewhere?”

“No,” said he, “I’m going to build a house for myself and the missis in a valley that I know; a house painted white with green blinds and with a porch as broad as a ship’s deck, and I’m going to have a fruit orchard and a flower garden with red geraniums in it, and I’m going to raise chickens—white Wyandottes, I think, but I’m not quite certain.”

[190]

“Of all things!” I ejaculated. “My imagination isn’t elastic enough for me to picture an old sea-dog like you settled down in a white farmhouse raising fruit and chickens. Where is all this going to be?”

“In the Santa Clara,” said he.

“It sounds like the name of a Pullman car or a tune in the hymn-book,” said I.

“It’s neither,” said he; “it’s a valley in California.”

“Tell me about it,” I suggested.

“I can’t,” said he. “It’s too beautiful—in the spring the whole valley is a sea of blossoms, like cherry season in Japan; and beyond are green hillsides that might be those of Devonshire; and looming up back of the hills are great brown-and-purple mountains that look like those at the back of Cintra, in Portugal (that’s some place, too, believe me); and there is always the smell of flowers in the air, such as you get in Bulgaria in the attar-of-rose season; and I’ve never seen a sky as blue anywhere else except in the Ægean; and——”

“That’s enough,” I interrupted. “That’s where I’m going next. Any place that will make a hardened old sea captain become poetical must be worth seeing.”

Months later, in Algiers, I found myself sitting at a small iron table on a sun-bathed terrace overlooking the orange-and-olive-and-palm-fringed shores of the Mediterranean. There are only five views to equal it in all the world. As I sat gazing out across the waters toward France a fellow countryman strolled up[191] and dropped into the seat beside me. I knew that he was an American by the width of his hat brim and because he didn’t wait for an introduction.

“Fine morning,” I remarked pleasantly. “Wonderful view from this terrace, isn’t it? And the sunshine is very warm and cheering.”

“Pretty fair,” he assented gloomily; “pretty fair for this place. But in the part of the world I come from fine mornings and wonderful views and sunshine are so darned common that it never occurs to us to mention them.”

“Where is your home, may I ask?” I inquired, for want of anything better to say.

“In the Santa Clara Valley of California,” he answered proudly. “God’s favourite country, sir! He took more pains with it than any place he ever made, not even barring the original Eden. This is a very pleasing little view, I admit; a very pleasing one, but I wish I could take you up on the slopes of Mount Hamilton just before sunset and let you look across the valley to Los Gatos when the prune orchards are in blossom. As for the climate, why, say, my friend——”

“Yes, yes, I know,” I said soothingly, for when a man gets a lump in his throat while talking about his native land it’s time to change the topic of conversation. “I know; I’ve heard all about it before. Fact is, I’m on my way there now.”

“You are?” he exclaimed incredulously, and, leaning back in his chair, he clapped his hands until the Arab waiter came running. “Garsong,” said he,[192] “bring us a bottle of the best wine you’ve got.” When the amber fluid was level with the rims we touched our glasses:

“It’s poor stuff compared with the wine we make in California,” he said, “but it’ll do to drink a toast in.” He stood up, bareheaded and very straight, as British officers do when they drink to the king.

“Friend,” said he, and his voice was husky, “here’s to God’s favourite valley—here’s to the Santa Clara.”

If you go to the Santa Clara when I did, which was in March, when the unfortunates who live beyond the Sierra Nevada are still waking up to find ice in their water-pitchers, you will find that the people of the valley are celebrating the Feast of the Blossoms. It is a very beautiful festival, in which every man, woman, and child in this fifty-mile-long garden of fruit and flowers takes part, but you cannot appreciate its true significance until you have climbed to a point on the slopes of the mountains which form the garden wall, where the whole enchanting panorama lies before you. Did you ever see one hundred and twenty-five square miles of trees in snow-white blossom at one time? No, of course not, for nowhere else in all the world can such a sight be seen. I, who have listened to the voice of spring on five continents and in more than five-score countries, assure you that it is worth the seeing.

Personally, I shall always think of the Santa Clara as a sleeping maiden, fragrant with perfume and intoxicatingly beautiful, lying in a carven bed formed[193] by the mountains of Santa Cruz, curtained by fleecy clouds, her coverlet of eiderdown tinted with rose, quilted with green, edged with yellow; her pillow the sun-kissed waters of San Francisco Bay. When you come closer, however, you find that the coverlet which conceals her gracious form is in reality an expanse of fragrant blossoms; that the green tufts are the live-oaks which rise at intervals above the orchards of cherry, peach, and prune; and that the yellow edging is the California poppies which clothe the encircling hills.

Sentimentally and commercially it is fitting that the people of the Santa Clara Valley should celebrate the coming of the blossoms, for they are at once its chief beauty and its chief wealth. In a single season these white and fragrant blossoms have provided the breakfast tables of the world with one hundred and thirty million pounds of prunes, to say nothing of those luscious pears, peaches, cherries, and apricots which beckon temptingly from grocers’ windows and hotel buffets from Salt Lake City around to Shanghai. No other single fruit of any region, not even the fig of Smyrna, the date of Tunis, the olive of Spain, or the currant of Greece, is so widely distributed as the prune of the Santa Clara Valley. The people of the valley will assure you very earnestly that the reason their wives and daughters have such lovely complexions is because they make it a point to eat prunes every morning for breakfast. Whether due to the prunes or not, I can vouch for the complexions.

Barring the coast of Tripolitania, where it is[194] harvest time all the year round, but where the Arabs are offering no inducements to settlers, and the Imperial Valley, whose summer heat makes it undesirable as a place of permanent residence, the Santa Clara Valley has more crops, through more months of the year, than any place I know. Ceres makes her annual appearance in February with artichokes—the ones that are priced at a dollar a portion on the menus of New York’s fashionable hotels; in March the people of the valley are having spring peas with their lamb chops; April brings strawberries, although, as a matter of fact, they are to be had almost every month of the year; in May the cherry pickers are at work; the local churches hold peaches-and-cream sociables in June; by the ides of July the valley roads are alive with teams hauling cases of pears, plums, and apricots to the railway stations; August, being the month of prunes, is marked with red on the Santa Clara calendars; September finds the presses working overtime turning grapes into wine, and the prohibitionists likewise working overtime trying to turn “wet” communities into “dry” ones; in October the men are at work in the orchards picking apples and the women are at work in the kitchens baking apple pies; the huge English walnuts which wind up dinners half the world around are harvested in November; while in December and January the prodigal goddess interrupts her bounty just long enough to let the fortunate worshippers at her shrine observe the midwinter holidays. After such a recital it is almost needless to add that the valley[195] boasts both the largest fruit-drying houses and the largest fruit canneries in the world, for in the Santa Clara they dry what they can and can what they can’t.

The chef-lieu of the valley is San José. It may interest Easterners to know that Don Caspar de Portola and his men, marching up from the south in their search for the lost Bay of Monterey, had looked down from the valley’s mountain rim upon the spot where the city now stands four years before the Boston Tea Party; while that indomitable Franciscan, Father Junipero Serra, had established the great Mission San José, and was hard at work Christianising and teaching the Indians of this region before the ink was fairly dry on the Declaration of Independence and while the three thousand miles of country which lies between the valley of the Santa Clara and the valley of the Connecticut was still an unexplored wilderness. The last time that the gentlemen with the census books knocked at San José’s front doors they reported that the city had forty thousand people, and it keeps agrowing and agrowing. It has about four times as many stores as any place of its size that I can recall, but that is because the local merchants depend on the trade of the rural rather than the urban population, for the hardy frontiersmen who rough it in this portion of the West run in to do their shopping by automobile or trolley-car or else give their orders over the telephone. There are two things about the city which I shall remember. One is the street-cars, which have open decks forward and aft, with seats running along them lengthwise,[196] on which the passengers sit with their feet hanging over the side, as though on an Irish jaunting-car. In pleasant weather the display of ankles on the street-car makes them look, from the sidewalks, like moving hosiery advertisements. The other municipal feature which riveted my attention was a sort of attenuated Eiffel Tower, sliced off about half-way up, which straddles the two main streets of the city at their intersection, and from the top of which a powerful search-light signals to the traveller on the valley highroads, to the shepherd on the mountains, to the fisherman on San Francisco Bay: “Here is San José.”

If there is anywhere a royal road to learning, it is the fifty-mile-long one which meanders up the Santa Clara Valley, for there are more schoolhouses scattered along it than there are milestones, and they’re not the little red schoolhouses of which our grandfathers brag, either. Every time our motor-car swung around the corner of a prune orchard we were pretty certain to find a schoolhouse of concrete, usually in the overworked mission style of architecture, with roses and honeysuckle and wistaria clambering over the door. The youngster who wants to travel the royal road to knowledge can commence his journey in one of the concrete schoolhouses at Gilroy, which is at the southern portal of the valley; the second stage will take him up to the great high school at San José, which is so extensive and handsome and completely equipped that it would make certain famous Eastern colleges feel shamefaced and embarrassed; the final[197] stage along this intellectual highway is only eighteen miles in length and ends at Palo Alto, amid whose live-oaks rise the yellow towers and red-tiled roofs of that great university which Leland Stanford, statesman and railway builder, founded in memory of the son he lost, and which he endowed with the whole of his enormous fortune. He gave the eight thousand acres of his famous stock-farm for the purpose, and to-day white-gowned “co-eds” wander, book in hand, where the paddocks once stood, and spike-shod sprinters dash down the track, where the great mare Sunol used to put close on half a mile a minute behind her spinning sulky wheels. It is one of the great universities of the world, is Leland Stanford, Jr., and, with its cloistered quadrangles, its wonderful mosaic façades, and its semitropical surroundings, certainly one of the most beautiful. It stands, fittingly enough, at the valley’s northern gateway and at the end, both literally and metaphorically, of the royal road to learning; so that the valley-bred youth who passes through its doors with his sheepskin in his pocket finds himself on the threshold of that great outside world for which, without leaving his native valley, he has been admirably prepared.

Speaking of roads, they have built one running the length of the State and, therefore, of the Santa Clara Valley, which would cause Mr. John MacAdam, were he still in the land of the living, to lift his hat in admiration. It is really a restoration of El Camino Real, that historic highway which the Spanish conquistadores[198] built, close on a century and a half ago, for the purpose of linking up the one-and-twenty missions which the indefatigable Padre Serra flung the length of California as outposts of the church, and which did more to open up the Pacific Coast to civilisation and colonisation and commerce than any undertaking save the construction of the Southern Pacific. Were this highway in the East I am perfectly sure that they would cheapen it by calling it the Shore Road or the State Pike, but it speaks well for California’s appreciation of the picturesque and the appropriate that she has decided to cling to the historic name of El Camino Real—the Royal Road—the King’s Highway.

Although the Santa Clara Valley, properly speaking, ends at Palo Alto, the ultrafashionable colonies of Burlingame, San Mateo, and Hillsboro may, for the purposes of this chapter, at least, be considered as within its compass. These are to the Pacific Coast what Lenox and Tuxedo are to the Eastern world of fashion: places where the rich dwell in great country houses set far back in splendid parks, with none but their fellow millionaires for neighbours and with every convenience for sport close at hand. Full of colour and animation are the scenes at their ivy-covered stations when the afternoon trains from San Francisco pull in; for here, at least, the motor-car has not ousted the horse from his old-time popularity, and the gravelled driveways are alive with tandem carts and runabouts and spider phaetons, with smart grooms in whipcord liveries and leather gaiters standing rigidly at the heads[199] of the horses. Probably the finest examples of architecture in California are to be seen in the neighbourhood of Burlingame and San Mateo, the only other communities which can rival them in this respect being Montecito, near Santa Barbara, Oak Knoll, outside of Pasadena, and Hollywood, a suburb of Los Angeles.

The East and, for that matter, all of the rest of America owe California a debt of gratitude for her development of a native domestic architecture. The first true homes for folk of real culture but moderate incomes were produced on the Pacific Coast. In the type of house that abounds to-day in California comfort, tradition, and art have been skilfully and interestingly combined. Based on the old missions, which in their turn drew inspiration from the ideals of the Spaniard and the Moor, modern Californian architecture has nevertheless made servants, not masters, of those traditions. Though drawing from the romantic background of the conquistadores and the padres the sturdy spirit, the simple lines, and the practical details of the old frontier buildings, the main virtue of these Californian homes is that they possess a definite relation to the soil and climate and the habits of the people. But, though back of each design lurks the motive of the Spanish missions, there is no monotony, no sameness; but, on the contrary, a remarkable variety of design. Each possesses the characteristic features of the Californian home: the low, wide-spreading roof lines, the solid walls, generally of concrete or plaster, the frank use of structural beams, the luxurious spaces of veranda[200] and balcony, the tiled terraces and pottery roofs, the cool, inviting patios, and the quiet loveliness of the interiors. It is true, of course, that many house-builders have been unable to resist the temptation of Colonial, Norman, Dutch, and Tudor, but, as their culture increases, Californians are fast realising that an architecture designed for inhospitable climates is utterly incongruous in California’s semitropical surroundings.

It rained one of the days that I spent in San José, and my genial host was so apologetic about it that I actually felt sorry for him. Though rain is seldom unwelcome in a horticultural country, the residents don’t like to have it come down in bucketfuls when visitors whom they are anxious to impress with the perfection of their climate are around. They are as proud of their climate in the Santa Clara Valley as a boy is of “his first long pants,” and to back up their boasts the residents carry in their pockets the blue slips of the Government Weather Bureau’s monthly reports to show the stranger. I’m not fond of figures, unless they happen to be on cheques drawn in my favour, but I was impressed by the fact, nevertheless, that in 1913 the valley had only fifty-eight cloudy days, sixty-four which were overcast, and two hundred and thirty-four in which there was not a cloud to dim the turquoise of the sky. Carrying my investigations a little further, I found that during the greater part of February, which is the coldest month of the year, the mercury remained above 55, only four times dropping[201] as low as 33, while there were only four days in August when the thermometer needle crept up to 79, and once in the same month it fell as low as 42, thus giving a solar-plexus blow to the idea stubbornly held by most Easterners that in summer California is an anteroom to Hades.

To this unvarying geniality of the climate and to the careless, happy-go-lucky, pleasure-loving strain handed down from the Spanish and Argonaut pioneers are due the invincible gaiety and the passionate love for the out-of-doors which are among the most likeable characteristics of the Californians. One of the first things that strikes an Eastern visitor is the fact that the Californians can always find time for amusement, and they enter into those amusements with the enthusiasm and the whole-souled gaiety of children. On the Pacific Coast recreation is considered quite as important as business—and business does not suffer, either. There is about these Californian merrymakings an abandon, a joyousness, a childlike freedom from restraint which is in striking contrast to the restrained, self-conscious pleasures of the older, colder East. To the colourful fiestas of the Spanish and Mexican eras may be traced the out-of-door festivities which play so large a part in the life of the people on the Pacific Coast, such as the midwinter Tournament of Roses at Pasadena, the Portola Festival with which the San Franciscans celebrate the discovery of San Francisco Bay, the Feast of the Blossoms held each spring in the Santa Clara Valley, the Battle of Flowers which,[202] until very recently, was a feature of life at Santa Barbara, but which, for some unexplainable reason, has been abandoned, the Rose Festival at Portland, the Potlatch at Seattle. Under much the same category are the classic plays given in the wonderful Greek Theatre at the University of California, the sylvan masks produced by the colony of authors and artists at Carmel-by-the-Sea, and the Bohemian Club’s celebrated Grove Play.

No account of Californian festivals is in any way complete without at least a brief description of the last named, which is characterised by a beauty of production and a dignity of treatment that make it in many respects an American Bayreuth. For forty years the Bohemian Club of San Francisco has gone into the California redwoods each summer for a fortnight’s outing. This famous club, founded in 1872 by a coterie of actors, newspaper men, and artists, now has a membership of upward of thirteen hundred, representing all that is best in the art, music, literature, drama, and science of the West. No one may become a member who has not achieved a distinction of sorts in one of these fields, the anticommercial spirit which animates the club being aptly expressed by the quotation at the top of its note-paper: “Weaving spiders come not here.” The Bohemian Grove, which consists of about three hundred acres of forest and contains some of the finest redwood giants in California, stands on the banks of the Russian River, ninety miles to the north of San Francisco. The stately redwoods stand[203] in a gentle ravine whose floor and slopes in the rainless midsummer are bright with the canvas of the club encampment, which resembles a sort of sylvan Durbar; for the camps, many of which are elaborately arranged and furnished, are made of canvas in the gayest colours—scarlet and white, green and white, blue and yellow—with flags and banners and gorgeous Oriental lanterns everywhere. Here, during the first two weeks in every August, congregate close on a thousand men who have done things—authors of “best sellers,” builders of bridges and dams and lighthouses and aqueducts, painters whose pictures hang on the line at the Paris Salon or on the walls of the Luxembourg, composers of famous operas, writers of plays which have made a hit on Broadway, presidents of transcontinental railway systems, celebrated singers, men who have penetrated to the remotest corners of the earth—wearing the dress of the woods, calling each other “Bill” or “Jim” or “Harry” as the case may be, and becoming, for the time being, boys once more. A steep side of the ravine forms the “back-drop” of the forest stage, the spectators—no woman has ever taken part in the play or witnessed an original performance—sitting on redwood logs under the stars. The Grove Play is an evolution from a simpler programme, which was originally known as “High Jinks.” It is now a serious composition, with music, largely symbolical in character, created entirely by members of the club, in which many artists of international fame have taken part, always in the amateur spirit.

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But to return to our Valley of the Santa Clara. In the Panhandle of Texas a ranch usually means anywhere from five thousand acres upward of uncultivated land; in the Santa Clara a ranch means anywhere from five acres upward of the most highly cultivated soil in the world. East of the Sierra Nevada, where scientific fertilisation and intensive cultivation are still wearing short dresses, five acres are scarcely worth considering, but five acres in California, properly planted and cared for, ofttimes supports a family in something akin to luxury. I had pointed out to me in the Santa Clara Valley at least a score of small holdings which yield their owners annually in the neighbourhood of five hundred dollars an acre. All of these hardy pioneers have telephones and electric lights and electric power for pumping and daily newspaper and mail deliveries. When they have any business in town, instead of going down to the corral and roping a bronco, they either stroll through the orchard and hail an electric car or they crank up the family automobile.

While I was in the Santa Clara Valley I asked a number of those questions to which every prospective home seeker wants to know the answers. I found that improved land, planted to prune, apricot, or peach trees old enough to bear, can be had all the way from four hundred to seven hundred dollars an acre, according to its location. At a conservative estimate this land, so I was told by a banker whose business it is to lend money on it (and you can trust a banker for never being oversanguine), can be depended upon to yield[205] an income of from one hundred to three hundred dollars an acre, it being by no means an unusual thing for a well-managed ranch to pay for itself in two or three years. I found that a ten-acre orchard—which is quite large enough for one man to handle—could be had for five thousand dollars, the purchaser paying, say, two thousand dollars down and carrying the balance on a mortgage at seven per cent, which is the legal rate of interest in California. The local building and loan associations would lend him two thousand dollars to build with, which he could repay, at the rate of twenty-four dollars a month, in ten years. Two thousand dollars, I might add, will build an extremely attractive and comfortable six-room bungalow, for the two chief sources of expense to the Eastern home builder—cellars and furnaces—are not necessary in California. Such a place, provided its owner has horse sense, is not afraid of work, and knows good advice when he hears it, should yield from fifteen hundred to two thousand dollars a year, in addition to which the whole family can find ready employment, at excellent wages, in the orchards or packing-houses during the fruit season. For this work a man receives from two dollars to two dollars and a half a day and can count on fairly steady employment through at least eight months of the year, while many women and girls, whose deft fingers make them particularly valuable in the work of wrapping and packing the finer grades of fruit, can earn as high as twenty dollars a week during the busy season. This work, I might add,[206] attracts an altogether exceptional class of people, for university and high-school students and the wives and daughters of small ranchers eagerly avail themselves of this opportunity to add to their incomes, the fruit orchards, during the picking season, looking less like a hive of workers than like a gigantic picnic among the shaded orchard rows, in which the whole countryside is taking part.

The air in the Santa Clara Valley is said to be the clearest in the world, though they tell you exactly the same thing at Colorado Springs, and in the Grand Cañon of Arizona, and at Las Vegas, N. Mex. The Santa Clara air is clear enough, however, for all practical purposes. In fact, its extraordinary clarity sometimes lends itself to extraordinary uses. I have a friend whose residence is set on a hillside high on the valley’s eastern rim. One day, idly scanning the distant landscape through his field-glasses, he noted that the field hands employed on the ranch of a neighbour on the opposite hillside, twenty odd miles away, knowing that they could not be observed by their employer, were loafing in the shade instead of working. My friend called up his neighbour by telephone and told him that his men were soldiering, whereupon that gentleman rode up the hillside and gave his astonished employees such a tongue-lashing that when the six-o’clock whistle blew that night they had blisters on their hands.

Lack of labour is one of the most serious problems with which the fruit-growers of California have had to[207] contend, though it is believed that this will be remedied, in some measure at least, by the flood of European immigration which will pour through the Panama Canal. Twenty years ago the labour problem was solved by the Chinaman, who was the most industrious and dependable labourer California has ever had, but with the agitation which resulted in closing our doors to the Celestial most of the Chinese in California entered domestic service and now command such high wages—fifty dollars a month is the average wage of a Chinese house boy or cook—that only the well-to-do can afford to employ them. Time and again I have heard clear-headed Californians of all classes assert that the admission, under certain restrictions, of a hundred thousand selected Chinese would prove an unqualified blessing for California. The relentless war waged by California—or, rather, by the labour element of California—against the admission of Chinese immigrants was based on the difference in the standard of living. The yellow man could live in something very akin to luxury on about a tenth of the ration required for a white man’s support. In other words, the Chinaman could outstarve the white man; therefore the Chinaman must go. And there has never been any one to take his place.

Outside of the Pacific Coast the impression seems to prevail that the Chinaman’s place has been taken by the Japanese. This is not so. To begin with, Japanese labour is not cheap labour. The Japanese do not work for less pay than white men, unless it be temporarily,[208] so as to obtain the white man’s job. Japanese house cleaners and gardeners demand and receive a minimum wage of thirty-five cents an hour, and in California, where most people of modest means are compelled to do their own housework because of the scarcity of and exorbitant wages demanded by domestic servants, housewives are thankful to get Japanese by the day at any price. Their standard of living is as high as that of other nationalities; much higher, in fact, than that of peoples from southern Europe. There is no pauperism among them and astonishingly little crime. They dress well, eat well, spend money lavishly for entertainment. But the Jap, unlike the Chinaman, “talks back.” He is not in the least impressed by the American’s claim of racial superiority. In fact, he considers himself very much better than the white man and, if the opportunity presents itself, does not hesitate to say so. He is patronising instead of patronised. He has proved that he is the white man’s equal in every line of industry and in some his superior. Three times in succession a Japanese grower has virtually cornered the potato crop of the Pacific Coast. The Japanese has driven the Greek and the Portuguese out of the fishing industry, in which they believed that they were impregnably intrenched. As a result of these things he steps off the sidewalk for no one. He knows that back of him stands a great empire, with a powerful fleet and one of the most efficient armies in existence, and he takes no pains to disguise this knowledge in his relations with the white man.

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To tell the truth, the prohibition of land ownership, the segregation of school children are but pretexts put forward by a jealous and resentful white population to teach the yellow man his place. The assertion that Japanese ownership of land is a menace to white domination is the veriest nonsense, and every Californian knows it. There are ninety-nine million acres in California and of this area the Japanese own or lease barely thirty thousand acres, or twelve hundredths of one per cent. The fifty-eight thousand Japanese in California form but two and one half per cent of the total population. These figures, which are authoritative, are not very menacing, are they? The bulk of the Japanese reside in Los Angeles County and in the delta of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers, where they work gigantic potato fields and truck-gardens and asparagus beds. Now, Los Angeles, mind you, has never demanded Japanese exclusion. Protests poured into Sacramento from the white settlers of the delta country against the passage of the anti-alien land laws. Why, then, you ask, does the entire Pacific Coast, including British Columbia, exhibit such intense dislike for the Jap? Because, as I have said, he has shown that he can beat the white man at his own game; because he is not in the least meek and humble as befits an alien and “inferior” race; because he believes in his heart that in an armed conflict Nippon could whip the United States as thoroughly as she whipped China and Russia; because, as a result of this belief, he perpetually swaggers about with his[210] hat cocked on one side and a chip perched invitingly on his shoulder; because, in short, his very manner is a constant irritation to the Californians. And until the status of the Japanese upon the Pacific Coast is definitely and finally established by international treaty this irritation may be expected to continue and to increase.

I wonder if sometimes, at that sunset hour when the lengthening shadows of the hills fall athwart the blossoming orchards, there do not wander through the Santa Clara those whom the eyes of mortals cannot see—Portola, swart of face under his steel cap, come back to feast his eyes once more, from the top of yonder hill, on that fertile valley which he was the first white man to see; Father Serra, mild-mannered and gentle-voiced, trudging the dusty highroad in his sandals and woollen robe, pausing to kneel in prayer as the bells boom out the Angelus from that mission which he founded; Captain Jedediah Smith, the first of the pathfinders, a strange and romantic figure in his garb of fringed buckskin, leaning on his long rifle as he looks down on the homesteads of the thousands who followed by the trail he blazed across the ranges; Stanford, who linked the oceans with twin lines of steel, pacing the campus of that great seat of learning which he conceived and built—guardian spirits, all, of that valley for which they did so much and which they loved so well.

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## VIII
THE MODERN ARGONAUTS

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“For once you’ve panned the speckled sand and seen the bonny dust,
Its peerless brightness blinds you like a spell;
It’s little else you care about; you go because you must,
And you feel that you could follow it to hell.
You’d follow it in hunger, and you’d follow it in cold;
You’d follow it in solitude and pain;
And when you’re stiff and battened down let some one whisper ‘Gold,’
You’re lief to rise and follow it again.”

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### VIII
THE MODERN ARGONAUTS

I once knew an Englishman and his wife who were possessed with a mania for things Egyptian. Some people were unkind enough to say that they were “dotty” on the subject, but that was an exaggeration. They knew all there was to know about Egyptian customs from the days of Amenhotep to those of Abbas Hilmi; they had delved in the sand-smothered ruins across the river from Luxor; they could converse as fluently in the degraded patois of the native coffee-houses as in the classic Arabic spoken at the University of El Azhar. Their chief regret in life was that they had not been born Egyptians. Their names were—but never mind; it is enough to say that they had coronets on their visiting cards and owned more fertile acres in Devonshire than an absentee landlord has any right to possess. Whenever they came to Cairo, which they did regularly at the beginning of the cold weather, they could never be induced to take the comfortable motor-bus which the management of Shepheard’s Hotel thoughtfully provides for its guests—at ten piastres the trip. Instead, they would wire ahead to have a couple of camels meet them at the station, and, perched atop of these ungainly and uncomfortable[214] beasts, would amble down the Sharia Kamel, which is the Fifth Avenue of Cairo, and dismount with great pomp and ceremony in front of their hotel to the delectation of the tourists assembled upon its terrace. I once asked them why they chose this outlandish mode of conveyance when there were a score or so of perfectly good taxicabs whose vociferously importunate drivers were only awaiting a signal to push down their little red flags and set their taximeters whirring.

“Well, it’s this way,” was the answer. “We’re jolly fond of everything Egyptian, y’ know. Sort of steeped ourselves, as you might say, in the country’s history and politics and customs and language and all that sort of thing. This city is so romantic and picturesque that a motor-car seems to be inappropriate and unfitting—like wearing a top hat in the country, y’ know. So we always have the camels meet us—yes. All bally nonsense, I suppose, but it sort of keeps us in the spirit of the place—makes us feel as though we were living in the good old days before the tourist Johnnies came and spoiled it all. Same idea that Vanderbilt has in driving his coach from London down to Brighton. You can make the trip by train in half the time and for half the money and much more comfortably, but you lose the spirit of the old coaching days—the atmosphere, as the painter fellows call it. Rum sort of an idea to use camels instead of taxis, perhaps, but we like it and that’s the chief thing after all, isn’t it? What?”

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That was precisely the frame of mind which caused us to disregard the one hundred and twenty-five miles of oiled highway which reaches, like a strip of hotel linoleum, from San Francisco to the Californian capital, and load ourselves, together with our six-cylindered Pegasus, aboard the stern-wheel river boat which leaves the Pacific Street wharf for Sacramento at half past eight on every week-day morning. That section of our Mexico-to-Alaska journey which lay immediately before us, you must understand, led through a region which is indelibly associated with “the days of old, the days of gold, the days of ’Forty-Nine,” and to storm through it in a prosaic, panting motor-car seemed to us as incompatible with the spirit of romance which enshrouds it as it would to race through the canals of Venice in a gasoline launch. Feeling as we did about it, the consistent thing, I suppose, would have been to have hired a creaking prairie-schooner and plodded overland to the mines in true emigrant fashion, but as the few prairie-schooners still extant in California have fallen into the hands of the moving-picture concerns, who work them overtime, we compromised by journeying up to the gold country by river boat, just as the Argonauts who came round the Horn to San Francisco were wont to do.

Whoever was responsible for dubbing the Sacramento River trip “the Netherlands Route” could have had but a bowing acquaintance with Holland. I don’t like to shatter illusions, but, to be quite truthful, the banks of the Sacramento are as unlike the Low Countries[216] 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”?[217] 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[218] 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[219] 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[220] 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,[221] 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[222] 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[223] 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[224] 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[225] 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[226] 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[227] 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[228] 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[229] 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[230] 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[231] 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[232] 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.

LAKE TAHOE FROM THE SLOPES OF THE HIGH SIERRAS.

Because we wished to follow the route which the overland emigrants had taken in their epoch-making march, we did not go to Tahoe through Placerville, which is connected with Tallac, at the southern end of the lake, by one of the finest motor highways in California, but chose the more direct and equally good road which climbs over the Sierras by way of Colfax, Dutch Flat, and Emigrant Gap. Upward and upward wound our road, like a spiral stairway to the skies. One of the most characteristic features of this Sierra region is that the traveller can see at a glance the lay of the whole land. Nowhere else, so far as I am aware, not from the Saint Bernard, or Ararat, or even from Darjeeling, can one command such comprehensive views as are to be had from the rocky promontory known as Cape Horn, or from Summit, which, as its name implies,[233] 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[234] 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[235] 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[236] 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.

[237]

## IX
THE INLAND EMPIRE

[238]

“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.”

[239]

### 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[240] “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[241] 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,[242] 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.[243] 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[244] 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[245] 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[246] 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[247] 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?”[248] 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[249] 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[250] 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[251] 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.

THE YOSEMITE—AND A LADY WHO DIDN’T KNOW FEAR.

“She balanced herself on one foot on the ledge’s very brink and extended the other, like a première danseuse, over three fifths of a mile of emptiness.”

It was quite by chance that I stumbled upon these copper-coloured stragglers from another era. While riding one afternoon along the foot of the sheer precipice which hems the valley in, my eye was caught by three strange objects standing in a row. They resembled—as much as they resembled anything—West African voodoo priests in the thatched garments which[252] 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.

[253]

“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.

In midwinter, when the Yosemite is deep in snow, skis and sledges provide the only means of giving the baby an airing.

“What’s his name?” I inquired. The mother giggled proudly: “He name Woodrow Wilson.”

YOSEMITE YOUNGSTERS, WHITE AND RED.

Of the Yosemite, Herr Karl Baedeker, to whose red guide-books every travelling American clings as tenaciously as to his letter of credit, and whose opinions he accepts as unreservedly as a Mohammedan accepts the Koran, has said: “No single valley in Switzerland combines in so limited a space such a wonderful variety of grand and romantic scenery.” Aside from its unique scenic beauties, the chief attraction of the Yosemite, to my way of thinking, is the altogether unusual variety of recreation which it affords. Excursions afoot, ahorseback, or acarriage to a dozen points of charm in the valley and its environs; trail rides along the dizzy paths which the government has built to skirt the cañon’s rim; fishing in the icy mountain streams, in whose shaded pools half a dozen varieties of trout—Steelheads, Speckled, Brook, Rainbow, Dolly Varden, and others—await the fly; al fresco luncheons in the leafy recesses of the Happy Isles, with the pine-carpeted earth for a seat, a moss-covered boulder for a table, and the mingled murmur of waterfalls and wind-stirred tree tops for music; it is days spent in such fashion which makes of a visit to the Yosemite an unforgettable memory.

A half-day’s journey south by stage from the Yosemite[254] 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[255] 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[256] 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[257] 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[258] 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[259] 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[260] 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[261] a wagon and had it hauled over hundreds of thousands of acres which he has since reclaimed. He was an ingenious fellow.

A “gusher” near Bakersfield spouting two and a half million gallons of oil a day.

The Kern River oil fields, near Bakersfield, Cal.

THE GREATEST OIL FIELDS IN THE WORLD.

You will need to journey far to find a region more desolate and forbidding than that lying between Bakersfield and the summit of the Tehachapi. Never shall I forget the deadly monotony of that long, straight road along which we pushed in the teeth of a buffeting wind, with its whistling telegraph-poles, its creaking iron windmills at regular intervals, and its barbed-wire fences all converging to a vanishing-point which looked to be perhaps five miles ahead but at which we never seemed to arrive. There are no trees to obstruct the view of the barren hills which rim the distance, and for many miles there is not enough cover to hide a grasshopper, for the soil is poisoned by alkalis and the poor, thin grass dies of a broken heart. But as the car panted its tortuous way from the floor of the valley up the face of the mountain wall which hems it in, the scenery became more varied and interesting. Great patches of the mountainside were clothed with masses of lupin of the coldest, brightest blue you ever saw. Once we ran through a forest of tree yuccas whose spiked, fantastic branches looked as though they were laden with hedgehogs. Sometimes the road would dip quite suddenly into a charming little hollow in the hills, shaded by venerable live-oaks and with a purling brook running through it, only to emerge again and zigzag along the face of the mountain, clinging to the bare rock as a fly clings to the ceiling. Several times we[262] 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.

“We ran through a forest of tree-yuccas whose spiked, fantastic branches looked as though they were laden with hedgehogs.”

“Our progress was frequently delayed by woolly waves which at times engulfed the car.”

OVER THE TEHACHAPIS.

The change in scenery as we emerged from the mouth of the pass at Saugus was almost startling in its suddenness. Gone were the dreary, wind-swept plains; gone was the endless vista of telegraph-poles; gone the dun and desolate hills. We found ourselves, instead, at the entrance to a valley which might well have been the place of exile of Persephone. Symmetrical squares of bay-green oranges, of soft gray olives and of yellowing vines turned its slopes into chessboards of striking verdure. Rows of tall, straight eucalyptus trees made of the highway a tunnel of blue-green foliage. The mountains, from foot to summit, were clothed with lupins of a blue that dulled the blue of heaven. The oleanders and magnolias and[263] 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[264] 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[265] 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[266] 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[267] 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[268] 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,[269] 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[270] 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.

[271]

## X
“WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON”

[272]

“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.”

[273]

### 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.[274] “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.

THE OVERLAND MAIL.

“With a rattle of wheels and a clickety-clack of hoofs the coach bore down upon us.”

“That was perfectly wonderful,” said the Lady, with a little gasp of satisfaction. “That was quite[275] 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[276] 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[277] 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[278] 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[279] 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[280] 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[281] 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.[282] 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[283] 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[284] 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.

Crater Lake: “It looks like a gigantic wash-tub filled with blueing.”

A flock of young pelicans on the shores of Lower Klamath Lake.

IN THE OREGON HINTERLAND.

The late E. H. Harriman, knowing the continent and having the continent to choose from, built a shooting lodge on the shores of Upper Klamath Lake, to which he was wont to retreat, after the periodical[285] 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[286] 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[287] were following plodded mile-long wagon-trains, the heads of women and children at every rent and loophole of the canvas tops, the men, rifle on shoulder, marching in the dust on either hand. Few, indeed, of these pioneers were rich in anything save children, affluent except in expectations; yet weather, roads, fare, mishaps—nothing daunted them, for they were “going West.”

Roughly speaking, it is a hundred miles from Shaniko to The Dalles, over a road most of which is back-breakingly rough and all of which is so intolerably dusty that we felt as though we were covered with sandpaper instead of skin. But the scenery of the last half dozen miles caused us to forgive, if not to forget, the discomforts and the monotony of those preceding, for in them we dropped down through the wild and winding gorge which the Deschutes follows on its way to join hands with its big sister, the Columbia. The nearer we drew to the mighty river the higher our expectations grew, and every time we topped a rise or swung around a granite shoulder we searched for it eagerly, just as our migrating predecessors must have done. But, owing to the high, sheer cliffs that wall it in, we caught no glimpse of it whatever until, our road emerging from the cañon’s mouth upon the precipice’s brink, we suddenly found ourselves looking down upon it as it lay below us in all its shimmering and sinuous beauty, its silvery length winding away, away, away: eastward to its birthplace in the country of the Kootenai: westward to Astoria and its mother,[288] the sea. Far below us, so far below that it looked like the little wooden villages you see in the windows of toy stores, the white houses of The Dalles were clustered upon the river’s banks.

The highroad, which had been palpably ailing for some time, took a sudden turn for the worse a few miles south of The Dalles, so that, when it found the great, peaceful, silent-flowing Columbia athwart its path, the temptation became too great to resist and it ended its misery in the river, leaving us, its faithful friends, who had borne it company all the way from Mexico, disconsolate upon the bank. Thus it befell that we were compelled to put the car and ourselves aboard a boat and trust to steam, instead of gasoline, to bear us over the ensuing section of our journey. It was a humiliating thing for motorists to have to do, of course—but what would you? There were no more roads. We were in the deplorable position of the man who told his wife that he came home because all the other places were closed. And think how keenly the veteran car—

“Me that ’ave been what I’ve been,
Me that ’ave gone where I’ve gone,
Me that ’ave seen what I’ve seen”

—must have felt the disgrace of being turned over to a crew of stevedores and a ruffianly, tobacco-chewing second mate, who unceremoniously sandwiched it between a pile of milk-cans and a crate of cabbages on[289] the lower deck of a chug-achug-chugging stern-wheel river boat.

But before the rickety deck chairs had ceased their creaking complaints about the burden we had imposed on them we were congratulating ourselves on the circumstance that had forced us to exchange a hot and dusty highroad for a cool and silent waterway. To me there is something irresistibly fascinating and seductive about a river. I always find myself wondering where it comes from, and what strange things it has seen along its course, and where it is going to, and I invariably have a hankering to take ship and keep it company. And the greater the stream, the greater its fascination, because, of course, it has travelled so much farther. Now the Columbia, as that friend of our boyhood, Huck Finn, would have put it, is no slouch of a river. If its kinks and twists were carefully straightened out it would reach half-way across the continent, or as far as from New York to Kansas City. It is somewhat disturbing for one who visits the valley of the Columbia for the first time, with the purpose of writing about it, to have these facts suddenly thrown, as it were, in his face, particularly if, like myself, he has been brought up in that part of the country where the Hudson is regarded as the only real river in America—doubtless because it washes the shores of Manhattan—and where all other waterways are looked upon as being not much better than creeks. I felt like apologising to somebody, and when, on top of all this, I was told that the Columbia[290] and its tributaries drain a region equal in area to all the States along our Atlantic seaboard put together, I had a sudden desire to go ashore at the next landing and take a train back home.

Though of British birth, for it has its source above the Canadian line in the country of the Kootenai, the Columbia emends this unfortunate circumstance by becoming naturalised when it is still a slender stripling, dividing its allegiance, however, between Oregon and Washington, for which it serves as a boundary for upward of four hundred miles. It is not only the father of Northwestern waters, but it is the big brother of all those streams, from the Straits of Behring to the Straits of Magellan, which call the Pacific Ocean “grandpa.” By white-hulled river steamer, by panting power-boat, by produce-laden barge, by bark canoe, by the goatskin raft called kelek, I have loitered my leisurely way down many famous rivers—the St. Lawrence, the Hudson, the Mississippi, the Fraser, the Skeena, the Rio Balsas, the Rhine, the Danube, the Volga, the Euphrates, the Ganges, the Zambesi, the Nile—and I assert, after having duly weighed my words, that in the continuity and grandeur of its scenery the Columbia is the superior of them all. If you think that I am carried away by enthusiasm you had better go and see it for yourself.

It was Carlyle—was it not?—who remarked that all great works produce an unpleasant impression on first acquaintance. It is so with the Columbia. We saw it first on a broiling August day from the heights[291] above Celilo—the great, silent, mysterious river winding away into the unknown between banks of lava as sinister and forbidding as the flanks of Etna, and with a sun beating down upon it from a sky of molten brass. There were no grassy banks, no trees, no flowers, no vegetation of any kind, none of the things that one usually associates with a river. But when the steamer bears you around the first of those frowning cliffs that rise sheer from the surface of the river below The Dalles—ah, well, that is quite another matter.

Since Time began, the sheets of lava which give The Dalles its name, by compressing the half-mile-wide river into a channel barely sixscore feet across, have effectually obstructed continuous navigation upon the Upper Columbia. But, as towns multiplied and population increased along the upper reaches of the great river and its tributaries in Washington and Oregon, in Montana and Idaho, this hinderance to the navigation of so splendid a waterway became intolerable, unthinkable, absurd. At last the frock-coated gentlemen in Congress were prodded into action, and the passage of a bill for the construction of a canal around The Dalles, at Celilo, was the result. Came then keen-eyed, self-reliant men who, jeering at the obstacles which Nature had heaped in their path, proceeded to slash a canal through eight miles of shifting sands and basalt rock, so that hereafter the fruit growers and farmers and ranchers as far inland as Lewiston, in Idaho, can send their produce down to the sea in ships.

[292]

“The trouble with the Columbia,” complained the Lady, “is that it’s all scenery and no romance. It’s too big, too prosaic, too commercial. It doesn’t arouse any overwhelming enthusiasm in me to be told that this river irrigates goodness knows how many thousand square miles of land, or that the top of that mountain over there is so many thousand feet above the level of the sea, or that so many thousand barrels of apples were grown last year in the valley we just passed and that they brought so many dollars a barrel. Facts like those are all well enough in an almanac, because no one ever reads almanacs anyway, but they don’t interest me and I don’t believe that they interest many other visitors, either. If a river hasn’t any romance connected with it, it isn’t much better than a canal. Don’t you remember that rock in the Bosphorus, near Scutari, to which Leander used to swim out to see Hero, and how when we passed it the passengers would all rush over to that side of the deck, and how the steamer would list until her rail was almost under water, and how the Turkish officers would get frightened half to death and shove the people back? You don’t see the passengers on this boat threatening to capsize it because of their anxiety to see something romantic, do you? I should say not. Do you remember Kerbela, that town on the Euphrates, where all Persians hope to be buried when they die, and how, long before we reached there, we could smell the Caravans of the Dead which were carrying the bodies there from across the desert? And those crumbling,[293] ivy-covered castles along the Rhine, with their queer legends and traditions and superstitions? That’s what I mean by romance, and you know as well as I do that there is nothing romantic about apple orchards and salmon canneries and sawmills. Is there?”

“Pardon me, madam,” said a gentleman who had been seated so close to us that he could not help overhearing what she said and who had been unable to conceal his disagreement with the views she had expressed, “but do you see that island over there near the Washington shore? The long, low one with the little white monument sticking up at the end of it. That is Memaloose—the Island of the Dead. It is the Indian Valhalla. Talk about the Persians whose bodies are borne across the desert to be buried at Kerbela! Did you happen to know that on the slopes of that island are buried untold thousands of Chinooks, whose bodies were brought on the backs of men hundreds of miles through the wilderness or in canoes down long and lonely rivers that they might find their last resting-places in its sacred soil? And the monument that you see marks the grave of a frontiersman who was as romantic a character as you will find in the pages of Fenimore Cooper. His name was Victor Trevet; he knew and liked the Indians; and he asked to be buried on Memaloose that his bones might lie among those of ‘honest men.’ Is it legend and tradition that you say the river lacks? A few miles ahead of us, at the Cascades, the river was once spanned, according to the Indian legend, by a stupendous natural[294] bridge of rock. The Indians called it the Bridge of the Gods. The great river flowed under it, and on it lived a witch woman named Loowit, who had charge of the only fire in the world. Seeing how wretched was the lot of the fireless tribes, who had to live on uncooked meats and vegetables, she begged permission of the gods to give them fire. Her request was granted and the condition of the Indians was thus enormously improved. So gratified were the gods by Loowit’s consideration for the welfare of the Indians that they promised to grant any request that she might make. Womanlike, she promptly asked for youth and beauty. Whereupon she was transformed into a maiden whose loveliness would have caused Lina Cavalieri to go out of the professional beauty business. The news of her beauty spreading among the tribes like fire in summer grass, there came numberless youths who pleaded for her hand, or, rather, for the face and figure that went with it. Among them were two young chieftains: Klickitat from the north and Wiyeast from the west. As she was unable to decide between them, they and their tribesmen decided to settle the rivalry with the tomahawk. But the gods, angry at this senseless waste of lives over a pretty woman, put Loowit and her two gentlemen friends to death and sent the great bridge on which she had dwelt crashing down into the river. But as they had all three been good to look upon in life, so the gods, who were evidently æsthetic, made them good to look upon even in death by turning them into snow peaks. Wiyeast became the mountain which[295] we palefaces call Mount Hood; Klickitat they transformed into the peak we know as Mount Adams; while Mount Saint Helens is the beautiful form taken by the fair Loowit. Thus was the wonderful Bridge of the Gods destroyed and the Columbia dammed by the débris which fell into it. In a few minutes we will be at the Cascades and you can see the ruins of the bridge for yourself. And, if you still have any lingering doubts as to the truth of the story, why, there is Klickitat in his white blanket rising above the forests to the right, and Wiyeast is over there to your left, and ahead of us, down the river, is the Loowit lady disguised as Mount Saint Helens. So you see there is no room for doubt.

“You assert that the Columbia is lacking in romance because, forsooth, no Leander has swum across it to see a Hero. Good heavens, my dear young lady, I can tell you a story that has more all-wool-and-a-yard-wide romance in it than a dozen such Hellespontine fables. Did you never hear of Whitman the missionary, who, instead of crossing a measly strait to win a woman, crossed a continent and won an empire?

“In the early forties Whitman established a mission station near the present site of Walla Walla. Hearing rumours that our government was on the point of accommodatingly ceding the Valley of the Columbia to England in return for some paltry fishing rights off the banks of Newfoundland—the government officials of those days evidently preferred codfish to salmon—he rode overland to Washington in the dead of winter,[296] through blinding snow-storms, swimming icy rivers, subsisting on his pack-mules and his dogs when his food ran out, facing death by torture at the hands of hostile Indians. Gaining admission to the White House in his dress of furs and buckskin, with his feet and fingers terribly frozen, he so impressed President Tyler and Secretary of State Webster by his vivid description of the richness and fertility of the region which they were on the point of ceding to England that he saved the entire Pacific Northwest to the Union. If that isn’t sufficient romance for you, then I’m afraid you’re hard to please.”

“I surrender,” said the Lady. “Your old Columbia has plenty of romance, after all. The trouble is that tourists don’t know these interesting things that you’ve just been telling us and they do know all about the Danube and the Rhine.”

“That’s easily remedied,” said I. “I’ll tell them about it myself.”

And that, my friends, is precisely what I have just been trying to do.

“Next stop Hood River!” bawled the purser.

“That’s where the apples come from,” remarked our deck acquaintance, who had turned himself into a guide-book for our benefit. “In some of the orchards up the valley you’ll find apples with paper letters pasted on them: ‘C de P’ for the Café de Paris, you know, and ‘W-A’ for the Waldorf-Astoria, and ‘G R & I’ for Georgius Rex et Imperator—which is not the[297] name of the restaurant. They paste the letters on quite carefully when the apples are still green upon the tree, and when they ripen the paper is torn off, leaving the yellow initials on the bright red fruit. Those are the apples that they serve at royal banquets and that they charge a dollar apiece for in the smart restaurants in Europe. I don’t mean to imply that all of the Hood River apples are thus initialled to order, but some of them are. The average value of the land in that valley, cultivated and uncultivated, is three hundred and forty dollars an acre, and if a man wanted to purchase an orchard in bearing he would have to pay at least four thousand dollars an acre for it. Some people think that it was the original Garden of Eden. If it was, I don’t blame Eve for stealing the apple. I’d steal a Hood River apple myself if I got the chance.”

Had the second mate been a little more obliging, and had there not been so formidable a barricade of crates and milk cans about the car, I would have had it run ashore then and there and would have taken a whirl through the famous apple orchards which cover the lower slopes of Mount Hood and have kept on up the zigzag mountain road as far as the cosy little hostelry called Cloud Cap Inn, which some public-spirited Portlander has built upon the snow-line. Perhaps it was just as well we didn’t, however, for I learned afterward that the famous valley is only about twenty miles long, so, if we had not put on the emergency brake before we started, we would have run through it before we could have stopped and would not have seen[298] it at all. Nowhere in Switzerland do I recall a picture of such surpassing splendour as that which stood before us, as though on a titanic easel, as, from the vantage of the steamer’s upper deck, we looked up the vista formed by this fragrant, verdant valley toward the great white cone of Mount Hood. It is, indeed, so very beautiful that those Americans who know and love the world’s white rooftrees can find scant justification for turning their faces toward the Alps when here, in the upper left-hand corner of their own country, are mountains which would make the ghost of the great Whymper moan for an alpenstock and hobnailed boots. This startlingly sudden transition from orchards groaning with fruit to dense primeval forests, and from these forests to the stately, isolated snow peaks, is very different from Switzerland, of course. Indeed, to compare these mountains of the Pacific Northwest with the Alps, as is so frequently done, seems to me to be a grave injustice to them both. The Alps form a wild and angry sea of icy mountains, and we have nothing in America to which they can be fittingly compared. The Cascades, on the other hand, form a great system of lofty forest-wrapped ranges surmounted by the towering isolated peaks of snowy volcanoes, and Europe contains nothing to equal them. I am perfectly aware, of course, that the very large number of Americans who spend their summers in the ascent of the orthodox Swiss peaks—more often than not, if the truth were known, by means of funicular railways or through telescopes on hotel piazzas—look[299] with scorn and contumely upon these mountains of the far Nor’west, which they regard as home-made and unfashionable and vulgar and not worth bothering about. Perhaps they are not aware, however, that no less an authority on mountaineering than James Bryce (I don’t recall the title that he has taken now that he has been made a peer, and no one would recognise him if I used it) said not long ago, in speaking of these sentinels that guard the Columbia:

“We have nothing more beautiful in Switzerland or Tyrol, in Norway or the Pyrenees. The combination of ice scenery with woodland scenery of the grandest type is to be found nowhere in the Old World, unless it be in the Himalayas, and, so far as we know, nowhere else on the American continent.”

Which but serves to point the truth that foreigners are more appreciative of the beauties and grandeurs of our country than we are ourselves.

At the Cascades the Columbia takes a drop of half a hundred feet and we had, perforce, to bide our time in the locks, by means of which the rapids have been circumvented, until the waters found their level. It is not until the Cascades are passed that the scenery for which the Columbia is famous begins in all its sublimity and grandeur. The Great Artist has painted pictures more colourful, more sensational, perhaps, as the Grand Cañon, for example, the Yellowstone, and the Sahara, but none which combines the qualities of strength and restfulness as this mighty river, flowing[300] swiftly, silently between the everlasting hills. From the shores the orchards and the gardens rise, terrace above terrace, until they become merged in the forest-covered ranges, and above the ranges rise the august snow peaks, solitary, silent, like a line of sentries strung along the horizon. At times, particularly in the early morning and again at sunset, these snow mountains present that singular appearance familiar to the traveller in the Himalayas and the Cordilleras, when the snowy cone seems to be floating ethereally upon a sea of mist which completely shrouds the hills and forests at its base. Immediately below the Cascades commences the series of waterfalls for which the lower reaches of the Columbia are famous, the granite cliffs which, for nearly twoscore miles border the Oregon shore with a sheer wall of rock, being scored at frequent intervals by what seem, from a distance, to be ribbons of shining silver. As the boat draws nearer, however, you see that what looked like ribbons are really mountain streams which are so impatient to join their mother, the Columbia, that, instead of taking the more sedate but circuitous route, they fling themselves tempestuously over the brink of the sheer cliff into the arms of the parent stream. First come the Horsetail Falls, whose falling waters, blown by the wind into silvery strands, are suggestive of the flowing tail of a white Arab; then, in quick succession, the Oneonta Falls, at the end of a narrow gorge which penetrates the cliffs for a mile or more; the nine-hundred-feet-high Multnomah, the highest falls in all the northwest country if not, indeed, on the entire[301] Pacific Coast; the Bridal Veil, as radiantly beautiful as its namesake of the Yosemite; and finally, just below the great monolith rising from the river known as Rooster Rock, the Falls of Latourelle. On the opposite shore the mighty promontory known as Cape Horn rises five hundred feet above the surface of the river, and, a few miles farther up-stream, Castle Rock, whose turreted crags bear a striking resemblance to some stronghold of the Middle Ages, attains to twice that height. By the time the steamer reaches the mighty natural gateway known as the Pillars of Hercules, the traveller is actually surfeited with grandeur and is quite ready for the simple, friendly, pastoral scenes again, just as one after a season of Wagnerian opera welcomes the simple airs and the old-fashioned songs.

“WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON.”

The Columbia from Saint Peter’s Dome, with Mount Adams in the distance. “The Great Artist has painted pictures more colorful, more sensational, perhaps, but none which so combine the qualities of strength and restfulness as this mighty river.”

As I do not chew popcorn, peanuts, gum, or candy, nor munch dripping ice-cream cones, and as I have an unconquerable aversion to other people doing those unpleasant things in my immediate vicinity, I left the others, who did not seem to mind such minor annoyances, among the excursionists upon the upper deck and made my way below. After clambering over great piles of crates, sacks, and barrels filled with Columbia River produce, I finally succeeded in finding a secluded spot in the vessel’s bows, whence I could watch, undisturbed by sticky-fingered youngsters or idle chatter, the varied commerce of the mighty water road. Stern-wheel, twin-funnelled passenger boats zigzagged from shore to shore to pick up the passengers and freight that patiently awaited their coming; rusty freighters[302] scuttled down-stream laden with fruit for the coast towns and salmon for the Astoria canneries; spick-and-span pleasure craft, with shining brass work and graceful, tapering spars, daintily picked their way through the press of river traffic as a pretty girl picks her way along a crowded street; grimy fishing craft, their sails as weather-beaten as the faces of the men that raise them, danced by us, eager for home and supper and the evening fire; great log rafts wallowed by, sent down by the forests to propitiate the greedy sawmills, whose sharp-toothed jaws devour the sacrifice and scream for more.

Perhaps the most interesting and characteristic feature of the landscape along the lower Columbia are the fish-wheels—ingenious contrivances, twenty to forty feet in diameter and six to eight feet across, which look like pocket editions of the passenger-carrying Ferris wheel at the Chicago Exposition. The wheels, which are hung in substantial frameworks close to the banks, where the salmon run the thickest, are revolved by the current, which keeps the wire-meshed scoops with which each pair of spokes are fitted for ever lifting from the water. The great schools of salmon are guided toward the wheel by means of a lattice dam which reaches out into the river like the arm of a false friend, and, before the unsuspecting fish know what has happened to them, they are hoisted into the air in the wire scoops and dumped into an inclined trough, down which they slide into a fenced-in pool, where the fishermen can get them at their leisure. They are then strung on wires and attached to a barrel[303] which acts as a buoy, the barrel, sometimes with a ton of fish trailing behind it like the tail to a kite, floating down-stream to the nearest cannery, where a man in a launch is on the lookout and tows them ashore. Months later, in Pekin or Peoria, in Rome or Rumford Falls, or wherever else you may happen to be dining, you will see the item “Columbia River Salmon” on the hotel menu.

As I hung over the steamer’s bow, with the incomparable landscape slipping past me as though on Burton Holmes’s picture screen, and no sound save the muffled throbbing of the engines and the ripple of the water running aft along the hull, I unconsciously yielded to the Columbia’s mystic spell. I closed my eyes and in a moment the surface of the river seemed peopled with the ghosts of the history makers. Nez Percés, in paint and feathers, slipped silently along, in the shadow of yonder wooded bank, in their barken war canoes. Two lean and sun-bronzed white men, clad in the fringed buckskin of the adventuring frontiersman, floated past me down the mighty stream which they had trekked across a continent to find. Half-breed trappers, chanting at the paddles, descended with precious freights of fur. A square-rigged merchantman poked its inquisitive bowsprit around a rocky headland, and as she passed I noted the words Columbia, of Boston, in raised gilt letters on her stern, and I remembered that it was from this same square-rigged vessel that the river took its name. A warship, flying the flag of England and with the black muzzles of guns peering from its rows of ports, cautiously[304] ascended, the leadsmen in the shrouds sounding for river bars. Log forts and trading-posts and mission stations once again crowned the encircling hills. Forgotten battles blew by on the evening breeze. A yellow dust cloud rose above the river bank and out of it emerged a plodding wagon-train. The smoke of pioneer camp-fires spiralled skyward from those rich valleys where in reality the cattle browse and the orchards droop with fruit. From the vantage of a rocky promontory a ghostly war party peered down upon me—a paleface—taking a summer’s holiday along that mighty stream upon whose bosom of old went forth the bepainted fighting men. The furtive twilight slipped behind night’s velvet curtain. The mountains changed from jade to coral, from coral to sapphire, from sapphire to amethyst. The snow peaks gleamed luminously, like sheeted ghosts, against the purple velvet of the sky. The night-breeze rose and I shivered. The steamer swung silently around a bend in the river and, all suddenly, the darkness ahead was sprinkled with a million blinking fireflies. At least they looked like fireflies.

“Portland!” shouted a raucous voice, far off somewhere, on the upper deck. “Portland! All ashore!”

I felt a hand upon my shoulder. It was the Lady.

“Where on earth have you been?” she asked. “We have been hunting for you everywhere.”

“I’ve been on a long journey,” said I.

[305]

## XI
A FRONTIER ARCADY

[306]

“Oh, woods of the West, I am sighing to-day
For the sea songs your voices repeat,
For the evergreen glades, for the glades far away
From the stifling air of the street.
“And I long, ah, I long to be with you again,
And to dream in that region of rest,
Forever apart from this warring of men—
Oh, wonderful woods of the West.”

[307]

### XI
A FRONTIER ARCADY

“Arcady—the home of piping shepherds and coy shepherdesses, where rustic simplicity and plenty satisfied the ambition of untutored hearts and where ambition and its crimes were unknown.”

Some pamphlet writer with a gift for turning phrases has called Oregon “The Land That Lures.” And, so far as home and fortune seekers are concerned, it is. Whether it is the spirit of romance that our people have always associated with the great Northwest; whether it is the glamour of its booming rivers and its silent, axe-ripe forests or the appeal of its soft and balmy climate; or whether it is the extraordinary opportunities it offers for the acquirement of modest fortunes before one is too old to enjoy them, I do not know, but the undeniable fact remains that no region between the Portlands exercises so irresistible a fascination for the man who knows the trick of coaxing a fortune from the soil as this great, rich, hospitable, unfenced, forest-and-mountain-and-stream, meadow-and-orchard-and-home land that stretches from the Columbia south to the Siskiyous. It may be that California holds more attractions for the man who has already made his fortune, but certainly Oregon is the place to make the fortune in. No Western State is essentially less “Western” in the accepted sense of the[308] term. This is due in part, no doubt, to the fact that it has been longer settled by Americans than any other portion of the Pacific Coast. Portland was a thriving city, remember, when St. Paul and Minneapolis were little more than trading-posts on the frontier. Settlers from the Atlantic seaboard and from the Middle West find themselves, upon reaching Oregon, in the midst of “home folks” and all the friendly, kindly, homely things that the term implies: ice-cream sociables and grange meetings and church picnics and literary societies and debating clubs and county fairs. The name of the State capital is inseparably associated with Puritan New England, one of its largest cities is named after the Massachusetts town which gave its name to rum, and I can show you a score of towns whose peaceful, elm-shaded streets and white-porticoed, red-brick houses might almost—but hot quite—deceive you into thinking that you are in Cooperstown, N. Y., or Newburyport, Mass., or Biddeford, Me. Almost, as I have said, but not quite, for all of these Oregonian towns, despite the staidness and sobriety of their appearance, are animated by an enthusiasm, an up-to-dateness, by an unshakable faith in their future, that is essentially a characteristic of the West.

The orthodox way of entering Oregon from the south is by way of Ashland, Medford, and Grant’s Pass, and so northward, through Roseburg and Eugene and Albany and Salem, to Portland. But, as I have related in the preceding chapter, we deliberately chose[309] the back-stairs route, crossing the California-Oregon line at Klamath Lake and motoring northward, along the trail of the Lewis and Clark expedition, via Crater Lake and the valley of the Deschutes to The Dalles, and thence down the Columbia to Portland. We prided ourselves on having thus obtained an extraordinarily comprehensive idea of the State and its resources, not to mention having traversed a region which is quite inaccessible to the tourist unless he travels, as we did, by motor-car, but when we came to talk with some people from western Oregon we found that we didn’t know nearly as much about the State as we thought we did.

“How did you find the roads in the Willamette Valley?” inquired a friend with whom we were dining one night in Portland.

“We haven’t seen the Willamette Valley,” I explained. “You see, we came round the other way.”

“I suppose you’ve been down to Salem, though—nice city, Salem.”

“No,” I was forced to admit, “we haven’t been to Salem.”

“What did you think of the Marble Halls? Many people claim they’re finer than the Mammoth Cave.”

“The Marble Halls? Where are they? What are they? I never heard of them.”

“I suppose you had some fine fishing in the Grant’s Pass country. I hear that the trout are running big down there this season.”

[310]

“No, we didn’t come through Grant’s Pass.”

“Well, you surely don’t mean to tell me that you didn’t visit the Rogue River Valley—the apple-cellar of the world?”

“Sorry to say we didn’t.”

“Nor the valley of the Umpqua?”

“No.”

“Well,” after a long and painful pause, “what in the name of Heaven have you seen?”

“I think,” said I, turning to the others, “that the thing for us to do is to turn the car south again and see Oregon. Else we shall never be able to hold up our heads and look an Oregonian in the eye. The thousand miles or so of the State that we’ve just come through apparently don’t count.”

Though I made the remark facetiously, it contained a good-sized germ of truth. Just now the back country of Oregon, the hinterland, as our Teutonic friends would call it, doesn’t count for very much. It is going to count tremendously, mind you, in the not far distant future, when the railroads now under construction have opened it up to civilisation and commerce and when it is settled by the European hordes that will pour into it through the gateway of Panama. As things stand at present, however, the wealth and prosperity of Oregon are concentrated in that comparatively narrow but incredibly fertile zone which lies between the sea and the mile-high mountain wall formed by the Cascades, and whose farms and orchards are watered by the Willamette, the Umpqua, and the Rogue.

[311]

It was one of those autumn days so characteristic of the Pacific Northwest, which seem to be a combination of an Italian June and a Devonshire September, when we slipped out of Portland’s rush and bustle and turmoil and turned our front tires toward the south and the open country. For a dozen miles or more our road, built high on the hill slope above the broad reaches of the lower Willamette, commanded as entrancing a vista of beautiful homes as I have ever seen. For six solid miles south of Portland the banks of the Willamette are bordered by country houses of shingle, stone, and stucco, rising from the most beautiful rose gardens this side of Persia (Portland, you know, is called “The City of Roses”) and with shaven lawns sweeping gently down, like unrolled carpets, to the river’s edge. Through gaps in the screen of shrubbery which lines the highway we caught fleeting glimpses, as we whirled past, of vine-covered garages housing shiny motor-cars, while along the river front were moored lean power-boats, every line of them bespeaking speed, for those who are fortunate enough—and wealthy enough—to own homes upon the Willamette are able to run in to their offices in the city either by road or river. Far in the distance the Fujiyama-like cone of Mount Saint Helens rose above the miles of intervening forest, and, farther to the southward, the hoary head of Mount Hood. About this portion of residential Portland which lies along the banks of the Willamette there is a suggestion of the Thames near Hampton Court, a hint of the Seine near Saint Cloud, a subtle[312] reminder of those residences which have been built by the rich of Budapest along the Danube, but most of all it recalls Stockholm. This is due, I suppose, to the proximity of the forests which surround the city, to the snow-capped mountains which loom up behind them, and to the ever-present scent of balsam in the air.

It is fifty miles or thereabout from Portland to Salem, which is the capital of the State, and when the roads are dry you can leave one city after an early dinner and reach the other before the theatre curtains have gone up for the first act. After a rain, however, it is a different matter altogether, for the roads, which leave a great deal to be desired, are for the most part of red clay, and so slippery that a car, even with chains on all four wheels, slips and slides and staggers like a Scotchman going home after celebrating the birthday of Robert Burns. Salem is as pleasing to the eye as a certified cheque. It is asphalted and electric-lighted and landscaped to the very limit. Though the residential architecture of the city shows unmistakable traces of the influence of both Queen Anne and Mary Anne, their artistic deficiencies are more than counter-balanced by the pleasant, shady lawns and the broad, hospitable piazzas, which seem to say to the passer-by: “Come right up, friend, and sit down and make yourself to home.” That’s the most striking characteristic of the place—hospitality.

The gates of the State Fair were thrown open the same day that we arrived in Salem, though I do not[313] wish to be understood as intimating that the two events bore any relation to each other. Now, a fair is generally a pretty reliable index to the agricultural condition of a region. The first thing that strikes the visitor upon entering the gates of a New England fair is the extraordinary number of ramshackle, mud-stained, “democrat” wagons lined up along the fence, the horses munching contentedly in their nose-bags. The first thing that struck me as we entered the grounds of the Oregon State Fair was the extraordinary number of shiny new automobiles. Save en route to a Vanderbilt Cup Race, I don’t recall ever having seen so many motor-cars on one stretch of road as we encountered on our way to the fair-grounds. They made a noise like the droning of a billion bumblebees. Though there was, of course, a preponderance of little cars, there were also any number of big six-cylinder seven-passenger machines, for your Oregonian is nothing if not up to the minute. Instead of jogging in from the farm in rattletrap wagons, they came tearing down the pike in shiny, spick-and-span automobiles; pa at the steering-wheel, hat on the back of his head and whiskers streaming, ma in her new bonnet sitting proudly beside him, and grandma and the youngsters filling up the tonneau. It did my heart good to see them. There is an intangible something about a motor-car that seems to give the most hidebound old farmer in the community a new lease of life. A year or so ago a weekly magazine published a picture of a group of cars at some rural gathering in the Northwest, and unwisely labelled it:[314] “Where the old cars go to.” It elicited a wave of indignant letters from automobile dealers and automobile owners in that section of the country that made the editor feel as though he had stepped on a charged wire. That gentleman learned, at the cost of several cancelled subscriptions, that, wherever else the second-hand cars go, they certainly do not go to the Northwest, whose people might well take as their motto: “The best is none too good for us.”

Your Oregonian farmer, unlike his fellows in the older, colder States, is neither hidebound nor conservative. He has no kinship with the bewhiskered, bebooted, by-gum and by-gosh hayseed made familiar by the comic papers and the bucolic dramas. Instead of shying from a new-fangled device as a horse does from a steam roller, he promptly gives it a trial and, if it makes good, he adopts it. He milks his cows and makes his butter by electricity, orders his groceries from the nearest town and asks for the baseball score by telephone, goes to church and to market in his motor-car, and passes his evenings with the aid of a circulating library, a pianola, and a phonograph. It did not take me long to find out that Oregon is as progressive agriculturally as it is politically. If the farmer does not succeed in Oregon it is because he has been hypnotised by those siren sisters, Obstinacy and Laziness; for if he is ignorant, the State stands ready to educate him; if he is perplexed, it stands ready to advise him; and if he gets into trouble, it stands ready to assist him. In other words, it wants him to make[315] good, and it isn’t the fault of the State if he does not. For this purpose it maintains, in addition to the State Agricultural College at Corvallis, which is one of the most completely equipped institutions of its kind in the world, six experimental farms which are geographically distributed so as to meet practically every condition of agriculture found in Oregon. Two extensive demonstration farms are maintained, moreover, by business interests, and there is an enormous amount of agricultural co-operative work among the farmers themselves, so that if a man is in doubt as to whether he had better go in for Jerseys or Holsteins, for White Wyandottes or Plymouth Rocks, for Spitzenbergs or Newtown Pippins, all he has to do to obtain expert advice is to ask for it.

It is an undeniable fact that at most fairs in the East, and at a great many in the West, for that matter, the wheel-of-fortune, the ring-and-cane, and the three-balls-for-a-dime-and-your-money-back-if-you-hit-the-coon concessionaires, the fat woman, the living skeleton, the bearded lady, and the wild man from Borneo, to say nothing of the raucous-voiced venders of ice-cold-lemonade-made-in-the-shade and red-hot-coney-islands-only-a-nickel-half-a-dime, serve to distract both the attention and the shekels of the rural visitors from the legitimate exhibits. It seemed to me that the farmers and fruit growers who came pouring into the Salem fair were there for purposes of education rather than recreation. They seemed to take the fair seriously and with the idea of obtaining all the information and suggestions[316] that they could from it. Eager, attentive groups surrounded the lecturers from the State Agricultural College and constantly interrupted them with intelligent, penetrating queries as to soils, grafting, fertilisers, insect sprays, and the like, while out in the long cattle sheds the men who are growing rich from milk and butter talked of Aaggie Arethusa Korndyke Koningen Colantha Clothilde Netherland Pietertje’s Queen of the Dairy IV and of Alban Albino Segis Pontiac Johann Hengerveld’s Monarch of the Meadows (the bearer of this last resonant title proving, upon investigation, to be a wabbly-kneed three-weeks-old calf) as casually as a New Yorker would refer to Connie Mack or Caruso or John Drew.

We went to the fair, as I have already intimated, for the primary purpose of getting a line on rural conditions as they exist in Oregon; but that did not prevent us from doing things which visitors to county fairs have done ever since county fairs began. We tossed rings—three-for-a-dime-step-right-this-way-and-try-your-luck-ladies-and-gents—over a bed of cane heads so temptingly thick that it seemed it would be only by a miracle that you could miss one, and after spending a dollar in rings the Lady won a bamboo walking-stick which she could have bought for ten cents almost anywhere and which she didn’t have the remotest use for, anyway. We tried our luck at breaking clay pipes in the shooting-gallery, and, in spite of the fact that the sights on my rifle had been deliberately hammered a quarter of an inch out of line, I succeeded in winning[317] three dubious-looking cigars, to the proprietor’s very great astonishment. Had I smoked them I should not have survived to write this story. Then we leaned over the pig-pens and poked the pink, fat hogs with the yard-sticks which some enterprising advertiser had forced upon us; in the art department we gravely admired the cross-stitched mottoes bearing such virtuous sentiments as, “Virtue Is Its Own Reward,” and “There’s No Place Like Home,” and the water-colour studies of impossible fruit perpetrated “by Jane Maria Simpkins, aged eleven years.” Then we went over to the race-track and hung over the rail and became as excited over the result of the 2.40 free-for-all as we used to be in the old days at Morris Park before the anti-racing bill became a law. In fact, I surreptitiously wagered a dollar with an itinerant book-maker on a sixteen-to-one shot, on the ground that, as the horse had the same name as the Lady, it would surely prove a winner—and lost. Not until dark settled down and the lights of the homeward-bound cars had turned the highway into an excellent imitation of the Chicago freight yards did we climb into the tonneau again, sticky and dusty and tired, and tell the driver to “hit it up for the nearest hotel.”

From Salem to Eugene, down the pretty and well-wooded valley of the Willamette, is seventy odd miles as the motor goes, and the scenery throughout every mile of the distance looks exactly like those pictures you see on bill-boards advertising Swiss chocolate or condensed milk—I forget which: black cows with[318] white spots, or white cows with black spots, grazing contentedly on emerald hillsides, with white mountains sticking up behind; rivers meandering through lush, green meadows; white farmhouses with red roofs and neat, green blinds peering out between the mathematically arranged orchard rows. But always there are the orchards. No matter how wide you open your throttle, no matter how high your speedometer needle climbs, you can’t escape them. They border the road on both sides, for mile after mile after mile, and in the spring, when they are in blossom, the countryside looks as though it had been struck by a snow-storm—and smells like Roger & Gallet’s perfumery works.

When I visited the Southwest the horny-handed farmer folk would meet me when I stepped from the train and whirl me incredible distances across the desert to show me a patch of alfalfa—“the finest patch of alfalfa, by jingo, in the whole blamed State!” In Oregon they did much the same thing, except, instead of showing me alfalfa they showed me apples. Up north of the Siskiyous, they’re literally apple drunk. They talk apples, think apples, dream apples, eat apple dumplings and apple pies, drink apple cider and apple brandy and applejack. Even their women are apple-cheeked. You can’t blame them for being a trifle boisterous about their apple crops, however, when you see what the apple has done for Oregon. I was shown one orchard of forty-five acres whose crop had sold the preceding year for seventy-five thousand dollars. Another orchard of but eight acres brought[319] its owner sixteen thousand dollars. Five hundred trees yielded another man five thousand dollars. And I could repeat similar instances ad infinitum. They assured us in Medford that the apple cellars at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle always contain barrels stencilled “Grown in Oregon”—which is, I believe, a fact—and, though they didn’t say so in so many words, they intimated that when King George feels the need of a bite after a court ball or some equally arduous function, he lights a candle and shuffles down the cellar stairs in his dressing-gown and slippers and gropes about until he finds an Oregon-grown Northern Spy or a big, green Newtown Pippin.

Oregon’s success in apple growing—a success that has headed the pioneer northwestward as the gold craze of ’49 started the frontiersman Californiaward—is the joint product of work and brains. Where New England has given up all thought of saving her orchards, Oregon, by tincturing labour with scientific knowledge, has founded an industry which is doing for the State what wheat did for the Dakotas, what gold did for California. What happened to the orchards all through New England? There was enough hard work put into them, Heaven knows. The old New England farmer and his wife slaved to the bone and were eventually trundled away to the insane asylum or the cemetery from overwork, from devotion to the arid soil. The orchards of New England have been watered with blood and sweat and fertilised with blasted hopes. The young men were away in the universities acquiring[320] scientific knowledge and learning how to apply that knowledge on the farms, and it never occurred to the old men that the wearied soil needed some encouragement, some strengthening, some vivifying, even as their spirits did, to bring material and spiritual prosperity. And Oregon has taken to heart and is profiting by the pathetic example of the New England farmer.

It is approximately four hundred miles as a motor goes from the Columbia to the California line and, as our object was to see the country, we spent upward of a week upon the journey, stopping as our fancies dictated to cast for trout in the swirling rivers, to gossip with village folk and farmers, and sometimes just to lie on our backs on inviting hillsides and smoke and chat and throw pebbles at inquisitive squirrels and watch the sunbeams filter through the foliage of the trees. That’s where the true joy of motoring comes in: to be able to stop when and where you please, without the necessity of having to give any why or wherefore, and, when you grow weary of one place, flying on again until you find another that tempts you. I have never been able to comprehend why those speed maniacs who tear through the country so fast that the telegraph-poles look like palings in a picket fence bother with automobiles at all; they could travel quite as fast in a train and ever so much more comfortably.

From Eugene our course lay south, due south through a bountiful and smiling land. We tore down yellow highroads between orchard rows as precisely[321] placed and uniform as ranks of Prussian grenadiers; we flashed past trim farmhouses overshadowed by huge hip-roofed barns which seemed to be bursting with produce, as, in fact, they were; we rolled through villages so neat and clean and happy that they might have served as models for the street-car advertisement of Spotless Town; we spun along the banks of sun-flecked rivers whose waters were broken by trout jumping hungry for the fly; we boomed down forest roads so dim and silent that we felt as though we were motoring down a cathedral nave; Diamond Peak and the white-bonneted Three Sisters came into view and disappeared again; until at last, churning our way up the tortuous road that climbs the Umpqua Range, we looked down upon the enchanted valley of the Rogue.

Imagine a four-hundred-thousand-acre valley, every foot of which is tilled or tillable, protected on every side by mountain walls—on the east by the Cascades, on the west by the Coast Range, on the north by the Umpqua chain, and on the south by the Siskiyous; and meandering through this garden valley, watering its every corner, the winding, mischievous, inquisitive Rogue. It is indeed a beckoning land. But mind you, it is not a get-rich-quick land. It is a work-like-the-devil-and-you’ll-become-prosperous country. The soil and the climate will do as much for the farmer, perhaps more, than anywhere else in the world, but he must do his share. And no one should buy a ticket to Oregon expecting to find immediate employment in any line. Jobs are not lying loose on the[322] streets, waiting for some one to come along and pick them up, any more than they are in Chicago or New York. I doubt very much, indeed, if the workingman with no other capital than his two hands has much to gain by emigrating to Oregon. Large projects, it is true, require many labourers, and these openings often present themselves; but the means of bringing in workmen are just as cheap and rapid as in other sections of the country, so it need not be expected that there would be any great difference in wages. The chief advantages that Oregon offers to labouring people without sufficient accumulations to give them a start are: a mild and equable climate, an absence of damaging storms, a certainty of crops, and opportunities as good, though perhaps no better, than any other State. If, however, he has been able to accumulate anywhere from a thousand to three thousand dollars, he is then in a position to avail himself of the innumerable opportunities which exist for men of small capital. Such men will find their best opportunities in buying a few acres of land, building a modest home upon it, and then “going in,” as the English say, for fruit growing or poultry raising or dairying or market-gardening. As sawmills are as plentiful in Oregon as pretty women are on Fifth Avenue, and as the State contains one fifth of all the standing timber in the country (you didn’t know that, did you?) lumber is extraordinarily cheap, the cost of the material for a comfortable four-room farmhouse, for example, not running to more than one hundred and fifty dollars.[323] It is a mistake for the intending emigrant to count on getting a farm under the terms of the Homestead Act, for, though the total government lands open to homestead entry in Oregon are greater in area than the entire State of West Virginia, they are, for the most part, in the least desirable portions of the State and the settler who occupied them would have to pay the price incident to life in a remote and semicivilised region. On the other hand, excellent land, within easy reach of towns and railroads, can be had in the valleys of western Oregon all the way from fifty to one hundred and fifty dollars an acre, and this would, I am convinced, prove the best investment in the end.

There is no space to dwell at any length on the towns of western Oregon—Salem, Eugene, Roseburg, Drain, Grant’s Pass, Medford, Ashland. All of these towns have paved streets lined with comfortable and homelike residences and remarkably well-stocked shops; up-to-the-minute educational, lighting, and sewage systems; about double the number of parks, hotels, garages, and moving-picture houses that you would find in towns of similar size in the East; and boards of trade and chambers of commerce with enough surplus energy and enthusiasm to make a booster out of an Egyptian mummy. In most of these towns prohibition reigns, and, though, to be quite truthful, I am not accustomed to raise an admonishing hand when some one uncorks a gilt-topped bottle, I repeatedly remarked the fact that they were cleaner, quieter, more orderly—in short, pleasanter places to live—than those[324] whose streets are dotted by the familiar swinging half-doors. That prohibition has done no harm to business is best proved by the fact that the very merchants who in the beginning were its most bitter assailants have become its most ardent advocates. After comparing the “dry” towns of Oregon to the “wet” ones—say, in the vicinity of Bakersfield, in California—it seems to me that, so far as the smaller rural communities are concerned, at least, there is only one side to the prohibition question.

Thirty miles from Grant’s Pass, in the fastnesses of the Siskiyous, are the recently discovered mammoth caves, which some genius in the art of appellation has christened “The Marble Halls of Oregon.” It needed an inspiration to conceive a name like that! Such a name would induce one to make a trip to see a hole in a sand-bank. As a matter of fact, these Oregonian caverns are decidedly worth the journey. Though they are very far from having been completely explored, sufficient investigations have been made to prove conclusively that they are much superior, both in size and beauty, to the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky, a visit to which was considered as essential for every well-travelled American half a century ago as to have seen the Virginia Natural Bridge and Niagara Falls.

Trout fishing in the high Sierras.

Salmon fishing in a Northwestern river.

WHERE RODS BEND DOUBLE AND REELS GO WHIR-R-R-R.

Oregon, with its fish-filled streams, its game-filled forests, and its coast-line rich in bays and coves and beaches, possesses all the requisites for one of the world’s great playgrounds, but some years must pass[325] before it will possess the luxuries demanded by that class of summer vacationists who travel with wardrobe trunks. With less than one fifteenth of its sixty odd million acres under cultivation, it is still to a great extent a frontier region, with many of a frontier’s crudities and discomforts and, for a man who knows and loves the open, with all of a frontier country’s charm. I am perfectly aware, of course, that the farmers who are growing such amazing quantities of big, red apples in the valleys of the Hood and the Rogue and the real-estate boosters who are so frantically chopping town sites out of the primeval forest within cannon-shot of Portland will resent the statement that this is still a frontier country; but it is, nevertheless, and will be for a number of years to come. Barring the system which parallels the coast from north to south and the one which cuts across its northeast corner, there are no railways in Oregon; the scantiness of population and the peculiarly savage nature of a great portion of the country having offered few inducements to the railroad builders. This condition is changing rapidly, however, for the transcontinental systems which enter the State are working overtime to give it population, cities and towns and villages are springing up like mushrooms along its many waterways, the vast grants held by the railway and trading companies and by the pioneers are gradually being cut up into small farms, and a rural situation is being slowly created which is bound to effect a marked change in the conditions which have heretofore prevailed.[326] But it has not yet, thank Heaven, reached that stage of civilisation which is characterised by summer hotels with miles of piazzas and acres of green lawns and oceans of red-and-white striped awnings. Taking the place of these sophisticated and ostentatious summer resorts are the unpretentious inns and camps and summer colonies which are sprinkled along the Oregon shore from the mouth of the Columbia to the California line.

The easiest way to reach this summer land is to take the little jerk-water railroad which meanders eastward from Hillsboro, a main-line townlet fifty miles or so south of Portland, through Tillamook County to the sea. For many miles the train follows the tumultuous Nehalem, stopping every now and then, as the fancy seems to strike it, at shrieking sawmills or at groups of slab-walled loggers’ shacks set down in clearings in the forest, where bearded, flannel-shirted men come out and swap stories and tobacco with the engineer. After a time the woods begin to dwindle into tracts of stumps and second-growths, and these merge gradually into farms, with neat white houses and orderly rows of fruit-trees and herds of sleek cattle grazing contentedly in clover meadows. Quite soon Nehalem Bay comes in sight and the lush meadows give way to wire-grass and the wire-grass runs out in beaches of yellow sand so much like those which border Cape Cod and Buzzard’s Bay that it is hard to believe that one is not on the coast of New England. From the names of the towns and from the types of faces that I saw, I gathered that much of this country was[327] settled by New Englanders, who must have found in its hills and forests and fertile farm lands and alternate stretches of sandy beach and rock-bound shore much to remind them of home. Oregon is, as a glance at the map will show you, in exactly the same latitude as the New England States and has the same cool, invigorating summer weather that one finds in Maine, though its winters, thanks to the warm Japan current which sweeps along its shores, are characterised by rains instead of snow. From Nehalem to Tillamook the railroad hugs the coast. On one side the bosom of the Pacific rises and falls languorously under a genial sun; on the other the line of rugged hills, in their shaggy mantles of green, go up to meet the sky. Here and there some placid lake mirrors the crags and wind-bent trees, or a river, complaining noisily at the delay to which it has been subjected, finds a devious way through the hindering hill range to the waiting ocean. Nor are the attractions of the Tillamook country those of the sea alone, for within a dozen miles of the coast bear, panther, wildcats, deer, partridge, pheasant, duck, and geese are to be found, while the mountain streams are alive with trout waiting to be lured by the fly. It is a storied region, too, for thousands of moccasined feet have trod the famous Indian trail which was once the only route from the wilds of southern Oregon to the fur-post which the first Astor established at the mouth of the Columbia and which still bears his name, and here and there along the coast are the remains of the forts and trading stations which the Russians, in[328] their campaign for the commercial mastery of the Pacific half a century ago, pushed southward even to the Bay of San Francisco. The lives led by those who summer along this shore would delight such rugged apostles of the simple life as John Muir and John Burroughs and Colonel Roosevelt, for there is a gratifying absence of fashionable hotels and luxurious camps and cottages, though there is an abundance of unpretentious but comfortable tent colonies and inns. The people whom I met in Portland and elsewhere apologised profusely for Oregon’s deficiencies in this respect and assured me very earnestly that in two or three years more the State would have a complete assortment of summer hotels “as good as anything you’ll find at Atlantic City or Narragansett Pier, by George.” All I have to say is that when their promises are realised, Oregon’s chiefest and most distinctive charm—its near-to-nature simplicity—will have disappeared, and, so far as the traveller and the pleasure seeker are concerned, it will be merely an indifferent imitation of the humdrum and prosaic East. At present, however, it is still a big, free, unfenced, keep-on-the-grass, do-as-you-please, happy-go-lucky, flannel-shirt-and-slouch-hat land. Even as I write I can hear its insistent, subtle summons in my ears: the whisper of the forests, the chatter of the rivers, the murmur of the ocean, the snarling of the sawmills, the chunk-a-chunk of paddles, the creak of saddle gear, all seeming to say: “Cut loose from towns and men; pack your kit and come again.” And that’s precisely what I’m going to do.

[329]

## XII
BREAKING THE WILDERNESS

[330]

“They rise to mastery of wind and snow;
They go like soldiers grimly into strife
To colonise the plain. They plough and sow,
And fertilise the sod with their own life,
As did the Indian and the buffalo.”

[331]

### XII
BREAKING THE WILDERNESS

When white men in Africa make long desert journeys on camel-back, they follow the example of the Arabs and wind themselves tightly from chest to hips with bandages like those with which trainers wrap the legs of race-horses. This, to put it inelegantly but plainly, is done to prevent their bursting from the violent and sustained shaking to which they are subjected by the roughness of the camel’s gait. When I said good-bye to the Sudan, taking it for granted that I would have no further use for my spiral corselet in the presumably civilised country to which I was going, I left it behind me in Khartoum. How was I to know that I would need it far more than I ever had in Africa while journeying in so essentially Occidental a conveyance as a motor-car through a region where camels are confined to circuses and Turkish-rug advertisements? But long before we had traversed the forty atrocious miles which make the distance between Portland, Ore., and Kalama, Wash., seem more like four hundred, I would have given a good deal to have had my racked and aching body snugly wrapped in it again. I have had more than a speaking acquaintance with some roads so bad that they ought to have[332] been in jail—in Asiatic Turkey and in Baja California and in other places—but to the Portland-Kalama road I present the red-white-and-blue championship ribbon. Roll down a rocky hillside in a barrel; climb into an electric churn and tell the dairyman to turn on the power; ride a bicycle across a railroad trestle and you will have had but the caviare course of the dinner of discomfort that was served to us. As, after five hours of this sort of thing, we bumped our way down a particularly vicious bit of hill road, every joint and bolt in the car squealing in agonised complaint, I saw a prosperous-looking farmer in his shirt-sleeves leaning comfortably over the front gate, interestedly watching our progress.

“St-t-t-op a m-m-m-inute,” I chattered to the chauffeur, as we jounced into the thank-ye-marms and rattled over the loose stones, “I w-w-want to t-t-t-t-ell this m-m-m-an-n-n w-what I think of the r-r-r-oad.”

As we drew up in front of the gate, the farmer, taking a straw out of his mouth, drawled:

“Say, stranger, you might like to know that you’ve just come over the most gol-damnedest piece of road north o’ Panama.”

So, unless the gentlemen who have the say in this portion of the State of Washington have repaired the road since we passed over it, I would advise those automobilists who are Seattle-bound to keep on the Oregon side of the Columbia as far as Goble (I think that is the name of the tiny hamlet), where they can put their car on a barge and hire the ferryman to tow[333] them across the river to Kalama. This will cost them five dollars, but it’s worth it.

A road near the Columbia as it was. | A road near the Columbia as it is.

WHAT THE ROAD-BUILDERS HAVE DONE IN WASHINGTON.

Were one to prejudge a country by the names of its villages and towns and counties he would form a peculiar conception of Washington, for I do not recall ever having heard anything quite so outlandish as the names which some one—the Siwash aborigine, presumably—has wished upon it. How would you like to get this sort of a reply to your question as to some one’s antecedents? “Me? Oh, I was born near Wahkiacus, down in Klickitat County, and I met my wife, whose folks live up Snohomish way, in Walla Walla, and later on we moved to Puyallup, but I’ve a sort of notion of goin’ into the cannery business at Skamokawa, over in Wahkiakum County, though the wife, she’s been a-pesterin’ me to buy an apple orchard up in the Okanogan.” Still, it’s more interesting to motor through a country like that, always wondering what bizarre, heathenish name is going to turn up next, than to tour through a region sprinkled with Simpson’s Centres and Cranberry Crossroads and New Carthages and Hickory Hollows until you feel as though you were an actor in “The Old Homestead.”

Throughout our trip through Washington we were caused untold annoyance, and in several instances were compelled to travel many weary and needless miles, because of the wanton destruction of the sign-posts by amateur marksmen. Up in that country every boy gets a gun with his first pair of pants, and, when there is nothing else to shoot, he makes a target[334] of the enamelled guide-posts which have been erected for the benefit of tourists. More than once, coming to a crossroads in the forest, we found these placards so riddled with bullets that we were compelled to guess which road to take—and we usually guessed wrong. “I wish to goodness,” said my friend in exasperation, after we had gone half a dozen miles out of our way on one of these occasions, “that they would declare a close season on sign-posts, just as they have on elk, and then give the man the limit who is caught shooting them.”

It would be a grave injustice to place undue emphasis upon the crudities and inconveniences which annoy the traveller in certain portions of Washington, for, when you get down to bed-rock facts, its farmers are still wrestling with the wilderness—and in most instances they have had to put up a desperate resistance to keep the wilderness from shoving them off the mat. We passed through many a community, far removed from the railway (for the railway builders have done little more than nibble at the crust of the Washington pie) where the people were living under conditions almost identical with those which confronted the Pilgrim settlers of New England. Many a farmstead that we passed was chopped out of the virgin forest, the house being built from the trees that had grown upon its site. Cleared land, as an Eastern or Middle Western farmer knows the term, seemed almost non-existent. Black and massive stumps rose everywhere, like gravestones to the dead forest. “There’s so danged many stumps in this country,”[335] one of these pioneer farmers remarked, “that sometimes I think that the Lord never intended for it to be cleared at all.” The problem of getting rid of these stumps is one of the most perplexing with which the Northwestern farmer has to contend, the expense of clearing land averaging in the neighbourhood of seventy-five dollars an acre. So inimical to colonisation has the question of land clearing become, indeed, that the State has found it necessary to step in and finance the stump-pullers in districts established in accordance with recent legislation. Though Washington is a country of hustle and hard work, no one who spends any length of time in it can fail to be impressed with the belief that it has a promising future. The climate is, as a whole, attractive. Though the cold is never extreme, the climate does not lack vigour, and, as a result of the Oregon mists, there is plenty of moisture. “We call ’em Oregon mists,” a farmer explained to me, “because they missed Oregon and hit here.” They are really more of a fog than a rain, and no one pays the slightest attention to them, even the womenfolk scorning to use umbrellas. These mists, taken with the verdancy of the vegetation and the pink-and-white complexions of the women, constantly reminded me of Ireland and the south of England. In striking contrast to the arroyos secos to which we became accustomed in many parts of California are the streams of Washington, which flow throughout the year, enough water-power going to waste annually to run a plant that would supply the nation.

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As the Pacific Highway goes, it is close to a hundred and fifty miles from Portland to Tacoma, but we made a slight detour so as to see Olympia, which is the capital of the State. Beyond its rococo State-house, which is surmounted by a statue of a female—it might be Justice and it might be Mrs. Pankhurst in her peignoir—there is nothing to distinguish Olympia from any one of a score of other pretty little towns whose back doors open onto the primeval forest. Because there was a moon in the heavens as big and yellow as a Stilton cheese, we decided to push on to Tacoma, which is thirty miles from Olympia, that night. I’ll not soon forget the beauty of that ride. With our engines purring like a contented cat we boomed down the radiant path that our headlights cut out of the darkness; the night air, charged with balsamic fragrance, beat in our faces; the black walls of the forest rose skyward on either hand, the tree tops bordering with ghostly hedges a star-sprinkled lane of sky. I wish you might have been there ... it was so enchanting and mysterious.

The theatres were vomiting their throngs of playgoers when we rolled under the row of electric arches which turns Tacoma’s chief thoroughfare into an avenue of dazzling light and drew up beneath the grotesque and towering totem-pole in the square in front of our hotel. Tacoma is as up-and-doing a city as you will find in a week’s journey through a busy land. It does not need to be rapped on the feet with a night-stick to be kept awake. Magnificently situated on a series of[337] terraces rising above an arm of Puget Sound, its streets, instead of defying the steepness of the hills, as do those of San Francisco and Seattle, sweep up them in long diagonals, like the ramps at the Grand Central Terminal in New York. Tacoma is peculiarly fortunate in being girdled by a series of so-called natural parks, a zone ten miles in width in which the landscape architect has not been permitted to improve on the lakes and woods and wild-flower-carpeted glades provided by the Creator. But Tacoma’s chief boast and glory is, of course, a mountain whose graceful, snow-capped cone, which bears an astonishing resemblance to Fujiyama, rises like an ermine-mantled monarch above the encircling forest. The name of the mountain is Rainier or Tacoma, according to whether you live in Seattle or Tacoma, an acrimonious dispute having been in progress between the people of the two cities over the question for some time, the citizens of Seattle claiming that the mountain is far too beautiful to be used as an asset in Tacoma’s municipal advertising campaign, while the people of the latter city assert that, as the British Admiral Rainier, for whom the peak was originally named, fought against the Americans in the Revolution, he does not deserve to have his name tacked onto an American mountain.

For thirty miles or more the road from Tacoma to Mount Rainier (for that is the name to which the Federal Government has given its approval) strikes across a wooded country as level as the top of a table, until, reaching the base of the mountain, it sweeps[338] upward in long and graceful spirals which were laid out by army engineers, for the region has been taken over by the government under its new and admirable policy of protecting the beauty-spots of the country through the formation of national parks. Nowhere, not even in the Alps, have I driven over a finer mountain road, the gradients being so gradual and the curves so skilfully designed that one scarcely appreciates, upon reaching National Park Inn, in the heart of the reservation, that he has climbed upward of five thousand feet since leaving tide-water at Tacoma. We spent the night at the Inn, a low-roofed, big-fireplaced tavern which has an air of cosiness and comfort in keeping with the surroundings. Everything about it reminded us of hotels we knew in the Alpine valleys, and when I drew up the shade in the morning the illusion was complete, for the great peak, its snow-clad flanks all sparkling in the morning sunlight, towered above us, just as Mont Blanc towers above Chamonix, dazzling, majestic, sublime. Leaving the Inn after an early breakfast, we motored up the mountain road as far as the snout of the great Nisqually Glacier, which is as far as automobiles are permitted to go. Take my word for it, this glacier—the largest on the continent outside of Alaska—is one of the most worth-while sights in all America. A river of ice, seven miles long and half a mile wide, it coils down the slope of the mountain like a mammoth boa-constrictor whose progress has been barred in other directions by the encircling wall of forest. We left the car at the glacier’s[339] snout, and, after an hour’s hard climbing over loose rubble and slippery rock, succeeded, in defiance of the danger signs, in reaching a flat shelf of rock from which we could look directly down upon the ice torrent, and there we ate the lunch that we had brought with us to the accompaniment of the intermittent crashes which marked the glacial torrent’s slow advance.

We descended to the road in time to catch the four-horse stage which runs twice daily from the Inn to Paradise Valley, which the Lady insisted that we must visit, “because,” she said, “there are snow-fields and fields of wild flowers side by side.”

“But you’ve seen much the same sort of thing in Switzerland,” I objected. “Don’t you remember that place above the Lake of Geneva, Territet, I think it was, where people in furs were skating on one side of the hotel and other people were having tea under big red parasols on the other?”

“I remember it, of course,” she answered, “but that was in Switzerland and this is in my own country, which makes all the difference in the world. Evidently you have forgotten that German baron we met at Grindelwald, who asked us if we didn’t think that the view from Paradise Valley was finer than the one from Andermatt, and we had to admit that we didn’t know where Paradise Valley was. I’m not going to let that sort of thing happen again. The next time I meet a foreigner I’m not going to be embarrassed to death by finding that he knows more about my own country than I know myself.”

[340]

So she had her way and, leaving the car behind us, we took the creaking stage up the steep and narrow road to the valley, where we gathered armfuls of wild flowers one minute and pelted each other with snowballs the next, and peered through the telescope—at a quarter a look—at the thirteen glaciers which radiate from the mountain’s summit, and aroused perfectly shameless appetites for supper, and slept as only healthily tired people can sleep, and the next morning, half intoxicated with the combination of blazing sunlight and sparkling mountain air, we rattled down again to the Inn and the waiting car.

The run from Rainier National Park, through Tacoma, to Seattle is as smooth and exhilarating as sliding down the banisters of the front stairs. Auto-intoxicated by the perfection of the roads, I stepped on the accelerator and in obedience to the signal the car suddenly leaped into its stride and hurtled down the highway at express-train speed, while farmhouses and barns and fields and orchards swept by us in an indistinguishable blur. It was glorious while it lasted. But out of the distance came racing toward us a big white placard, “City Limits of Seattle,” and I slowed down to a pace more conformable with the law and rolled over the miles of trestles which span the swamps and lowlands adjacent to Seattle as sedately as though a motor-cycle policeman had his eye upon us. The builders of Seattle must have been men of resource as well as courage, for those portions of the city that have not been reclaimed from the tide-lands have been[341] blasted out of the rocky hillsides, so that the city gives one the impression of clinging precariously to a slippery mountain slope midway between sea and sky. Instead of propitiating the hills, as is the case in Tacoma, the streets go storming up them at angles which give a motorist much the same sensation a rider has when his horse rears and threatens to fall over backward. Though Seattle is very big and very busy, with teeming streets and huge department stores and miles of harbour frontage and one of the tallest sky-scrapers in existence and a park and boulevard system probably unequalled anywhere, it gave me the impression of being a little crude, a trifle nouveau riche, and not yet entirely at home in its resplendent garments. Between Seattle and Portland the most intense rivalry exists, the two cities running almost neck-and-neck as regards population, although this assertion will be indignantly denied by the citizens of both of them. Standing at one of the world’s crossways, the terminus of several transcontinental railways and several trans-Pacific steamship lines, with a superb harbour and the recognised gateway to Alaska, Seattle has a tremendous commercial advantage over her Oregonian rival, but from a residential standpoint Portland, exquisitely situated on the Willamette near its junction with the Columbia, with its milder climate, its greater number of theatres and hotels, and its older society, has rather a more metropolitan atmosphere, a more assured air than its northern neighbour.

Seattle is the natural portal to the Puget Sound[342] country, that wilderness of mountains, glaciers, forests, lakes, lagoons, islands, bays, and inlets which makes the upper left-hand corner of the map of the United States look like a ragged fringe. It is not an easy country to describe. Southward from the Straits of Juan de Fuca, an eighty-mile-long arm of the Pacific penetrates the State of Washington—that is Puget Sound. On its eastern shore are the cities of Seattle and Tacoma, at the head of the sound is Olympia, the capital of the State, and bordering the western shore rise the splendid peaks of the unexplored Olympic Range. If your imagination will stand the further strain of picturing an archipelago four times the size of the Thousand Islands, clothed with forests of cedar, fir, and pine, and indented with countless bays, harbours, coves, and inlets, dropped down in this body of water, you will have a hazy conception of the island labyrinth of Puget Sound, which is generally admitted, I believe, to be the most beautiful salt-water estuary in the world. Despite the narrowness of many of its channels, the water is so deep and the banks so precipitous that at many points a ship’s side would touch the shore before its keel would touch the ground, which, taken in conjunction with its innumerable excellent harbours, makes it the most ideal cruising ground for power-boats on our coasts.

I can conceive, indeed, of no more enchanting summer than one spent in a well-powered, well-stocked motor-boat cruising in and about this archipelago, loitering from island to island as the fancy seized one,[343] dropping anchor in inviting harbours for a day or a week, as one pleased. There are deer and bear in the forests and trout in the rivers and salmon in the deeper waters, and, if those did not provide sufficient recreation, one could run across to the mainland and get the stiffest kind of mountain climbing on Mount Olympus or Mount Rainier. During the summer months scores of small steamers, the “mosquito fleet,” ply out of Seattle and Tacoma, hurrying backward and forward between the city wharfs and the fishing villages, farming communities, lumber camps, sawmills, and summer resorts that are scattered everywhere about the archipelago’s inland waterways, so that the camper on their shores, seemingly far off in the wilds, need never be without his daily paper, his fresh vegetables, or his mail.

Let us give ourselves the luxury of imagining—for, to my way of thinking, there is about as much enjoyment to be had in imagination as in realisation—that we have a fortnight at our disposal on which no business worries shall be permitted to intrude, that we have the deck of a sturdy power-boat beneath our feet, and that the placid, island-dotted waters of Puget Sound lie before us, asparkle on a summer’s morning. Leaving Seattle, seated on her stately hills, astern, and the grim, grey fighting ships across the Sound at the Bremerton Navy Yard abeam, we will push the wheel to starboard and point the nose of our craft toward Admiralty Inlet, the Straits of Juan de Fuca, and the open sea. Our first port of call will be, I think, at[344] Dungeness, whose waters are the habitat of those Dungeness crabs which tickle the palates and deplete the pocketbooks of gourmets from Vancouver to San Diego. At the back of Dungeness is Sequim Prairie, whose seventy odd thousand acres of irrigated lands produce “those great big baked potatoes” which are so prominent an item on dining-car menus in the Northwest. It is nothing of a run from Dungeness to Port Angeles, which is the most convenient gateway to the unexplored Olympics. A score or so of miles southward from Port Angeles by automobile, a portion of which is by ferry across the beautiful mountain Lake Crescent, and over a road which is a marvel of mountain engineering, are the Sol Duc Hot Springs, whose great modern hotel is in startling contrast to the savagery of the region which surrounds it. Laying our course from Port Angeles straight into the setting sun, we coast along the rock-bound, heavily timbered shores of the Olympic Peninsula to Neah Bay, where a crew of Macah Indians will take us in one of their frail canoes close around the harsh face of Cape Flattery, which is the extreme northwest corner of the United States. Westward of Cape Flattery we may not go, for beyond it lies the open sea; but, steering eastward again, we can nose about at will, loitering through the romantic scenery of Deception Pass and Rosario Straits, dropping in at Anacortes, whose canneries supply a considerable portion of the world with salmon, and coming thus to Friday Harbour, the county-seat of the San Juan Islands, which, despite the Robinson Crusoe-ness[345] of its name, looks exactly like one of those quaint, old-fashioned seaport towns which dot the coast of Maine. The San Juan Islands, which are a less civilised and more beautiful edition of the Thousand Islands of the Saint Lawrence, like their counterparts on the other side of the continent, lie midway between the American and the Canadian shores. They were the scene of numerous exciting incidents in the boundary dispute of the late fifties, being for a number of years jointly occupied by British and American troops; but, though several crumbling British blockhouses still rise above the island harbours, the nearest British soil is Vancouver Island, across the Strait of Georgia. That the Stars and Stripes, and not the Union Jack, fly to-day over this picturesque archipelago is due, curiously enough, to the Emperor Frederick, father of the present Kaiser, who was asked to act as arbitrator between England and the United States and decided in favour of the latter.

THE UNEXPLORED OLYMPICS.

A forest fire sweeping across the flanks of the Olympic range near Lake Chelan. In the foreground is a sea of glacial ice.

Did you ever, by any chance, drop into a sporting-goods store only to find yourself so bewildered by the amazing number and variety of implements for sports and recreations displayed upon its shelves that you scarcely knew what to choose? Well, that is precisely the sensation I had the first time I visited the Puget Sound country. I felt as though I had been turned loose in a gigantic sporting-goods store with so many things to choose from that I couldn’t make up my mind which to take first. And, mark you, everything is comparatively close at hand. If a Londoner wants to[346] get some mountain climbing he has to go to Chamonix or Zermatt, which means a journey of at least two days. If, getting his fill of precipices and glaciers and crevasses, he wishes some bear shooting, he must turn his face toward the Caucasus, to reach which will require seven or eight days more. Should he suddenly take it into his head that he would like some salmon fishing he will have to spend ten days and several hundred dollars in recrossing Europe to reach the fishing streams of Norway—and then pay a good round sum for the privilege of fishing in them when he gets there. On the other hand, one can leave Tacoma by train or motor-car and reach the slopes of the second highest peak in the United States, a mountain higher and more difficult of ascent than the Jungfrau, as quickly and as easily as one can go from New York to Poughkeepsie. From Seattle one can reach the country of the big grizzlies as easily as a Boston sportsman can reach the Maine woods. From Victoria, the island capital of British Columbia, a gallon of gasoline and a road as smooth as a billiard-table will take one to the banks of a stream where the salmon are too large to be weighed on pocket scales in less time than a Chicagoan spends in getting out to the golf-links at Onwentsia.

There is no other region of equal size, so far as I am aware, which offers so many worth-while things in a superlative degree for red-blooded people to do. Where else, pray, can you climb a mountain which is higher than any peak in Europe save one (Mount Hooker, in British Columbia, is only eighty feet lower[347] than Mont Blanc, the monarch of the Alps, while Mount Rainier, which, as I have remarked, is almost in Tacoma’s front yard, is nearly a thousand feet higher than the Jungfrau); where else can you look along your rifle barrel at such big game as grizzly, elk, panther, mountain-sheep, and even the spotted bear, the rarest of all North American big game; where else can you have your fly-rod bent like a sapling in a storm and hear your reel whir like a sawmill by a sixty-pound salmon or a six-pound trout; where else can you cruise, for weeks on end, amid the islands of an archipelago more beautiful than those of Georgian Bay and more numerous than those of the Ægean, without the necessity of ever dropping anchor twice in the same harbour; where else can you canoe by day and camp by night along rivers which have their sources on the roof of a continent and, after taking their course through a thousand miles of wilderness, empty into the greatest of the oceans; where else can you throw open the throttle of your motor on a macadamised highway which, in another year or two, will stretch its length across twenty-five degrees of latitude, linking Mexico with Alaska? Where else can you find such amusements as these, I ask? Answer me that.

Were it not for the complicated customs formalities that a motorist has, perforce, to go through at the Canadian border, one could, by getting an early start and not lingering over his lunch, make the one-hundred-and-seventy-mile journey from Seattle to Vancouver[348] between dawn and dark of the same day. But the red tape which the American officials insist upon unwinding before you can leave the land of the beef trust and the home of the Pullman porter and the equal amount of red tape which the Canadian officials wind up before you are permitted to enter the dominions of his gracious Majesty King George make a one-day trip out of the question; so we did it comfortably in two and spent the intervening night in the seaport town of Bellingham. It’s a great place for canneries, is Bellingham; indeed, I should think that the residents would be ashamed to look a salmon in the face. Twenty miles farther on, at a hamlet called Blaine, we were greeted by a huge sign whose staring letters read: “International Boundary.” On one side the Stars and Stripes floated over an eight-by-ten shanty; on the other side of this imaginary but significant line the Union Jack flapped in the breeze over a shanty a trifle larger. They are inquisitive, those British customs officials, and when they had finished with our car there wasn’t much they didn’t know about it. They inspected it as thoroughly as a Kaffir is inspected when he knocks off work in a South African diamond mine. Before entering Canada it is wise to obtain from the American authorities at the border a certificate containing a description of your car and all that it contains; otherwise you will be subjected to innumerable formalities upon entering the country again, while the Canadian laws require that a tourist desiring to remain more than eight days in the Dominion must[349] provide a bond to cover the value of his car and make in addition a deposit of twenty-five dollars, both of which will be returned to him when he leaves the country. There is a grocer in Blaine—I forget his name, but he is a most obliging fellow—who makes a specialty of providing bonds for motorists, and by going to him we saved ourselves much trouble. It was all very informal. He simply called up the Canadian customs house on the phone and said: “Say, Bill, there’s some folks here that’s motorin’ into Canada. I ain’t got time to make out a bond just now, ’cause there’s an old lady here waitin’ to buy some potatoes, but you just let ’em skip through and I’ll fix it up the next time I see you.” Careless and informal, just like that. So all they did was to take the pedigree of the car for four generations, note the numbers of the spare tires, inventory the extra parts, go through our belongings with a dandruff comb, inquire where I was born, what the E. in my name stood for, and was I unfortunate enough to have to pay taxes; and, after presenting me with a list of the pains and penalties which I would incur if I broke any of his Majesty’s orders in council, permitted us to enter the territory of the Dominion.

WHERE THE SALMON COME FROM.

“It’s a great place for canneries, is Bellingham; I should think the residents would be ashamed to look a salmon in the face.”

I hope, for the sake of those who follow in our tire tracks, that the fifty miles of highway between Blaine and Vancouver has been materially improved since we went over it. Doubtless with the best intentions in the world, they had constructed a “crowned” road, which, as its name implies, is one that is rounded upward in the middle so as to drain the more readily;[350] but, as a result of the rains, the sloping sides were so greasy that it was only with considerable difficulty that I kept the car from sliding into the ditch. There is one thing that the motorist must bear constantly in mind from the moment his front tires roll across the Canadian border, and that is keep to the left. Barring New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, British Columbia is the only Canadian province which retains the English system of turning to the left and passing to the right, and it takes an American some time to become habituated to it.

After seemingly endless miles of slippery going through dripping woods, we entered the outskirts of New Westminster, a prosperous seaport near the mouth of the Fraser and the oldest place in this region, as age is counted in western Canada. A splendid boulevard, twenty-five miles long, connects New Westminster with Vancouver, and the car fled along it as swiftly as an aeroplane and as silently as a ghost. The virgin forest dwindled and ran out in recently made clearings, where gangs of men were still at work dynamiting and burning the stumps; and on the cleared land neat cottages of mushroom growth appeared, and these changed gradually to two-storied, frame houses, and these again to the increasingly ornate mansions of the well-to-do, the wealthy, and the rich. Through the murk beyond them the white sky-scrapers of Vancouver shot skyward—memorials to the men who have roped and tied and tamed a savage land.

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## XIII
CLINCHING THE RIVETS OF EMPIRE

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“Up along the hostile mountains where the hair-poised snowslide shivers—
Down and through the big fat marshes that the virgin ore bed stains,
Till I heard the mile-wide muttering of unimagined rivers
And beyond the nameless timber saw illimitable plains.
Plotted sites of future cities, traced the easy grades between ’em;
Watched unharnessed rapids wasting fifty thousand head an hour;
Counted leagues of water frontage through the axe-ripe woods that screen ’em—
Saw the plant to feed a people—up and waiting for the power!”

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### XIII
CLINCHING THE RIVETS OF EMPIRE

Darkness had fallen on the Oregonian forest when our forward tire exploded with a report which sounded in that eerie stillness like a bursting shell. It was not a reassuring place to have a blowout—in the heart of a forest as large as many a European kingdom, with the nearest settlement half a hundred miles away and the nearest apology for a hotel as many more. Between the cathedral-like columns of the pines, however, I glimpsed a signal of human presence in the twinkling of a fire, and toward it I made my way through underbrush and over fallen trunks, while my chauffeur, blaspheming under his breath, busied himself at the maddening task of fitting on another tire in the darkness.

I shall not soon forget the incongruity of the scene which greeted me as I halted on the edge of a little clearing fitfully illuminated by a roaring camp-fire. Within the circle of warmth—for the summer nights are chilly in the north country—stood a canvas-topped wagon which appeared to be a half-brother to a prairie-schooner, an uncle to an army ambulance, and a cousin to a moving van. Its side curtains had been let down, so that it formed a sort of tent on wheels, and seated[354] beside it on an upended soap box a plump little woman in a calico dress was preparing six small youngsters for bed as unconcernedly as though she were in a New England farmhouse, with the neighbours’ lights twinkling through the trees, instead of in the middle of a primeval wilderness, a long day’s journey from anywhere. The horses had been outspanned, as they say in South Africa, and were placidly exploring the recesses of their nose-bags for the last stray grams of oats. A lank, stoop-shouldered, sinewy-framed man, who had been squatting beside the fire watching the slow progress of a pot of coffee, slowly rose to his feet on my approach and slouched forward with outstretched hand. He radiated good nature and hospitality and an air of easy-going efficiency, and from the first I liked him.

“Howdy, friend,” he drawled, with the unmistakable nasal twang of the Middle West. “I reckon you’ve had a little bad luck with your machine, ain’t you? We heard you a-comin’ chug-chuggin’ through the woods, hell bent for election, an’ all to once there was a noise ’s if some one had pulled the trigger of a shotgun. ‘There,’ says I to Arethusa, ‘some pore autermobile feller’s limpin’ ’round in the darkness on three legs,’ says I, ‘an’ as soon ’s I get this coffee to boilin’ I reckon I’ll stroll over with a lantern an’ see if I can’t give him some help.’”

“Just as much obliged,” said I, “but my man has the tire pretty well on by now. But we could do with a cup or so of that coffee if you’ve some to spare.”

This settler’s nearest neighbour was fifty miles away—

And he was a Swede farmer with a Siwash wife.

OUTPOSTS OF CIVILISATION.

[355]

“That’s what coffee’s for, friend—to drink,” he said cordially, reaching for a tin cup. “Where’ve you come from?” he added with polite curiosity.

“From the Mexican border,” said I, with, I suspect, a trace of self-satisfaction in my voice, for fifteen hundred miles of desert, forest, and mountains lay behind us. “And you?” I asked in turn.

“Us?” he answered. “Oh, we’ve come from Kansas.” (He said it as unconcernedly as a New Yorker might mention that he had just run over to Philadelphia for a day.) “Left Emporia thirteen weeks ago come Thursday and have averaged nigh on twenty-five miles a day ever since. An’ the horses ain’t in bad condition, neither.”

“And where, in the name of Heaven,” I exclaimed, “are you going?”

“Well,” was the reply, “we’re headed for British Columbia, but I reckon we’ll have to winter somewheres in Washington and push on across the line in the spring. You see, friend,” he continued, in his placid, easy-going manner, in reply to my rapid fire of inquiries, “it was this way. I was in the furniture business back in Kansas, furniture an’ undertakin’, but I didn’t much care for the business ’cause it kept me indoors so much, my folks always havin’ been farmers and such like. Well, one day a while back, I picked up one of them folders sent out by the Canadian Gov’ment, tellin’ ’bout the rich resources up in British Columbia, an’ how land was to be had for the askin’. So that night when I went home I says to[356] Arethusa: ‘What’d you think of sellin’ out an’ packin’ up and goin’ up British Columbia way, an’ gettin’ a farm where we can live out o’ doors an’ make a decent livin’?’ ‘Sure,’ says she, ‘I’d like it fine. An’ it’ll be great for the kids.’ ‘All right,’ says I,’ it’s all decided. I’ll build a body for the delivery wagon that we can sleep in, an’ we’ll take Peter an’ Repeater, the delivery team, an’ it won’t take us more than six or eight months to make the trip if we keep movin’.’ You see, friend,” he added, “my paw moved out to Kansas when there warn’t nothin’ there but Indians an’ sage-brush, an’ hers did, too, so I reckon this movin’ on to new places is sort of in the blood.”

“But why British Columbia?” I queried. “Why Canada at all? What’s the reason that you, an American, don’t remain in the United States?”

“Well, I don’t know exactly, friend,” he answered, a little shamefacedly, I thought, “unless it’s because it’s a newer country up there an’ a man has a better chance. What with the Swedes an’ the Germans an’ the Eyetalians, this country’s gettin’ pretty well settled an’ there ain’t the chances in it there was once; but up British Columbia way it’s still a frontier country, they tell me, an’ a man who’s willin’ to buckle down an’ work can make a home an’ a good livin’ quicker’n anywhere else, I guess. It’s fine land up in the middle o’ Vancouver Island, I hear, an’ in the Cariboo country, too, an’ they want settlers so darn bad that they’ll give you a farm for nothin’. An’ it’s a pretty good country for a man to live in, too. Here in[357] the United States we do a heap o’ talkin’ ’bout our laws, but up in Canada they don’t talk about ’em at all—they just go right ahead an’ enforce ’em. I may be in wrong, of course, but from all I hear it’s goin’ to be a great country up there one of these days, when they get the railroads through, an’ me an’ Arethusa sorta got the notion in our heads that we’d like to be pioneers, like our paws were, an’ get in an’ help build the country, an’ let our kids grow up with it. You’ve got to be startin’, eh? Won’t you have another cup o’ coffee before you go? Well, friend, I’m mighty glad to’ve met you. Good luck to you.”

“Good luck to you,” said I.

“Chopping a path to To-morrow—” Frontiersmen clearing a town site in the forests of British Columbia. | Law and order in the back country: the sheriff of the Cariboo—the only law-officer for three hundred miles.

BREAKING THE WILDERNESS.

Though I didn’t appreciate it at the time, my acquaintance of the forest was a soldier in an army of invasion. This army had come from the south quietly, unostentatiously, without blare of bugle or beat of drum, its weapons the plough and the reaper, the hoe and the spade, its object the conquest, not of a people but of a wilderness. Have you any conception, I wonder, of the astounding proportions which this agricultural invasion of Canada has assumed? Did you know that last year upward of one hundred thousand Americans crossed the border to take up farms and carve out fortunes for themselves under another flag? These settlers who are trekking northward by rail and road are the very pick of the farming communities of our Middle West. Besides being men of splendid character and fine physique, and of a rugged honesty[358] that is characteristic of those closely associated with the soil, they take with them a substantial amount of capital—probably a thousand dollars at least, on an average, either in cash, stock, or household goods. Moreover, they bring what is most valuable of all—experience. Coming from a region where the agricultural conditions are similar to those prevailing in the Canadian West, they quickly adapt themselves to the new life. Unlike the settlers from the mother country and from the Continent, to whom everything is strange and new, and who consequently require some time to adjust themselves to the changed conditions, the American wastes not a moment in contemplation but rolls up his sleeves, spits on his hands, and goes hammer and tongs at the task of making a farm and building a home. He is efficient, energetic, industrious, businesslike, adaptable, and quite frankly admits that he has come to the country because it offers him better prospects. So, though he may not sing “God Save the King” with the fervour of a newly arrived Briton, he is none the less valuable to the land of his adoption.

A heavy load but well packed. | Even the dogs have to carry their share.
A heavy load poorly packed.

PACK-HORSES AND A PACK-DOG.

Ask your average well-informed American what he knows about British Columbia, and it is dollars to doughnuts that he will remark rather dubiously: “Oh, yes, that’s the place where the tinned salmon comes from, isn’t it?” Take yourself, for example. Did you happen to be aware that, though it has barely as many inhabitants as Newark, N. J., its area is equal to that of California, Oregon, and Washington put together, with Indiana thrown in to make good measure? Or,[359] if the comparison is more graphic, that it is larger than the combined areas of Italy, Switzerland, and France? Westernmost of the eleven provinces comprising the Dominion, it is bounded on the south by the orchards of Washington and the mines of Idaho; eastward it ends where the cattle-ranges of Alberta begin; to its north are the fur-bearing Mackenzie Territories and the gold-fields of the Yukon; westward it is bordered by the heaving Pacific and that narrow strip of ragged coast which forms the panhandle of Alaska. Though clinging to its edges are a score of towns and two great cities; though a transcontinental railway (the only one on the continent, by the way, which runs from tide-water to tide-water under the same management and the same name) hugs the province’s southern border and another is cutting it through the middle; its vast hinterland, larger than the two Scandinavian kingdoms, with its network of unnamed rivers and its unguessed-at wealth in forests, fish, furs, and minerals, contains thousands upon thousands of square miles which have never felt the pressure of a white man’s foot or echoed to a white man’s voice. Do you realise that, should you turn your horse’s head northwestward from the Kootenai, on the Idaho border, you would have to ride as far as from Lake Superior to the Gulf of Mexico before you could unsaddle beneath the Stars and Stripes at White Pass, on the frontier of Alaska? Did you know that the province contains the greatest compact area of merchantable timber in North America, its forests being greater in extent than those of the New England[360] States, New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and the Blue Ridge combined? I have heard naval experts and railway presidents and mining men talk ponderously of a future shortage in the coal supply—but they need not worry, for British Columbia’s coal measures are estimated to contain forty billion tons of bituminous and sixty billion tons of anthracite (100,000,000,000, tons in all, if so endless a caravan of ciphers means anything to you)—enough to run the engines of the world until Gabriel’s trumpet sounds “Cease working.” The output of its salmon canneries will provide those who order fish on Fridays with most excellent and inexpensive eating until the crack of doom. Its untouched deposits of magnetite and hematite are so extensive that they bid fair to make the ironmasters of Pittsburg break that commandment (I forget which one it is) which says: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s goods.” The province has enough pulpwood to supply the Hearst and Harmsworth presses with paper until the last “extra special edition” is issued on the morning of judgment day. The recently discovered petroleum deposits have proved so large that they promise to materially reduce the income of the lean old gentleman who plays golf on the Pocantico Hills. The area of agricultural and fruit lands in the province is estimated at sixty million acres, of which less than one tenth has been taken up, much less put under cultivation. And scattered through the length and breadth of this great Cave-of-Al-ed-Din-like territory is a total population of less than four[361] hundred thousand souls. Everything considered, it has, I suppose, greater natural resources than any area of the same size on the globe. So I don’t see how a young man with courage, energy, ambition, a little capital, and a speaking acquaintance with hard work could do better than to drop into the nearest railway ticket office and say to the clerk behind the counter: “A ticket to British Columbia—and step lively, if you please. I want to get there before it is too late to be a pioneer.”

Situated in the same latitude as the British Isles, sheltered from the winter blizzards of the prairie provinces by the high wall of the Rocky Mountains, its long western coast washed by the warm waves of the Japan current, its air tinctured with the balsamic fragrance of millions of acres of hemlock, spruce, and pine, British Columbia’s climate is, to use the phraseology of the real-estate boosters, “highly salubrious”; although, to be strictly truthful, I am compelled to add that it is extremely wet during a considerable portion of the year. But it is a misty, drizzly sort of rain to which no one pays the slightest attention. You will see ladies without umbrellas stop to chat on the streets, and men lounging and laughing in front of the clubs and hotels in a rain which would make a Chicagoan hail a taxicab and a Bostonian turn up his collar and seek the subway. When you speak about it they laugh good-naturedly and say in a surprised sort of way: “Why, is it raining? By Jove, it is a trifle misty, isn’t it? Really, you know, I hadn’t noticed it at all.”[362] Then they will go on to tell you that it is the moistness of the climate which gives British Columbia its beautiful women and its beautiful flowers. And I can, and gladly do, vouch for the beauty of them both. They—particularly the women—are worth going a long way to see.

You mustn’t confuse British Columbia, you understand, with the flat, monotonous, grain-growing provinces which lie on the other side of the Rockies. It isn’t that sort of a country at all. It is too mountainous, too ravined, with many impassable chasms and nigh-impenetrable forests. Its plateaus are eroded by lake and river into gorges which are younger sisters of the Grand Cañon of the Colorado. From a little distance the mountain slopes look as though they had been neatly upholstered in the green plush to which the builders of Pullman cars are so partial, but, upon closer inspection, the green covering resolves itself into dense forests of spruce and pine. Thousands and thousands of brooks empty into the creeks and hundreds of creeks empty into the big rivers, and these mighty waterways, the Fraser, the Kootenai, the Skeena, the Columbia, go roaring and booming seaward through their rock-walled channels, wasting a million head of power an hour. Nowhere, that I can recall, are so many picturesque and interesting scenes combined with such sensational and impressive scenery as along the cañon of the Lower Fraser. Here the mountains of the Coast Range rise to a height of nearly two miles above the surface of the swirling, angry river, the walls[363] of the cañon being so precipitous and smooth that one marvels at the daring and ingenuity of the men who built a railway there. As the cañon widens, the traveller catches fleeting glimpses of Chinamen washing for gold on the river bars; of bearded, booted lumberjacks guiding with their spike-shod poles the course of mile-long log rafts; of Siwash Indians, standing with poised salmon-spears on the rocks above the stream, like statues cast in bronze. Then the outposts of civilisation begin to appear in the form of hillsides which have been cleared and set out to fruit-trees, of Japanese truck-gardens, every foot of which is tended by the little yellow men with almost pathetic care, of sawmills, and salmon canneries; and so through a region where neat hamlets alternate with stretches of primeval forest, until in the distance, looming above the smoke pall, the sky-scrapers of Vancouver appear.

The Upper Fraser: “Streams of threaded quicksilver hasten through the valleys as though anxious to escape from the solitude that reigns.”

“On the flanks of the ridges, massed in their black battalions, stand the bleak, barbarian pines.”

IN THE GREAT, STILL LAND.

The chief cities of the province are Vancouver, the commercial capital and a port and railway terminus of great industrial importance, and Victoria, the seat of government and the centre of provincial society. There are also several smaller cities: New Westminster, at the mouth of the Fraser and so close to Vancouver that it is almost impossible for the stranger to determine where the one ends and the other begins; Nanaimo, a coal-mining town of considerable importance on the eastern shore of Vancouver Island, and Alberni, famous for its salmon fisheries, at the head of an arm of the sea extending inland from the western coast; Nelson, the chef-lieu of the prosperous fruit-growing[364] district of the Kootenai, in the extreme southeastern corner of the province; Bella Coola, on a fiord at the mouth of the Bella Coola River; Ashcroft, the gateway to the hinterland, on the main line of the Canadian Pacific Railway; Fort George, at the junction of the Fraser and Nechako Rivers; and Prince Rupert, the remarkable mushroom city which the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway has built, from the ground up, on the coast of British Columbia, forty miles south of the Alaskan border, as the Pacific Coast terminus for the transcontinental system which has recently been completed.

Between Vancouver and Victoria the most intense rivalry exists. They are as jealous of each other as two prima donnas singing in the same opera. Vancouver is a great and prosperous city, with broad and teeming streets, clanging street-cars, rumbling traffic, belching factory chimneys, towering office-buildings, extensive railroad yards, excellent pavements, and attractive residential suburbs. Of course there is nothing very startling in all this, were it not for the fact that it is all new—twenty years ago there was no such place on the map. It is a busy, bustling place, where every one seems too much occupied in making fortunes overnight to have much time to spare for social amenities. There was a land boom on the last time I was in Vancouver—in fact, I gathered that it was a perennial condition—and prices were being asked (and paid!) for town lots not yet cleared of forest which would have made an American real-estate agent admit quite frankly[365] that he had not progressed beyond the kindergarten stage of the game. I am perfectly serious in saying that within the city limits of Vancouver lots are being sold which are still covered with virgin forest. Within less than two miles of the city hall you can see gangs of men clearing residential sites by chopping down the primeval forest with which they are covered and blowing out and burning the stumps. This real-estate boom, with its consequent inflation of land values, has had a bad effect on the prosperity of Vancouver, however, for many ordinarily conservative business men, dazzled by visions of sudden wealth, have gone land mad; money is difficult to get, for Canadian banks are prohibited by law from loaning on real estate; and, like so many other towns which have been stimulated by artificial means, Vancouver is already beginning to show the effects of the inevitable reaction.

Victoria, unlike Vancouver, is old, as oldness counts in the Dominion. It was the seat of government when Vancouver was part jungle and part beach. It is the residential city of western Canada, and is much in vogue as a place of permanent abode for those who in any of the nearer provinces “have made their pile,” for well-to-do men with marriageable daughters and socially ambitious wives, and for military and naval officers who have retired and wish to get as much as possible out of their limited incomes. Victoria is as essentially English as Vancouver is American. It is, indeed, a bit of England set down in this remote corner of the empire. It has stately government buildings,[366] broad, tree-shaded streets, endless rows of the beam-and-plaster villas which one sees in every London suburb, and one of the most beautiful parks I have ever seen. Its people spend much of their time on the tennis-courts, cricket-fields, and golf-links, and are careful not to let business interfere with pleasure. That is the reason, no doubt, why in business Vancouver has swept by Victoria as an automobile sweeps by a horse and buggy. Vancouver might aptly be compared to a hustling, energetic business man who never lets slip an opportunity to make a dollar and who is always on the job. Victoria, on the contrary, is a quietly prosperous, rather sportily inclined old gentleman who is fond of good living and believes that no time is wasted that is devoted to sport. Each town has a whole-souled contempt for the other. The Victorian takes you aside and says: “Oh, yes, Vancouver is progressing quite rapidly, I hear, although, fact is, the subject really doesn’t interest me. The people are so impossible, you know. Why, would you believe it, my dear fellow, most of them came there without a dollar to their names—fact, I assure you. Now they’re all bally millionaires. Positively vulgar, I call it. Very worthy folk, no doubt, but scarcely in our class. Look here, let’s have a drink and then motor out and have a round of golf. What say, old chap? Right-o!”

The Vancouver man shoves his derby on the back of his head, sticks a thumb in the armhole of his waistcoat, and with the other hand gives you a resounding whack on the shoulder. “Victoria? Pshaw, no one[367] takes Victoria seriously. Nice little place to send the madam and the kids for the summer. But it’s asleep—nothing doing—no business. Why, say, friend, do you know what they do down there? They drink afternoon tea! Believe me, Vancouver is the only real, growing, progressive, wide-awake, up-and-doing burg this side of Broadway. Say, have you got an hour to spare? Then just jump into my car here and I’ll run you out and show you a piece of property that you can make a fortune on if you buy it quick. Yes, sirree, you can get rich quick, all right all right, if you invest your money in Vancouver.”

There are not more than ten harbours in the world, certainly not more than a dozen at the most, that have a right to be spoken of in the same breath with Victoria’s landlocked port. Picking her cautious way through the long, narrow, curving entrance that makes the harbour of Victoria resemble a chemist’s retort, our vessel swept ahead with stately deliberation, while we leaned over the rail in the crispness of the early morning and watched the scenes that accommodatingly spread themselves before us. Slender, white-hulled pleasure yachts, dainty as a débutante; impertinent, omnipresent launches, poking their inquisitive noses everywhere and escaping disaster by the thickness of their paint; greasy, hard-working tugboats, panting like an expressman who has carried your trunk upstairs; whalers outfitting for the Arctic—you can tell ’em by the scarlet lookout’s barrel lashed to the fore masthead; rusty freighters from Sitka, Callao, Singapore,[368] Heaven knows where; Japanese fishing-boats with tattered, weather-beaten sails such as the artists love to paint; Siwash canoes manned by squat, shock-headed descendants of the first inhabitants; huge twin-funnelled Canadian Pacific liners outward bound for Yokohama or homeward bound for Vancouver, for Victoria boasts of being “the first and last port of call”—take my word for it, it’s a sight worth seeing, is Victoria Harbour on a sunny morning. We forged ahead at half speed and the city crept nearer and nearer, until we could make out the line of four-horsed brakes waiting to rattle those tourists whose time was limited to the customary “points of interest,” and the crowd of loungers along the quay, and the constables with their helmet straps under their lower lips and blue-and-white-striped bands on their sleeves, exactly like their fellows in Oxford Circus and Piccadilly. At the right the imposing stone façade of the Parliament buildings rose from an expanse of vivid lawn—as a result of the combined warmth and moisture the vegetation of Victoria is unsurpassed in the temperate zone; at the left the business portion of the city stretched away in stolid and uncompromising brick and stone; squarely ahead of us loomed the great bulk of the Empress Hotel. We would have run into it had we kept straight on, but of course we didn’t, for the captain yanked a lever on the bridge and bells jangled noisily in the engine room, and the vessel, turning ever so deliberately, poked her prow into the berth that awaited it like a horse entering its accustomed stall.

[369]

What I like about Victoria is that it is so blamed British. Unless you are observing enough to notice that the date-lines of the London papers in the Union Club are quite a fortnight old, you would never dream that you were upward of six thousand miles from Trafalgar Square and barely sixty from the totem-pole in Seattle. If you still have any lingering doubts as to the atmosphere of the place being completely and unreservedly British, they will promptly be dispelled if you will drop into the lobby (they call it lounge) of the Empress Hotel any afternoon at four o’clock and see the knickerbockered sons of Albion engaged in the national diversion of drinking tea. When an American is caught drinking afternoon tea he assumes an I-give-you-my-word-I-never-did-this-before-but-the-ladies-dragged-me-into-it air, but your Britisher does it with all the matter-of-courseness with which a New Yorker orders his pre-dinner cocktail. One of the earliest impressions one gets in Victoria is that all the inhabitants are suffering from extraordinarily hard colds—brought on, you suppose, by the dampness of the climate—but after a little it dawns on you that they are merely employing the broad A that they brought with them from the old country, along with their monocles and their beautifully cut riding clothes. In Vancouver, on the contrary, you never hear the broad A used at all unless by a new arrival with the brand of Bond Street fresh upon him. They have no time for it. They are too busy making money. The Victorians, on the other hand, never lie awake nights fretting about the filthy lucre. They are too busy having a good time.[370] They have enough money to be comfortable, and that seems to be all they want. That’s the plan on which the place is run—comfort and pleasure. Most of the Victorians, so I was told, are people with beer pocketbooks and champagne thirsts. For a man with a modest income and an unquenchable thirst for sport Victoria is the best place of residence I know. In most places it needs a rich man’s income to lead the sporting life, for game-preserves and salmon rivers and polo ponies run into a lot of money, but in Victoria almost any one can be a sport, if not a sportsman, for you can pick up a pony that can be broken to polo for sixty or seventy dollars and a few miles back of the city lies one of the greatest fishing and shooting regions in the world. The last time I was in Victoria I found all the banks and business houses closed, and flags were flying from every public building, and a procession, headed by mounted police and a band, was coming down the street. “What’s going on?” I inquired of a deeply interested bystander. “Is it the King’s birthday or is there royalty in town, or what?” “Not on your life!” he answered witheringly. “It’s the prime minister on his way to open the baseball season.”

If you want to go a-motoring in a foreign country without the expense and trouble of an ocean voyage, I doubt if you could do better than to put your car on a steamer at Seattle or Vancouver, with “Victoria” pencilled on the bill of lading. Take my word for it, you will find Vancouver Island as foreign (perhaps I[371] should say as un-American) as England; in many respects it is more English than England itself. Though the aggregate length of the insular highways is not very great, for civilisation has as yet but nibbled at the island’s edges, the roads that have been built are unsurpassed anywhere. If roads are judged not only by their smoothness but by the scenery through which they pass, then the highways of Vancouver Island are in a class by themselves. They are as smooth as the arguments of an automobile salesman; their grades are as easy as the path to shame; they are bordered by scenery as alluring as Scherezade. The spinal column of Vancouver’s highway system is the splendid Island Highway, which, after leaving Victoria, parallels the east coast, running through Cowichan, Chemainus, Ladysmith, Nanaimo, and Wellington, to Nanoose Bay. Here the road divides, one fork continuing up the coast to Campbell River, which is the northernmost point that can be reached by road, while the other fork swings inland, skirting the shores of Cameron Lake and through Alberni, at the head of Barclay Sound, to Great Central Lake, which, as its name indicates, is in the very heart of the island, upward of a hundred and fifty miles from Victoria as the motor goes. The first twenty miles of the Island Highway are known as the Malahat Drive, the road here climbing over a mountain range of considerable height by means of a splendidly surfaced but none too wide shelf, with many uncomfortably sharp turns, cut in the rocky face of the cliff. This shelf gradually ascends until[372] the giant firs in the gloomy gorge below look no larger than hedge-plants, and the waters of the sound, with its wild and wooded shores, like a miniature lakelet in a garden. The Malahat is a safe enough road if you drive with caution. But it is no place for joy riding. It is too narrow, in the first place, and the turns are too sharp, and it is such a fearfully long way to the bottom that they would have to gather up your remains with a shovel, which is messy and inconvenient.

Throughout our tour on Vancouver Island we were impressed with the universal politeness and good nature of the people we met, particularly in the back country, and by the courteous wording of the signs along the highways. The highway signs in the United States have a habit of shaking a fist in your face, metaphorically speaking, and shouting at you: “Go any faster if you dare!” But in Vancouver they assume that you are a gentleman and address you as such. Instead of curtly ordering you to “Go slow” without condescending to give any reason, they erect a sign like this: “Schoolhouse ahead. Please look out for the children,” and, a little way beyond, another which says, “Thank you”—a little courtesy which costs nothing except a few extra strokes of the brush and leaves you permeated with a glow of good feeling.

When we reached Nanaimo, which is a coal-mining centre of considerable importance, we found one of the periodic strikes which serve to relieve the tedium of life in the drab little colliery town in progress and a militia regiment of Highlanders encamped in its streets.[373] When we speak of militia in the United States we usually think of slouch-hatted youths in rather slovenly uniforms of yellow khaki, who meet every Wednesday night for drill at the local armoury, spend ten days in an instruction camp each summer, and parade down the main streets of their respective towns on Decoration Day and the Fourth of July. But these Canadian militiamen were something quite different. I don’t suppose that they are a whit more efficient when it comes to the business of slaughter than their cousins south of the border, but they are certainly a lot more picturesque. But I ask you now, candidly, can you imagine several hundred young Americans dressed in plaid kilts and plaid stockings, with an interim of bare knees, jackets chopped off at the waist-line, and dinky little caps with ribbons hanging down behind keeping the upper hand in a strike-ridden American city? I can’t. These young men belonged, so I was told, to a “Highland” regiment, though after talking with a few of them I gathered that their acquaintance with the Highlands consisted in having occupied seats in the upper gallery at a performance by Harry Lauder. But, kilts or no kilts, there was no doubt that they were running the show in Nanaimo and, from all indications, running it very well.

Decidedly the most worth-while thing on Vancouver Island, either from the view-point of an artist or a motorist, is that portion of the Island Highway between Nanoose Bay, on the Straits of Georgia, and Alberni, at the head of Barclay Sound. When I first[374] traversed it in the golden radiance of an October day, I thought it was the most beautiful road I had ever seen. And as I traverse it again in the motor-car of memory, with a knowledge of most of the other beautiful highways of the world to compare it with, I am still of the same opinion. So impressive is the scenery, so profound the silence that we felt a trifle awed and spoke in whispers when we spoke at all, as though we were in the nave of a great cathedral. High above us the tree tops interlaced in a roof of translucent green through which the sun-rays filtered, turning the road into a golden trail and the moss on the rocks and the tree trunks into old-gold plush. The meadowed hillsides were so thickly strewn with lacy ferns and wild flowers that it seemed as though the Great Architect had draped them in the dainty, flowered cretonne they use in ladies’ boudoirs; and scattered about, as might be expected in a lady’s boudoir, were silver mirrors—with rainbow-trout leaping in them. Then there were the mountains: range piled upon range, peaks peering over the shoulders of other peaks like soldiers en échelon. They ran the gamut of the more sober colours; green at the base, where the lush meadows lay, then the dark green of the forest, then the rusty brown of scrub and underbrush, the violet and blue and purple of the naked rock, and, atop of all, a crown of dazzling white.

The versatile gentlemen who write those alluring folders that you find in racks in railway offices and hotel lobbies very cleverly play on the Anglo-Saxon[375] love for sport by describing the region through which their particular system runs as “a sportsman’s paradise.” It makes small difference whether they are describing the New Jersey mud-flats or the Berkshire hills, they are all “sportsman’s paradises.” But the northern half of Vancouver Island is all that this much-abused term implies and more. It is, I suppose, the finest and most accessible fish and game country on the continent south of the Skeena. I am perfectly aware that I may be accused of belonging to the Ananias Club when I say that certain of the smaller streams in Vancouver Island (and also in northern British Columbia) are at certain seasons of the year so choked with salmon that they can be, and are, speared with a pitchfork, and that ruffed grouse and Chinese pheasants are so plentiful and tame that they can be knocked over with a long-handled shovel. It’s true, just the same. We didn’t pitchfork any salmon ourselves, because it isn’t our conception of sport, but we saw natives tossing them out of a stream north of Alberni as unconcernedly as though they were pitchforking hay. Nor did we assassinate any game-birds with a shovel; but more than once, during the run from Nanoose Bay to Great Central Lake, we had to swerve aside to avoid running down grouse, which were so tame that a Plymouth Rock would be wild in comparison; and once, near Cameron Lake, we actually did run over the trailing tail-feathers of a gorgeous Chinese cock pheasant that insolently refused to get off the road.

Alberni and its bigger, busier sister, Port Alberni,[376] occupy the anomalous position of being in the middle of the island and at the same time on its western coast. If you will take the trouble to look at the map you will see that the arm of the sea called Barclay Sound reaches into the very heart of the island, thus permitting deep-sea merchantmen to tie up at Port Alberni’s wharfs and take aboard cargoes of lumber and dried salmon. Alberni was one of the places that I should have liked to linger in, so peaceful and easy-going is its Old-World atmosphere as it dozes the sunny days away, the soft salt breath of the sea mingling with the balsamic fragrance of the forest which surrounds it. Because it is so comparatively little visited, and because the waters of the sound are famous for their salmon runs, we expected that we would have an opportunity to bend our rods off Alberni, but we were met with disappointment, for the salmon with which these waters swarm were, for strictly domestic reasons, not biting at the time we were there. So we kept on to Great Central Lake, a dozen miles north of Alberni, through the forest.

The Ark, on Great Central Lake. “Like its prototype of Noah’s day, it is a floating caravansary.”

A wolverine caught in a trap in the forest at the northern end of Vancouver Island.

SPORT ON VANCOUVER ISLAND.

Even though you do not know a trout from a turbot, a fly from a spoon; even though some of the finest scenery in the three Americas could not elicit an “Oh!” of admiration or an “Ah!” of pleasure, I hope that some day you will visit Great Central Lake, if for no other reason than to experience the novelty of spending a night in its extraordinary hotel. It is called The Ark, and, like its prototype of Noah’s day, it is a floating caravansary. Briefly, it is a hotel of[377] twenty bedrooms built on a raft anchored in the lake. When the fishing becomes indifferent in the neighbourhood, the proprietor hoists his anchors, starts up the engines of his launch, and tows his floating hotel elsewhere. The fish have a hard time keeping away from it, for it pursues them remorselessly. It is patronised in the main by that world-wide brotherhood whose members believe that no place is too remote or too difficult of access if their journey is rewarded by the thrill of a six-pound trout on an eight-ounce rod or by glimpsing a bighorn or a bear along a rifle barrel. For that reason one is quite likely to run across some very interesting people at The Ark. While we were there a party of English notabilities arrived. There were the Earl of Something-or-Other and his beautiful daughter, Lady Marjorie What’s-her-Name, and a cousin, the Honourable So-and-So, and the earl’s mine manager, and one or two others. Now there isn’t anything very remarkable about meeting British nobility in the Colonies, for nowadays you find earls and marquises and dukes floating around everywhere. In fact, as Mark Twain once remarked of decorations, you can’t escape them. The remarkable thing about this particular party was that they had tramped overland from the extreme northern end of the island, where some mining properties in which the earl was interested are situated, through unmapped and almost unknown forests, sleeping in the open with no covering save the blankets they carried on their backs, and with the Lady Marjorie for their cook. She was as slim and[378] trim and pretty a girl as one could ask for, and, with her curly hair creeping out from under her soft hat, her Norfolk jacket snugly belted to her lissom figure, her smartly cut knickerbockers and her leather stockings, she might have stepped out of one of those novels by the Williamsons.

The chief factor in the colonisation of British Columbia and in the development of its resources is the remarkable railway expansion which is now taking place. No region in the world has witnessed such extraordinary progress in railway construction during the past five years. Until the spring of 1914 the “C. P. R.,” as the Canadian Pacific is commonly called throughout the Dominion, enjoyed a monopoly of freight and passenger transportation in the province, being scarcely less autocratic in its attitude and methods than the Standard Oil Company before it was curbed by Federal legislation. But when, early in 1914, the last rail of the Grand Trunk Pacific was laid in the vicinity of Fort George and the last spike driven, the “C. P. R.” suddenly found its hitherto undisputed supremacy challenged by a rich, powerful, and splendidly equipped system, which, owing to its more northerly route and easier gradients, is able to make considerably faster running time from ocean to ocean than its long-established rival. Moreover, another great transcontinental system, the Canadian Northern, is already in partial operation and is rapidly nearing completion, while the construction gangs have begun work on the[379] Pacific Great Eastern, a subsidiary of the Grand Trunk Pacific, over whose rails the latter plans to reach tide-water at Vancouver, thus invading territory which the Canadian Pacific has heretofore regarded as peculiarly its own. In another year or so, therefore, British Columbia will not only have a more complete railway system than either Washington or Oregon, but it will be the terminus of three great transcontinental systems, each of which will run from tide-water to tide-water, under the same management and the same name.

If you will glance at the map at the back of this volume you will see that the railway systems of British Columbia roughly resemble a gigantic Z. The lower right-hand corner of the Z represents Kicking Horse Pass, near Lake Louise, where the Canadian Pacific crosses the Rockies; the lower left-hand corner may stand for Vancouver, which is the terminus of the Canadian Pacific, the Canadian Northern, and the Pacific Great Eastern; the upper right-hand corner of the Z we will designate as Yellowhead (or Tête Jaune) Pass, where both the Grand Trunk Pacific and the Canadian Northern cross the Rockies; while the upper left-hand corner is the great terminal port which the Grand Trunk Pacific has built to order at Prince Rupert. The lower bar of the Z approximately represents the Canadian Pacific, the upper bar the Grand Trunk Pacific, and the diagonal the Canadian Northern.

The main line of the Canadian Pacific enters the province at Kicking Horse Pass and, dropping southward in a series of sweeping curves, strikes the Fraser[380] at Lytton and hugs its northern bank to Vancouver. From the main line numerous branches straggle southward to the American border, thus giving access to the rich country lying between the Kootenai and the Okanogan. Entering British Columbia far to the northward, through the Tête Jaune Pass, where the mountains are much lower, the Canadian Northern lays its course southwestward in almost a straight line, crossing the Thompson just above its junction with the Fraser and thence paralleling the Canadian Pacific through the cañon of the Fraser, though on the opposite side of the river, to Vancouver. The Canadian Northern is, I might add, spending a large sum in the construction of railway shops and yards at Port Mann, a place which it is building to order amid the virgin forest, a few miles east of New Westminster. The Grand Trunk Pacific likewise uses the Tête Jaune Pass as a gateway. Instead of turning southward after crossing the mountains, however, it swings far to the north, following the east fork of the Fraser to Fort George and thence up the level and fertile valleys of the Nechako and the Bulkley to New Hazelton and so down the Skeena to Prince Rupert. Recognising the necessity of having a means of direct access to Vancouver, which is the metropolis of western Canada, the Grand Trunk Pacific now has under construction a subsidiary system, to be known as the Pacific Great Eastern, which, leaving the main line at Fort George, will follow the Fraser due southward to Lillooet and then strike directly across a virgin country to Vancouver,[381] thus giving the Grand Trunk Pacific two west-coast terminals instead of one. The Grand Trunk Pacific engineers have also drawn plans for a line running due north from New Hazelton toward the Yukon, which would throw open to exploitation the rich coal-fields of the Groundhog and the fertile prairies of northernmost British Columbia, the idea being, of course, to ultimately effect a junction with the proposed Federal railway in Alaska, thus bringing Alaska into direct railway communication with the outside world.

Indians breaking camp.

Mr. Powell arriving at a frontier hotel in the Nechako country.

An Indian bridge near New Hazelton.

LIFE AT THE BACK OF BEYOND.

Though enormously rich in timber and ore, Vancouver Island has not yet had its share of railway expansion, its only system of transportation at present being the Esquimault & Nanaimo Railway, which runs from Victoria to Alberni, in the heart of the island. The Canadian Northern, however, proposes to build a line from Victoria half-way up the west coast of the island, while the Grand Trunk Pacific, going its rival one better, has obtained a concession for building a railway from one end of the island to the other, thus opening up its enormously rich fisheries, mines, and forests. With this era of railway expansion immediately before them, it seems to me that the British Columbians are quite justified in looking at the future through rose-coloured glasses.

The bull train: the last on the continent.

The dog train: taking in supplies to the miners of the Groundhog coal-fields.

TRANSPORT ON AMERICA’S LAST FRONTIER.

Consider the cities, how they grow—Prince Rupert, for example. A city literally made to order, just as a tailor would make a suit of clothes, is something of a novelty even in an age which jeers at precedent and slaps tradition in the face. “Rome was not built[382] in a day,” but that was because it had no transcontinental railway system to finance and superintend and push forward its construction. If a Gaul, Transalpine, & Pompeian Railway had been in operation, and its directors knew their business, they would have turned loose their engineers, architects, and builders and, after staking out and draining a town site beside the Tiberian marshes, they would have run up the Eternal City and auctioned off the building lots along the Via Appia as expeditiously as the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway has brought into being the west-coast terminus which it has named Prince Rupert after that adventurous Palatine prince, nephew of Charles I, who was in turn a cavalry leader, a naval commander, and the first governor of the Hudson Bay Company. Unless your family atlas is of recent vintage (and I have regretfully observed that most of them were purchased at about the period of Stanley’s explorations) you will search it in vain for Prince Rupert, for this custom-made municipality came into existence about the same time as the tango and the turkey-trot. The easiest way to locate it, then, is to trace with your finger parallel 54° 40′ North (the slogan “Fifty-four forty or fight!” you will recall, once nearly brought on a war with England) until it reaches the Pacific Coast of North America. There, five hundred and fifty miles north of Vancouver, forty miles south of the Alaskan border, on Kai-en Island, at the mouth of the Skeena River, set on a range of hills overlooking one of the finest deep-water harbours in the world, is Prince[383] Rupert. It is in the same latitude as London and has a wet and foggy climate which cannot fail to make a Londoner feel very much at home. Probably never before have there been so much time and money expended in the planning and preliminary work of a new city. The town site was chosen only after a careful inspection of the entire British Columbia coast-line and was laid out by a famous firm of Boston landscape engineers with the same attention to detail which they would have given to laying out a great estate. Experts who have studied the plan on which Prince Rupert is built assert that in time it will be one of the most beautiful cities on the continent. The site is a picturesque one, for, from the six-mile-long shore-line which sweeps around the front of the city, the ground rises abruptly, so that on clear days—which, by the way, are far from common—a magnificent view may be had from the heights of the forested and fiord-indented coast, of the island-studded channel, of the Indian village of Metlakatla, known as the “Holy City,” and, on rare occasions, of the mountains of Alaska. Unless one is conversant with the development of the Pacific Coast; unless one has seen its seaports—Victoria, Vancouver, Seattle, Tacoma, San Pedro, San Diego—spring into being almost overnight, one cannot fully realise the possibilities and potentialities of this new city with the unfamiliar name. To begin with, the distance from Liverpool to Yokohama by way of Prince Rupert is eight hundred miles shorter than via New York and San Francisco; it is five hundred miles nearer the[384] Orient than any other Pacific port. Nothing illustrates more graphically the strategic value of its position than the fact that a traveller bound, say, for New York from China, Japan, or Alaska can board a train at Prince Rupert and be as far as Winnipeg, or virtually half across the continent, before the steamer from which he disembarked could reach Vancouver. In addition to the shorter distance across the Pacific must be added the much faster time that can be made by rail over the practically level grades (four tenths of one per cent) that the Grand Trunk Pacific has obtained through the lower mountains to the north, which will enable trains to be moved at the rate of two miles for every one mile on the heavier grades of rival systems. What is most important of all, however, Prince Rupert has at its back probably the potentially richest hinterland in the world—a veritable commercial empire waiting to be explored, developed, and exploited. The mineral wealth of all this vast region, the forest products, the gold, the coal, the copper, the iron ore of northern British Columbia and the Yukon, the food products of the prairie provinces, and the fish and fur of the far North—in short, all the westbound export wealth of this resourceful region—will find its outlet to the sea at Prince Rupert as surely and as true to natural laws as its rivers empty into the Pacific.

The pack-train: crossing the prairies of northern British Columbia.

The wagon-train: a settler on his way into the interior over the Cariboo Trail.

TRANSPORT ON AMERICA’S LAST FRONTIER.

You of the sheltered life: you, Mr. Bank President, you, Mr. Lawyer, you, Mr. Business Man, you, Mr. Tourist, who travel in Pullman cars and sleep in palatial hostelries, have you any real conception of the[385] breed of men who are conquering this wilderness, who are laying these railways, who are building these cities, who are making these new markets and new playgrounds for you and me? Some of them have saved and scrimped for years that they might be able to buy a ticket from the Middle West, or from the English shires, or from the Rhine banks to this beckoning, primeval, promiseful land. Others, taking their families and their household belongings with them, have trekked overland by wagon, just as their grandfathers did before them for the taking of the West, trudging in the dust beside the weary horses, cooking over camp-fires in the forest or on the open prairie, sleeping, rolled in their blankets, under the stars. Some there are who have come overland from the Yukon, on snowshoes, mayhap; their pitifully meagre possessions on their back, living on the food which they killed, their only sign-posts the endless line of wire-draped poles. There are the engineers, who, mocking at the hostility of the countenance which this savage, untamed land turns toward them, are pushing forward and ever forward their twin lines of steel, cutting their way through well-nigh impenetrable forests, throwing their spider spans across angry rivers and forbidding gorges, running their levels and laying their rails and driving their spikes oblivious to torrential rains or blinding snows, to blistering heat or freezing cold. Then, too, there are the silent, efficient, quick-witted men who have maintained law and order through the length and breadth of this great province—travelling on duty[386] through its wildest parts, amid dangers and privations without end, at one time deep in the snows of the far Nor’west, at others making their hazardous way on horseback along the brink of precipices which make one sick and dizzy to look down; swimming rapid rivers holding to the tails of their horses or journeying over the frozen lands with teams of dogs; one month in the mining camps on the uppermost reaches of the Fraser and the next carrying the fear of the law to the wild tribes of the Kootenai. Such are the men who, in Britain’s westernmost outpost, are clinching down the rivets of empire.

[387]

## XIV
BACK OF BEYOND

[388]

“I hear the tread of pioneers,
Of millions yet to be;
The first low wash of waves where soon
Shall roll a human sea.
The elements of empire here
Are plastic yet and warm,
The chaos of a mighty world
Is rounding into form.”

[389]

### XIV
BACK OF BEYOND

Most people—and by that I mean nine hundred and ninety-eight in every thousand—have come to believe quite positively that, on this continent at least, there is no longer any region that can truthfully be called “The Frontier.” Therein they are wrong. Because the municipality of Tombstone has applied to the Arizona Legislature for permission to change its name, because the cow-puncher is abandoning the range for the more lucrative occupation of cavorting before a moving-picture camera, because the roulette ball clicks no longer behind open doors in any Western town is no proof that the frontier is no more. As a matter of fact, it has only been pushed back. There still exists a real frontier, all wool and eight hundred miles wide, together with all the orthodox concomitants of cowboys, Concord coaches, log cabins, prairie-schooners, pack-trains, trappers, grizzly bears, and Indians. But it won’t last much longer. This is the last call. If you would see this stage of nation building in all its thrilling realism and picturesqueness you have need to hurry. A few more years—half a dozen at the most—and store clothes will replace the chaparejos and sombreros; the mail-sacks, instead of being carried in the[390] boots of stage-coaches, will be flung from the doors of flying trains; the motor-car will supplant the prairie-schooner and the pack-train.

Answer me, now. If, at a moderate outlay of time, money, and exertion, you could visit a region as untamed and colourful as was the country beyond the Pecos forty years back and peopled by the hardiest breed of adventurers that ever foreran the columns of civilisation, would you give up for a time the comforts of the sheltered life and go? You would? I hoped so. Get out the atlas, then, from its dusty place of exile and open it to the map of North America that I may show you the way. In the upper left-hand corner, stretching its scarlet bulk across eleven degrees of printed latitude, is British Columbia, whose central and northern portions contain thousands upon thousands of square miles that have never felt the pressure of a white man’s foot or echoed to a white man’s voice. Here is the last of the “Last West”; here the frontier is making its final stand; here, fighting the battles and solving the problems of civilisation, are to be found the survivors of that race of rugged adventurers, now almost extinct, who replaced the forest with the wheat-field—the Pioneers.

There are several routes by which one can reach the interior of the province: from the made-to-order seaport of Prince Rupert up the Skeena by railway to New Hazelton and Fort Fraser, for example; or down the South Fork of the Fraser by river steamer from Tête Jaune Cache to Fort George; or from the country[391] of the Kootenai overland through the Okanogan and Lillooet. These, however, are obscure side entrances and more or less difficult of access. The front door to the hinterland, and the logical way to enter it, is by way of Ashcroft, a one-street-two-hotels-and-eight-saloons town on the main line of the Canadian Pacific, eight hours east of Vancouver as the Imperial Limited goes. At Ashcroft, which is the principal outfitting point for all this region, begins the historic highway known as the Cariboo Trail, by which you can travel northward—provided you are able to get a seat in the crowded stages—until civilisation sits down to rest and the wilderness begins.

What the Wells-Fargo Company, with its comprehensive system of mail, passenger, and freight services, was to our own West in the days before the railway came, the British Columbia Express Company, commonly known as the “B. C. X.,” is to that vast region which is watered by the Fraser. Nowhere that I can recall has travelling through a wild and mountainous country been reduced to such a science. Although the company operates upward of a thousand miles of stage lines, along which are distributed more than three hundred horses at relay stations approximately sixteen miles apart, its coaches, in spite of blizzards, torrential rains, and ofttimes incredibly atrocious roads, maintain their schedules with the rigidity of mail-trains. The company’s equipment is as complete in its way as that of a great railway system, its rolling stock consisting of everything from a two-horse thorough-brace[392] “jerky” to a six-horse Concord stage, to say nothing of automobiles and sleighs. In conjunction with its system of vehicular transportation it operates a service of river steamers, specially constructed for running the rapids, upon the Upper Fraser and the Nechako.

The backbone of the “B. C. X.” system, and, indeed, of all transportation in the British Columbian hinterland, is the Cariboo Trail, a government post-road, three hundred miles long, which was built by the Royal Engineers in the early sixties as a result of the rush to the gold-fields on Williams Creek. Starting from Ashcroft, it runs due north for two hundred and twenty miles to Quesnel, on the Upper Fraser, where it abruptly turns westward and continues to its terminus at Barkerville, once a famous mining-camp but now a quiet agricultural community in the heart of the Cariboo. Scattered along the trail, at intervals of fifteen miles or so, are rest-houses where the wayfarer can obtain surprisingly well-cooked meals at a uniform charge of six bits—a “bit,” I might explain for the benefit of the Eastern chechako, being equivalent to twelve and a half cents. For the same price the traveller can get a clean and moderately soft bed, although he must accept it as part and parcel of frontier life should he find that the room to which he is assigned already contains half a dozen snoring occupants. These rest-houses, which, with their out-buildings, stables, and corrals, are built entirely of logs, are often liberally coated with whitewash and[393] occasionally surrounded by stockades and constantly reminded me of the post stations which marked the end of a day’s journey on the Great Siberian Road before Prince Orloff and his railway builders came. During the summer months the “up journey” of three hundred and twenty miles from Ashcroft to Fort George is performed by a conjoined service of motor-cars, stage-coaches, and river boats, and, if the roads are dry, is made in about four days. As a one-way ticket costs sixty-five dollars, exclusive of meals, the fare works out at a trifle over twenty cents a mile, thus making it one of the most expensive journeys of its length in the world, being even costlier, if I remember rightly, than the one by the Abyssinian railway from Djibuti to Deré Dawa. It is worth every last penny of the fare, however, for there is about it a novelty, a picturesqueness, an excitement, which cannot be duplicated on this continent. From the moment that you set your foot on the hub of the stage-coach in Ashcroft until your steamer slips out of Prince Rupert Harbour, southward bound, you are seeing with your own eyes, instead of through the unconvincing mediums of the Western novel and the moving-picture screen, a nation in the cellar-digging stage of its existence; you are transported for a brief time to the Epoch of the Dawn.

In anticipation of the atrocious roads which we expected to encounter, I had had the car fitted with shock-absorbers and had brought with me from Vancouver an entire extra set of springs, and at Ashcroft[394] we selected an equipment with as great care as though we were starting on an East African safari. A pick, a long-handled shovel, a pair of axes, a block and tackle, four spare tires, and a dozen inner tubes comprised the essentials of our outfit, to which was added at Quesnel a supply of tinned foods, a small shelter tent, a set of rubber sheets, and three of the largest-size Hudson Bay blankets. It’s a costly business, this motoring in lands where motors have never gone before. The most important thing of all, of course, is the gasoline, the entire success of our venture depending upon our ability to carry a sufficient supply with us to get us through the six hundred miles of uninhabited wilderness between Quesnel and the Skeena. By reducing our personal belongings to a minimum, we succeeded in getting eight five-gallon tins into the tonneau of the car, in addition to the twenty gallons in the tank, thus giving us a total of sixty gallons, which, theoretically at least, should have sufficed us. As a matter of fact, it did not suffice to carry us half-way to the Skeena, so slow was the going and so terrible the condition of the road, and, had I not been so fortunate as to obtain an order from a British development company on its agents at several points in the interior, instructing them to supply us with gasoline from some drums which had been taken in at enormous expense a year or so before in a futile attempt to establish an automobile service, we should have been compelled to abandon the car in the wilderness for lack of fuel. Gasoline, like everything else, is expensive in the interior: at Ashcroft I paid[395] fifty cents a gallon, at Quesnel a dollar, and thereafter, until we reached the end of steel at Moricetown, two dollars a gallon—which, so I was assured, was exactly what it had cost the company to freight it in. Briefly, our plan was this: to start from Ashcroft, a station on the Canadian Pacific, two hundred miles from the coast, and follow the Cariboo Trail northward to Quesnel, thence striking through the unsettled and almost unexplored wilderness which reaches from the Fraser to the Skeena, following the Yukon Telegraph Trail through Fort Fraser to New Hazleton, on the Skeena, which is barely half a hundred miles south of the Alaskan border. I asked every one I met in Ashcroft as to our chances of getting through, and the more people to whom I talked the slimmer they seemed to become.

One man assured us that there was no road whatever north of Fort Fraser and that, if we wanted to get through, we would have to take the car apart and pack it in on the backs of horses, as an automobile agent from Seattle had done the year before; another told us that there were no bridges and that we would be compelled to hire Siwash Indians to make rafts to ferry us across the streams; still a third cheered us up by assuring us that we could always get a team to haul us out.

“An eight-horse swing ought to haul you out in a fortnight,” he remarked cheeringly.

“What would it cost?” I inquired.

“Oh,” he answered, “if you’re a good hand at[396] bargaining you ought to get the outfit for about a hundred dollars a day.”

That cheered us up tremendously, of course.

We started from Ashcroft early on an autumn morning. The air was like sparkling Moselle, overhead was a sky of wash-tub blue, and before us the gray ribbon of the Cariboo Trail stretched away, between dun and barren hills, into the unknown. The entire population of the little town had turned out to see us off, and as we moved away, with the long, low bonnet of the car pointed northward, they gave us a cheer and shouted after us, “Hope you’ll get through, fellows!” and “Good luck!” Before we left Seattle I had bought a little silk American flag, and this we flew from a metal rod at the front of the hood, and more than once, when we were mired in the mud below the Nechako, and were utterly exhausted and ready to quit, it was the sight of that bit of tricoloured bunting fluttering bravely before us which spurred us on.

Were the Cariboo Trail in certain of the Eastern States it would be described by the natives as “a fair to middlin’ road,” and it is all of that and more—in the dry season. When we traversed it, in the early fall, it had not yet been rutted by the torrential autumn rains and heavy teaming and was as good a road as an automobile pioneer could ask for. In that journey up the Cariboo Trail were concentrated all the glamour and colour and panorama of that strange, wild border life which most people think of as having passed with the pony express and the buffalo. A stage-coach rattled[397] past amid a rolling cloud of dust, its scarlet body lurching and swaying on its leathern springs, its four horses at a spanking trot, the driver cracking his whip-lash spasmodically between the ears of his leaders, for he carried his Majesty’s mails and must make his six miles an hour, hour in and hour out. Like a gigantic boa-constrictor, a pack-train wound slowly past, the burdened mules plodding by dejectedly, long ears to shaven tails. Scattered along the line, like mounted officers beside a marching column, were the packers: wiry, iron-hard fellows, their faces sun tanned to the colour of their saddles; picturesque figures in their goatskin chaparejos, their vivid neckerchiefs, and their broad-brimmed, rakish hats. Where they were bound for, Heaven only knows: with supplies for the operators of the Yukon Telegraph, perhaps, or the miners of the Groundhog, or, it might be, for the lonely trading-posts on Great Slave Lake and the headwaters of the Liard and the Peace. In the pack-train’s dusty wake would plod a solitary prospector, dog dirty, his buckskin shirt glazed with grime, his tent, pick, shovel, and his meagre store of food loaded upon a single patient donkey. Occasionally we passed some Sguswap and Siwash ranchers—for the Indian of British Columbia takes more kindly to an agricultural life than do his brothers on the American side of the border—gaily clad squaws and bright-eyed children peering curiously at our strange vehicle from beneath the canvas covers of the wagons, driving into the settlements to barter the produce of their holdings in the back country[398] for cartridges, red blankets, ginger ale, perhaps a phonograph.

But oftenest of all we met the freighters, their six and eight and twelve horse teams straining at the huge, creaking, white-topped wagons—the freight trains of the railroadless frontier. Though they bear a marked resemblance to the prairie-schooners of crossing-the-plains days, the British Columbian freight wagons are barely half as large as the enormous scow-bodied vehicles in which the American pioneers trekked westward. Their inferior carrying capacity is compensated for, however, by the custom of linking them in pairs, experience having proven that to attempt to negotiate the hairpin turns in the mountain roads with vehicles having an unusually long wheel-base is but to invite disaster. In freighting parlance, five wagons with their teams are called a “swing,” the drivers are known as “skinners,” and the man in charge of the outfit is the “swing boss.” To meet one of these wagon-trains on a road that was uncomfortably narrow at the best and frequently bordered by a sheer cliff was not a pleasant business, for, according to law, the freighter is always permitted to take the inside of the road, so that more than once we were compelled to pull so far to the outside, in order to give the huge vehicles space to get by, that there was not room between our outer wheels and the precipice’s brink for a starved greyhound to pass.

The deeper into the wilderness you push, the more infrequent become the mails, until, north of the Fraser,[399] the settlers receive their letters and newspapers only once a month during the summer and frequently not for many months on end when the rains have turned the trails into impassable morasses. When we left Quesnel for Fort Fraser the mail was already two weeks overdue, and the roads were in such terrible condition that the driver of the mail-stage would not even hazard a guess as to when he could start. At frequent intervals along the way men were camping in the rain-soaked brush beside the road, with no protection save the scant shelter afforded by a dog-tent or a bit of canvas stretched between two trees. At the sound of our approach they would run out and hail us and inquire eagerly as to whether we could tell them when the mail was likely to be along. These men were settlers whose ranches lay far back in the wilderness, and they had been waiting patiently beside that road for many days, straining their ears to catch the rattle of the wheels which would bring them word from the loved ones at home. One of them, a clean-cut, clear-eyed young Englishman, who was camping beside the road in a little shelter tent, told us that he had been there for fifteen days waiting for the postman.

“I’ve got a little ranch about thirty miles back,” he explained, “and I was so afraid that I might miss the mail that I tramped out and have been sleeping here by the roadside waiting for it. My wife and the kiddies are back in the old country, in Devonshire, waiting until I can get a home for them out here. I haven’t had a letter from them now for going on seven[400] weeks. The last one that I had told me that my little girl was sick, and I’m pretty anxious about her. It’s bad news that the coach hasn’t started yet. I guess the only thing to do is to keep on waiting.”

To such men as these I lift my hat in respect and admiration. Resolute, patient, persevering, facing with stout hearts and smiling lips all the hardships and discouragements that such a life has to bring, they are the real advance-guards of progress, the skirmishers of civilisation. In Rhodesia, the Sudan, West Africa, New Zealand, Australia, Canada you find them, wherever the flag of England flies, clamping down the rivets of empire.

A great deal has been written about the brand of Englishman who goes by the name of remittance-man. With a few pounds a month to go to the devil on, he haunts the highways and byways of the newer lands, working when he must, idling when he may. In Cape Town, Bulawayo, Johannesburg, Sydney, Melbourne, Calgary you will find him, hanging over the polished bars, or, if his remittances permit, in the local clubs. As his long-suffering relatives generally send him as far from home as they can buy a ticket, he has become a familiar figure in the western provinces of the Dominion and particularly along the Pacific Coast. Dressed in well-cut tweeds or flannels and smoking the inevitable brier, you can see him at almost any hour of any day strolling aimlessly about the corridors of the Empress Hotel in Victoria or dawdling about the Union Club. But you rarely find him in the British[401] Columbian bush. The atmosphere—and by this I do not mean the climate—is uncongenial, for “he ain’t a worker” and in consequence is cordially detested by the native-born no less than by those industrious settlers whose mail from home brings them no monthly cheques. In that country, if a man does not go out to his labour in the morning he is counted an undesirable addition to the population. Hence, though the hinterland is filled with the discards of the pack, comparatively few of them bear the despised label of remittance-man.

A meeting of the old and the new.

“The freight trains of the railroadless frontier.”

“The rest-houses are built entirely of logs and occasionally surrounded by stockades.”

SCENES ON THE CARIBOO TRAIL.

But that is not saying that you do not find numbers of well-bred, well-educated young Englishmen chopping out careers for themselves up there in the forests of the North. We came across two such at a desolate and lonely ranch midway between Quesnel and Blackwater, three hundred miles from the nearest railway and thirty from the nearest house. We stopped at their little cabin and asked for lunch, and they welcomed us as they would a certified cheque. One of them, I learned after considerable questioning, was the nephew of an earl and had stroked an Oxford crew; the other, with a diffidence that was delightful, showed me the picture of a rambling, ivy-covered manor-house in Hampshire which he called home, and remarked quite casually that he had been something of a cricketer before he came out to the Colonies and had played for the Gentlemen of England. Yet here were these two youngsters, gently born and cleanly bred, “pigging it,” as they themselves expressed it, in a one-room[402] cabin up here at the Back of Beyond. Good Heavens! how glad they were to see us—not for our own sakes, you understand, but because we were messengers from that great, gay world from which they had exiled themselves. While one of them pared the potatoes, the other fried the bacon—“sow-belly” they called it—in ill-smelling cottolene, and both of them fired questions at us like shots from an automatic: what were the newest plays, the latest songs, how long since I had been in London, was the chorus at the Gaiety as good-looking as it used to be, was Winston Churchill really making good in the cabinet or was he just a bally ass, did we think that there was anything to this talk about the Ulstermen revolting—and all the other questions that homesick exiles ask.

“What on earth induces you to stay on in this God-forsaken place?” I asked, when at length they paused in their questioning for lack of breath. “No neighbours, no theatres, no amusements, mails once a month if you are lucky, rain six months out of the twelve, and snow for four months more. Why don’t you try some place nearer civilisation? You can’t do much more than make a bare living up here, and a pretty poor one at that, eh?”

“Well,” said one of them apologetically, “we do a lot better up here than you’d think. Why, last season we cut a hundred tons of hay and this year, now that we’ve cleared some more land, we’ll probably get a hundred and fifty.”

“A hundred tons of hay!” I exclaimed, with pity[403] in my voice. “Heavens alive, man, what does that amount to?”

“It amounted to something over ten thousand dollars,” he answered. “Up here, you see, hay is a pretty profitable crop—it sells for a hundred dollars a ton. Besides, we like the life jolly well. It’s a bit lonely, of course, but we’re fond of the open and there’s all sort of fishin’ and shootin’—there’s a skin of a grizzly that I killed last week tacked up at the back of the house. And,” he added, with a hint of embarrassment, “this life is a lot more worth while than loafin’ around London and doin’ the society-Johnnie act. We feel, y’ know, as though we were doin’ a bit toward buildin’ up the country—sort of bally pioneers.”

Though they probably didn’t know it, those two young fellows in flannel shirts and cord breeches, who had evidently left England because they were tired of living à la métronome, because they had wearied of garden-parties and club windows and the family pew, were members in good standing of the Brotherhood of Nation Builders.

Though we had started from Quesnel with sixty gallons of gasoline, the going had been so heavy that by the time we reached the telegraph hut at Bobtail Lake, where the development company of which I have already spoken had left the first of its drums of gasoline, our supply was seriously diminished. These relay telegraph stations are scattered at intervals of fifty miles or so along that single strand of copper wire, two thousand miles long, which connects Dawson City[404] with Vancouver. Many of them are so remotely situated that the only time the operators see a white man’s face or hear a white man’s voice is when the semiannual pack-train brings them their supplies in the spring and fall. I can conceive of no more intolerable existence than the lives led by these men, sitting at deal tables within the lithograph-covered walls of their log cabins, with no neighbours, no amusements, nothing under the sun to do save listen to the ceaseless chatter of a telegraph instrument, day after day, week after week, month after month the same. Imagine the monotony of it! There were two young men at the Bobtail Lake hut, an operator and a linesman, and when they saw the little flag of stripes and stars fluttering from the bonnet of the car they waved their hats and cheered madly. To you who lead sheltered lives in offices or factories or stores, the flag may be nothing more than a bit of red-white-and-blue bunting, but to those who live in the earth’s far corners, where it is rarely seen, it stands for home and country and family and friends, and is reverenced accordingly.

“It seems darned good to see the old flag again,” one of the young men remarked a trifle huskily. “This is the first time I’ve laid eyes on it in more’n two years. When we heard you coming through the woods we thought we must be dreaming. We never expected to see an automobile up in this God-forsaken hole.”

“You’re not a Canadian, then?” I asked.

“Not on your tintype. I’m from Tennessee. Used to be a train-despatcher down in Texas, got tired[405] of living in a box car with no trees but sage-brush and no neighbours but coyotes, so I wandered up here. And believe me, I wish I was back in God’s country again.”

That night we spent at a ranch on the Blackwater. The English owner and his wife were absent in Vancouver, but the ranch hand in charge of the place was only too willing to play the part of host. The ranch-house, though built of logs, for up there there is nothing else to build with, was considerably more pretentious than the general run of frontier dwellings. Instead of the customary kitchen-living-dining-sleeping room, it had a comfortable living-room with a hospitable stone fireplace and the floor thickly strewn with bearskins, and two sleeping rooms, while in front, in pathetic imitation of some old-country garden, was a tiny plat set out to fuchsias and mignonette and geraniums and surrounded by an attempt at a picket fence. The floor of the house was of planks hand-hewn; cedar poles laid lengthwise and covered with shakes and sod formed a roof impervious to snow or rain; the chinks in the log walls were stuffed with moss and clay and papered over with illustrations torn from the London weeklies. Like nearly all of the houses that we saw in the interior of the province, its furniture was crude and obviously home-made, with benches instead of chairs, for the freighters, who charge thirty cents a pound for hauling merchandise in from the railway, refuse to bother with anything so unprofitable as chairs, which require space out of all proportion to their weight.[406] Lying on the table in the living-room, atop of a heap of year-old newspapers and magazines (for in the north country printed matter of any description is something to be read and reread and then read once again before it is passed on to a neighbour) were two much-thumbed volumes. I picked them up, for I was curious to see what sort of literature would appeal to people who lived their lives in such a place. One was the “Discourses of Epictetus,” the other “Manners and Social Usages”—with a book-mark at the chapter entitled “The Etiquette of Visiting Cards”! And the nearest neighbour, a Swedish rancher with a Siwash wife, lived fifty miles away.

If the food at Blackwater had been as good as the house, or only half as good, there would have been little left to be desired. The ranch hand who was in charge of the place and who did the cooking—he vouchsafed the information that he had been a British soldier in India before coming to Canada to seek his fortune and wished to God that he was back in India again—made it a point, so he told us, to bake enough soda-biscuits the first of every month to last until the next month came round. As we were there about the twenty-eighth, the biscuits were quite hard—like dog-biscuits, only not so appetising. Then we had a platter of “sow-belly” swimming in an ocean of rancid grease; stone-cold boiled potatoes, a pan of the inevitable stewed prunes, and mugs of evil-looking coffee, which was really chicory in disguise. But what would you? This was not Fifth Avenue; this was the Frontier.

[407]

I was particularly impressed throughout our journey across British Columbia with the almost paternal interest the provincial government takes in the welfare of the settlers. On trees and buildings everywhere are posted crown-surmounted notices relating to everything from the filing of homestead claims to the prevention of forest-fires. Rest-houses are maintained by the government along certain of the less-travelled routes; new roads are being cut through the wilderness in every direction; forest-rangers and agricultural experts are constantly riding about the province with open eyes and ears; in every settlement is stationed a government agent from whom the settlers can obtain information and advice on every subject under the sun. Law and order prevail to an extraordinary degree. I was told that there are only three police constables between Ashcroft and Fort George, a distance of more than three hundred miles—and this in a savage and sparsely settled country, where a criminal would have comparatively little difficulty in making his escape. This remarkable absence of crime is due in large measure, no doubt, to the rigid prohibition of the sale of alcoholic liquor within a certain distance of a public work, such as the building of a railway; in fact, the workman is debarred from intoxicants as rigorously as the Indian. “No drink, no crime,” say the authorities, and results have shown that they know what they are talking about. Not until the railway is completed and the construction gangs have moved on are the saloons permitted to throw open their doors. Although[408] this policy unquestionably makes for law and order, it is by no means popular with the workmen, who refuse to consider any place deserving of the name of town until it has obtained a licence. “Such and such a place is a hell of a fine town,” I was frequently assured. “They’ve got a saloon there!” Judged by this standard, Fort George, which is a division point on the Grand Trunk Pacific, at the junction of the Fraser and Nechako Rivers, and will unquestionably become in time a second Winnipeg or Calgary, is a veritable metropolis, for it has considerably more than its share of gin-palaces and booze joints. The poet has vividly described it in a single couplet:

“The camp at the bend of the river, with its dozen saloons aglare,
Its gambling dens ariot, its gramophones all ablare.”

It is not surprising, therefore, that Fort George is a Mecca for the dry of throat, who make bacchanalian pilgrimages from incredible distances to its bottle-decorated shrines; for if a man is determined to “go on a jag” no power on earth, not even a journey of a hundred miles or more, can prevent him from gratifying his desires. Indeed, it is by no means unusual for a man to work on a ranch or on the railway until he has accumulated a half year’s wages, and then, throwing up his job, to tramp a hundred miles through the wilderness to Fort George and blow every last cent of his hard-earned money in one grand jamboree. What a sudden falling off in intemperance there would be in a civilised community if a man had to walk a hundred[409] miles to get a drink! What? Yet this proscription of alcohol has, in a way, defeated its own object, for the men, being denied what might be described as legal liquors, resort to innumerable more or less efficient substitutes. Red ink they will swallow with avidity, for it contains a good percentage of low-grade alcohol, and the colour, no doubt, completes the illusion. Another popular refreshment is lemon extract, such as is commonly used in civilised households for flavouring jellies and puddings. But the favourite beverage, which is to all other alcoholic substitutes what vintage champagne is to all other wines, is a certain patent medicine which contains eighty per cent of pure alcohol. This is as common in the “end-of-steel” towns and the construction camps as cocktails are in a New York club, both workmen and Indians pouring it down like water. It is warranted to cure all pains, and it does, for the man who drinks two bottles of it is dead to the world for at least a day.

As a result of its popularity with the thirsty ones, Fort George might truthfully be described as a very lively town. In one of its saloons twelve white-aproned individuals are constantly on duty behind a bar of polished oak; behind the cash-register sits a watchful man with a cocked revolver on his knees; while mingling with the crowd in front of the bar are three bull-necked, big-bicepsed persons known as the “chuckers-out.” Instead of throwing a patron who becomes obstreperous into the street, however, in which case he would stagger to the saloon opposite and get rid of the[410] balance of his money, he is thrown into the “cooler,” where he is given an opportunity to sleep off the effects of his debauch, after which he is ready to start in all over again. As a result of this ingenious system of conservation, very little money gets away.

These frontier communities have handled the perplexing problem of the social evil in a novel manner. The bedecked and bedizened women who follow in the wake of the gold seekers and the construction gangs, instead of being permitted to flaunt themselves within the town, are forced to reside in colonies of their own well without the municipal limits, sometimes half a dozen miles back in the bush. The miner who wishes to see his light-o’-love is compelled, therefore, to expend a considerable amount of time and shoe-leather, though I regret to add that this did not appear to act as a serious deterrent, the deepest-worn trails that I saw in the Northland being those which led from the settlements to these colonies of easy virtue.

Shortly after we left Blackwater Ranch it began to rain—not a sudden shower which comes and drenches and goes, but one of those steady, disheartening drizzles, which in this region sometimes last for a week. The road—I call it a road merely for the sake of politeness—which had been atrocious from the moment we left the Fraser, quickly became worse. It was composed of the decayed vegetable accumulations of centuries, saturated with stagnant water, thus forming a very sticky and very slippery material peculiar to British Columbia, known as “muskeg.” Though it looks substantial[411] enough, with its top growth of stubble and moss, it combines the most unpleasant qualities of Virginia red clay, Irish peat-bog, Mexican adobe, and New Orleans molasses. To make matters worse, a drove of several hundred cattle had recently preceded us, so that the road, which was inconceivably bad under any circumstances, had been trampled into a black morass which no vehicle could by any possibility get through. There was only one thing for us to do and that was to corduroy the road, or at least the worst stretches of it. I have heard veterans of the Civil War dwell on the difficulties of corduroying roads for the guns to pass over in the swamps of the Chickahominy, but I didn’t appreciate the truth of their remarks until I tried it myself. While camping in various parts of the world I had used an axe in a dilettante sort of way for cutting tent-poles and chopping fire-wood, but there is a vast deal of difference between that sort of thing and cutting down enough trees to pave a road. In an hour our hands were so blistered that every movement of the axe helve brought excruciating pain; but it was a question of corduroying that road or else abandoning the car and making our way to civilisation afoot through several hundred miles of forest. There was no garage to telephone to for assistance. At noon we paused long enough to light a fire and cook a meal of sorts, which we ate seated on logs amid a sea of slimy ooze, with rain pelting down and swarms of voracious black flies and mosquitoes hovering about us. Five hours more of tree felling and we[412] decided that our corduroy causeway was sufficiently solid to get over it with the car. As a matter of fact, we doubted it in our hearts, but we had reached that stage of exhaustion and desperation where we didn’t care what happened. If the car stuck in the mud, well and good. She could stay there and take root and sprout motor-cycles, so far as I was concerned. Backing up so as to get a running start, our driver opened wide his throttle and the car tore at the stretch of home-made corduroy like a locomotive running amuck. Under the terrific impact logs as large as a man’s body were hurled a dozen feet away. The snapping of the limbs and the deafening explosions of the engines sounded like a battle in the Balkans. The car reeled and swayed like a schooner in a squall, and every instant I expected it to capsize; but our driver, clinging desperately to the wheel, contrived, with a skill in driving that I have never seen equalled, to keep it from going over, and, in far less time than it takes to tell it, we had traversed the morass we had spent an entire day in corduroying, and the car, trembling like a frightened horse, stood once again on solid ground. The road over which we had passed looked as though it had been struck by a combined hurricane, cyclone, and tornado.

It was nightfall when we reached the ranch owned by a Swede named Peter Rasmussen. What the man at Blackwater had described as “a swell place” consisted of two small cabins and a group of log barns set down in the middle of a forest clearing. No smoke[413] issued from the chimney, no dog barked a welcome, there was not a sign of life about the place, and for a few minutes we were assailed by the horrid fear that no one was at home. Presently, however, we saw a fair-haired, raw-boned Swede, an axe upon his shoulder, emerge from the forest and come swinging toward us across the pasture. I hailed him.

“Are you Mr. Rasmussen?”

“Ay ban reckon ay am.”

“And can you put us up for the night?” I queried anxiously.

“Ay ban reckon ay can.”

A stone’s throw from the one-roomed log cabin in which Rasmussen and his single ranch-hand, a stolid and uncommunicative Swede, slept and cooked and ate and in the evenings read three-months-old papers by the light of a guttering candle was the bunk house. A bunk house, I might explain, is a building peculiar to the frontier, usually consisting of one large room with two, and sometimes three, tiers of bunks built against the wall. Here travellers may find a roof to shelter them and some hay on which to spread their blankets, for in British Columbia every one carries his bedding with him. From the musty odour which greeted us when Rasmussen threw open the heavy door, this particular bunk house had evidently not been occupied for some time. When we tried to go to sleep, however, we found that the bunks were very much occupied indeed. But after Pete had started a roaring fire in the little sheet-iron stove and when we had spread[414] our “five-point” Hudson Bay blankets on the five-cents-a-pound hay which served in lieu of mattresses and had scrubbed off some of the mud with which we were veneered and had changed our wet clothes for dry ones, the complexion of things began to change from brunette to blonde. Between the intervals of corduroying the road in the morning, I had shot with my revolver half a dozen grouse that persisted in getting in our way. They were almost as large as Plymouth Rocks and we handed them over to Pete to pluck and cook for supper, which was still further eked out by a mess of lake trout brought in by his ranch hand. Up in that region one may have considerable difficulty in obtaining the every-day necessities, such as salt and butter and bread, but he can surfeit himself on such luxuries as venison and grouse and trout. We found that Rasmussen, like so many other settlers in British Columbia, had come from the American Northwest, lured by the glowing prospectuses issued by the provincial government. But he, like so many others, had found that the appalling cost of living had made it impossible, even with hay at a hundred dollars a ton, for him to clear as much as he had in the United States. “So ay ban tank ay go back an’ buy a farm in Minnesota,” he concluded, knocking the ashes from his pipe. And that’s precisely what a great many other discouraged Americans in western Canada are going to do.

For thirty miles or so after leaving Rasmussen’s the road was rough, boggy, and exceedingly trying to the disposition, but it gradually improved until by the[415] time we reached Stony Creek we found ourselves running along a short stretch of road of which a New England board of supervisors need not have felt too much ashamed. The terrible condition of the roads throughout the interior of British Columbia is largely due to the fact that they run for great distances through dense forests where the sun cannot penetrate to dry them up; this, taken with the abnormally heavy rains, serving to make them one long and terrifying slough. At Stony Creek there is a Siwash village consisting of some twoscore log cabins clustered about a mission church whose gaudy paint and bulging dome spoke of its proximity to Alaska and the influence of the Russians. The interior tribes are known as “stick Indians,” referring, of course, to the fact that they dwell in the forest, in contradistinction to those living along the coast, who are known as “salt-chuck Indians.” Squaws in vivid blankets and quill-embroidered moccasins sat sewing and gossiping before their cabin doors, just as womenfolk, be their skins white or black or bronze, sit and gossip the whole world over; bright-eyed, half-naked youngsters gambolled like frisky puppies in the street; bearskins were stretched on frames for drying, and at the rear of every house was a cache for dried salmon, which forms the Siwashes’ staple article of food. Though only one of the braves, who had been out into civilisation, had ever set eyes on a motor-car before, none of them seemed to have any particular fear of it, although, strangely enough, they became as shy as deer at sight of my[416] camera, one picturesque old squaw refusing consecutive offers of twenty-five cents, fifty cents, and a dollar to come out from behind the door where she was hiding and let us take her picture. The old lady’s daughter was willing enough to take a chance, however, for she offered to pose for as many pictures as we desired if we would give her a ride in the car, a proposal to which I promptly acceded. I brought her down the stone-strewn street of the village at a rattling clip, and she not only never turned a hair but asked me to go faster. Given an opportunity, that Siwash maiden would make a real road burner.

It is less than twenty miles from Stony Creek to Fort Fraser and the road proved a surprisingly good one. You must bear in mind, however, that when I speak of a British Columbian road being a good one, I am speaking comparatively. The best road we encountered would, if it existed in the United States, drive a board of highway commissioners out of office, while the worst road we negotiated in a civilised community wouldn’t be considered a road at all—it would be used for a hog-wallow or for duck shooting. The mushroom settlement of Fort Fraser takes its name from the old Hudson Bay post, which is three miles from the town on the shores of Fraser Lake. When we were there the town consisted of half a hundred log and frame buildings, a blacksmith shop, four or five general stores, the branch of a Montreal bank, and the only hotel in the four hundred miles between Quesnel and Hazelton. It was a real frontier town when we[417] were there, and was of particular interest to us because it represented a phase of civilisation which in our own country has long since passed, but now that the railway is in operation its picturesque log cabins will doubtless be replaced by prosaic white frame houses with green blinds, the boards laid along the edge of the road will give way to cement sidewalks, and it will have street lamps and a town hall and its name displayed in a mosaic of whitewashed pebbles on the station lawn and will look exactly like any one of a hundred other towns scattered along the transcontinental lines of railway. Some day, no doubt, I shall pass through it again, this time from the observation platform of a Pullman, and I shall remark quite nonchalantly to my fellow travellers: “Oh, yes, I was up here in the good old days when this was nothing but a cluster of log huts at the Back of Beyond.”

[418]

[419]

## XV
THE MAP THAT IS HALF UNROLLED

[420]

“Have you gazed on naked grandeur where there’s nothing else to gaze on,
Set pieces and drop-curtain scenes galore,
Big mountains heaved to heaven, which the blinding sunsets blazon,
Black canyons where the rapids rip and roar?
Have you swept the visioned valley with the green stream streaking through it,
Searched the Vastness for a something you have lost?
Have you strung your soul to silence? Then for God’s sake go and do it;
Hear the challenge, learn the lesson, pay the cost.”

[421]

### XV
THE MAP THAT IS HALF UNROLLED

It wasn’t much of a chain as chains go—it really wasn’t. After a good deal of poking about I had come upon its dozen feet of rusted links thrown carelessly behind the forge in the only blacksmith shop in Fort Fraser. Now, I had an imperative need for a chain of some sort, for our skid chains, as the result of the wear and tear to which they had been subjected on the journey from Quesnel, were on the point of giving out, and it is not wise to attempt to negotiate what the settlers of northern British Columbia, with an appalling disregard for the truth, call roads unless you have taken all possible precautions against skidding. Up in that country of two-mile-high mountains, and mountain roads as slippery as the inside of a banana peel, a side-slip of only a few inches is as likely as not to send car and occupants hurtling through half a mile of emptiness. As the chain would answer our purpose after a fashion, and as we could get nothing better, I told the smith to throw it in the car. After he had attended to a few minor repairs I asked him how much I owed him.

“Well,” he answered, figuring with his pencil on a chip of wood, “the chain comes to sixteen dollars an’ forty cents, an——”

[422]

“Hold on!” I interrupted. “Please say that over again. It must be that I’m getting hard of hearing.”

“Sixteen dollars and forty cents for the chain,” he repeated, unabashed.

I leaned against the door of the log smithy for support. “Not for the chain?” I gasped unbelievingly. “Not for twelve feet of rusty, second-hand, five-eighths-inch chain that I could get for half a dollar almost anywhere?”

“Sure,” said he. “An’ I ain’t makin’ no profit on it at that. The freight charges for bringin’ it in from the coast were eighteen cents a pound. But lookee here, friend, I don’t want you to go away from Fort Fraser with the idee in your head that things up here is high-priced, ’cause they ain’t. I wanta do the right thing by you. I’ll tell you what I’ll do—I’ll knock off the forty cents.”

Despite the assurances of the blacksmith, by no stretch of the imagination could Fort Fraser be called a poor man’s town. Some of the prices which were asked—and which we paid—in the local store where we replenished our supply of provisions were as follows:

Flour | 16 cents per pound
Sugar | 25 cents per pound
Tea and coffee | $1.00 per pound
Butter | 75 cents per pound
Oatmeal | 30 cents per pound
Dried fruits | 25 cents per pound
Tinned fruits | 75 cents to $1.00 per 2-pound tin
Bacon | 50 cents per pound[423]
Eggs (when procurable) | $1.50 per dozen
(In winter they sell for 50 cents each.)
Potted meats | 50 cents to $1.00 per tin
Bread | 25 cents per 1-pound loaf
(Farther in the interior 50 cents per loaf is the standard price.)
Potatoes | $3.00 per bushel
Chickens | $4.00 each

It was my introduction to a scale of frontier prices to which I soon became accustomed though not reconciled. It is only fair to say, however, that this was before the completion of the railway. Now that Fort Fraser is a station on a transcontinental system, the cost of living has doubtless been materially reduced, though I have no doubt that the scale of prices just quoted still obtains and will for a very long time to come in the settlements to the north of the Skeena.

A Siwash lady going shopping. | Half-breeds of the Upper Skeena. | “Blackwater Kate.”

SOME LADIES FROM THE UPPER SKEENA.

The population of Fort Fraser turned out en masse to see us off, the mothers—there were only eight white women in the town when we were there—bringing their children to the cabin doors to see their first motor-car. Did you ever stop to think of the deprivations suffered by these women who dwell along “the edge of things”: no soda-water fountains, no afternoon teas, no bargain sales, no moving-picture shows, and the fashion papers usually six months late? It must be terrible.

We felt quite gay and light-hearted that morning, I remember, for we had slept in beds instead of vermin-infested bunks or in blankets beside the road, we had breakfasted on coffee, eggs, and porridge instead of the customary chicory, “sow-belly,” and prunes, and a[424] feeble sun was doing its best to dry up the rain-soaked roads. Three miles out of Fort Fraser the swollen Nechako lay athwart our path and our troubles once more began, for the ferry was not built to carry three-ton motor-cars, or, indeed, any motor-cars at all, and when it felt the sudden weight of the big machine upon its deck it dipped so alarmingly that for a moment it looked as though the car would end its journey at the bottom of the river. Barring numerous short stretches where the treacherous black mud was up to our hubs, several miles of bone-racking corduroy, two torrential showers, any number of stumps which threatened to rip off our pan and had to be levelled before we could pass, two punctures, a blowout, and a broken spring, the journey from the banks of the Nechako to Burns Lake was uneventful.

Darkness had long since fallen when we zigzagged down the precipitous flank of a forest-clothed mountain, and the beams from our head lamps illumined the cluster of tents, shacks, and cabins which compose the settlement known as Burns Lake. Though the settlement boasted at the time we were there the population of a fair-sized village, notwithstanding the fact that there was not a woman or a child in it, it was nothing more than a railway-construction camp, with its usual concomitants of hash houses, bunk houses, and gambling dens. With the completion of the railway it has doubtless disappeared as suddenly as it arose. Upon inquiring for sleeping quarters, we were taken up a creaking ladder into a loft above an eating-house,[425] where fully twoscore labourers from the south of Europe lay stretched on their backs on piles of filthy straw, snoring or scratching or tossing, in an atmosphere so dense with the mingled odours of garlic, fried pork, wet leather, and perspiration that it could have been removed with a shovel. While we were debating as to whether we should look for less impossible quarters or wrap up in our blankets and spend the night in the car, an American, who, from his air of authority, I gathered to be a foreman, addressed us:

“There’s no place here that’s fit to sleep in,” he said, “but I understand that one of the contracting company’s barges is leaving for Decker Lake at midnight. She’s empty, so they’d probably be willing to carry you and your car. You’d have to sleep in the car, of course, and it’s pretty cold on the water at this time of the year, but, believe me, it’ll be a heap more comfortable than spending the night in one of these bunk houses. There’s no road around the lake anyway, so you’ll have to go by water if you go at all.”

Thanking him for his suggestion, we set out in quest of the manager of the contracting company, whom we found in a log cabin at the entrance to the roughly constructed wharf. It took but a few words to explain our errand and complete arrangements for being transported down the lakes by the barge which was leaving at midnight. Burns and Decker Lakes, which are each approximately ten miles in length and whose shores are lined with almost impenetrable forest, are connected by a shallow and tortuous channel which[426] winds its devious course through a wilderness of swamps, lagoons, and bulrushes known as the Drowned Lands. The firm of Spokane contractors engaged in the construction of the western division of the Grand Trunk Pacific had availed itself of this devious waterway for transporting its men, materials, and supplies to the front, using for the purpose flat-bottomed barges drawing only a few inches of water. Notwithstanding the fact that the pilots frequently lost their way at night and the barges went aground in the shallow channel, the fortunate circumstance of the two lakes being thus connected had saved the company tens of thousands of dollars.

It will be a long time, a very long time, before my recollection of that night journey down those dark and lonely lakes will fade. The deck of the barge was but a few inches wider than the car, so that, as we sat in our accustomed seats, wrapped to the eyes in blankets, it seemed as though the car were floating on the surface of the water. The little gasoline engine that supplied the barge’s motive power was aft of us, and its steady throb, together with the twin swaths of light which our lamps mowed out of the darkness, put the final touch to the illusion. It was an eerie sensation—very. Though a crescent moon shone fitfully through scudding clouds, its feeble light but served to emphasise the darkness and mystery of the forest-covered shores, which were as black as the grave and as silent as the dead. Once some heavy animal—a bear, no doubt—went crashing through the underbrush with a noise[427] that was positively startling in that uncanny stillness. By the time we reached the shallow channel that winds its devious course through the Drowned Lands the moon had disappeared and a thick white fog had fallen on everything, hiding the shores with its impalpable curtain and completely nullifying the effect of our powerful lights. The only sound was the laboured panting of the engine and the scraping of the bulrushes against the bow. How the skipper found his way through that fog-bound channel I can’t imagine, unless he smelt it, for he couldn’t see an object five feet away. Day was breaking above the eastern forest when the barge crunched against the timbers of the wharf at Decker Lake, and I breathed a little prayer of thanksgiving for our safe arrival; for, truth to tell, I had fully expected that the light of morning would find us hard and fast aground in the middle of a swamp. Word of our coming had preceded us and we found that the company’s local manager—an American—had cots and blankets awaiting us in the log shanty that served him as an office. We were shivering with the cold and heavy-eyed from weariness. My word, how we slept! I can’t remember when I have so enjoyed a pillow.

Before leaving Decker Lake we acquired an addition to our party. His name was Duncan and he was an axeman from the forests of Quebec. He had the shoulders of a Clydesdale, the sinews of a mule, and could handle an axe as an artist handles a brush. One of those restless spirits who, with their worldly possessions on their backs, are here to-day and gone to-morrow,[428] he had worked on the railway grade just long enough to earn a little money and, when we arrived, was setting out on foot for New Hazelton, two hundred miles away, to spend it. He was only too glad to work his passage and we were only too glad to have him along—he was so extremely capable that his presence gave us a feeling of reassurance. It was well that we took him along, for before we had left Decker Lake an hour behind us we found ourselves at the beginning of as ugly a stretch of road as I ever expect to set eyes on.

“That’s not a road,” said my companion disgustedly, as he stood looking at the sea of slime. “That’s a lake, and if we once get into it we’ll never see the car again.”

What he said was so obviously true that we decided that the only thing to do was to avoid the road altogether and chop our way around it. This involved cutting a path through three quarters of a mile of primeval forest and the removal of scores of trees. There was nothing to be gained by groaning over the prospect, so we rolled up our sleeves, spat on our lacerated palms, and went at it with the axes. Did you ever see an expert woodsman in action? No? Well, it’s a sight worth seeing, take my word for it. Duncan would walk up to a forest giant that looked as big as the Tower of Pisa and slam-bang into it with his double-bitted axe, amid a perfect shower of chips, until he had chopped a hole in the base the size of a hotel fireplace. A few more strokes at the right spot, a warning shout of “Timber!” “Timber!” and the great tree would[429] come crashing down within a hand’s breadth of where he wanted it. A few minutes more of the axe business and the prone trunk would be cut into sections and rolled away. “She’s all jake, boys,” Duncan would bellow, and, putting on the power, we would push the car a few yards more ahead. It took the four of us eight hours of steady chopping to make our way around that awful stretch of road, but we did get through finally with no more serious mishap than crumpling up one of the forward fenders, caused by the car swerving into a tree. While we were still congratulating ourselves on having gotten out of the woods in more senses than one, we swung around a bend in the road and came to a sudden halt before a hog-wallow which stretched away, like a black and slimy serpent, as far as the eye could see.

After the car had passed: a stretch of road south of the Nechako.

Mired in muskeg on the Yukon Telegraph Trail.

Prying the car out of a swamp in the Blackwater country.

WHERE NO MOTOR-CAR HAD EVER GONE: SOME INCIDENTS OF MR. POWELL’S JOURNEY THROUGH THE BRITISH COLUMBIAN WILDERNESS.

“We’re up against it good and hard this time,” said our driver, grown pessimistic for the first and only time. “I don’t believe the car can make it. There’s too much of it and it’s too deep—the wheels simply can’t get traction.”

As we were contemplating it in dismal silence we heard the welcome rattle of wheels and clink of harness, and an empty freight wagon, drawn by eight sturdy mules, pulled out of the forest behind us, the bearded “mule-skinner” urging on his beasts with cracking whip and a crackle of oaths. I waded toward him through the mire.

“Where’s the nearest place that we can eat and sleep?” I demanded.

[430]

“Waal,” he drawled with exasperating slowness, “I reckon’s how they mought fix ye up fer the night at th’ Hunderd an’ Fifty Mile House. Thet’s the only place I knows on, an’ it’s darned poor, too.”

“How far is it from here?” I asked.

“Waal, I calkilate it mought be a matter o’ two mile an’ a half or three mile.”

“Good,” said I, “and what will you charge to haul us there? We can’t get through this mud-hole alone, but the car’s got lots of power and with the help of your mules we ought to make it all right.”

Instantly the man’s native shrewdness asserted itself. He cast an appraising eye over my mud-stained garments, over the mud-bespattered car and at the yawning sea of mud ahead.

“I’ll haul ye to th’ Hunderd an’ Fifty Mile House for fifteen dollars,” he said.

“Fifteen dollars for a two-and-a-half-mile haul?” I exclaimed.

“Take it or leave it,” said the teamster rudely. “I ain’t got no time to stand in the road bargainin’.”

I promptly capitulated, for I had no intention of letting our only hope of rescue get away. “Hitch on to the car,” said I.

That was where the sixteen-dollar-and-forty-cent chain to which I referred at the beginning of this story came in handy, for we had no rope that would have stood the strain of hauling that car through those three perfectly awful miles. Night was tucking up the land in a black and sodden blanket when the driver pulled[431] up his weary mules at the roadside post bearing the numerals “150,” which signified that we were still a hundred and fifty miles from our journey’s end, and I counted into his grimy paw the sum agreed upon in the greasy bank-notes of the realm. It had taken us just eleven hours to make fourteen miles.

Though we had not deluded ourselves into expecting that we would find anything but the most primitive accommodation at the 150 Mile House, we were none of us, unless it might have been Duncan, prepared for the wholly impossible quarters that greeted us. Standing in a clearing in the wilderness was a log cabin containing but a single room, in one corner of which was a stove and in the other a rickety table piled high with unwashed dishes. Such space as was left in the twelve-by-fourteen room was occupied by a huge home-made bed which provided sleeping quarters for the English rancher, his gaunt, starved-looking wife, and a veritable litter of small children.

“We’ve nothing here that ’ud do for the likes of you, sir,” said the man civilly, in reply to my request for accommodations. “The missis can fix you up a meal, but there’s not a place that you could lay your heads, unless ’twould be in the loft.”

“Good Heavens, man!” interrupted my companion, “We can’t sleep out-of-doors on such a night as this. Let’s see the loft.”

Assuring us once more that “it was no place for the likes of us,” the rancher pointed to a ladder made of saplings which poked its nose through a black square[432] in the ceiling directly above the family couch. Taking a candle from the woman I ascended. The fitful light illuminated a space formed by the ceiling of the room below and the steeply pitched roof of the cabin, barely large enough for a man to enter on his hands and knees. Its uneven floor, made of saplings, laid lengthwise, was strewn with musty hay, upon which were thrown some tattered pieces of filthy burlap bagging. One of these pieces of bedding seemed to move, but upon looking at it more closely I saw it was fairly aswarm with vermin. I took one glance and scrambled down the ladder. “Where’s the nearest ditch?” I asked. “I’d rather sleep in a ditch any time than in that loft.”

But we did not have to do either, for Duncan, who had previous acquaintance of the place, wasting no time in lamentation, had set to work with his axe and in ten minutes a great fire was sending its hail of sparks into the evening sky. It’s marvellous what wonders can be worked in the wilderness with a sharp axe by a man who knows how to handle it. By stretching the piece of sail-cloth we had with us between two convenient trees and keeping it in place with saplings, in an amazingly brief time Duncan had constructed a shelter which was proof against any but a driving rain, and which, thanks to the camp-fire blazing in front of it, was as warm as a steam-heated room in a hotel. Covering the soggy ground with a layer of hemlock branches, and this in turn with a layer of hay bought from the rancher at five cents per pound, and spreading on top of the hay our rubber sheets and our blankets—behold,[433] we were as comfortable as kings; more comfortable, I fancy, than certain monarchs in the Balkans. We lay side by side beneath the flimsy shelter like sardines in a tin, while outside the rain fell drearily and the night wind soughed in the tree tops, and the flickering flames of the camp-fire alternately illumined and left in darkness everything.

We awoke the next morning to find that the sun, which is an infrequent visitor to northern British Columbia in the autumn, had tardily come to our assistance and was trying to make up for its remissness by a desperate attempt to dry up the roads which, for the succeeding hundred miles or so, lay across an open, rolling country bordered by distant ranges of snow-capped mountains. Though the recollection of that day stands out sharp and clear in my memory as the only one since leaving Quesnel when we were not delayed by mud, our progress was hampered by something much more inimical to the car—stumps. When the road was constructed it evidently never entered into the calculations of its builders that it would be used by a motor-car, so they sawed off the trees which occupied the route at a height which would permit of their stumps being cleared without difficulty by the axles of the high-wheeled freight wagons, but which, had they been struck by the automobile, would have torn the pan from the body and put it permanently out of business. Along the stump-strewn stretches, therefore, our progress was necessarily slow, for Duncan marched in advance, axe on shoulder, like a scout before an advancing[434] army, and whenever he found an enemy in the form of a stump lying in wait to disable us he would destroy it with a few well-directed blows of his axe. But it was a tiresome business. After a time, however, the stump-dotted trail was supplanted by quite an excellent road of gravel, and down this we spun for thirty miles with nothing to interrupt our progress. When we started that morning we would have laughed derisively if any one had told us that we could make Aldermere that night, but, thanks to the unexpected blessing of good roads, we whirled into that little frontier village at five o’clock in the afternoon, ascertained from the open-mouthed loungers on the steps of the grocery store that it was only thirty miles to Moricetown, which was at that time the “end of steel,” and determined to push on that night. The good roads soon died a sudden death, however, and it was late that night before there twinkled in the blackness of the valley below us the bewildering arrangement of green and scarlet lights which denote a railway yard all the world over, and heard the familiar friendly shriek of a locomotive.

I don’t care to dwell on the night we spent at Moricetown. The recollection is not a pleasant one. In a few years, no doubt, it will grow into a prosperous country village, with cement sidewalks and street lamps and rows of neat cottages, but when we were there it was simply the “end of steel.” In other words, it was the place where civilisation, as typified by the railway in operation between there and the coast, quit[435] work and the wilderness began. The “town” consisted of the railway station, still smelling of yellow paint, two or three log cabins, a group of hybrid structures, half house, half tent, and another building which, if one had no regard whatever for veracity, might have been called a hotel. Let me tell you about it. It was built of scantlings covered with log slabs, and the partition walls consisted of nothing thicker than tarred paper. In certain respects this had its advantages, for if you needed more light or air in your room all you had to do was to poke your finger through the wall. Because we had arrived by automobile and were therefore fair game, we were given the suite de luxe. This consisted of a six-by-eight room containing an iron bed with a dubious-looking coverlet which had evidently passed through every possible experience save a washing. There being no place in the room for a wash-stand, the cracked wash-bowl was kept under the bed. Indeed, had not the door opened outward we could never have gotten into the room at all. The partitions were so flimsy that we were awakened every time the occupant of the next room changed his mind. Outside our door was what, for want of a better term, I will call the lobby: a low-ceilinged room warmed to the suffocating point by a huge whitewashed stove, around which those who could not get rooms sat through the night on rude benches, talking, whispering, cursing, snoring, spitting, coughing, smoking. The place was blue with the acrid fumes of Bull Durham. Dozing on the benches were all the types peculiar to this remote[436] corner of the empire: Montenegrin and Croatian railway labourers, stolid and dirty; Canadian lumberjacks in their moccasins and hooded parkas; Scandinavian ranchers from the back country; a group of immigrants, fresh from England, their faces whitened by the confinement of the long journey, who had left their rented farms in Sussex or their stools in London counting-houses to come out to the colonies to earn a living; even some pallid women with squalling children in their arms, fretful from lack of sleep, who had come from the old country to join their husbands and lead pioneer lives in the British Columbian wild. The men snored sickeningly, the tired mothers scolded their crying children, the clouds of tobacco smoke eddied toward the ceiling, the army of insects that we found in possession of the bed attacked us from all directions, the rain pattered dishearteningly upon the tin roof, the air was heavy with the odours of grimy, sweat-soaked, tired humanity. It was a nuit du diable, as our Paris friends would say.

It is only about five-and-twenty miles from Moricetown to New Hazelton, the prefix “new” distinguishing it from the “old town,” which lies five miles from the railway to the north. The road, so we were told, though slippery after the rains and very hilly, was moderately smooth, and we were as confident that we would eat our Sunday dinner in New Hazelton as we were that the next day was Monday. But the best-laid plans of mice and motorists, you know, “gang aft agley,” which, according to the glossary of Scottish phrases[437] in the back of the dictionary, means “to go off to the side,” and that was precisely what we did, for when only five miles from our destination our driver, in his eagerness to taste civilised cooking again, took a slippery curve at incautious speed and the car skidded over into the ditch and reclined against the shelving bank like some mud-stained, weary monster. It took the better part of an hour to get out the jacks and build a causeway of stones and pry her up. But at last everything was ready and we shouted to the driver to throw on the power. But there was no response from the engines to his pressure on the throttle.

“By Jove!” he muttered despondently. “We’re out of gasoline!”

Sunday noon, a deserted mountain road, a ditched and helpless car, a sky leaden with impending rain—and only five miles from our destination. There was nothing for it but for some one to walk into New Hazelton, rouse the local storekeeper from his Sunday nap, and bring us a tin of gasoline. The choice unanimously fell on Duncan, who set off down the middle of the muddy road at a four-miles-an-hour pace. Meanwhile, we set about preparations for our Sunday dinner. While the driver skirmished about with an axe in search of wood that was not too rain-soaked to burn, my friend opened such of the tinned goods as were left, and I attempted to wash the knives and forks and tin plates in a convenient mud puddle. As we had neglected to clean them after our last meal in the open, on the ground that we would have no further use for[438] them, the task I had set myself was not an easy one: it’s surprising how difficult it is to remove grease from tin with nothing but a stick and some cold water. We achieved a meal at last, however—tinned sausages, tinned spaghetti, mouldy bread made palatable by toasting, and some week-old coffee which we found in one of the thermos bottles and heated—and I’ve had many a worse meal, too. Just as the rain began to descend in earnest, a horse and sulky swung round the bend bearing Duncan and the precious tin of gasoline. Thirty minutes later we were rolling between a double line of welcoming townspeople down the muddy main street of New Hazelton. We were at our journey’s end!

Though New Hazelton now boasts the most pretentious hotel in all the North country, when we were there this hostelry was still in course of construction, so we were compelled to look elsewhere for bed and board. After some searching we found accommodation in the cabin occupied by the operator of the Yukon Telegraph and ate our meals at the pie counter run by an American known as “Black Jack” Macdonald. And it was good eating, too. Our first question after reaching New Hazelton was, of course:

“Is there any chance of our getting through to the Alaskan border?”

“Not a chance in the world,” was the chorused answer. But we protested that that was the answer we had received at Vancouver and Ashcroft and Quesnel and Fort Fraser when we inquired as to the chances of getting through to Hazelton.

[439]

“The boys are quite right, gentlemen,” said a bearded frontiersman named “Dutch” Cline. “There isn’t a chance in the world. I’ve lived in this country close on twenty years and I know what I’m talking about. It’s only about forty miles in an air-line from here to the Alaskan boundary, but I doubt if a pack-mule could get through, let alone a motor-car. You would have to actually chop your way through forests that haven’t so much as a trail. You would have to devise some way of getting your car across no less than a dozen dangerous rivers. You would have to climb to the very summit of a six-thousand-foot mountain range and then drop down on the other side; and, finally, you would have to find some means of crossing the Portland Canal, which separates British Columbia from Alaska. Add to that the fact that winter is at hand and that you would probably be snowed in before you had got a quarter of the way, and you will understand just how utterly impossible it is.”

So we were forced to abandon regretfully the hope of hearing the Alaskan gravel crunch beneath our tires and to content ourselves with the knowledge that we had driven farther north than a motor-car had ever been driven on this continent before: farther north than the Aleutian Islands, farther north than Hudson Bay, farther north than the Peninsula of Kamchatka, half a hundred miles farther north, in fact, than the southern boundary of Alaska itself.

New Hazelton is in the very heart of northern British Columbia, where the Skeena, the Babine, and[440] the Bulkley meet, and in the same latitude as the lower end of the Alaskan panhandle.

A collection of log cabins and weather-beaten shacks huddled on the river bank at the foot of the Rocher de Boulé, whose cloud-wreathed summit, seven thousand feet in height, seems to scrape the sky, it is one of those boom towns with which the pioneer business men of the region are shaking dice against fate. If they lose, the place will revert to the primeval wilderness from which it sprang; if they win—and the coming of the railway has made it all but certain that they will—they will have laid the foundation of a future Winnipeg or Vancouver. Save only in Constantinople during the stirring days which marked the end of the Hamidieh régime, and at Casablanca with the Foreign Legion, I do not recall ever having encountered so many strange and picturesque and interesting figures as I did in this log town on the ragged edge of things. Every evening after supper the men would come dropping into the hut by twos and threes until there were a dozen or more gathered in a circle about the whitewashed stove and the air was so thick with the fumes of Bull Durham that you could have cut it with a knife. Talk about the Arabian Nights! Those were the British Columbian Nights, and if the Caliph of Bagdad had sat in that circle of frontiersmen and listened to the tales that passed round with the black bottle in that cabin on the banks of the Skeena he would have beheaded Scherezade in disgust. Here, in the flesh, were the[441] characters of which the novelists love to write: men whom the wanderlust had lured from the Morris chairs of ease; men who had gone the pace in England long ago; men who had left their country between two days and for their country’s good; men who, in clubs or regimental messes, had been caught with an ace too many; men who, on nameless rivers or in strange valleys, had played knuckle down with Death.

The talk fest of anecdote and reminiscence would generally be opened by “Dutch” Cline, a hairy, iron-hard pioneer who would have delighted the heart of Remington. I remember that the first time I met him he remarked that there would be an early winter, and when I asked him how he knew he explained quite soberly it was because he was afflicted with an uncontrollable desire to steal a dog. Cline was a Boer by birth—hence his nickname of “Dutch”—and in his youth had fought in turn the Zulus, the Basutos, and the Matabele, having, as he expressed it, lived on the frontier ever since he was knee-high to a grasshopper. He was a born raconteur and would hold us spellbound as he yarned of the days when he sailed under Captain Hansen, “the Flying Dutchman,” and poached for seals off the Pribilofs. Hansen, who was a Dane, evolved the ingenious idea of having a ship built in Japan but owned by Americans and sailing under the British flag, so that when he was overhauled by a gunboat, whether American, British, Japanese, or Russian, and arrested for pelagic sealing, it stirred up such an international rumpus with all the other[442] nations concerned that it was easier to let him go. He once gave his vessel a coat of the grey-green paint used on the Czar’s warships, uniformed his crew as Russian sailors, and, with guns of stovepipe frowning from his decks and the flag of Saint Andrew flaunting from his stern, bore majestically down on the sealing grounds, and when his unsuspecting rivals cut their cables and fled seaward he helped himself to the skins. Though a pirate and an outlaw whose hands were stained with blood, he met his death not on deep water, as he would have wished, but in a little harbour at the north end of Vancouver Island while trying to save a little child. I remember that “Dutch” wiped his eyes as he told the story, and no one smiled at his doing it, either; for, though these men of the North have the hearts of vikings, they likewise often have the tenderness of a woman.

Then there was Bob MacDonald, a red-headed man-o’-war’s man who had served under Dewey at the taking of the Philippines and later on had been a steam-shovel man at Panama. He needed no urging to reel off tales of mad pranks and wild adventures on every seaboard of the world, but when the deed for which he had been recommended for the Carnegie medal was mentioned his face would turn as fiery as his hair. So, as he could never be induced to tell the story, some one, to his intense embarrassment, would insist on telling it for him. While prospecting in that remote and barren region which borders on the Great Slave Lake his only companion had gone suddenly[443] insane. MacDonald bound the raging madman hand and foot, placed him in a canoe which he built of whip-sawed planks, and brought him down a thousand miles of unexplored and supposedly unnavigable rivers, sometimes dragging his flimsy craft across mile-long portages, sometimes hoisting it, inch by inch, foot by foot, over rocky walls half a thousand feet in height, sometimes running cataracts and rapids where his life hung on the twist of a paddle, living on wild berries and such game as he could kill along the way, but always caring for the gibbering maniac as tenderly as though he were a child. He reached New Hazelton and its hospital with his charge at last, after one of the most intrepid journeys ever made by a white man—and the next day his comrade died. Yet when I exclaimed over his heroism, MacDonald was genuinely abashed. “Hell,” he blurted, “what else was there for me to do? You wouldn’t have had me go off and leave him up there to die, would you? You’d do the same thing if your pal was took sick on the trail. Sure you would.”

When his instrument would cease its chatter for a time, the telegraph operator would chip in with stories of the men who sit in those lonely cabins scattered along two thousand miles of copper wire and relay the news of the world to the miners of the Yukon. In hair-raising detail he told of that terrible winter when the pack-train with its supplies was lost and the snow-bound operators had to keep themselves alive for many months upon such scanty game as they[444] could find in the frozen forests. He told of the insufferable loneliness that drives men raving mad, of the awful silence that seems to crush one down. He told, with the thrill in the voice that comes only from actual experience, of how men run from their own shadows and become frightened at the sound of their own voices; of how each succeeding day is the intolerable same, only a little worse, the messages that come faintly over the line being the sole relief from the awful feeling that you are the only person left on all the earth.

Occasionally Eugene Caux, or Old Man Cataline as he is invariably called because of his Catalonian origin, would join our conversazione. His ninety odd years notwithstanding, he is a magnificent figure of a man, six feet four in his elk-hide moccasins, with a chest like a barrel, his mop of snowy hair in striking contrast to a skin which has been tanned by sun and wind to the rich, ripe colour of a well-smoked meerschaum. Cataline is the most noted packer in the whole North country, being, in fact, the owner of the last great pack-train north of the Rio Grande. So much of his life has been spent in the wild, with Indian packers and French-Canadian trappers for his only companions, that his speech has become a strange mélange of English, French, half a dozen Indian dialects, and some remnants of his native Spanish, the whole thickly spiced with oaths. When, upon his periodic visits to the settlements, he is compelled to sleep under a roof, he strips the bed of its blankets and,[445] wrapping himself in them, spends the night in comfort on the floor, his cocked revolver next his leg so that he can shoot through the coverings in case a marauder should appear. It is a custom among those who know him to invariably offer him a drink for the sake of enjoying the unique performance that ensues. His invariable brand of “hooch” is Hudson Bay rum, strong enough to eat the lining from a copper boiler. “Salue, señores!” says the old Spaniard, and drains half his glass at a single gulp. But he does not drink the other half. Instead, he pours it slowly over his mop of tousled hair and carefully rubs it in. It is a strange performance.

They tell with relish in the northern camps the story of how Old Man Cataline, summoned to appear before the court sitting at Quesnel to defend the title to some land that he had filed a claim on, strode into the crowded court-room in the midst of a trial, and, shoving aside the bailiffs, menacingly confronted the startled judge. “Je worka pour that land, señor!” he thundered, shaking his fist and his whole frame trembling with passion. “Je payez pour heem, mister! He belonga to moi! Je killa any one who try tak heem away! Oui, by God, je killa you, m’sieu!” and, drawing a hunting-knife from his belt, he drove its blade deep into the top of the judge’s table. Leaving this grim memento quivering in the wood, Cataline turned upon his heel and strode away. He was not molested.

When the world was electrified by the news that[446] gold had been discovered on the Yukon, the authorities at Ottawa, anticipating the stampede of the lawless and the desperate that ensued, rushed a body of troops to the scene for the preservation of law and order. To Old Man Cataline was intrusted the task of transporting the several hundred soldiers and their supplies overland to the gold-fields by pack-train. The officer in command was a pompous person, fresh from the Eastern provinces and much impressed with his own importance, who insisted that the routine of barrack life should be rigidly observed upon the long and tedious march through the wilderness, the men rising and eating and going to bed by bugle-call. The absurdity of this proceeding aroused the contempt of Cataline, who would snort disgustedly: “Pour cinquante, soixante year I live in the grand forêt. Je connais when it ees time to get up. Je connais when I am hongry. Je connais when I am tired. But now it ees blowa de bug’ to get up; blowa de bug’ to eat; blowa de damned bug’ to sleep. Nom d’un nom d’un nom du chien! What t’ell for?” Within twenty-four hours Cataline and the commanding officer were not on speaking terms. But the expedition continued to press steadily forward, the commander riding at the head of the mile-long string of soldiers on mule back, and Cataline bringing up the rear. One day a heavily laden pack-mule became mired in a marsh and, despite the orders of the officer and the efforts of the soldiers, could not be extricated. As they were standing in deep perplexity about the helpless animal[447] Cataline came riding up from the rear. Pulling up his mule, he sat quietly in his saddle without volunteering any advice. At last the officer, at his wit’s end, pocketed his pride.

“How would you suggest that we get this mule out, Mr. Cataline?” he asked politely.

“Oh,” remarked the old frontiersman drily, “blowa de bug’.”

Nor will I readily forget Michael Flaherty, a genial Irish section boss on the Grand Trunk Pacific, whose effervescent Celtic wit formed a grateful relief to the grim stories of hardship and suffering. He had a front tooth conveniently missing, I remember, and one of his chief delights was to lean back in his chair and write patriotic “G. R.’s” and “U. S. A.’s” in squirts of tobacco juice upon the ceiling. One day he ordered out his hand-car in a hurry.

“And where moight yez be goin’, Misther Flaherty?” solicitously inquired his assistant.

“To hell wid yer questions,” was the answer. “Did Napoleon always be tellin’ his min where he was goin’?”

The Indians of British Columbia, doubtless because of their remoteness from civilisation, have retained far more of their racial customs and characteristics than have their cousins below the international boundary. Though divided into innumerable clans and tribes, under local names, they fall naturally, on linguistic grounds, into a few large groups. Thus, the[448] southern portion of the hinterland is occupied by the Salish and the Kootenay; in the northern interior are to be found the Tinneh or Athapackan people; while the Haidas, Tsimshians, Kwakiatles, and Nootkas have their villages along the coast, though the white settlers speak of them collectively as Siwashes, “Siwash” being nothing more than a corruption of the French sauvage. These British Columbian aborigines are strikingly Oriental in appearance, having so many of the facial characteristics of the Mongol that it does not need the arguments of an ethnologist to convince one that they owe their origin to Asia. Indeed, it is a common saying that if you cut the hair of a Siwash you will find a Japanese. They are generally short and squat of figure and, though habitually lazy, are possessed of almost incredible endurance. One of them was pointed out to me, a brave named Chickens, who packed a piece of machinery weighing three hundred pounds over one hundred and eighty miles of rough forest trails in twelve days. Some years ago the Indians of the Hag-wel-get village constructed a suspension bridge of rope and timbers across the dizzy chasm at the bottom of which flows the raging Bulkley. This bridge is an interesting piece of work, for in building it the Indians adopted the cantilever system, a form of construction generally supposed to be beyond the comprehension of uncivilised peoples. But the amazing feature of the structure is that the varying members are not secured together by nails, bolts, or screws but simply lashed with willow withes. It is[449] a crazy-looking affair, and when you venture on it it creaks, groans, and swings as if threatening to collapse. Even the weight of a dog is sufficient to set it vibrating sickeningly. When it was completed, the Indians were evidently in some doubt as to the stability of their handiwork, for they tested it by sending a score of kloochmen out upon the quivering structure. If it held, well and good—it was strong enough to bear the weight of an Indian; if it gave way—oh, well, there were plenty of other squaws where those came from.

“Some of the cemeteries look as though they were filled with white-enamelled cribs.”

The grave-house of a chieftain near Kispiox.

“Over each grave is a house which is a cross between ... a Turkish kiosk and a Chinese pagoda.”

SOME SIWASH CEMETERIES.

The Siwashes bury their dead in some of the strangest cemeteries in the world, over each grave being erected a grave house of grotesquely carved and gaudily painted wood, which is a cross between a dog kennel, a chicken-coop, a Chinese pagoda, and a Turkish kiosk. In these strange mausoleums the personal belongings and gewgaws of the dear departed are prominently displayed. It may be a trunk or a dressing-table, usually bedecked with vases of withered flowers; from a line stretched across the interior of the structure hang the remnants of his or her clothing, and always in a conspicuous position is a photograph of the deceased. Though sometimes several hundred dollars are expended in the erection of one of these quaint structures, as soon as the funeral rites are over the tomb is left to the ravages of wind and rain, not a cent being expended upon its up-keep. Of recent years, however, those Indians who can afford it are abandoning the old-time wooden grave houses for elaborate enclosures of wire netting which gave the[450] cemeteries the appearance of being filled with enamelled iron cribs. Perhaps their most curious custom, however, is that of potlatch giving. A potlatch is generosity carried to the nth degree. Some of them are very grand affairs, the Indians coming in to attend them from miles around. It is by no means unusual for an Indian to actually beggar himself by his munificence on these occasions, a wealthy chieftain who gave a potlatch recently at Kispiox piling blankets, which are the Indians’ chief measure of wealth, around a totem-pole to a height of forty feet.

The Siwash villages are usually built high on a bank above some navigable stream, the totem-poles in front of the miserable cabins being so thick in places as to look from a distance like a forest that has been ravaged by fire. The Skeena might, indeed, be called the Totem-Pole River, for from end to end it is bordered by Indian villages whose grotesquely carven spars proclaim to all who traverse that great wilderness thoroughfare the genealogies of the families before whose dwellings they are reared. Though the Siwashes are accustomed to desert a village when the fishing and hunting run out and establish themselves elsewhere, their totem-poles may not be disturbed with impunity, as some business men of Seattle once found out. A few years ago the Seattle Chamber of Commerce arranged an excursion to Alaska, chartering a steamer for the purpose. While returning down the British Columbian coast, the vessel dropped anchor for a few hours at the head of a fiord, off a deserted Siwash[451] village whose water-front was lined with imposing totem-poles.

“Proclaiming ... the stories of the families before whose dwellings they are reared.” | “The Skeena might be called the Totem Pole River.” | The base of a Siwash totem-pole—“the God of Love.”

HERALDRY IN THE HINTERLAND.

“Say,” said an enterprising business man, “this place is deserted, all right, all right. The Indians have evidently gotten out for good. So what’s the matter with our chopping down that big totem-pole over there, hoisting it on deck, and taking it back to Seattle? It’ll look perfectly bully set up in Pioneer Square.”

Every one agreed that it was, indeed, a perfectly bully suggestion and it was carried out, the purloined pole being erected in due time in the heart of Seattle’s business section, where it stands to-day. The affair received considerable notice in the newspapers, of course, and those responsible for thus adding to the city’s attractions were editorially patted on the back. A few weeks later, however, they were served with papers in a civil suit brought against them by the Indians from whose village, without so much as a by-your-leave, they had removed the pole. At first they jeered at the idea of a handful of Siwash villagers dwelling up there on the skirts of civilisation having any rights which they could enforce in a court of law, but they soon found that it was no laughing matter, for the Indians, backed by the British Columbian Government, pressed their claim and it cost the gentlemen concerned four thousand dollars for their Siwash souvenir.

Everything considered, British Columbia is, I believe, the finest game country in the western hemisphere, bar none, for the sportsmen have as yet barely[452] nibbled at its edges. It is to America, in fact, what the Victoria Nyanza country is to Africa: a veritable sportsman’s paradise, to make use of a term which the writers of railway folders have taken for their own. It is the sole remaining region south of Alaska where the hunter can go with almost positive assurance that he will have a chance to draw a bead upon a grizzly bear; mountain sheep and goat are seen so frequently on the slopes of the Rocher de Boulé, at the back of New Hazelton, that they do not provoke even passing comment; the islands off the province’s ragged coast are the only habitat of that rara avis, the spotted bear; musk-ox and wood-buffalo, among the scarcest big game in existence, still graze on the prairies which are watered by the headwaters of the Mackenzie and the Peace; elk, caribou, and mule-deer are as common as squirrels in Central Park; wolves, wolverenes, lynxes, and the fox in all its species, to say nothing of the beaver, the marten, and the mink, still make the province one of the richest fur grounds in the world. Wild fowl literally blacken its lakes and fiords in the spring and autumn; grouse and pheasant, as I have previously remarked, are so tame that they can be and are killed with a club; while salmon, trout, and sturgeon fill the countless streams, sometimes in such vast numbers that they actually choke the smaller creeks and rivers. When there is taken into consideration the fact of its comparative accessibility (New Hazelton can be reached from Seattle in a little more than three days) and the healthfulness of its climate—for[453] British Columbia, unlike most of the other celebrated hunting-grounds, is distinctly a “white man’s country”—it is almost incomprehensible why it has not attracted far greater attention from the men who go into the wild with rod and gun.

The Rocher de Boulé from the Indian village of Awillgate.

The Upper Fraser at Quesnel. This is the head of steamer navigation and the end of the Cariboo Trail.

The Babine Range from Old Hazelton.

A LAND OF SUBLIMITY AND MAGNIFICENCE AND GRANDEUR, OF GLOOM AND LONELINESS AND DREAD.

It is a land of immensity and majesty and opportunity, is this almost unknown empire in the near-by North. It is a region of sublimity and magnificence and grandeur, of gloom and loneliness and dread. It is as savage as a grizzly, as alluring as a lovely woman. Its scenery is of the set-piece and drop-curtain kind. Streams of threaded quicksilver, coming from God knows where, hasten through deep-gashed valleys as though anxious to escape from the solitude that reigns. On the flanks of the ridges, massed in their black battalions, stand the bleak barbarian pines, while above the scented pine gloom, like blanketed chiefs in council under the wigwam of the sky, the snow peaks gleam in splendour, and behind them, beyond them, the sun-god paints his canvas in the West. Pregnant with the seed of unborn cities, potent in resources and possibilities beyond the stranger’s ken, it lies waiting to be conquered:

“The last and the largest empire,
The map that is half unrolled.”

[454]

[455]

## INDEX

- Abbott, Judge, ranch-house of, 22.
- Acoma, New Mexico, 22, 35, 40-55;
- antiquity, 44;
- costumes, 52, 53;
- church, 48, 49;
- customs, 44, 55;
- dwellings, 46;
- funeral, 51;
- graveyard, 51;
- houses, 45-47;
- industries, 53, 54;
- paths to, 42;
- people of, 42;
- picture of San José in, 49, 50;
- police, 58;
- site of, 40, 41, 45;
- symbolic hair-dressing, 54, 55;
- women, 53-55.
- Agricultural College, Oregon, 315, 316.
- Agriculture, United States Department of, 98.
- Alaska, 381, 438, 439.
- Alberni, B. C., 363, 375, 376.
- Albuquerque, New Mexico, 13-16, 35;
- agricultural possibilities, 14;
- climate, 13;
- commercial club, 14, 15;
- university at, 15.
- Alcatraz, prison at, 218.
- Aldermere, B. C., 434.
- Alejandro, Padre, 179.
- Alfalfa raising, 9, 74, 75, 100, 260.
- Algiers, 190.
- Amargosa River, the, 174.
- “American Alps,” the, 217.
- “American Mentone,” the, 217.
- American River, the, 229, 230.
- American School of Archæology, 23, 25.
- Anacapa Island, 151
- Anacortes, 344.
- Apple orchards, Oregon, 296, 297, 318, 319.
- Archæological research in the United States, 22-25.
- Architecture, California, 199, 200.
- Arizona, 31;
- admitted to the Union, 79;
- cities, 80;
- climate, 83-85;
- contrasted with Egypt, 71;
- copper output, 81;
- desert, 72, 73;
- early inhabitants, 77;
- effects of civilization in, 63-65;
- game-hunting, 85-87;
- history of, 76-79, 91;
- irrigation, 70, 88, 93, 94;
- misconceptions concerning, 71, 74;
- missions, 91-93;
- organised as territory, 79;
- people law-abiding, 88, 89;
- pioneers, 67-69, 79;
- prison system, 89, 90;
- products of the soil, 74-76;
- progress in, 66-69;
- two distinct regions of, 87, 88.
- Arizona Rangers, the, 89.
- Ark, the, 376, 377.
- Arroyo Hondo, 56.
- Ashcroft, B. C., 391-6.
- Ashland, Oregon, 323.
- Automobiles, in Oregon, 313.
- Avalon, Santa Catalina, 148-151.
- Bakersfield, California, 259-261, 324.
- Banning Company, the, 147.
- Barbareños, 152, 153.
- Barkerville, B. C., 392.
- Barrancas, 56.
- Bay of Monterey, the lost, 195.
- Beaman, Judge, 150.
- Bellingham, 348.
- “Ben Hur,” 16.
- Benedict, Judge Kirby, 50.
- Benicia, California, 219, 220.
- Bent, Governor, 21.
- Big-game hunting, 85-87, 347, 451-3.
- Big trees of California, 254, 255, 257, 258.
- Bisbee, Arizona, 87.
- Black Hills, 81.
- Blackwater, B. C., 401, 405, 406.
- Blaine, 348, 349.
- Boar-hunting, 153.
- Bobtail Lake, B. C., 403, 404.
- Bohemian Club of San Francisco, the, 158, 202.
- [456]Bohemians in California, 282, 283.
- Borax deposits, 174, 177.
- Bradshaw Mountains, 82.
- Bret Harte, 229, 230.
- Bridge built by Indians, 448, 449.
- Bridger, Jim, 56.
- British Columbia, 209, 355 et seq.;
- area, 358, 359;
- character of the country, 362, 363, 453;
- cities of, 363, 364;
- climate, 361;
- corduroying roads in, 411, 412;
- cutting path through forest, 428, 429;
- freighters, 398;
- frontier, 389 et seq., 421 et seq.;
- game-hunting, 451-3;
- government’s interest in settlers, 407;
- Indians, 415, 447-451;
- “muskeg,” 410, 411;
- pioneers in, 385, 386, 390, 397 et seq.;
- prohibition in, 407-9;
- railways, 378-382;
- resources, 359-361;
- roads, 411, 415, 416, 433.
- British Columbia Express Company, 391, 392.
- Brussels, restoration of, 17.
- Bryce, James, 299.
- Bunk-houses, British Columbia, 413.
- Bureau of Indian Affairs, 58.
- Burlingame, California, 198, 199.
- Burns Lake, B. C., 424, 425.
- Busch Gardens, Pasadena, 141.
- Cabbage-growing in New Mexico, 10.
- Cabrillo, Juan Rodrigues, 147, 171, 172.
- Cabrillo, the, 147, 149.
- Caire estate, the, 152.
- California Debris Commission, 226.
- California, 160 et seq.;
- agriculture of, 218;
- architecture, 199, 200;
- Chinese in, 207;
- climate, 157-9;
- coast, 161, 162;
- discovery of, 172;
- dust, 159;
- festivals, 201-3;
- fogs, 159;
- Great Valley of, 242-4;
- hinterland, 240 et seq.;
- Japanese in, 207-210;
- labour problems in, 206-8;
- missions, 117-122, 179, 180, 183, 186, 195, 198;
- orange groves, 125-8, 133-8;
- popular misnomers, 216, 217;
- rain, 158;
- roads, 116, 132, 197, 198;
- seaside resorts, 142-4;
- summer climate, 157-160;
- three distinct zones of, 157;
- trees, 254-8.
- Camels, wild, 86, 87.
- Camino Real, El, 21, 108, 115, 122, 161, 178, 185, 197, 198.
- Camp Sierra, 257.
- Canada, agricultural invasion of, 357, 358;
- motoring in, 348-350;
- railways, 378-381.
- Canadian Northern Railway, 378-381.
- Canadian Pacific Railway, 378-380, 395.
- Canal at Celilo, 291.
- Cañon of the Macho, 21;
- of the Santa Fé, 21.
- Cañons, 21, 23.
- Cañon’s Crest, 131.
- Cape Flattery, 344.
- Cape Horn, 232, 301.
- Caravels, miniature, 171, 172.
- Cariboo Trail, the, 391-9.
- Carmel, mission of, 183.
- Carpinteria, California, 166.
- Carquinez Straits, the, 219.
- Carson, Kit, 21, 56.
- Casa Grande, ruins of, 91, 94;
- irrigation, 110.
- Cascade Range, the, 277, 285, 293, 295, 298-300, 310.
- Casitas Pass, the, 166.
- Casteñeda, 45.
- Castle Hot Springs, Arizona, 81-83.
- Castle Rock, 301.
- Castro, General, 186.
- Catalina Range, 85.
- Cattle-raising in New Mexico, 26.
- Caux, Eugene (Old Man Cataline), 444-7.
- Cave-dwellers, 22-25.
- Caves, painted, of Santa Cruz, 151;
- Oregon, 324.
- Celilo, canal at, 291.
- Channel Islands, the, 146-154.
- Charles the Second of Aragon, 49.
- Chinese, in California, 207;
- [457]farming, 7, 8.
- Church, adobe, at Acoma, 48-50.
- Civil War, 79.
- Clarksburg, California, 223.
- Cline, “Dutch,” 439, 441.
- Cloud Cap Inn, 297.
- Coast Range, the, 241.
- Colorado Desert, 98.
- Colorado River, the, 99, 100.
- Colton Hall, Monterey, 183.
- Columbia, of Boston, the, 303.
- Columbia River, the, 273 et seq.;
- Indian legend, 293-5;
- length of, 289, 290;
- romance of, 292-6;
- salmon, 302;
- scenery, 290, 299-301;
- traffic, 301, 302;
- waterfalls, 300, 301.
- Commerce of the prairies, 20, 21.
- Commercial Club in Albuquerque, 14, 15.
- Contra Costa County, California, 219.
- Copper mines, 32, 81.
- Coronado, California, 103-7, 216;
- hotel, 105-7;
- Polo Club, 104;
- Tent City, 112, 113.
- Coronado, Don Francisco Vasquez de, expedition of, 45, 78, 115.
- Coronados Islands, the, 146.
- Cotton, Egyptian, 75, 76.
- Coulterville, California, 256;
- road, 246.
- Crater Lake, 285, 286.
- Crocker’s Sierra Resort, 246, 247.
- Czechs, 282.
- Dalton Divide, the, 21, 22.
- Dams, Laguna and Roosevelt, 70, 88, 91, 93, 94;
- Elephant Butte, 110.
- Date, the Algerian, 75, 76;
- the Deglet Noor, 100.
- Death Valley, 83, 172-8;
- borax deposits, 177;
- climatic variation, 176;
- effects of ultrararefied air, 175;
- sand-storms, 176, 177.
- Decker Lake, 425-8.
- Del Mar, California, 117-9.
- Del Monte, California, 184, 185.
- Deming, New Mexico, 3-8, 13.
- Denver, 21.
- Depew, Chauncey, 84, 85.
- Deschutes, the, 287.
- Desert, Arizona, 72, 73;
- Colorado, 98;
- New Mexican, 36, 38, 39.
- Dikes on the Sacramento, 226, 227.
- Donner Lake, 233.
- Donner party tragedy, story of, 233, 234.
- Drain, Oregon, 323.
- Drowned Lands, the, 426, 428.
- Dry Lake Ranch, 282.
- Duncan, woodsman, 427-433, 437, 438.
- Dungeness, 344.
- Easter pilgrimage, 129-131.
- Egypt, 71, 72.
- El Centro, 101, 102.
- El Paso, 21.
- Elephant Butte, dam at, 110.
- Elkins, Stephen B., 21.
- English in New Mexico, 12;
- pioneers in the North, 399-403.
- Erosion, Acoma, a striking example of, 41.
- Eugene, Oregon, 317, 320, 323.
- Fair, Oregon State, 312-7.
- Farms, New Mexico, 7-11;
- Oregon, 314, 315.
- Feast of the Blossoms, the, 192, 193, 201.
- Festivities, California out-of-door, 201-3.
- Fishing, deep-sea, at Avalon, 149-151.
- Fishing industry of the Sacramento, 220, 221.
- Fish-wheels, 302.
- Flaherty, Michael, 447.
- Floral mosaic, 267.
- Florence, Arizona, State penitentiary at, 89.
- Folsom, California, 229.
- Foot-hills Hotel, the, 164-6.
- Forests, Sierran, 266.
- Fort Fraser, B. C., 390, 395, 399, 416, 421-4;
- cost of provisions in, 422.
- Fort George, B. C., 393, 408, 409.
- [458]Fowl, wild, 220.
- Fraser River, the, 391, 392, 398.
- Freight wagons, British Columbian, 398.
- Frémont, 115, 186, 228.
- Fresno, California, 256.
- Friday Harbour, 344.
- Frontier, the last, 389 et seq., 421 et seq.
- Frontiersmen, British Columbian, 440-7.
- Frost in the orange belt, 133, 257.
- Fruit-growing, in Arizona, 75.
- Fruit-packing industry, 205.
- Funeral Range, the, 173, 174.
- Furnace Creek, 174.
- Gadsden Treaty, 79.
- Gasoline, cost of in British Columbia, 394, 395.
- Gaviota Pass, the, 178.
- General Grant Big Tree Grove, 257.
- Gila River, the, 9, 79, 83, 110.
- Gilroy, California, 196.
- Glacier meadows, 266, 267.
- Globe, Arizona, 90.
- Goat, wild, 153.
- Gold discovery, California, 79, 173, 224.
- Gold dredger, 230-2.
- Golden Gate, the, 241.
- Golf-links, California, 159, 185.
- Grand Island, 227.
- Grand Trunk Pacific Railway, 364, 378-382, 384, 408, 426.
- Grant’s Pass, Oregon, 323, 324.
- Great Central Lake, B. C., 220, 375, 376.
- Great Valley of California, the, 242 et seq.;
- irrigation of, 243, 244;
- petroleum fields, 258, 259.
- Grove Play, Bohemian Club’s, 158, 202, 203.
- Halleck, 183.
- Harriman, E. H., 284.
- Hawk’s Nest, the, 186.
- Heenan, the “Benicia Boy,” 220.
- High Sierras, the, 266.
- Highways, 21, 102, 108, 114-8, 161, 166, 197, 198, 215, 229, 278.
- Hillsboro, California, 198;
- Oregon, 326.
- Holland, waterways of, 215, 216.
- Hollanders in New Mexico, 13.
- Hollywood, California, 199.
- Homestead and Desert Land Acts, 6, 323.
- Honey Lake, 279, 280.
- Hood River, 296, 297.
- Hopi Indians, 16, 47, 53-59.
- Horton, Alonzo, 108.
- Hot Springs Junction, 81.
- Hotel Arlington, 170, 171;
- del Coronado, 105-7;
- The Foot-hills, 164-6.
- Hund, John, 6.
- Hundred and Fifty Mile House, the, 430-2.
- Hunt, Governor George W. P., 79, 89.
- Hunting big game in Arizona, 85-87;
- in British Columbia, 451-3;
- in the Puget Sound country, 347.
- Hydraulic mining, 226, 230.
- Imperial Valley, the, 8, 97-102, 110, 194;
- agricultural products, 100;
- highway into, 102, 103;
- irrigation of, 99;
- soil expert’s report concerning, 98, 99;
- towns in, 101.
- Indian education, 47, 48;
- legend of the Columbia, 293-5;
- punishments, 58-60;
- revolt of 1680, 19, 78;
- settlement in the Yosemite, 250-2;
- sheep-owners, 27.
- Indians, Palatingwa, 120, 121;
- Hopi, 16, 47, 53-59;
- Siwash, 415, 447-451.
- Invalids, in Albuquerque, 13.
- Iron Hills, the, 279.
- Irrigation, 5, 6, 8, 14, 30, 32, 70, 88, 93, 94, 99, 110, 225-7, 243, 246.
- Isleton, California, 223.
- Japanese in California, 207-210.
- [459]Jewellery, Indian, 53.
- Kalama, 331, 332.
- Katzimo, 40, 41.
- Kearney Boulevard, the, 256.
- Kearney, General, 19, 20.
- King’s Highway. (See Camino Real.)
- Kino, Jesuit Father, 91.
- Klamath Falls, 283-5.
- La Jolla, California, 117.
- Labour problems in California, 206-8.
- Laguna, New Mexico, 35, 37, 38, 49, 50;
- dam, 70, 88.
- Lake Chapala, 220.
- Lake of Elsinore, 117.
- Lake Tahoe, 228, 232, 235, 236, 264-270.
- Larkin house, Monterey, 183.
- Leland Stanford, Jr., University, 197.
- Lick, James, 147.
- Linda Vista grade, the, 114.
- Lisa, Manuel, 56.
- Long Beach, California, 143.
- Los Angeles, California, 142-5, 209;
- harbour, 144, 145;
- name, 139.
- Los Gatos, 191.
- Los Olivos, inn at, 180, 181.
- Lummis, Charles, 139.
- Macdonald, “Black Jack,” 438.
- MacDonald, Bob, 442, 443.
- Machine shearing, 27.
- Madera, California, 256.
- Manzano Ranges, the, 14.
- “Marble Halls of Oregon,” the, 324.
- Marcos de Niza, 78.
- Mare Island Navy Yard, 219.
- Mariposa Big Tree Grove, 254, 255.
- Mark Twain, 230.
- Marshall, John, 229.
- Matilija Valley, the, 162, 164.
- Meadows, mountain, 266, 267.
- Medford, Oregon, 319, 323.
- Mediterranean Riviera, the, 161.
- Memaloose, the Island of the Dead, 293.
- Merced Big Tree Grove, 247, 256.
- Mesa Encantada, La (the Enchanted Mesa), 30-41.
- Mexican War, 79.
- Mexicans, in New Mexico, 28, 29.
- Militiamen, Canadian, 372, 373.
- Miller, Frank, 121.
- Mimbres Valley, the, 6 et seq., 32;
- climate, 8, 9.
- Mining, 226, 230-2.
- Miramar, California, 167.
- Mission Inn at Riverside, 121, 127.
- Mission Valley, 117.
- Missions, Arizona, 91-93;
- California, 117-122, 179, 180, 183, 186, 195, 198.
- Modesto, California, 246.
- Mojave City, Arizona, 87.
- Montecito, California, 167, 199, 223.
- Monterey, California, 159, 181-5, 195, 216;
- historic interest of, 182, 183.
- Morehouse, Colonel C. P., 150.
- Moricetown, B. C., 434-6.
- Motoring in British Columbia, 348-350, 372, 439;
- in California, 113-8, 132, 166, 228, 261-4, 278, 279;
- in Oregon, 320;
- in the Yosemite, 246-8, 254.
- Mount Adams, 295;
- Hamilton, 191;
- Hood, 295, 298;
- Hooker, 346;
- Lowe, 142;
- Rubidoux, 128, 129;
- Rainier, 337-340, 347;
- Shasta, 160;
- Saint Helens, 295;
- San Jacinto, 160;
- Tamalpais, 219;
- Topotopo, 163.
- Moving pictures taken in the West, 64, 90, 171.
- Muir, John, 249.
- Nanaimo, 363, 372, 373.
- Napoleon, 182.
- Natalie, the, 182.
- Nechako River, the, 424.
- Nehalem Bay, 326.
- “Netherlands Route,” the, 217.
- New Hazelton, B. C., 380, 381, 428, 436-440, 443, 452.
- “New Helvetia,” 227.
- [460]New Mexico, annexation of, 19, 20;
- changes in, 3 et seq.;
- character of the people, 31, 32;
- climate of, 8, 9;
- desert, 36, 38, 39;
- dress, 10;
- farming in, 7-11;
- fuel, 11;
- industries, 25-28;
- Mexicans in, 28, 29;
- mineral deposits, 32;
- prosperity of, 31, 32;
- religious fanaticism, 29, 30;
- settlers in, 10-13;
- social fabric, 28, 30;
- Spanish spoken in, 29;
- turquoise deposits, 32;
- water discovery, 5, 6;
- well-digging, 11;
- white population, 30.
- New Westminster, B. C., 350, 363.
- Nisqually Glacier, the, 338-340.
- Oak Knoll, California, 109.
- Oceanside, California, 117-9.
- Oil-fields, California, 258, 259.
- Ojai Valley, the, 162-6.
- Olympia, 336.
- Oñate, Juan de, 19, 51.
- Orange groves of California, 125-8, 133-8, 257.
- Oregon, 307-328;
- Agricultural College, 315;
- apple orchards, 296, 318, 319;
- caves, 324;
- character of the country, 324-8;
- charm of, 326-8;
- climate, 327;
- emigration to, 321-3;
- farmer, 313-6;
- a frontier country, 325;
- hinterland, 275 et seq., 309, 310;
- opportunities in, 322;
- prohibition in, 323, 324;
- railroad, 325-7;
- State Fair, 312-7;
- timber, 322;
- towns, 308, 323, 324.
- Oregon Trail, the, 276.
- “Our Italy,” 216.
- Pacific Great Eastern Railway, 379-380.
- Pack-train on the Cariboo Trail, 397.
- “Padre’s Path,” 42.
- Pajarito National Park, 22-25.
- Pala, San Antonia de, mission chapel, 117, 120.
- Palatingwa tribe, the, 120, 121.
- Palo Alto, 197, 198.
- Panamint Range, the, 174.
- Pasadena, California, 131-3, 138-142, 170, 201, 223;
- Busch Gardens, 140, 141;
- Mount Lowe, 140, 142;
- Orange Grove Avenue, 140, 141.
- Pecos, the, valley of, 9, 32;
- Forest Reserve, 22.
- Pelican Bay Lodge, 285.
- Pelicans, 283.
- Penitentes, the, 29, 30.
- Petroleum fields, California, 258, 259.
- Philip III, 147.
- Phœnix, Arizona, 80, 83, 90, 91, 93, 110.
- Pillars of Hercules, 301.
- Pilot Peak, 278.
- Pio Pico, 147.
- Placerville, California, 228, 229, 232.
- Plaza del Mar, Santa Barbara, 169, 171.
- Point Loma, 103.
- Polo Club at Coronado, 104.
- Port Alberni, B. C., 376.
- Port Angeles, 344.
- Port Mann, B. C., 380.
- Portland, Oregon, 202, 308, 331, 332, 341;
- residences, 311.
- Portola, Don Caspar de, 195, 210.
- Prescott, Arizona, 80, 81.
- Prince Rupert, B. C., 379-384, 390.
- Prison system, Arizona, 89.
- Prunes, California, 193.
- Pueblo system of government, 58.
- Puget Sound country, the, 341-7;
- a trip through, 343-5;
- variety of sports and recreations, 345-7.
- Punishments, Indian, 58-60.
- Quesnel, B. C., 392, 394, 395, 399, 401, 445.
- Railways in British Columbia, 378-382.
- Rainier National Park, 338, 340.
- Raisin industry, 256.
- Ramona, home of, 117.
- Ranches, Californian, 242.
- Rasmussen, Peter, 412-4.
- Raton, New Mexico, 12.
- Redlands, California, 131, 132.
- [461]Redondo, California, 143.
- Remittance-man, the, 400, 401.
- Rincon route, the, 166.
- Rio Grande, the, 14, 23, 110.
- Rito de los Frijoles, the, 23-25.
- River gardens, 221, 222.
- Riverside, California, 117, 120, 125-133, 136;
- Easter pilgrimage, 129-131;
- Mission Inn at, 121, 127.
- Riviera, the Californian, 161, 216.
- Rogue, valley of the, 321.
- Roosevelt dam, 70, 88, 91, 93, 94, 110.
- Roseburg, Oregon, 323.
- Sacramento, 215, 224-8.
- Sacramento River, the, 215-227, 233, 241;
- dikes, 226, 227;
- fishing industry, 220, 221;
- homes along, 223;
- house-boats, 224;
- reclamation of banks, 225-7;
- traffic, 222;
- truck-gardens, 221.
- Salem, Oregon, 312, 323.
- Salmon fisheries, 302, 348, 375.
- Salt River Valley, 93.
- San Antonio de Pala, mission chapel of, 117, 120.
- San Bernardino Range, the, 241.
- San Buenaventura, 162.
- San Carlos, Church of, Monterey, 183.
- San Clemente, island of, 151.
- San Diego, 97, 98, 102, 107-112, 117, 118;
- advantages, 109, 110;
- climate, 111, 112;
- geography, 103;
- growth of, 108;
- highway, 102, 103;
- history, 107, 108;
- prospects, 109-111.
- San Francisco, 215;
- Portola Festival at, 201.
- San Joaquin River, the, 221, 241, 242, 245, 256.
- San José, California, 196, 200;
- mission, 195.
- San José, picture of, 49, 50.
- San Juan Bautista, mission of, 186.
- San Juan Islands, 343, 344.
- San Luis Obispo, California, 172.
- San Luis Rey, mission of, 117, 119, 120.
- San Mateo, California, 198, 199;
- New Mexico, 29.
- San Pedro, harbour of, 144, 145.
- San Salvador, the, 171.
- San Xavier del Bac, mission of, 91-94.
- Sand-storms in Death Valley, 176, 177.
- Sangre de Cristo Range, the, 18, 22.
- Santa Barbara, 166-172, 202, 217;
- architecture, 170;
- Arlington Hotel, 170, 171;
- college, 170;
- contrasts in, 167;
- Old Town section, 168;
- Plaza del Mar, 169;
- State Street, 169, 170.
- Santa Barbara Islands, the, 146, 151-3.
- Santa Catalina Island, 146-151, 153.
- Santa Clara Valley, the, 8, 190-210;
- air in, 206;
- blossom-time in, 192, 193;
- climate, 200, 201;
- land values, 204, 205;
- productiveness of, 193-5;
- schools in, 196;
- ultrafashionable colonies of, 198.
- Santa Clara Valley (southern), 262, 263.
- Santa Cruz Island, 151-3.
- Santa Fé, 16-21, 56;
- governor’s palace, 16;
- history, 19;
- Mexicans in, 29;
- name of, 19;
- possibilities of, 17, 18;
- scenery, 16.
- Santa Fé, Prescott & Phœnix Railway, 81.
- Santa Fé Trail, the, 18, 20.
- Santa Monica, California, 143.
- Santa Paula, California, 263, 264.
- Santa Rita Mountains, 92.
- Santa Ynez, inn near, 180;
- mission of, 179.
- Santa Ynez Range, the, 178, 216.
- Saugus, California, 262, 263.
- Scenic Highway, the, 21, 22.
- Schoolhouses in the Santa Clara, 196.
- Seals, of Santa Cruz, 151.
- Seaside resorts, California, 142-4.
- Seattle, 202;
- compared with Portland, 340, 341, 346.
- Sentinel Hotel, the, 249, 250.
- [462]Sequim Prairie, 344.
- Sequoia trees, the, 254, 255, 257, 258.
- Serra, Father Junipero, 108, 115, 121, 130, 180, 181, 183, 184, 195, 198, 210, 246.
- Servilleta, 56.
- Sespe Valley, the, 164.
- Sheep-raising, 26-28, 262.
- Sherman, 183.
- Sierra Nevada Range, the, 160, 232, 241, 265-7.
- Silver City, New Mexico, 32.
- Siskiyous, the, 324.
- Siwash Indians, 415, 416, 447-451.
- Skeena, the, 390, 394, 395.
- Skylanders, 42 et seq.
- Smiley Heights, California, 131.
- Smith, Captain Jedediah, 56, 115, 210.
- Smithsonian Institution, 40.
- Sol Duc Hot Springs, 344.
- Southern California, 97.
- Spanish dominion in Mexico, overthrow of, 19.
- Sprockets, John D., 109.
- Stage-coaches, 90.
- Stanford, Leland, 197, 210.
- Stevenson, Robert Louis, 183.
- Stockton, California, 244-6.
- Stony Creek, B. C., 415, 416.
- Studebaker, John, 229.
- Suisun Bay, 220, 221.
- Summerland, California, 167.
- Summit, California, 232, 233.
- Superstition Mountains, 93.
- Susanville, 277, 280-2.
- Sutler, John Augustus, 227, 228, 234.
- Sutler’s Fort, 227, 228, 234.
- Swamp and Drowned Lands Act, 260.
- Tacoma, 336-8, 346.
- Tahoe. (See Lake Tahoe.)
- Tahoe Tavern, 268.
- Tallac, California, 232.
- Taos, New Mexico, 22, 55-58;
- houses, 45, 57.
- Tehachapi Range, the, 97, 241, 261.
- Telegraph stations, frontier, 403, 404.
- Tennis Club, Ojai Valley, 164.
- Tent City, at Coronado, 112, 113.
- Tête Jaune Pass, the, 379, 380.
- The Dalles, Oregon, 276, 277, 286-8, 291.
- Tiles, Spanish, 168.
- Tillamook County, Oregon, 326, 327.
- Tingley, Madame, 103.
- Torrey pine, the, 118.
- Trail riding, 260.
- Trees, California Big, 254, 255, 257, 258.
- Trevet, Victor, 293.
- Truck-gardens, 221, 222.
- Truckee, California, 233-5, 268, 269.
- Tucson, Arizona, 80, 81, 92, 94.
- Tucson Farms, 110.
- Tuna Club, the, at Avalon, 150, 151.
- Tuna fishing, 140-151.
- Turquoise deposits, 32.
- Tyler, President, 296.
- Union Pacific Railroad, 21.
- Universal Brotherhood, the, 103.
- University of California, Greek Theatre at, 202.
- University of New Mexico, the, 15.
- Vallejo, California, 219, 220.
- Vancouver, B. C., 116, 349, 350, 363-7, 369.
- Vancouver Island, 345, 370-6, 442;
- fish and game, 375;
- Island Highway, 371-4;
- motoring on, 372;
- railway, 381;
- scenery, 373, 374.
- van Dyke, Dr. Henry, 130.
- Vargas, De, 19.
- Venice, California, 143, 144.
- Ventura, California, 162.
- Victoria, B. C., 346, 363-370;
- Harbour, 367, 368.
- Visalia, California, 246, 257, 258.
- Vittoria, the, 171.
- Vizcaino, 181.
- Wagon-trains, 20, 21, 398.
- Wah, the brothers, 7, 8.
- Walla Walla, 295.
- [463]Wallace, General Lew, 16.
- Washington, 331 et seq.;
- character of the country, 334, 335;
- climate, 335;
- land clearing, 334, 335;
- names of towns, 333;
- roads, 331, 332;
- sign-posts, 333, 334;
- water-power, 335.
- Water discovery in the Mimbres Valley, 5, 6.
- Waterfalls of the Columbia River, 300, 301.
- Wawona, California, 254.
- Webster, secretary of state, 296.
- Well-digging in New Mexico, 11.
- White Rock Cañon, 23.
- Whitman, 295, 296.
- Willamette River, the, 309-311, 317.
- Wood, Mr., 150.
- Wool industry, the, 26-28.
- Yavapai Club, the, 81.
- Yosemite Valley, the, 246-260;
- Indian settlement, 250-2;
- Sentinel Hotel, 249, 250;
- variety of recreation, 253.
- Yukon Telegraph Trail, 395.
- Yuma, Arizona, 83-85, 97, 98, 102, 110.

MAP OF THE FAR WEST, FROM NEW MEXICO TO BRITISH COLUMBIA, SHOWING THE ROUTE FOLLOWED BY THE AUTHOR