Part 16

To fully appreciate the miracle of reclamation, whereby the banks of the Sacramento have been transformed from worthless drowned lands into the richest gardens in the world, you should motor down the splendid boulevard which for a dozen miles or more parallels the river. The miners along the Sacramento early found that the easiest and cheapest method of getting gold was to direct a powerful stream of water against the hillsides, washing the hills away and diverting the resultant mud into long sluice-boxes, in which the gold was collected. The residue of mud and water was then turned back into the streams again and was carried down and deposited in the bed of the Sacramento River, gradually decreasing its capacity for carrying off flood waters and making its navigation impossible for large boats. Hence, when the spring freshets came the swollen river overflowed and devastated the farms and orchards along its banks. For forty years this sort of thing continued, the protests of the farmers and fruit growers being ignored, for in those days the miners virtually ruled the land. But as time wore on, mining gradually decreased in importance and agriculture grew, until, in 1893, the farming interests became powerful enough to induce Congress to stop all hydraulic mining and to put all mining operations on streams in the San Joaquin and Sacramento Valleys under the control of the California Debris Commission. Once rid of the bugaboo of the hydraulic nozzle and its resultant obstruction of the river channels, the farmers along the Sacramento got together and purchased a number of clam-shell dredgers and set to work to build new levees and to repair the old ones. If you will follow the course of the Sacramento for a few miles outside the capital, either by road or river, you will see them at work. It is very interesting. A great arm, ending in a sort of hand like two clam-shells, reaches out over the river and the hand plunges into the stream. When the hand, which is in reality a huge steel scoop with hinged jaws, emerges from its gropings at the river-bottom it is filled with sand, whereupon the arm carries it over and empties it upon the bank. This is the way in which the dikes which border the Sacramento are constructed, one clam-shell dredger doing as much work in a day as five hundred men. As a result of this ingenious contrivance you can make the circuit of Grand Island on an oiled road, forty feet wide, which has been built on top of the dikes. Below you on one side is the river; on the other orchards and gardens from which come annually a quarter of the world’s asparagus crop, the earliest cherries in the United States, and a million boxes of pears.

I think that the most significant thing that I saw in Sacramento was Sutter’s Fort, or, to be quite accurate, the restored remnants of it. Three quarters of a century ago this little rectangular fortification was the westernmost outpost of American civilisation. In 1839 a Swiss soldier of fortune named John Augustus Sutter obtained from the Mexican Government a grant of eleven square leagues of land on the banks of the Sacramento River and permission to erect a stockade as a protection against the encroachments of the Indians. The stockade, however, quickly grew into something closely resembling a fort, with walls loopholed for musketry and capable of resisting any attack unsupported by artillery. Sutter’s Fort, or “New Helvetia,” as the owner called his little kingdom, was on the direct line of overland immigration from the East, and as a result of the strategic position he occupied and of his influence with the Mexican authorities, Sutter soon became the virtual ruler of all this Sierran region. During those stirring days when Frémont and his frontiersmen came riding down from the passes, it was this Swiss-American adventurer who held the balance of power on the Pacific Coast, and it was in no small measure due to the encouragement and aid he gave the American settlers that California became American. The old frontiersman died in poverty, the great domain of which he was the owner having been wrested from him, on one pretext and another, each flimsier than the one preceding, during the turmoil and lawlessness which marked the gold-rush days. To-day the old fort is the centre of a highly landscaped city park; the muzzles of its brass field-guns frown from their embrasures down paved and shaded avenues; street-cars clang their noisy way past the gates which were double-barred at night against the attacks of marauding bands of Mexicans and Indians; and at night spluttering arc-lamps illuminate its loopholed, vine-clad walls. Sacramento has acknowledged the great debt she owes to Sutter by giving his destitute grandson employment as a day labourer on the grounds of the fort which his grandfather built and to which the capital city of California owes its being.

There are two routes open to the automobilist between Sacramento and Lake Tahoe and, historically as well as scenically, there is little to choose between them. The Placerville route, though considerably the longer, traverses the country immortalised by Bret Harte and inseparably associated with the “Forty-Niners.” From Sacramento to Folsom the highway follows the route of the first railroad built in California, this jerk-water line, constructed in 1854 to take the miners in and the gold-dust out, being the grandfather of those great systems which now cover the State with a cobweb of steel. At Folsom, built on the edge of a sheer cliff high above the waters of the American River, is the stone-walled château where a thousand or more gentlemen who have emerged second best from arguments with the law are dwelling in enforced seclusion at the expense of the State. Placerville is the historic “Hangtown” of early days, having gained its original name from the fact that the sacredness of law and order was emphasised there in the good old days by means of frequent entertainments known as “necktie parties,” the hosts at these informal affairs being committees of indignant citizens. At them the guest of honour made his positively last appearance. It was here that “Wheelbarrow John” Studebaker, by sticking to his trade of wheelwright instead of joining in the mad stampede to the diggings, laid the foundation for that great concern whose vehicles are known wherever there are roads for wheels to run on. At Coloma, not far from Placerville, a heroic statue does honour to the memory of John Marshall, the news of whose discovery of yellow sand in a mill-race brought fortune seekers flocking Californiaward from every quarter of the globe. Though fruit growing has long since succeeded mining as the chief industry of this region, and though the buildings mentioned in the stories of Bret Harte and Mark Twain have for the most part gone to wrack and ruin, these towns of the “Mother Lode” still retain enough of their old-time interest and picturesqueness so that it does not require a Bausch & Lomb imagination to picture them as they were in the heyday of their existence, when their streets and barrooms and dance halls were filled with the flotsam and jetsam of all the earth: wanderers from dim and distant ports, adventurers, seafarers, soldiers of misfortune, gamblers, absconding bank clerks, farmers, unsuccessful merchants, out-at-elbows professional men, men of uneasy conscience and women of easy virtue, world without end.

When Congress put an end to hydraulic mining the mining men made an outcry that rose to heaven. The prosperity of California was ended. The State was going to the bow-wows. There was nothing but gloom and disaster ahead. The companies that owned the water-rights along the American River planted their properties to grape-vines and used their hydraulic apparatus to water them with. But always they were tormented with the knowledge that under the roots of the vines was gold, gold, gold. Spurred on by this knowledge, there was devised a new process of gold extraction; a process that not only did not deposit any débris in the rivers but which proved to be far more profitable than the old. Ground that had not yielded enough gold to pay for its being worked was turned into “pay dirt” through the agency of the giant gold dredger invented in New Zealand and later developed to its highest efficiency in California. Picture to yourself a boulder-strewn field, covered with the tailings of old mining operations, with here and there a pit as large as the foundation for a sky-scraper made by the hydraulic miners. Each successive layer of gravel in this field, straight down to bed-rock, bears gold in small quantities—gold brought there ages ago by the waters of the river. To extract this gold by the old methods was obviously as unprofitable as it was illegal. So they tried the new method imported from the gold-fields of New Zealand. It is not easy to explain the workings of a modern gold dredger unless you have seen one. Go out into the middle of a field and dig a pit—a pit large enough to contain a city office-building. Run water into the pit until it becomes a mud-hole. Then build in that mud-hole a great steel caisson of several thousand cubic tons displacement. There you have the basis of the mammoth contrivances which have supplanted the ’Forty-Niner’s pick and pan. Each of these dredgers costs a quarter of a million dollars to build and labours night and day. The business end of the dredger consists of an endless chain of buckets, each of which weighs two tons when empty, which burrow down into the mud-hole until they strike bed-rock. The gravel which they bring up, after being saturated with water, is passed over quicksilver tables which collect the gold, and runs out again at the bottom of the pit, thus reversing the natural arrangement of the soil, the dirt being left on the bottom and the gravel and cobbles on top. It costs in the neighbourhood of seven thousand dollars a month to operate one of these dredgers, but the resultant “clean-up” pays for this several times over. Not only is the gold extracted from the earth as effectually as a bartender squeezes the juice out of a lemon, but rock crushers convert the mountains of cobbles into material for building highways all over the surrounding region, and on the aerated and renovated soil which the dredgers leave behind them any crop on earth will thrive. Thus has mechanical genius succeeded in turning those hereditary enemies, Agriculture and Mining, into coworkers and friends.

[Illustration: LAKE TAHOE FROM THE SLOPES OF THE HIGH SIERRAS.]

Because we wished to follow the route which the overland emigrants had taken in their epoch-making march, we did not go to Tahoe through Placerville, which is connected with Tallac, at the southern end of the lake, by one of the finest motor highways in California, but chose the more direct and equally good road which climbs over the Sierras by way of Colfax, Dutch Flat, and Emigrant Gap. Upward and upward wound our road, like a spiral stairway to the skies. One of the most characteristic features of this Sierra region is that the traveller can see at a glance the lay of the whole land. Nowhere else, so far as I am aware, not from the Saint Bernard, or Ararat, or even from Darjeeling, can one command such comprehensive views as are to be had from the rocky promontory known as Cape Horn, or from Summit, which, as its name implies, is at the top of the pass. At our feet, like a map spread out upon the ground for our inspection, lay California. The dense forests which clothed the upper slopes of the Sierras gave way to orchards of pear and apple, and these changed to the citrus groves which flourish on the lower, balmier levels, and the green of the orange zone ended abruptly in the yellow of the grain-fields, and this merged into the checker-board of the truck-gardens, and through these we could dimly descry the blue ribbon of the Sacramento turning and twisting and doubling on its tortuous way to the sea.

The summit of the pass is one hundred and five miles from Sacramento, and in that distance we had ascended just seven thousand feet, or seven hundred feet higher than Mount Washington, the highest peak east of the Rockies. From Summit to Truckee is fourteen miles and we coasted all the way, the rush of mountain air in our faces as we swept silently and smoothly down the long diagonals recalling the sensation on the Cresta Run at Saint Moritz. Swinging suddenly around a shoulder of the mountain at the “Three Miles to Truckee” sign, we found ourselves looking down upon a lake, a very gem of a lake, so scintillatingly blue amid the encircling forest that it looked like a sapphire set in jade. So smiling and pure and beautiful it was that it seemed impossible to associate it with the ghastliest and most revolting incident in Californian history. Yet this was Donner Lake and those who have heard the terrible tale of the Donner party, for whom it was named, are not likely to forget it. A party of some eighty emigrants—men, women, and children—making their way to California by the Overland route, and delayed by an ill-advised detour, reached the site of the present town of Truckee late in the autumn of 1846. While attempting to cross the pass a blinding snow-storm drove in upon them. The story of how the less robust members of the party died, one by one, from starvation, and of how the survivors were forced to eat the bodies of their dead comrades—Donner himself, it is claimed, subsisted on the remains of his grandmother; of the “Forlorn Hope” and of its desperate efforts to reach the settlements in the Sacramento Valley, in which only seven out of the twenty-two who composed it succeeded; of the successive relief expeditions sent out from Sutter’s Fort; and of the final rescue in the spring of 1847 of the pitiful handful of survivors, illustrates as nothing else can the incredible hardships and perils encountered by the American pioneers in their winning of the West. A grim touch of humour is lent to the tragedy by the fact that two Indians in charge of some cattle which Sutter had sent to them were killed and eaten by the starving emigrants, on the theory of the frontiersman, no doubt, that the only good Indian is a dead one. The hospitable Sutter, in a statement published some months later, complained most bitterly of this ungrateful act, saying that they were welcome to the cattle but that they were unjustified in depriving him of two perfectly good Indians.

Truckee still bears all the earmarks of a frontier town, for miners, cow-punchers, and lumbermen, bearded to the eyes, booted to the knees, and in several cases quite evidently loaded to the neck, lounged in the shade of the wooden awnings and swapped stories and spat tobacco juice as they waited for the train bringing the San Francisco papers to come in; while rows of saddle ponies, heads drooping and reins trailing in the dust, waited dejectedly at the edge of the raised wooden sidewalks for their masters. From Truckee to Tahoe our way led through the Truckee cañon, running for a dozen miles or more so close to the banks of the sparkling, tumbling mountain river that we could have cast for the rainbow-trout we saw in it without having to leave the car. Dusk fell, and hard on its heels came its mother, the Dark, but still the yellow road, turned by the twin beams of the headlights to silver now, wound and turned and twisted interminably on, now swerving sharply as though frightened by the ghostliness of a thicket of white birches, then plunging confidently into the eerie darkness of a grove of fir-trees and emerging, all unexpectedly, before a great, low, wide-spread building, its many windows ablaze with lights and its long verandas outlined by hundreds and hundreds of scarlet paper lanterns. A wave of fragrance and music intermingled was wafted to us from where an orchestra was playing dreamy music in the rose gardens above the lake, whose silent, sombre waters reflected a luminous summer moon. Music and moonlight I have known in many places—beneath the cypresses of Lago Maggiore, along the Canale Grande, off the coasts of Africa, in the gardens of the Taj Mahal—but I have never seen, nor do I ever expect to see, anything quite as beautiful as that first night on Tahoe, when the paper lanterns quivered in the night breeze, and the violins throbbed, oh, so softly, and the pale moon shone down upon the snow-capped mountains and they in turn were reflected dimly in the darkened waters of the lake.

IX

THE INLAND EMPIRE

“I watched the sun sink from the west, I watched the sweet day die; Above the dim Coast Range’s crest I saw the red clouds lie; I saw them lying golden deep, By lingering sunbeams kissed, Like isles of fairyland that sleep In seas of amethyst.

...

“Then through the long night hours I lay In baffled sleep’s travail, And heard the outcast thieves in grey— The gaunt coyotes—wail. With seaward winds that wandering blew I heard the wild geese cry, I heard their grey wings beating through The star-dust of the sky.

...

“Yet, with the last grim, solemn hour, Stilled were the voices all, And then, from poppied fields aflower, Rang out the wild bird’s call; The glad dawn, deep in white mists steeped, Breathed on the day’s hushed lyre, And far the dim Sierras leaped In living waves of fire.”

IX

THE INLAND EMPIRE

Along in January, after the holiday festivities are over, and the youngsters have gone back to school or college, and the Christmas presents have been paid for, Mr. American Business Man and his wife, to the number of many thousands, escape from the inclemency of an Eastern winter by “taking a run out to the coast.” They usually choose one of the southern routes—the trip being prefaced by an animated family discussion as to whether they shall go via the Grand Cañon or New Orleans—getting their first glimpse of the Golden State at San Diego. After taking a shivery dip in the breakers at Coronado so as to be able to write the folks back home that they have gone in bathing in midwinter, they continue their leisurely progress northward by the _table-d’hôte_ route, picking oranges at Riverside, taking the mountain railway up Mount Lowe from Pasadena, stopping off at Santa Barbara to see the mission and the homes of the millionaires at Montecito, playing golf and whirling round the Seventeen Mile Drive at Del Monte, visiting Chinatown, the Cliff House, and the Barbary Coast in San Francisco, and returning to the East in the early spring via Salt Lake City or the “C. P. R.,” having, as they fondly believe, seen pretty much everything in California worth the seeing.

They turn their faces homeward utterly unconscious of the fact that they have only skirted along the fringe of the State; that of the great country at the back, which constitutes the real California, they have seen absolutely nothing. To them Sacramento, Stockton, Merced, Fresno, Bakersfield, Lake Tahoe, the San Joaquin, the Big Trees, the Yosemite, the High Sierras are but names. They do not seem to appreciate, or it may be that they do not care, that the narrow coast zone dedicated to the amusement of the winter tourist is no more typical of California than the Riviera is typical of France. Though it is true that the Californian hinterland has no million-dollar “show places” and no huge hotels with tourists in white shoes and straw hats taking tea upon their terraces, it has other things which are more significant and more worth seeing. The visitor to the back country can see the orchards which supply the breakfast-tables of half the world with fruit and the vineyards which supply the dinner-tables of the other half with grapes and wine and raisins; he can see flocks of sheep so large that the hills on which they are grazing seem to be covered with snow; he can see oil-fields which produce enough petroleum to keep all the lamps in the world alight until the crack of doom. And, if this is not sufficient inducement, he can motor along the foot of the highest mountain range in America, he can visit the most beautiful valley in all the world, he can picnic under the biggest trees in existence. A country of big things: big distances, big mountains, big trees, big ranches, big orchards, big crops, big pay, big problems—that’s the hinterland of California.

Now, that you may the more easily follow me in what I have to say, I will, with your permission, refer you to the map of the regions described in this volume. (See end of book.)

The mountain systems, as you see, form a gigantic basin which comprises about three fifths of the total area of the State. The eastern rim of this basin is formed by the Sierra Nevada and the western rim by the Coast Range, these two coming together at the northern end of the basin in the great mountain wall which separates California from Oregon, while to the south they sweep inward in the form of a gigantic amphitheatre, being joined by a minor range known as the Tehachapis. Reaching Mexicoward is the continuation of the Coast system known as the San Bernardino Range, forming, as it were, a sort of handle to the basin. The only natural entrance to the basin is the Golden Gate, through which the two great river systems—the San Joaquin and Sacramento—reach the sea. Lying between the Coast Range and the Pacific is that narrow strip of pleasure land, with its orange groves, its silver beaches, its great hotels and splendid country houses, which is the beginning and end of California so far as the tourist is concerned. The northern part of the great basin, which is drained by the Sacramento River, is called the Sacramento Valley, while its southern two thirds, whose streams run into the San Joaquin River, is commonly known as “the San Joaquin,” the whole forming the Great Valley of California. “Valley” is, however, a misnomer. One might as fittingly call Mount McKinley a hill, or Lake Superior a pond. It is a plain rather than a valley; a plain upon whose level reaches Belgium would be lost and Holland could be tucked away in the corners. From the rampart of the Sierra Nevada on the east to the wall of the Coast Range on the west the rich brown loam has an average width of half a hundred miles. North and south it extends upward of four hundred miles—as far as from Pittsburg to Chicago. What Rhodesia is to South Africa, what its prairie provinces are to Canada, the Great Valley, with its millions of incredibly fertile acres, level as a floor and checker-boarded with alfalfa, fruit, and vine, is to California—the storehouse of the State.