Part 17

Before the railway builders came the Great Valley was one of the most important cattle-ranges in the West, and hundreds of thousands of longhorns grazed knee-deep in its lush grass. With the railway came the homesteaders, who, despite the threats of the cattlemen, drove their stakes and built their cabins and started to raise wheat. Then a dry year came, and on top of that another, a heart-breaking succession of them, and the ruined wheat growers sold out to the cattle barons. In such manner grew up the big ranches—holdings ranging all the way from ten thousand to half a million acres or more—a few of which still remain intact. But a drought that will kill wheat will kill cattle, too, and after one terrible year a hundred thousand horned skeletons lay bleaching on the ranges. And so the cattlemen evacuated the valley in their turn and their places were taken by the diggers of ditches. Now the Lord evidently built the Great Valley to encourage irrigation. He filled it with rich, alluvial loam, tilted it ever so slightly toward the centre, brought innumerable streams from the mountains and glaciers down to the edge of the plain, ordered the rain and the blizzard to stay away and the sun to work overtime. All this he did for the Great Valley, and the ditch did the rest—or, rather, the ditch allied to hard work, for without sweat-beaded brows, calloused hands, aching backs, the ditch is worthless. A social as well as an agricultural miracle was performed by the watering of the thirsty land. The great ranches were subdivided into farms and orchards. Settlers came pouring in. Communities of hardy, industrious, energetic folk sprang up everywhere and these grew into villages and the villages became towns and the towns expanded into cities. School bells clanged their insistent summons to the youth of the countryside, church spires pointed their slender fingers toward the sky, highways stretched their length across the plain, and before this onset of civilisation the moral code of the frontier crumbled and gave way. The gun-fighter took French leave, the gambler silently decamped between two days, and in many communities the saloon-keeper tacked a “For Sale” sign on his door and took the north-bound train. Civilisation had come to the Great Valley, not with the dust of hoofs or beat of train, but with the gurgle of water in an irrigating ditch—and it had come to stay.

Of the effect produced by this spreading of the waters we saw many evidences as we fled southward from Sacramento across the oak-studded plain. Throwing wide the throttle, the car leaped forward like a live thing. The oiled road slipped away from our wheels like an unwinding bolt of grey silk ribbon. The grain-fields were wide, the houses few. Constables there were none. Vineyards and orchards, trim rows of vegetables, neatly fenced farms alternated with seas of barley undulating in the wind. Such a country, however prosperous, offers little to detain a motorist, and we went booming southward at a gait that made the telegraph poles resemble the palings in a picket fence. Occasionally a torpedo-shaped electric car, a monstrous thing in a dull, hot red, the faces of its passengers grotesquely framed by the circular port-holes which serve as windows, tore past us with the wail of a lost soul. Whence it came or whither it went was a matter of small moment.

The factory whistles were raucously reminding the workers that it was time to take the covers off their dinner pails when we swung into the plaza of the city whose name perpetuates the memory of the admiral who added California to the Union and drew up before the entrance of the Hotel Stockton. If you should chance to go there, don’t let them persuade you into lunching in the restaurant with its fumed oak wainscotting and the Clydesdale furniture which appears to be inseparable from the mission style of decoration, but insist on having a table set on the roof-garden with its vine-hung pergola and its ramparts of red geraniums. That was what we did, and the meal we had there, high above the city’s bustle, became a white milestone on our highway of memories. Had it not been for the advertisements of chewing-gum and plug tobacco which stared at us from near-by hoardings, I would not have believed that we were in the United States at all, so different was the scene from my preconceived notions of the San Joaquin Valley. We might have been on the terrace of that quaint old hotel—I forget the name of it—that overlooks the Dam in Rotterdam. Stockton, you see, is at the head of navigation on the San Joaquin River, and the hotel stands at the head of one of the canal-like channels which permit of vessels tying up in the very heart of the city, so that from the terrace on its roof you look down on as animated and interesting a water scene as you will find anywhere: pompous, self-important tugs, launches with engines spluttering like angry washerwomen, stern-wheel passenger steamers, little sisters of those upon the Mississippi, and cumbersome, slow-moving barges, their flat decks piled high with bagged or barrelled products of the valley on their way to San Francisco Harbour, there to be transshipped for strange and far-off ports.

As a result of the Powers That Be at Washington having recently had a change of heart in respect to motor-cars entering the Yosemite, every valley town between Stockton and Visalia has announced itself as the one and only “official gateway to the valley,” and has backed up its claims with tons of maps and literature. As a matter of fact, the Department of the Interior has announced that motorists desiring to visit the Yosemite must enter and leave it by the Coulterville road, and this road can be reached from any one of half a dozen valley towns with equal facility. Coming, as we did, from the north, the most convenient route led through Modesto. As a result of the sudden prosperity produced by a modern version of the Miracle of Moses, water having been brought forth where there was no water before by a prophet’s rod in the form of an irrigating ditch, the little town is as up to date as a girl just back from Paris. Its lawns and gardens have been Peter-Hendersonised until they look like the illustrations in a seedsman’s catalogue; the architecture of its schools and public buildings is so faithful an adaptation of the Spanish mission style that they would deceive old Padre Serra himself; and its roads would do credit to the genius of J. MacAdam.

If you will set your travelling clock to awake you at the hour at which the servant-girl gets up to go to early mass you should, even allowing for the five-thousand-foot climb, reach Crocker’s Sierra Resort, which is the nearest stopping place to that entrance of the Yosemite assigned to motorists, before the supper table is cleared off. It is necessary to spend the night at Crocker’s, as the government regulations, which are far more inflexible than the Ten Commandments, permit motorists to enter the valley only between the hours of ten and one. Leaving Crocker’s at a much more respectable hour than we did Modesto, we reached the first military outpost at Merced Big Tree Grove shortly before ten, where a very businesslike young cavalry officer put me through a catechism which made me feel like an immigrant applying for admission at Ellis Island. If your answers to the lieutenant’s questions correspond to those in the back of the book and your car is able to do the tricks required of it—to test the holding power of its brakes you are ordered to take a running start and then throw the brakes on so suddenly that the wheels skid—you are permitted the pleasure of paying five dollars for the privilege of entering the jealously guarded portals. They stamp your permit with the hour and minute at which you leave the big trees, and if you arrive at the next military post, which is nine miles distant, at the foot of the Merced River Cañon, in a single second under an hour and seventeen minutes you are fined so heavily that you won’t enjoy your visit. I remember that we sneered at these regulations as being unnecessary and absurd—but that was before we had seen the Merced Cañon grade. As my chauffeur remarked, it is a real hum-dinger. It is nothing more or less than a narrow shelf chopped out of the face of the cliff.

“I wonder if those soldiers were quite as careful in examining our brakes as they should have been?” anxiously remarked one of my companions, glancing over the side of the car into the dizzy gorge below and then looking hurriedly away again.

“Oh, there are some perfectly lovely wild flowers!” suddenly exclaimed the Lady, who had been choking the life out of the cushions. “If you don’t mind I’ll get out and pick them ... and please don’t wait for me, I’ll walk the rest of the way down. Yes, indeed, I’m very fond of walking.”

It is only fair to warn those who propose to follow in our tire tracks that, entering the Yosemite by automobile, you do not get one of those sudden and overwhelming views which cause the beholder to “O-o-o-oh-h-h-h-h!” and “A-a-a-ah-h-h-h-h!” like the exhaust of a steam-engine. On the contrary, you sneak into the famous valley very unostentatiously indeed, along a winding wood road which might be in New England. Nor are you permitted to tear about the floor of the valley whither you list, for no sooner do you reach the Sentinel Hotel than a khaki-clad trooper steps up and orders you to put your car in the garage and keep it there until you are ready to leave.

The Yosemite is not, properly speaking, a valley. That word suggests a gentle depression with sloping sides, a sort of hollow in the hills, which have been moulded by the fingers of ages into flowing and complaisant lines. The Yosemite is nothing of the sort. It is a great cleft or chasm, hemmed in by rocky walls as steep as the prices at a summer hotel and as smooth as the manners of a confidence man. It is the exact reverse of that formation so characteristic of the Southwest known as a mesa: it is a precipice-walled plain. One might imagine it to be the work of some exasperated Titan who, peeved at finding the barrier of the Sierras in his path, had driven his spade deep into the ridge of the range and then moved it back and forth, as a gardener does in setting out a plant, leaving a gash in the mountains eight miles long and a mile deep. When flocks of wild geese light in the Yosemite, so John Muir tells us, they have hard work to find their way out again, for, no matter in which direction they turn, they are soon stopped by the wall, the height of which they seem to have an insuperable difficulty in gauging. They must feel very much like a fish in an aquarium which is for ever battering its nose against the glass walls of its tank. The wall looks to be only about so high, but when they should be far over its top, northward or southward according to the season, back they find themselves once more, beating against its stony face, and it is only when, in their bewilderment, they chance to follow the downward course of the river, that they hit upon an exit.

Standing in the centre of the valley floor, on the banks of the winding Merced, is the Sentinel Hotel, which, barring several camps, is the only hostelry in the valley. It is a cosy, homelike, old-fashioned place, the fashion in which the rooms open onto the broad verandas which run entirely around both the lower and the upper stories recalling the old-time taverns of the South. As there are neither dance pavilions nor moving-picture houses in the Yosemite, the young women employed as waitresses at the Sentinel Hotel frequently find their unoccupied time hanging heavy on their hands, this tedium occasionally leading them into exploits calculated to make the hair of the observer permanently pompadour. One of these girls, a slender, willowy creature, anxious to outdare her companions, climbed to Glacier Point and on the insecure and scanty foothold afforded by the Overhanging Rock, which juts from the face of the sheer cliff, three thousand two hundred feet above the valley floor, proceeded to dance the tango! Evidently feeling that this exhibition, which had sent chills of apprehension up the spines of the beholders, was too tame, she balanced herself on one foot on the ledge’s very brink and extended the other, like a _première danseuse_, over three fifths of a mile of emptiness.

An unobtrusive but interesting feature of the Yosemite which may well escape the notice of the casual tourist is the little settlement of Indians, who dwell in a collection of wretched shacks at the base of the valley’s northern wall. Like all the California Indians, this remnant of the Yosemite tribe are entirely lacking in the picturesqueness of dress and bearing which characterises their kinsmen of the Southwest. Their presence in the Yosemite possesses, however, a certain romantic interest, for, had it not been for them, it may well be that the famous valley would still remain unfound. Their story is an interesting and pathetic one. As a result of the injustices and outrages committed upon the peaceful Californian Indians by the settlers who came flocking into the State upon the discovery of gold, the tribes were driven to revolt, and in 1851 the government found itself with a “little war” upon its hands. The trouble ended, of course, by the complete subjugation of the Indians, who were transferred from their hereditary homes to a reservation near Fresno. The Yosemites proved less tractable than the other tribes, however, and, instead of coming in and surrendering to the palefaces, they retreated to their fastnesses in the High Sierras, and it was while pursuing them that a troop of cavalry discovered the enchanted valley which bears their name. They were captured and carried to Fresno, but the humid climate of the lowlands wrought such havoc among these mountain-bred folk that the survivors petitioned the government for permission to return to their old home. Their petition was granted, and during the half century which has passed since their return to the valley which was the cradle of their race they have never molested the white man and have supported themselves by such work as the valley affords and by basket weaving.

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

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

It was quite by chance that I stumbled upon these copper-coloured stragglers from another era. While riding one afternoon along the foot of the sheer precipice which hems the valley in, my eye was caught by three strange objects standing in a row. They resembled—as much as they resembled anything—West African voodoo priests in the thatched garments which they wear on ceremonial occasions. Upon questioning the Indian woman who appeared, however, I elicited the information that they were _chuck-ahs_, and were built to store acorns in. The Yosemite _chuck-ah_ looks like a huge edition of the hampers they use in the lavatories of hotels to throw soiled towels in, thatched with fir branches and twigs, covered with a square of canvas to shed the rain, and mounted on stilts so as to place its contents beyond the reach of rodents. As the Yosemites, who are bitterly poor, largely subsist upon a coarse bread made from meal produced by pounding the bitter acorn, the _chuck-ah_ is as essential to their scheme of household economy as a flour barrel is to ours. The copper-coloured lady who painstakingly explained all this to me in very disconnected English told me that her name was Wilson’s Lucy. Whether she was married to Wilson or whether she was merely attached, like her name, I did not inquire. Flattered by my obvious interest in her domestic affairs, she disappeared into the miserable hut which served as home, to reappear an instant later carrying what at first glance I took for a small-sized mummy, but which, upon closer inspection, proved to be a very black-haired, very bright-eyed, very lusty youngster, bound to a board from chin to ankle with linen bandages which served the double purpose of making him straight of body and keeping him out of mischief.

“What’s his name?” I inquired, proffering a piece of silver.

“My name Wilson’s Lucy,” the mother giggled proudly. “He name Woodrow Wilson.”

So, should the President see fit to present a silver spoon to his copper-coloured namesake, he can address it care of Yosemite Valley Post-Office, California.

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

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

YOSEMITE YOUNGSTERS, WHITE AND RED.]

* * * * *

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

A half-day’s journey south by stage from the Yosemite brings one to the lovely Sierran meadow of Wawona, above which are marshalled that glorious company of Sequoias known as the Mariposa Big Tree Grove. Just as Ireland has its lakes, and Switzerland its mountains, and Norway its fiords, so California has its Sequoias, and in many respects they are the most wonderful of all. The Big Trees, as they are called, are of two _genera_: the _Sequoia gigantea_, found only in the lower ranges of the high Sierras, and the _Sequoia sempervirens_, which are peculiar to the region lying between the Coast Range and the sea. There is no more fascinating trip on the continent than that from the Yosemite to the Big Trees of Mariposa, the road, which in the course of a few miles attains an elevation of six thousand five hundred feet, commanding magnificent retrospects of the Bridal Veil Falls, El Capitan, Cathedral Spires, and Half Dome, then plunging into the depths of a forest of cedar, fir, and pine, crossing the south fork of the brawling Merced, passing the hospitable verandas of the Wawona Hotel, and ending under the shadow of the redwood giants, traversing, en route, a tunnel cut through the heart of a living Sequoia. In their exploitation of the Big Tree groves, the railway companies have had the rather questionable taste to advertise these monarchs of the forest by means of pictures showing six-horse coaches being driven through them, or troops of cavalry aligned upon their prostrate trunks, or good-looking young women on horseback giving equestrian exhibitions upon their stumps. To me this sort of thing smacks too much of the professional showman; it is like making a Bengal tiger jump through a paper hoop or a lion sit up on his hind legs and beg like a trick dog. The Sequoias are too magnificent, too awesome to thus cheapen. When once you have stood in their solemn presence and have attempted to follow with your eye the course of the great trunks soaring skyward, higher than the Flatiron Building in New York, half again the height of the shaft on Bunker Hill; when you have made the circuit of their massive trunks, equal in circumference to the spires of Notre Dame; when you have examined their bark, thicker than the armour of the dreadnought _Texas_; you will agree with me, I think, that the Big Trees of California need no circus performances to emphasise their proportions and their majesty.

According to the rules promulgated by the government, motorists are permitted to leave the Yosemite only between the hours of six and seven-thirty in the morning. After I had crawled out of a warm bed into the shiveryness of a Sierran dawn—for the early mornings are bitterly cold in the High Sierras—I felt inclined to agree with Madame de Pompadour that “travelling is the saddest of all pleasures.” But when we were sandwiched in the tonneau of the car again, with the long and trying grade by which we had entered the valley safely behind us and the river road to Merced stretching out in long diagonals in front, we soon forgot the discomforts of the early rising, for the big car leaped forward like a spirited horse turned loose upon the countryside, and the crisp, clear air dashed itself into our faces until we felt as buoyant and exhilarated as though we had been drinking champagne. After “checking out” at the Big Tree military outpost, we turned down the road which leads through Coulterville to Merced, the walls of the cañon gradually becoming less precipitous and the rugged character of the country merging into orchards and these in turn to farms and vineyards as we debouched into the San Joaquin again.

Leaving Merced in the golden haze behind us, we swung southward, through the land of port wine and sherry, to Madera, the birthplace of the American raisin, and so down the splendid Kearney Boulevard—fifteen miles of oiled delight running between hedges of palms and oleanders—to Fresno, the geographical centre of California and the home of the American raisin and sweet-wine industry, which in little more than a dozen years has elbowed Spain out of first place among the raisin growers of the world and has caused ten thousand homes to spring up out on the sandy plain. Unleashing the power beneath the throbbing bonnet, we tore southward and ever southward, at first through growing grain-fields and then across vast barren stretches, waiting patiently for reclamation. Draped along the scalloped base of the moleskin-coloured foot-hills, where they rise abruptly from the plain, was a bright green ribbon—the citrus belt of the San Joaquin, where the orange groves nestle in the sheltered coves formed by the Sierras’ projecting spurs. In the region lying between Visalia and Porterville frost is an almost negligible quantity and, as a result, it is threatening the supremacy of the Riverside-Pasadena district as a producer of the golden fruit.