Part 18
Visalia is the starting-point for the Sequoia and General Grant Big Tree Groves, which have recently been opened to automobilists. The route to the Sequoia Park lies through Lemon Cove and then over a moderately good road, extremely dusty in summer, to Rocky Gulch, on the Giant Forest Road, where the motorist is halted by a cavalry patrol and the customary five-dollar admittance fee to national parks exacted. From Visalia to Camp Sierra, in the heart of the Sequoia, is fifty-five miles, to cover which, allowing for the mountain grades, the indifferent condition of the roads, and the delay at the park boundary, will require a full half day. The monarch of the Sequoia Grove is the redwood known as “General Sherman,” two hundred and eighty feet in height and ninety-five feet in circumference. Taking height and girth together, the “General Sherman” is, I believe, the largest tree in the world, though in the little-visited Calaveras Grove, the northernmost of the Californian groups of big trees, the “Mother of the Forest” is three hundred and fifteen feet high and the prostrate “Father of the Forest” is one hundred and twelve feet in circumference. If, however, the size of a tree is gauged by its girth only, there are several trees larger than any of the Californian Sequoias—the gigantic cypress near Oaxaca, in Mexico, known as the “Great Tree of Tule,” whose trunk measures one hundred and sixty feet in circumference but whose height is barely more; the great banyan in the botanical garden at Calcutta, and the “Chestnut Tree of a Hundred Horses”—said to be the largest tree in the world—at the foot of Mount Etna. I do not know whether these bald figures convey anything to you, but they certainly do not to me and I am not going to burden you with more of them. I have done my duty in giving you the dimensions of the largest of the Sequoias, which, I might add, is almost the exact height of the Flatiron Building. A vast deal of nonsense has been written about the age and other features of the Californian redwoods. It is not enough for the visitor to learn that the oldest Sequoia was probably a sapling when Rameses drove the Israelites out of Egypt, but the guide must needs draw upon his imagination and add another six or seven thousand years on top of that. The Sequoia, the noblest living thing upon our continent to-day, would appear, even at the age of five-and-twenty centuries, to be capable of much added lustre, for I was gravely assured that it was probably from these very groves that Solomon obtained the pillars for his temple.
It is in the neighbourhood of fourscore miles from Visalia to the delta of the Kern, most southerly of the Sierra’s golden streams, along whose banks rise the gaunt, black skeletons of the oil-derricks. So vast is the extent of the Great Valley of California that, though it contains the greatest petroleum fields in all the world, the traveller may zigzag through it for many days without seeing a sign of the industry which lights the lamps and provides the motive power for trains, boats, and motor-cars from the Straits of Behring to the Straits of Magellan. It is not an attractive region. Hungry and bare are the tawny hills, viscous the waters of the stream that meanders between them, weird and gibbet-like the forest of derricks which crowns them. There is a smell of coal-oil in the air, and the few habitations we passed were, by their very ugliness, obviously connected with this, the unloveliest of the earth’s products.
Bakersfield marks the virtual end of the Great Valley, a few miles south of it the converging ranges of fawn-coloured plush being linked by the Tehachapi, which is the recognised boundary between central and southern California. Bakersfield owes its abounding prosperity to the adjacent oil-fields, its streets being lined by the florid residences and its highways resounding to the arrogant _honk honk_ of the high-powered motor-cars of the “oil barons,” as the men who have “struck oil” are termed. I like these oil barons because with their loud voices and their boisterous manners and the picturesqueness of their dress they typify a phase of life in the “Last West” which is rapidly disappearing. There is something rough-and-ready and romantic about them; something which recalls their get-rich-quick fellows in Dawson and Johannesburg and Baku. Most of them have acquired their wealth suddenly; most of them have worked up from the humblest beginnings; and most of them believe in the good old proverb of “Easy come, easy go—for there’s more where this came from.” Red-faced, loud-voiced, with a predilection for broad-brimmed hats and gaudy ties, you can see them playing poker for high stakes in the back rooms of the saloons or leaning over the hotel bars in boisterous conversation. After I had watched them for a time I no longer doubted the assertion that Bakersfield buys more spittoons than any city in the country.
Although from the gilded cupola of Bakersfield’s truly beautiful court-house you can look out across a quarter of a million irrigated acres, though you can see a solid block of alfalfa covering forty squares miles and fattening twenty-five thousand head of steers a year, these form but a patch of green on the yellow floor of the valley’s gigantic amphitheatre. As a matter of fact, the development of the country around Bakersfield has been seriously retarded by the enormous holdings of two or three great landowners who neither improve their properties nor sell them. One of these great landlords, who numbers his Californian acres alone in the millions and who boasts that his cow-punchers can drive a herd of his steers from the Mexican frontier to the Oregon line and camp on his own land every night, obtained his enormous holdings near Bakersfield long years ago under the terms of the Swamp and Drowned Lands Act, which provided that any one who applied could obtain title to any land which he had gone over in a boat. So he put a boat on a wagon and had it hauled over hundreds of thousands of acres which he has since reclaimed. He was an ingenious fellow.
[Illustration: 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 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.
[Illustration: “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 palms and clumps of bamboo about the ranches gave to the scene an almost tropical luxuriance. This was the vale of Santa Clara—not to be confused with the valley of the same name farther north—perhaps the richest and most prosperous agricultural region for its size between the oceans and certainly the least advertised and the least known. Unlike the residents of other parts of California, its residents issue no enticing literature depicting the surpassing beauties and attractions of their valley as a place of residence, for the very good reason that they do not care to sell, unless at prohibitive prices. They have a good thing and they intend to keep it. Less than twoscore miles in length, the Santa Clara Valley, which begins at Saugus and runs westward to Ventura-by-the-Sea, comes nearer to being frostless than any region in the State, save only the Imperial Valley. But its industries are by no means restricted to the cultivation of citrus fruits, for the walnuts it produces are finer than those of England, its figs are larger than those of Smyrna, and its olives more succulent than those grown on the hills of Greece.
As with engines droning like giant bumblebees we sped down the eucalyptus-bordered highway which leads to Santa Paula, the valley was flooded with the rare beauty of the fleeting twilight of the West. The sky, a moment before a dome of lapis lazuli, merged into that exquisite ashes-of-roses tint which is the foremost precursor of the dark, and then burst, all unexpectedly, into a splendid fiery glow which turned the western heavens into a sheet of rosy coral. But, like most really beautiful things, the Californian sunsets are quick to perish. A few moments only and the rose had dulled to palest lavender and this to amethyst and this in turn to purple and then, at one bound, came the night, and our head lamps were boring twin holes in the velvety, flower-scented darkness. Before us the street lights of Santa Paula burst into flame like a diamond necklace clasped about the neck of a lovely woman.
* * * * *
The region of which Lake Tahoe is the centre is difficult to describe; one is drawn illusively into over-praising it. Yet everything about it—the height of the surrounding mountains, the vastness of the forests, the size of the trees, the beauty of the wild flowers, the grandeur of the scenery, the colourings of the lake itself—is so superlative that, to describe it as it really is, one must, perforce, lay himself open to the charge of exaggeration. There is no lake in Switzerland or, for that matter, anywhere else in Europe which is Tahoe’s equal. To find its peer you will need to go to Lake Louise, in the Canadian Rockies, or, better still, to some of the mountain lakes of Kashmir. Here, set down on the very ridge-pole of the High Sierras, is a lake twenty-two miles long by ten in width, the innumerable pleasure craft whose propellers churn its translucent waters into opaline and amaranthine hues being nearly a mile and a quarter above the surface of the Pacific. To attempt to describe its ever-changing and elusive colourings is as futile as to describe the colours of a sunset sky, of a peacock’s tail, of an opal. Looked at from one point, it is blue—the blue of an Ægean sky, of a baby’s eyes, of a turquoise or of a sapphire—but an hour later, or from another angle, it will be green: a gorgeous, glorious, dazzling green, sometimes scintillating like an emerald of incredible size, sometimes lustreless as a piece of jade. In the bays and coves and inlets which corrugate its shores its waters become even more diverse in colouring: smoke grey, pearl grey, bottle green, Nile green, yes, even apple green, lavender, amethyst, violet, purple, indigo, and—believe me or not, as you choose—I have more than once seen Tahoe so rosy in the reflected _alpenglow_ of twilight that it looked for all the world like a sheet of pinkest coral. Its shores are as diverse as its colourings, pebbly beaches alternating with emerald bays; pine-crowned promontories; snug coves on whose silver beaches bathers disport themselves and children gambol; moss-carpeted banks shaded by centenarian trees; cliffs, smooth as the side of a house, rising a thousand feet sheer above the water; and, here and there, deep and narrow inlets so hemmed in by vertical precipices of rock that to find their like you would have to go to the Norwegian fiords. Completely encircling the lake, like watchful sentinels, rise the snow peaks—not the domesticated mountains of the Adirondacks or the Alleghenies, but towering monsters, ten, twelve, fifteen, thousand feet in height and white-mantled throughout the year—the monarchs of the High Sierras. From the snow-line, which is generally about two thousand feet above the surface of the lake and ten thousand feet above the level of the sea, the coniferous Sierran forests—the grandest and most beautiful in the world—clothe the lower slopes of the mountains in mantles of shaggy green which sweep downward until their hems are wet in the waters of the lake.
One of the most distinguishing and pleasing characteristics of these Sierran forests is their inviting openness. The trees of all the species stand more or less apart in groves or in small, irregular groups, enabling a rider to make his way almost anywhere, along sun-bathed colonnades and through lush, green glades, sprinkled with wild flowers and as smooth as the lawns of a city park. Now you cross a forest garden ariot with wild flowers, now a mountain meadow, now a fern-banked, willow-shaded stream, and ever and anon emerge upon some granite pavement or high, bare ridge commanding superb views of majestic snow-peaks rising grandly above the intervening sea of evergreen. Every now and then you stumble upon mountain lakes tucked away in the most unexpected places, gleaming amid the surrounding forest like sapphires which a jeweller has laid out for inspection upon a green plush cloth. The whole number of lakes in the Sierras is said to be upward of fifteen hundred, not counting the innumerable smaller pools and tarns. Another feature of the High Sierras are the glacier meadows: smooth, level, silky lawns, lying embedded in the upper forests, on the floors of the valleys, and along the broad backs of the ridges at a height of from eight to ten thousand feet above the sea. These mountain meadows are nearly as level as the lakes whose places they have taken and present a dry, even surface, free from boulders, bogs, and weeds. As one suddenly emerges from the solemn twilight of the forest into one of these dreamy, sunlit glades, he looks instinctively for the dainty figures of Watteau shepherdesses or for the slender forms of sportive nymphs. The close, fine sod is so brightly enamelled with flowers and butterflies that it may well be called a meadow garden, for in many places the plushy turf is so thickly strewn with gentians, daisies, ivesias, forget-me-nots, wild honeysuckle, and paint-brush that the grass can scarcely be seen.
In certain of these mountain meadows I noticed a phenomenon which I have observed nowhere else save in Morocco: the flowers, instead of being mixed and mingled in a huge bouquet, grew in distinct but adjacent patches—a square of blue forget-me-nots here, a blanket of white daisies there, a strip of Indian paint-brush over there, and beyond a dense clump of wild lilac—so that from a little distance the meadow looked exactly like a great floral mosaic. It was very beautiful. On the higher slopes the scarlet shoots of the snow-plant dart from the soil like tongues of flame. Around it hangs a pretty native legend. Two young braves, so the legend runs, made desperate love to an Indian princess, who at length chose the one and turned away the other. On the marriage day the rejected lover ambushed himself in the forest, and, as his rival went riding past to claim his bride, sent an arrow twanging into his breast. But, though wounded unto death, the lover clung to his horse and raced through the forest to die in the arms of his bride. As he sped his heart’s blood, welling forth, left a trail of crimson splotches on the ground behind him. And wherever a drop of blood fell, there a blood-red flower sprang into bloom. If you doubt the story you can see and pick them for yourself.
Set high on the western shore of Tahoe, and so appropriately designed that it seems to be a part of the forest which encircles it, is Tahoe Tavern—a long, low hostelry of shingles, stone, and logs, its deep verandas commanding an entrancing view of the lake and of the mountainous Nevada shore, for the California-Nevada boundary runs down the middle of the lake. Just as the smart set along the Atlantic seaboard flock to Newport, Narragansett, and Bar Harbour in the summer, so the corresponding section of society upon the Pacific Coast may be found at Tahoe from July to September. A narrow-gauge railway, leaving the main line of the Southern Pacific at Truckee, two hundred miles or so east of San Francisco, hugs the brawling Truckee to the Tavern, a distance of a dozen miles, whence steamers convey the visitor to the numerous hotels, camps, and cottages which dot the shores of the lake. The summers are never warm on Tahoe, nor, for that matter, ever uncomfortably cool, while the air is as crisp and invigorating as extra-dry champagne. From the first of July to the first of October it almost never rains. And yet ninety-nine Easterners out of a hundred pity the poor Californians who, they imagine, are sweltering in semitropic heat.
One never lacks for amusement at Tahoe. Lean power-boats tear madly from shore to shore, their knife-like prows ploughing the lake into a creamy furrow. Hydroplanes hurtle by like leaping tunas. There is angling both in Tahoe and the maze of adjacent lakes and lakelets for every variety of trout that swims. There is bathing—if one doesn’t mind cold water. At night white-shouldered women and white-shirted men dip and hesitate and glide on the casino’s glassy floor to the impassioned strains of “Get Out and Get Under” and “Too Much Mustard.” But trail riding is the most characteristic as it is the most exciting, diversion of them all. It is really mountaineering on horseback—up the forested slopes, across the gaunt, bare ridges, and so to the icy summits, on wiry ponies which are as sure-footed as mountain-goats and as active as back-yard cats. The narrowness of many of the trails, the slipperiness of ice and snow, the giddiness of the sheer cliffs, the thought of what would happen if your horse _should_ stumble, combine to make it an exciting amusement. You can leave the shores of the lake, basking in a summer climate, with flowers blooming everywhere, and in a two hours’ ride find yourself amid perpetual snow. It is a novel experience, this sudden transition from July to January, and not to be obtained so readily anywhere else that I know, unless it be in a cold-storage plant. On the Fourth of July, for example, after a late breakfast, the Lady and I waved _au revoir_ to our white-flannelled friends on the Tavern’s veranda and before noon were pelting each other with snowballs on a snow-drift forty feet deep, with Lake Tahoe, gleaming beneath the sun like a gigantic opal, three thousand feet below us. There may, of course, be more enchanting vacation places than this Tahoe country—higher mountains, grander forests, more beautiful lakes, a better climate—but I do not know where to find them.
X
“WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON”
“I hear the far-off voyager’s horn; I see the Yankee’s trail— His foot on every mountain pass, On every stream his sail.
...
“I hear the mattock in the mine, The axe stroke in the dell, The clamour from the Indian lodge, The Jesuit chapel bell!
“I see the swarthy trappers come From Mississippi’s springs; And war-chiefs with their painted brows And crests of eagle wings.
“Behind the scared squaw’s birch canoe The steamer smokes and raves; And city lots are staked for sale Above old Indian graves.
...
“Each rude and jostling fragment soon Its fitting place shall find— The raw material of a State, Its muscle and its mind.”
X
“WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON”
With a rattle of wheels and a clickety-clack of hoofs the coach bore down upon us, its yellow body swaying drunkenly upon its leathern springs. It was a welcome sight, for since early morning we had been journeying through a region sans sign-posts, sans houses, sans people, sans everything. I threw up my hand, palm outward, which is the recognised halt sign of the plains, and in obedience to the signal the sombreroed driver pulled his wheelers back on their haunches and jammed his brakes on hard. Half a dozen bearded faces peered from the dim interior of the vehicle to ascertain the reason for the sudden stop.
“Are we right for the Columbia?” I asked.
“You betcha, friend,” said the driver, squirting a jet of tobacco juice with great dexterity between the portals of his drooping moustache. “All ye’ve got to do is keep ’er headed north an’ keep agoin’. You’re not more nor sixty mile from the river now. How fur’ve ye come with that there machine, anyway?”
“From Mexico,” I replied a trifle proudly.
“The hell you say!” he responded with open admiration. “An’ where ye bound fur, ef I might make so bold’s to ask?”
“As far north as we can get,” I answered. “To Alaska, if the roads hold out.”