Part 19
“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.
[Illustration: 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 the nicest thing we’ve seen since we left Mexico. I didn’t know that that sort of thing existed any more outside of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.”
“It won’t exist much longer,” said I. “This Oregon hinterland is the last American frontier, but the railway is coming and in a few more years the only place you will be able to see a Concord coach like the one we just met will be in a museum or on a moving-picture screen. The old fellow was perfectly right when he said that our meeting typified the passing of the old and the coming of the new.”
“I’m awfully sorry for them,” remarked the Lady abstractedly.
“Sorry for whom?” I asked.
“Why,” she answered, “for the people who can only see this wonderful West on moving-picture screens.”
* * * * *
We took the back-stairs route to Oregon. When we turned the bonnet of the car northward from Lake Tahoe, we had the choice of two routes to the Columbia. One of these, which we would have taken had we followed the advice of every one with whom we talked, would have necessitated our retracing our steps across the High Sierras to Sacramento, where we would have struck the orthodox and much-travelled highway that runs northward through the Sacramento Valley, via Marysville and Red Bluff and Redding, enters the Siskiyous at Shasta and leaves them again at Grant’s Pass, and keeps on through the fertile and thickly settled valleys of the Rogue, the Umpqua, and the Willamette, to Portland and its rose gardens. The other route, which is ignored by the road-books and of which those human road-books who run the garages seemed to be in total ignorance, strikes boldly into the primeval wilderness that lies to the north of Tahoe, parallels for close on two hundred miles the western boundary of Nevada, crosses the Oregon border at Lower Klamath Lake, and then, hugging the one hundred and twenty-second parallel like a long-lost brother, climbs up and up and up over the savage lava beds, through the country of the Warm Springs Indians, across the fertile farm lands of the Inland Empire, and so down the Cañon of the Deschutes to where the rocky barrier of The Dalles says to the boats upon the Columbia: “You can go no further.” This is the famous Oregon Trail, which lies like a long rope thrown idly on the ground, abandoned by the hand that used it. Though the people with whom we talked urged us not to take it, prophesying long-neglected and impassable roads and total lack of accommodation and all manner of disaster, we stubbornly persisted in our choice, lured by the romantic and historic memories that hover round it; for was it not, in its day, one of the most famous of all the routes followed by mankind in its migrations; was it not the trail taken by those resolute frontiersmen who won for us the West?
We were warned repeatedly, by people who professed to know whereof they spoke, that, if we persisted in taking this unconventional and therefore perfectly ridiculous route, we would experience great difficulty in crossing the mountains, and, as some of our informants cheeringly observed, it was dollars to doughnuts that we wouldn’t be able to cross them at all. But as we had had experiences with these brethren of calamity howlers while motoring in Rhodesia and in Grande Kabylie and in the Anti-Lebanon, their mournful prognostications did not trouble us in the least. In fact, they but served to whet our appetites for the anticipated adventures. As a matter of fact, throughout the entire thousand miles that our speedometer recorded between Tahoe and The Dalles, not once did we cross any mountains worthy of the name, for our route, which had been carefully selected for its easy gradients long years before our time by men who traversed it in prairie-schooners instead of motor-cars and whose motive power was oxen instead of engines, lay along the gently rolling surface of that great mile-high plateau which parallels the eastern face of the Cascade Range and comes to a sudden termination in the precipitous cliffs which turn the upper reaches of the Columbia into a mighty gorge.
Turning our tonneau upon Truckee and its brawling trout-stream, we struck into the forest as the compass needle points, with Susanville one hundred and fifty miles away, as our day’s objective. (Who Susan was I haven’t the remotest idea, unless she was the lady that they named the black-eyed daisies after.) For hour after hour the road wound and turned and twisted through the grandest forest scenery that can be found between the oceans. To our left, through occasional breaks in the giant hedge of fir and spruce and jack-pine, we caught fleeting glimpses of Pilot Peak, whose purple summit has doubtless served as a sign-post for many an Oregon-bound band of pioneers. To us, who had seen only the tourist California and the highly cultivated valleys of the interior, these Californian highlands proved a constant source of joy and self-congratulation. We felt as though we were explorers and, so far as motoring for pleasure in that region is concerned, we were. But the greatest revelation was the road. We had expected to need the services of an osteopath to rejoint our dislocated vertebræ and, to modify the anticipated jolts, I had had the car equipped with shock-absorbers and had taped the springs. We could, however, have gone over that road with no great discomfort in a springless wagon, for, upon a roadbed undisturbed for close on half a century by any traffic worthy of the name, had fallen so thick and resilient a blanket of pine-needles that we felt as though a strip of Brussels carpet had been laid for our benefit, as they do in Europe when royalty has occasion to set foot upon the ground. The sunbeams, slanting through the lofty tree tops, dappled the tawny surface of the road with golden splotches and fleckings, squirrels chattered at us from the over-arching boughs; coveys of grouse, taken unaware by the stealth of our approach, rocketed into the air, wings whirring like machine guns, only to settle unconcernedly as soon as we had passed; an antlered stag bounded suddenly into the road, stood for an instant motionless as though cast from iron, with wide-open, startled eyes, and disappeared in panic-stricken flight; once, swinging silently around a turning, we came upon a black bear gorging himself at the free-lunch counter that the wild blackberries provide along the road; but before we could get our rifles out of their cases he had crashed his way into underbrush too dense for us to follow. Nor did we have any great desire to follow. The smoothness and silence of the road were too enchanting. Hour after hour we sped noiselessly along without a glimpse of a human being or a human habitation. There were no sign-posts to point the way and we wanted none.
But all good things must end in time, and our pine-carpeted road debouched quite unexpectedly into the loveliest valley that you ever saw. Perhaps it is because its sylvan serenity is undisturbed as yet by the jeering screech of the locomotive, but you will need to use much gasoline and wear out many tires before you will happen upon anything more idyllic than those cloistered and incredibly fertile acres that sweep down from the summit of the Iron Hills to the margin of Honey Lake. The trim white farmhouses that peep coquettishly, like bashful village maidens, from amid the fragrant orchards at the passer-by; the fields green-carpeted with sprouting grain; the barns whose queer hip-roofs made them look as though they were aburst with stored-up produce, as, indeed, they are; the sleek cattle, standing knee-deep in a lake as clear as Circe’s mirror—all these things spell p-r-o-s-p-e-r-i-t-y so plainly that even those who whirl by, as we did at forty miles an hour, may read.
Susanville, which is built on a hill at the end of Honey Lake Valley, very much as the Italian hill towns command the tributary countryside, is a quiet rural community that has been stung by the bee of progress and is running around in circles in consequence. When we were there a railroad was in course of construction for the purpose of tapping the wealth of this rich but hitherto unexploited region, and the main street of the town, which we reached on a Saturday evening, was alive with farmers who had come in to do their week-end shopping, cow-punchers in gaudy neckerchiefs and Angora chaps, fresh from the ranges, engineers in high-laced boots and corduroy trousers, sun-tanned labourers from all four corners of Europe and the places in between. As a result of this week-end influx, the only hotel that Susanville possessed was filled to the doors.
“I can’t even fix you up with a pool-table, gents,” said the shirt-sleeved proprietor, mopping the perspiration from his forehead with a violent-hued bandana; “and what’s more, every blame boardin’-house in town’s just as full up as we are.”
“But we _must_ find some place to sleep,” I asserted positively. “We’ve a lady with us, you see, and she can’t very well sleep in the open—or on a pool-table either, can she?”
“A lady? God bless my soul! Why didn’t you say so? Well, now, that’s too durned bad. But hold on a minute, friends. I wouldn’t be s’prised if Bill Dooling, the barber, could fix you up. He’s got a cottage down the road a piece and I’ll send a boy along with you to show you where he lives.”
Bill the barber and his family, which consisted of his wife, his mother—known as granmaw—nine children who had reached the age of indiscretion, and a baby, dwelt in a vine-clad cottage as neat as the proverbial beeswax and about as roomy as a limousine.
“Sure,” said he cordially, when I had explained our predicament, “we’ve got slathers of room. We’ll fix you up and welcome. You and the lady can have Rosamond Clarissa’s room, and your friend here can have the boys’ room across the hall, and your showfer can sleep in Ebenezer’s bed. Me and the wife’ll fix ourselves up on the porch, and granmaw she’ll go acrost the street to a neighbour’s, and Abel and Absalom and David and Rosamond Clarissa and Ebenezer and Elisha and Gwendoline Hortensia and Hiram and Isaiah’ll sleep in the tent. Sure, we’ve got all the room you want.”
“You must have almost as much trouble in finding names for your children,” the Lady remarked, “as the Pullman Company does in naming its sleeping-cars.”
“Well, it’s this way, ma’am,” he explained. “Me and maw have a sort of an agreement. She names the girls and gets the names out of the magazines. I name the boys and get the names out of the Bible. She hoped that the baby’d be a girl so’s she could name her Patricia Penelope, but seeing as it’s a boy it’s up to me, and I haven’t been able to make up my mind yet between Jabez, Josiah, and Jeremiah.”
Barring the fact that we were awakened at a somewhat unseasonable hour by a high-voiced discussion between Rosamond Clarissa and Gwendoline Hortensia as to which should have the privilege of washing the baby, we were very comfortable indeed—very much more so, I expect, than if we had been able to obtain quarters at the hotel—and, after a breakfast of berries with cream that was not milk incognito, and coffee, and hot cakes, and eggs that tasted as though they might have originated with a hen instead of a cold-storage vault, we rolled away with the hospitable barber and his brood waving us Godspeed from the doorstep.
It is in the neighbourhood of two hundred and fifty miles from Susanville to the Oregon line, the earlier portion of the journey taking us through a forest that had evidently never known the woodsman’s axe. North of Dry Lake Ranch, which is the only place in between where a motorist can count on finding a bed to sleep in or a bite to eat, a grazing country of remarkable fertility begins, much of it having been taken up by Czechs from Bohemia: a stolid, sturdy, industrious folk who work themselves and their patient families and the ground unremittingly and whose prosperity, therefore, passes that of their more shiftless neighbours at a gallop. This fringe of farming communities, although in California, really mark the beginning of that great, rich agricultural region comprising the back country of Oregon which, because of its prosperity, its extent, and its wealth of resources, is known as the Inland Empire.
A few miles beyond these Bohemian settlements we caught our first glimpse of Lower Klamath Lake, whose low and marshy shores, which lie squarely athwart the boundary between California and Oregon, forming a spring and autumn rendezvous for untold thousands of wild fowl, the government having set it aside as a sort of natural aviarium.
“Look!” suddenly exclaimed the Lady, pointing. “The shores of the lake are covered with snow!”
But what looked for all the world like an expanse of snow suddenly transformed itself, as we drew near, into a cloud of huge, ungainly birds with perfectly enormous bills, creating a racket like a thousand motor-cars with the beating of their wings.
“Pelicans, by Jove!” exclaimed my friend, and that is what they were—thousands, yes, tens of thousands of them. The pelican, as we learned later, is the symbol, as it were, of all this Klamath country, the really beautiful hotel at Klamath Falls being named The White Pelican, “perhaps,” as the Lady observed, “because of the size of its bill.” However this may be, it is a very excellent hotel, indeed, and if you ever chance to find yourself in that part of the country I would advise you to spend a night there, if for no other reason than to enjoy the novel experience of staying in a hostelry which would do credit to Fifth Avenue and looking out of your window on a frontier town. This, mind you, is casting no aspersions on Klamath Falls, which is a very prosperous and wide-awake little place indeed, although ten years ago you would have had some difficulty in finding it on the map, its mushroom growth being due to the development of the immense lumber territory of which, since the completion of the railway, it has become the centre. As a matter of fact, the hotel was not built so much for the convenience of the traveller as it was for the comfort of the handful of Eastern capitalists whose great lumber interests necessitate their spending a considerable portion of the year in Klamath Falls and who demanded the same luxuries and conveniences in this backwoods town that they would have on Broadway. That explains why it is that in this remote settlement in the wilderness you can get a room furnished in cretonne and Circassian walnut, with a white porcelain bathroom opening from it, and can sit down to dinner at a red-shaded table in a gold-and-ivory dining-room. I know a man who keeps a private orchestra of thirty pieces, year in and year out, for his own amusement, but these Oregon lumber kings are the only men I have ever heard of who have built a great city hotel purely for their personal convenience.
[Illustration: 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 strikes and railroad mergers and congressional investigations which punctuated his career, for rest and recreation. After the death of the great railway builder the lodge was purchased by the same group of men who built The White Pelican Hotel and has been converted into a sort of sporting resort _de luxe_. They call it Pelican Bay Lodge, and I know of nothing quite like it anywhere. It consists of perhaps a dozen log cabins, externally as rough as any frontiersman’s dwelling, but steam-heated, luxuriously furnished, and liberally bathtubised.
Pelican Bay Lodge is the most convenient starting-point for that mountain mystery known as Crater Lake, which lies forty miles to the north of it and six thousand feet above it, in the heart of the Cascade Range. It took us five hours of steady running to cover those forty miles, and we didn’t stop to pick wild flowers either. The road is a very beautiful one, winding steadily upward through one of the finest pine forests on the continent. The last mile is more like mountaineering than motoring, however, for the road, in order to attain the rim of the lake, suddenly shoots upward at a perfectly appalling angle—I think they told me that at one place it had a grade of thirty-eight per cent—and more than once it seemed to us who were sitting in the tonneau that the car would tip over backward, like a horse that rears until it overbalances itself. Crater Lake is one of those places where the most calloused globe-trotter, from, whom neither the Pyramids nor the Taj Mahal would wring an exclamation of approval, gives, perforce, a gasp of real astonishment and admiration. Part of this is due, no doubt, to the startling suddenness with which you come upon it and to its dramatic situation; the rest to its surpassing beauty and its extraordinary colour. The lake, which occupies the crater of an extinct volcano the size and height of Mount Shasta, is almost circular, half a mile deep, five miles in circumference, and nearly a mile and a half above sea-level, the rocky walls which surround it being in places two thousand feet high and as sheer and smooth as the side of an upright piano. But its outstanding feature is its colour, for it is the bluest blue you ever saw or dreamed of: as blue as lapis lazuli, as a forget-me-not, as an Italian sky, as a baby’s eyes (provided, of course, that it is a blue-eyed baby), or as a Monday morning. It looks, indeed, like a gigantic wash-tub, filled with bluing, in which some weary colossus has been condemned to wash the clothing of the world.
Nothing that we had seen since leaving Mexico so profoundly stirred my imagination as that portion of our road which stretched northward from Crater Lake, through Crescent and Shaniko, to The Dalles. Every few miles we passed groups of dilapidated and decaying buildings, with sunken roofs and boarded windows, which must once have been busy road-houses and stage stations, for near them were the remains of great barns and tumble-down corrals, now long since disused—melancholy reminders of those days, half a century agone, when down this lonely road that we were following plodded mile-long wagon-trains, the heads of women and children at every rent and loophole of the canvas tops, the men, rifle on shoulder, marching in the dust on either hand. Few, indeed, of these pioneers were rich in anything save children, affluent except in expectations; yet weather, roads, fare, mishaps—nothing daunted them, for they were “going West.”
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, 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 the lower deck of a chug-achug-chugging stern-wheel river boat.