of the big sixty-foot canoes, dug out of a single immense log, paddled
by Indians, were passing up and down the bay. Throughout the States of
Washington and Oregon the Indians are the chief reliance of the hop
growers for the picking of their crops, and every summer's-end the
various tribes along the coast gather to the work. They come from
everywhere--from Vancouver's Island, from British Columbia and even from
Alaska. They voyage down the coast in their immense sea canoes, stop at
the ports, or ascend the rivers, pushing as far as water will carry
them. They bring the children and the old folks with them, they buy or
hire horses, and they push hundreds of miles inland to the hop fields,
where a merry holiday is made of the gathering of the hops. They were
now returning, and many were passing through Tacoma. They were here
outfitting, and spending their newly earned wages in buying all those
useful and useless things an Indian wants--gay shawls and big ear-rings
for the squaws, gaudy blankets, knives and guns for the bucks; even toys
for the papooses. On the side the women were also selling baskets made
in their seasons of leisure. In the shelter of the long pier one
afternoon we came upon a group of several family canoes preparing for
the long voyage to the north. A number of pale-face women were
bargaining for baskets; one had just bought a toy canoe from an anxious
mother, and I was fortunate in buying another. Near by a man was
carefully cutting out the figures of a Totem pole. They were evidently
from Alaska. Alaska and a thousand miles or more of sea lay between them
and home. They looked like a group of Japanese and spoke in gutteral
throat tones. The Indians we lately met at Yakima were wholly different,
being redskins of the interior, not the light yellow of the coast. When
in Caribou Crossing, old Bishop Bompas, who has spent more than forty
years among the Indians of the north, told me that in his view the coast
Indians had originally come over from North Asia and were allied to the
Mongolian races, while he believed that the red-tinged, eagle-nosed
Indian of the interior was of Malay origin and of a race altogether
distinct. Be this as it may, the coast Indian, according to our
preconceived ideas, is no Indian at all, but rather a bastard Jap. He
fishes and hunts and works, and his labor is an important factor in
solving the agricultural problems of the Pacific Coast. The enormous and
profitable hop crops could not be gathered without him.
We had hoped while in Tacoma to have had the chance of visiting some of
the primeval forest regions of the State, where the largest trees are
yet in undisturbed growth, but the opportunity of taking advantage of a
railway excursion to Yakima, there to see the State Fair, was too good
to be lost, and we accordingly made that journey instead. Mr. S---- had
joined us in Tacoma, so we four bought excursion tickets, and climbed
into one of eleven packed passenger coaches of a Northern Pacific
special, and made the trip. Eight hours of it, due east and southeast,
across the snow-capped Cascade Mountains and down into the dry, arid
Yakima River basin to the city--big village--of North Yakima. An arid
valley, but yet green as an Irish hedge, a curious sight. The hills all
round sere and brown, tufted and patched with dry buffalo grass and sage
brush; the flat bottom lands mostly an emerald green; all this by
irrigation, the first real irrigation I had yet seen. The river is
robbed of its abundant waters, which are carried by innumerable ditches,
and then again divided and sub-divided, until the whole level expanse of
wide valley is soaked and drenched and converted into a smiling garden.
Here and there a piece of land, unwatered, stretched brown and arid
between the green.
North Yakima, named from the Indian tribe that still dwells hard by upon
its reservation, is a thriving little place, the greenest lawns of the
most velvety turf, roses and flowers abounding where the water comes.
Trees shading its streets, which are bounded on each side by flowing
gutters, and the driest, dustiest, vacant lots on earth. The fair is the
annual State show of horses, cattle, sheep and fruits, and these we were
glad to see. All fine, very fine, and such apples as I never before set
eyes on. Thousands of boxes of Washington apples are now shipped to
Chicago, and even to New York, so superior is their size and flavor.
Returning, we had an instance of the insolence of these great land grant
fed railway corporations. While the Northern Pacific had advertised an
excursion to Yakima and hauled eleven carloads of men, women and
children to the fair, it yet made no extra provision to take them back,
so that when next day several hundred were at the station in order to
board the train for home, only a few dozen could get in, and the very
many saw with dismay the train pull away without them! We had got into a
sleeper on the rear, fortunately, and thus escaped another twelve hours
in the overcrowded little town.
Yesterday we boarded the night express for Portland. The country between
this city and Tacoma is said to be rough and unsettled, and not fit for
even lumbering or present cultivation, so we did not regret the travel
at night. On the other hand, we saw much fine forest in crossing the
Cascade Mountains, although the finest timber in the State is, I am
told, over in that northwestern peninsula on the slopes of the Olympia
Mountains, between Puget Sound and the Pacific. There the trees grow
big, very big, and thence come the more gigantic of the logs, fifty and
one hundred feet long and ten to twenty-five feet in diameter at the
butt.
[Illustration: MT. RANIER OR TACOMA.]
The Puget Sound cities are destined to become among the chief marts of
commerce and of trade upon the Pacific Coast, and they are filled with
an energetic, intelligent population of the nation's best. The climate,
too, though mild, is cool enough for the preservation of vigor. Roses
bloom all the winter through in Tacoma, they tell me. And the summers
are never overhot. The humidity of the atmosphere is the strangest thing
to one of us from the East. "More like England than any other is the
climate," they say, and the exquisite velvet turf is the best evidence
of this. But the most wonderful sight of all to my Kanawha eyes was the
ever-present snow-massed dome of Mt. Rainier, lifting high into the
sky, sixty miles away, but looking distant not more than ten.
The third great center of the life of this northwest coast is
Portland. Solid, slow, rich, conservative. A hundred and twenty miles
from the sea, but yet a seaport. Situated on the Willamette River, six
miles from its confluence with the mighty Columbia. Already Seattle
outstrips it in population, so a Portland man admitted to me to-day, yet
Portland will always remain one of the great cities of the coast. It
possesses many miles of fine docks; the waters about their piles are not
quiet and serene, but swift and turbulent, sometimes mad and dangerous.
It has a complete and extensive electric tramway system, and this
evening we have ridden many miles about the city, and up by a cable road
onto the heights, a straight pull four hundred feet in the air. Below us
lay the city, level as a floor, the Willamette winding through it,
crossed by many steel draw-bridges, while distant, to the north, we
could just make out the two-mile-wide Columbia. Portland is a wealthy
and substantial city--a city for the elderly and well-to-do, while
Seattle is the city for the young man and for the future.
The lesson we have really been learning to-day, however, is not so much
of Portland as of the river Columbia, the really "mighty Columbia."
At 9:30 we took a train on the Oregon Shortline Railway up along the
Columbia--south shore--to the locks at the Cascades, a three hours' run,
and then came down again upon a powerful steamboat of the Yukon type,
though not so large. It took us about four and one-half hours with only
three landings and with the current. The last fifteen or twenty miles of
the trip the river was fully two miles wide, although at the Cascades it
had narrowed to be no broader than the Kanawha. On either side the
valley was generally occupied by farms and meadows, grazing cattle, many
orchards, substantial farmsteads. A long-time settled country and
naturally fertile. And along either shore, at intervals of not more than
a quarter of a mile, were the fish-traps, the wheels, the divers handy
contrivances of man, to catch the infatuated salmon. Until I saw the
swarming waters of that creek of Ketchikan, my mind had failed to
comprehend the fatuity of these fish. This year, owing, they say, to the
influence of the hatcheries established by the Government, the catch of
salmon here has been enormous; so great, in fact, that "hundreds of
_tons_" of the salmon had to be thrown away, owing to the inability
of the canneries to handle them before they had spoiled.
[Illustration: ALONG THE COLUMBIA RIVER.]
The Portland people whom I have met and talked with all tell me that
even though Seattle secures the Alaskan trade, even though Seattle and
Tacoma obtain the lion's share of the waxing commerce of China and
Japan, yet will Portland be great, because she must ever remain the
mistress of the trade of that vast region drained by the Columbia and
the Willamette, all of whose products come to her by water, or by a rail
haul that is wholly downgrade. And when I realize that the Columbia is
plied by steamboats even up in Canada, a thousand miles inland, where we
traversed its valley on the Canadian Pacific Railway, and that when
Uncle Sam has built a few more locks, these same boats can then come
down to Portland, and Portland boats ascend even to the Canadian towns,
as well as traverse Washington and enter Idaho and Montana, then is it
that I realize that the future of this fine city is most certainly well
assured.
THIRTEENTH LETTER.
THE VALLEY OF THE WILLAMETTE.
STATE OF OREGON, THE VALLEY OF THE WILLAMETTE, }
October 3, 1903.}
From Portland to San Francisco. Written while moving thirty miles
an hour on the Southern Pacific Railway.
Here we are flying due south from Portland, crossing the entire State of
Oregon. We have left Portland on the 8:30 morning train--"The Southern
Limited"--and shall be in "Frisco" at eight o'clock to-morrow night. We
are now ascending the beautiful valley of the Willamette, "Will-am-ett;"
with a fierce accent on the _am_. Flat and level as a table--ten to
twenty miles wide and two hundred miles long, lying between the Coast
Range on the west and the higher Cascade Mountains on the east. A land
of perfect fertility, so gracious a country as I have never yet beheld.
In winter, rarely any snow, plenty of rain and very much moist Scotch
air. In summer, a sunshine that ripens fields of wheat, a moisture that
grows the biggest apples and prunes and small fruits. Everywhere neat,
tidy farmhouses, big barns. Great stacks of wheat straw and as big ones
of hay, and these generally tented in with brown canvas. We are passing,
too, extensive fields of hop vines, an especially lucrative crop at
present prices--twenty-five cents a pound, while seven cents is reckoned
as the cost. Everywhere we see flocks of chickens, turkeys and some
geese plucking the stubble fields, for the crops are all cut and
harvested. And every now and then we espy a superb Mongolian pheasant in
gorgeous plumage, for they have become acclimated and multiply in this
salubrious climate. Herds of fine cattle and sheep are grazing in the
meadows, and the horses are large and look well cared for. A rich, fat
land, filled with a well-to-do population. I have just fallen into talk
with a young lawyer who lives at the port of Toledo, where Uncle Sam is
dredging the bar at the mouth of the Yaquina River, and to which city
new railroads are coming from the interior, and where they expect a
second Portland to grow up. He tells me that east of the Cascade
Mountains lie other fertile valleys west of the Rockies, and where also
is the great cattle and stock raising region of the State, and where
moisture is precipitated sufficient to save the need of irrigation.
Now we are just coming to the Umpqua River and the town of Roseburg--a
garden full of superb roses blooming by the station--where stages may be
taken to the coast at Coos Bay, another growing seaport section, where
extensive coal mining and timbering prevail. And as the dusk grows we
are passing over the divide to Rogue River and its verdant valley, which
we shall traverse in the night. Oregon is green and the verdure much
like that of England--the same moist skies, with a hotter summer sun
urging all nature to do its best.
In the night we shall climb over the Siskiyou Mountains, and by dawn
will be in sight of Mount Shasta. At Portland we were amidst mists and
fogs and drizzling rain, so we caught no glimpses of Mt. Hood and Mt.
Adams and Mt. St. Helena and Mt. Jefferson, all of whose towering
snow-clad cones may be seen on a clear day. We hope that to-morrow Mt.
Shasta will be less bashful and not hide her white head.
SUNDAY A. M., October 4th.
In California! We were called at six o'clock that we might see Mt.
Shasta, and also have a drink from the famous waters of Shasta Spring.
Mt. Shasta we did not see, so great were the fog masses and mists
enshrouding her, but we have had a drink from the elixir fountain. A
water much like the springs at Addison, in Webster County, W. Va., but
icy cold.
Now we are coming down the lovely valley of the Sacramento. A downgrade
all the way to "Frisco." The verdure is growing more tropical. The
undergrowth of the forests is more and more luxuriant. I see big, red
lilies by the swift water-side. The air is milder. We have descended
already 1,600 feet since passing Shasta Spring. We have five hundred
feet more to drop to Oakland. We are now in a ruggedly volcanic mining
country, many iron, lead and copper mines and once placer diggings for
gold, these latter now pretty much worked out, only a few Chinese
laboriously washing here and there.
Now we are at Keswick and see our first groves of figs and almonds and
some wide-reaching palms and the spreading umbrella-trees, and many
prune orchards. The valley is widening, the air is warmer than we have
known it for many days. We are surely in California.
I have just been talking with the brakeman. He has been in Dawson and on
the Klondike. "Mushed" through the White Pass, but, after reaching
Dawson, he lost heart and came back again without a stake. The man who
failed! Another, a big man, with a strong jaw and keen eye, has just
climbed on the rear platform. He, too, has been in Dawson, stayed one
day, bought a claim in the morning for $1,000, and sold it in the
evening for $15,000, and then came right back to his almond groves to
invest his make and thereafter rest content with California. The man who
won.
Near us sits a black-eyed Russian woman, young and comely, whose husband
was one of the discoverers of gold in Nome, and with her the loveliest
blue-eyed Norwegian maiden just arrived from Hammerfest. "My husband's
sister who is come to America to stay," the Russian says in perfect
English. She is learning to talk American, and wonders at the huge cars,
the multitude of people, the distances--"only a few hours from Trondhjem
to Kristiania, but over four days and nights from New York to Seattle!"
she exclaims. And her blue eyes grow big with wonder at the
half-tropical panorama now unrolling before us.
I am writing this letter by bits as we travel. We are now on a straight
track, as from my improved handwriting you may detect. A stretch of
thirty-seven miles straight as the crow flies. We are past the smaller
fruit farms of the upper Sacramento Valley; we are out on the interior
plain that from here extends all down through California, a thousand
miles almost to Mexico. We are in the wonderful garden land of the
State. On either side of us stretches away, as far as the eye can see, a
flat, level plain. It is one monstrous wheat field, and fences only at
rare intervals mark it into separate holdings. On the east, far on the
sky line, extend the snow-tipped summits of the Sierra Nevada Mountains;
on the west, the Coast Range. We have passed out of the region of mists
and clouds, and are now in a clear, warm sunshine, the heavens an
arching vault of cloudless blue. As clear as on the Yukon almost, but
with many times the warmth. This is the region of the Mammoth Bonanza
wheat farms you have so often read about. And one feels that man
hereabouts does things in a big way.
In Oregon, they tell me, the climate is so equable that a single blanket
keeps you warm of night the year round. You need it in summer; you do
not need more in winter. Here, I fancy, you scarcely need any at all, so
much further south have we already come.
Even yet we are passing through the wide stretches of wheat lands, wheat
now milled in California and sent in many big ships to the Orient. The
Chinaman is just learning the joy of an American flap-jack or a loaf of
wheat bread--and he can't get enough.
Dusk has come down upon us before we have reached Carquinez Strait, over
which our train--a long train--is carried by a monstrous ferry boat, and
then, skirting San Francisco Bay, we are soon among the suburban
illuminations of Oakland. Across the five miles of water lies San
Francisco, its million glittering electric lights stretching several
miles and covering the hills on which the city is built, while far out
on the right flashes the intermittent gleam of the light-houses marking
the entrance of the Golden Gate. The ferry-boat taking us across is said
to be the largest in the world, and the Norwegian lass's big blue eyes
grow all the bigger as she looks about her on the multitude of
fellow-passengers. And then we are ashore and are whirling through
broad, well-lighted streets to our hotel, "The Palace," where now we
are.
FOURTEENTH LETTER.
SAN FRANCISCO.
LOS ANGELES, October 12, 1903.
We slept in the old, famous, and yet well-patronized Palace Hotel, and
on which the Fair estate has just renewed a mortgage for another term of
years.
In the morning we essayed to have a look at the city, and so took a
long, wide electric car devoted to that purpose. A ride of thirty miles,
and all for the price of only "two bits"! We circled around the city, we
traversed its streets and avenues, climbed and descended its multitude
of hills, went everywhere that an electric car might dare to go, and
were given the chance to try the cable trams when the declivity was too
steep for anything to move that did not cling.
The sunshine was delicious, the watered lawns and watered flowers
superb, the unwatered, blistered sand spaces, vacant lots and dust-laden
winds dreadful.
The city pleased and disappointed me. It is an old city--half a century
old--old for the driving West, and mainly built of wood. Miles and miles
of small, crowded, two-story, wooden dwellings, sadly needing a coat of
paint, and mostly constructed thirty or forty years ago. A town once
replete with vigor, that has slumbered for several decades, and is now
reviving into life again. The vast mansions of the bonanza kings, the
railway lords on "Nob Hill," are now all out of date and mostly empty of
their former occupants. The Fairs, the Mackeys, the O'Briens are dead,
their heirs scattered to the winds. The Crokers, the Stanfords, the
Huntingtons are reminiscences. The street urchins know them no more.
Fashionable San Francisco has moved to another hill. The tenement
quarter of the town has crept to their very doors. But the business
section of the city has not moved as it has in New York. It stands just
where it always stood. The Palace Hotel, once the glory and boast of the
Pacific Slope, is still the chief hostelry of the town; and yet the city
is instinct with a new life. Its lively, hustling thoroughfares are full
of a new vigor; a new tide of Asiatic and Oriental commerce has entered
the somewhat somnolent city. All this, the magic result of the battle of
Manila Bay, and the new relation of the United States to the far east.
Where the Pacific Mail S. S. Co. sent a single monthly ship across the
Pacific five years ago, now six lines of great freight and passenger
steamships are unable to satisfy the increasing demands of trade. Now
twenty steamers and a multitude of sailing craft come to deliver and
take cargoes, where few or none came six years ago. On the land side,
too, there is progress. The A. T. & Santa Fe Railway has broken through
the monopoly of the Southern Pacific Railway Company, so cleverly and
firmly fastened by Huntington and his friends; and there are hopes that
other lines may yet establish independent relations with the city. Along
with this new growth of commerce have come a new throng of energetic
men, and new fortunes are being made--and more widely distributed. The
city, the commercial center, the ocean port, are all growing at a
steadier, healthier gait than in the ancient feverish days of bonanza
kings and railroad magnates. For awhile, San Francisco was "in the
soup," so to speak. Its rich men were leaving it, did leave it; its
sand-lots proletariat threatened to gain the upper hand; its middle
class, the people making and possessing only moderate incomes, were
doubtful of a success that to them had not yet come. To the north,
sleepy Portland had wakened up; Seattle and Tacoma had been born; and in
the south, Los Angeles had risen, like a phoenix, from the torrid
sands. But San Francisco did not stir. Then Dewey sank the fleet of
Montejo; the nation quickened with a consciousness that she was a
world-power; that the trade and commercial dominance of the Pacific
lands and isles and seas were rightly hers, and in a night San Francisco
found herself re-endowed with new life.
After the tramway ride, we spent an afternoon strolling about through
the business streets and along the docks and wharves, viewing the many
new shops, splendid modern stores, quite equaling, in the sumptuous
display of their wares, the great trading centers of New York and
Chicago, and noting the volume of wholesale traffic on the down-town
streets, the jobbing center, and the busy stir along the waterfront
for several miles.
No finer sight have we seen than when we stood near the surf-washed
rocks, famous as the home of the sea-lions, and, turning our gaze toward
the wind-tossed billows of the Pacific Ocean, beheld eight or ten
full-rigged ships and four-masted barques converging on the narrow
entrance of the Golden Gate, coming in out of the west, laden with the
teas and silks and commerce of the Orient, their multitudinous sails all
set before the breeze, like a flock of white-winged sea birds, while
slipping among them a steamer from Honolulu and another from Nome came
swiftly in.
Another day we were ferried five miles across the wide bay toward the
north, to the pretty suburban residence section of Sausalito, and there
taking an electric road were brought to the foot of Mount Tamalpais, and
then changing to a climbing car were pushed ten miles up near 4,000 feet
into the air, to the top of a volcanic cone that rises out of sea and
bay, and dominates the landscape for many miles. Below us, at our feet,
lay the great Bay of San Francisco and the city itself, with its green,
garden-like suburban villages, the many islands, the ships of war and of
commerce, the narrows of the Golden Gate; and, westward, the Pacific
Ocean, with the distant Farallon Islands, outposts of the Orient, while
far to the east, peeping above the clouds, gleamed the snow-capped
summits of the Sierra Nevadas.
Another day, we visited the Presidio, and rejoiced to see the blue
uniform of Uncle Sam after the many weeks of red coats upon the Yukon.
Say what you may, it quickens the blood to catch a glimpse of our boys
in blue. I well remember how good it seemed when we met them in command
of the fortress of El Moro, at Havana, two years ago.
We also spent a night in Chinatown--or part of the night--for we were
bound to see its horrors and its joys. The opium dens--a picture of Hop
Sing and his cat, the beast also a victim of the habit--I bring home to
you; the theatre, where the audience and the actors were equally
interesting; the Joss house or temple; the lady with the tiny feet, one
of whose midget shoes I took off and have to show you; the barber shop
where they shave the head and scrape out the ears and nose; the many
handsome shops and almost priceless curios; and the swarms of
bright-eyed, laughing, friendly, gentle children.
[Illustration: A BIG REDWOOD.]
While the Chinese upon the Pacific Coast, and in San Francisco more
particularly, have been greatly lessened in number the last few years,
it is interesting to note how many of the more progressive Japanese are
now to be seen in all of the great cities along the Pacific coast. In
Vancouver, all of the bell boys and elevator boys in the large Hotel
Vancouver were bright-eyed Japs. Keen, intelligent, wide-awake little
fellows, speaking good English, dressed in American style, and seeming
to know their business perfectly. We saw them at Seattle and Tacoma and
Portland, and now we find them in large numbers in San Francisco. They
get along well with the white man. They dress like him, eat like him,
walk like him, and try to look as much like him as possible. They seek
employment as servants, as day laborers, and are also getting
extensively into trade in a small way. They keep prices up like a white
man and join labor unions like the white man, and sympathetically act
with him to a degree that eliminates the prejudice that hedges in and
drives out the Chinaman. The Japanese seem to supply a genuine want in
the Pacific slope. I learned, also, that Japanese capital is now coming
into California and making substantial investments, the expenditure of
their money giving employment to American white labor.
Coming down the Sacramento Valley the other day, I noticed that all the
labor gangs employed by the Southern Pacific Railroad were Greeks,
dull-looking Greeks who could speak no English. It seemed to me as I
looked into their semi-Oriental faces, that they gave less promise of
satisfactory American citizenship than did the up-to-date, alert,
intelligent Japanese. The one represented a semi-Oriental country, whose
greatness was destroyed by Rome two thousand years ago; the other
expressed the awakened intelligence of the new Orient, the new Japan
whose great modern navy to-day ranks first upon the Pacific.