It is as hard to leave San Francisco as to get there. To a traveller
paying his first visit it has the interest of a new planet. It ignores
the meteorological laws which govern the rest of the world. There is no
snow there. There are no summer showers. The tailor recognizes no
aphelion or perihelion in his custom: the thin woollen suit which his
patron had made in April is comfortably worn until April again. The only
change of stockings there is from wet to dry, or from soiled to clean.
Save that in so-called winter frequent rainfalls alternate with spotless
intervals of amber weather, and that _soi-disant_ summer is one entire
amber mass, its unbroken divine days concrete in it, there is no
inequality on which to forbid the banns between May and December. In San
Francisco there is no work for the scene-shifter of Nature: the wealth
of that great dramatist, the year, resulting in the same manner as the
poverty of dabblers in private theatricals,--a single flat doing service
for the entire play. Thus, save for the purpose of notes-of-hand, the
Almanac of San Francisco might replace its mutable months and seasons
with one great kindly, constant, sumptuous All The Year Round.
Out of this benignant sameness what glorious fruits are produced! Fruit
enough metaphorical: for the scientific man or artist who cannot make
hay while such a sun shines from April to November must be a slothful
laborer indeed. But fruit also literal: for what joy of vegetation is
lacking to the man who every month in the year can look through his
study-window on a green lawn, and have strawberries and cream for his
breakfast,--who can sit down to this royal fruit, and at the same time
to apricots, peaches, nectarines, blackberries, raspberries, melons,
figs both yellow and purple, early apples, and grapes of three kinds?
Another delightful fact of San Francisco is the Occidental Hotel. Its
comfort is like that of a royal home. There is nothing inn-ish about it.
Remembering the chief hotels of many places, I am constrained to say
that I have never, even in New York, seen its equal for elegance of
appointment, attentiveness of servants, or excellence of _cuisine_.
Having come to this extreme of civilization from the extreme of
barbarism, we found that it actually needed an exertion to leap from the
lap of luxury, after a fortnight's pleasaunce, and take to the woods
again in flannel and corduroys.
But far more seductive than the beautiful bay, the heavenly climate, the
paradisiacal fruits, and the royal hotel of San Francisco, were the old
friends whom we found, and the new ones we made there. With but one
exception, (and that an express-company, not a man,) we were received by
all our San-Francisco acquaintance in a kind and helpful manner, with a
welcome and a cheer as delightful to ourselves as it was honorable to
them. Need I say whose brotherly hands were among the very first
outstretched to us, in whose happy home we found our sweetest rest, by
whose radiant face and golden speech we were most lovingly detained
evening after evening and far into the night? A few days ago when we
read that dreadful message, "_Starr King is dead_," the lightning that
carried it seemed to end in our hearts. We withered under it; California
had lost its soul for us; at noon or in dreams that balmy land would
nevermore be the paradise it once was to us. The last hand that pressed
our own, when we sailed for the Isthmus on our way home, was the same
that had been first to give us our California welcome. Just before the
lines were cast off, Starr King stood at the door of our state-room, and
said,--
"I could not bear to have you go away without one more good-bye. Here
are the _cartes-de-visite_ I promised. They look hard-worked, but they
look like me. Good bye! God bless you! I hope to make a visit to the
East next summer, and then we will get together somewhere by the sea.
Good bye!"
He went down the ladder. When the steamer glided off, his bright face
sent benedictions after us as far as we could see; and then, for the
last time on earth, that great, that good, that beloved man faded from
our sight,--but, oh! never from our hearts, either in the here or the
hereafter. "We shall see him, but not now." We shall be together with
him "in the summer, by the sea"; but that summer shall have other glory
than the sun to lighten it, and the sea shall be of crystal.
King was to have joined us in our Yo-Semite trip. We little knew that we
were losing, for this world, our last opportunity of close daily
intercourse with his sweet spirit, though we were grievously
disappointed when he told us, on the eve of our setting out, that work
for the nation must detain him in San Francisco, after all.
If report was true, we were going to the original site of the Garden of
Eden,--into a region which out-Bendemered Bendemere, out-valleyed the
valley of Rasselas, surpassed the Alps in its waterfalls, and the
Himmal'yeh in its precipices. As for the two former subjects of
comparison, we never met any tourist who could adjust the question from
his own experience; but the superiority of the Yo-Semite to the Alpine
cataracts was a matter put beyond doubt by repeated judgments, and a
couple of English officers who had explored the wildest Himmal'yeh
scenery told Starr King that there was no precipice in Asia to be
compared for height or grandeur with Tu-toch-anula and Tis-sa-ack.
We were going into the vale whose giant domes and battlements had months
before thrown their photographic shadow through Watkins's camera across
the mysterious wide continent, causing exclamations of awe at Goupil's
window, and ecstasy in Dr. Holmes's study. At Goupil's counter and in
Starr King's drawing-room we had gazed on them by the hour already,--I,
let me confess it, half a Thomas-a-Didymus to Nature, unwilling to
believe the utmost true of her till I could put my finger in her very
prints. Now we were going to test her reported largess for ourselves.
No Saratoga affair, this! A total lack of tall trunks, frills, and
curling-kids. Driven by the oestrum of a Yo-Semite pilgrimage, the
San-Francisco belle forsakes (the Western vernacular is "goes back on")
her back-hair, abandons her capillary "waterfalls" for those of the
Sierra, and, like John Phoenix's old lady who had her whole osseous
system removed by the patent tooth-puller, departs, leaving her
"skeleton" behind her. The bachelor who cares to see unhooped womanhood
once more before he dies should go to the Yo-Semite. The scene was three
or four times presented to us during our seven weeks' camp
there,--though the trip is one which might well cost a feeble woman her
life.
Our male preparations were of the most pioneer description. One wintry
day since my return I was riding in a train on the New-York Central,
when an undaunted herdsman, returning Westward, flushed with the sale of
beeves, accosted me with the question,--"Friend, yeou've travelled
consid'able, and believe in the religion of Natur', don't ye?" "Why so?"
I responded. "_Them boots_," replied my new acquaintance, pointing at a
pair with high knee-caps, like those our party wore to the Yo-Semite.
Otherwise, we took the oldest clothes we had,--and it is not difficult
to find that variety in the trunk of a recent overland stager. We were
armed with Ballard rifles, shot-guns, and Colt's revolvers which had
come with us across the continent; our ammunition we got in San
Francisco, together with all such commissariat-luxuries as were worth
transportation: our necessaries we left to be purchased at that
jumping-off place of civilization, Mariposa, whence we were to start our
pack-mules into the wilderness. Let me recommend tourists like
ourselves to include in the former catalogue plenty of canned fruits,
sardines, and apple-butter,--in the latter, a jug of sirup for the
inevitable camp slapjacks. No woodsman, as will presently appear in our
narrative, can tell when a slapjack may be the last plank between him
and starvation; and to this plank how powerfully sirup enables him to
stick!
The only portion of our outfit which would have pleased an exquisite
(and he must be rather of the Count-Devereux than the Foppington-Flutter
school) was our horseflesh. That greatest of luxuries, a really good
saddle-animal, is readily and reasonably attainable in California.
Everybody rides there; if you wish to create a sensation with your
horsemanship in the streets of San Francisco, you must ride ill, not
well: everybody does this last. Even since the horse-railroad has begun
to clutter Montgomery Street (the San-Franciscan Boulevards) with its
cars, it is a daily matter to see capitalists and statesmen charging
through that thoroughfare on a gallop, which, if repeated in Broadway by
Henry G. Stebbins, would cost him his reputation on 'Change and his seat
in the next Congress. The nation of beggars-on-horseback which first
colonized California has left behind it many traditions unworthy of
conservation, and multitudinous fleas not at all traditional, but even
less keepworthy; but all honor be to the Spaniards, Greasers, and
Mixed-Breeds for having rooted the noble idea of horsemanship so firmly
in the country that even street-railroads cannot uproot it, and that
Americans who never sat even so little as an Atlantic-State's pony, on
coming here presently take to the saddle with all their hearts. In most
of the smaller Californian towns, a very serviceable half- or
quarter-breed saddle-horse is to be had for forty dollars,--the "breed"
portion of his blood being drawn from an Eastern stallion, the remaining
fraction being native or Mustang stock. This animal, if need be, will
live on road-side croppings nearly as well as a mule,--travel all day
long on an easy "lope," never offering to stop till fatigue makes him
fall,--and, if you let him, will take you through _chaparrals_, and up
and down precipices at whose bare suggestion an Eastern horse would
break his legs. Our party, seeking rather more ambitious mounts,
supplied itself, after a tour through the San-Francisco stables, with
saddle-animals at an average of seventy dollars apiece. This, payable in
gold, then amounted to one hundred dollars in notes; but the New-York
market could not have furnished us with such horses for one hundred and
fifty dollars.
It may seem as if, like most cavalcades, we should never get started,
but I must linger a moment to do justice to our accoutrements. If there
be a more perfect saddle than the Californian, I would ride bare-back a
good way to get it. Anything more unlike the slippery little pad on
which we of the East amble about parks and suburban roads cannot be
imagined. It is not for a day, but for all time, and for those who spend
nearly the latter in it. Its wooden skeleton is as scientifically fitted
to the rider's form as an old "_incroyable's_" pair of pantaloons. There
is no such thing as getting tired in or of it. Rising to the lower
lumbar vertebrae behind, and in front terminating gracefully in a
broad-topped pommel, it enables one to lean back in descending, forward
in climbing, the great ridges on the path of California travel,--thus
affording capital relief both to one's self and one's horse, and
bringing in both from a fifty-miles' march comparatively unjaded.
The stirrups of this saddle are broad hickory hoops, shaped nearly like
an Omega upside-down (U)[Transcriber's note: upside down Omega], left
unpolished so as to afford the most unshakable footing, covered with a
half-shoe of the stoutest leather, which renders it impossible for the
toe to slip through or the ankle to foul under any circumstances.
Attached to the straps from which these swing is a wide and neatly
ornamented stirrup-leather, which effectually prevents the grazing of
the rider's leg. The surcingle, or, _Californicè_, the _cinch_, is a
broad strip of hair-cloth with a padded ring at either end through which
you reeve and fasten with a half-hitch stout straps sewed to other rings
under the saddle-flaps. This arrangement is not only far securer than
our Eastern buckle, but enables you to graduate the tightness of your
girth much more delicately, and make a far snugger fit.
The only particular in which I could not commend and adopt the native
practice was the Mexican bit. It is a dreadful instrument of torture,
putting immense leverage in the rider's hands, and enabling him at will
to tear the mouth of his horse to pieces; indeed, the horse on which it
is used is guided entirely by pressure on the opposite side of the neck
from that in which one seeks to turn him. Our Eastern way of drawing his
head around would so lift the bit as to drive him frantic. There are
very few horses of any breed, even the Mustang, that _never_ stumble;
and as I prefer lifting my horse to letting him break his knees or neck,
I want a bridle I can pull upon without tearing his mouth. So, in spite
of its handsome appearance and the very manageable single white cord
into which its two reins are braided, I eschewed the Mexican head-gear,
and took the ordinary Eastern snaffle and curb. Immense spurs completed
our accoutrement,--whips being here unknown.
I may as well make a word-map of our route before going farther.
Pilgrims to the Yo-Semite ship themselves and their horses from San
Francisco by steamer to Stockton. This town is on the San Joaquin, the
most northerly of a series of rivers fed directly from the Sierra Nevada
water-shed, and here through the middle portion of the State,--a series,
indeed, continued through much of the still lower Pacific coast to the
Isthmus of Nicaragua. The Sacramento drains quite a different region,
that of the broad plains between the Sierra and Coast ranges, occupying
the northern portion of the State,--resembling in its physical features,
much more than any of the Pacific streams beside, the large isolated
trunks which drain the east slope of the Alleghanies. The Colorado is
almost the only other large river created from many tributaries, which
debouches between the Columbia and the Isthmus,--and that rises east of
the mathematical axis of the Rocky Mountains. The Yo-Semite valley is
one of the cradles through which the short Sierra-draining rivers reach
the ocean; its threading stream is the Merced; and if on any good
United-States Survey-map you will please to follow that river back to
the mountains, when your finger-nail touches the Sierra it will be (or
would, were the maps somewhat correcter) in the Great Yo-Semite. You
will then see that our course led us across three streams, after leaving
the San Joaquin at Stockton _en route_ for Mariposa,--the Stanislaus,
the Tuolomne, and the Main Merced. The distance from Stockton to
Mariposa is about one hundred miles, a small part of the way between
fenced ranches, a much greater part on wide, open, rolling plains,
somewhat like those of Nebraska, embraced between the two great ranges
of the State. Here and there you find an isolated herdsman or a small
settlement dropped down in this not unfruitful waste, and thrice you
come to a hybrid town, with a Spanish _plaza_, and Yankee notions sold
around it. We went the distance leisurely, consuming four days to
Mariposa, for we stopped here and there to sketch, "peep, and botanize";
besides, we were dragging with us a Jersey wagon, bought second-hand in
Stockton, in which we carried our heavier outfit till we should get our
extra pack-beasts at Mariposa, and to which we had harnessed for their
first time an implacable white mule with an incapable white horse, to
neither of which each other's society or their own new trade was
congenial.
I shall not linger here as we did there. To an ornithologist the whole
road is interesting,--especially to one making a specialty of owls. The
only game within easy reach is the dove and the California
ground-squirrel,--a big fellow, much like our Northeastern gray,
barring the former's subterranean habits. On the plains threaded by the
road the pasture is good, save in the extremest drought of summer, when
the great herds which usually feed at large on and between the
river-bottoms are driven to the rich green grass in the high valleys of
the Sierra,--or ought to be: many cattle died along the San Joaquin last
summer for want of this care. Occasionally the road winds through the
refreshing shadow of a grove of live-oaks, standing far from any water
on a sandy knoll. But the most magnificent trees of the oak family that
I ever beheld were growing on the banks of the Tuolomne River, where we
forded it at Roberts's Ferry. They were not merely in dimension superior
to the finest white-oaks of the East, but surpassed in beauty every
tradition of their genus. Their vast gnarled branches followed as
exquisite curves as belong to any elm on a New-England meadow, and wept
at the extremities like those of that else matchless tree,--possessing,
moreover, a sumptuous affluence of leafage, an arboreal _embonpoint_,
unknown to their graceful sister of our lowlands. Be sure that we
lingered long among their shadows with book and pencil, and look for a
desirable acquaintance with new Dryads when they grow into the life of
color from our artists' hands.
At Princeton, a thriving suburb of Mariposa, we completed our cavalcade
of pack-animals, transferred our wagon-load to their backs, (the average
mule-pack weighs from two hundred and fifty to three hundred pounds,)
roped it there in the most approved _muletero_-fashion, and started into
the wilderness.
Let us call the roll. Beside Bierstadt and the two other gentlemen who
with myself had formed the original overland-party, we numbered two
young artists of great merit now sojourning for a short time in
California, Williams, an old Roman, and Perry, an ancient Düsseldorf
friend,--also a highly scientific metallurgist and physicist generally,
Dr. John Hewston of San Francisco.
To serve the party we secured a man and a boy. Regarding the former,
perhaps the more truthful assertion would be that he secured us; for, as
will shortly appear, though we bought his services, he sold us in
return. We picked him up in a San-Francisco employment-office, after
looking all over the city for a respectable groom and camp-cook, and
finding that in a scarce-labor country like California even fifty gold
dollars per month, with keep and expenses, were no sufficient bait for
the catch we wanted. He was a meagre, wiry fellow, with sandy hair,
serviceable-looking hands, and no end to self-recommendations; but then
it was impossible to ask after him at his "last place," that having been
General Johnston's camp during Buchanan's forcible-feeble occupation of
Utah. As he said he had been a teamster, and knew that soup-meat went
into cold water, we rushed blindly into an engagement with him,
marriage-service fashion, and took him for better or worse. The thing
which I think finally "fired our Northern hearts" and clinched the
matter was his assertion of nephewship to the Secession Governor Vance,
whose name he bore, combined with unswerving personal loyalty. Lest by
some future D'Israeli this be written down among the traditional
greennesses of learned men, let me say that he was our _pis-aller_,--we
finding ourselves within two hours of the Stockton boat, with nobody to
help pack our mules or care for them and the horses.
The boy we obtained near Mariposa. He was an independent squire to the
man of whom we got the extra animals, and accompanied them as a sort of
trustee and _prochein amy_ to an orphan family of mules. At fifteen
years and in jackets, he was one of the keenest speculators in fire-arms
I ever saw; could swap horses or play poker with anybody; and, take him
for all in all, in the Eastern States, at least, I shall never look upon
his like again.
Thus manned, and leading, turn-about, four or five pack-beasts by as
many tow-lines, we struck up into the well-wooded Sierra foot-hills,
commencing our climb at the very outset from Mariposa. The whole
distance to the Valley was fifty miles. For twelve of these we pursued a
road in some degree practicable to carts, and leading to one of those
inevitable steam saw-mills with which a Yankee always cuts his first
swath into the tall grass of Barbarism. Passing the saw-mill in the very
act of astonishing the wilderness with a dinner-whistle, we struck a
trail and fell into single file. Thenceforward our way was almost a
continuous alternation of descent and climb over outlying ridges of the
Sierra. Our raw-recruited mules, and the elementary condition of our
intellects in the science of professional packing, spun out this portion
of our journey to three days,--though allowance is to be made for the
fact of our stopping at noon of the second day and not resuming our
trail till the morning of the third. This interim we spent in visiting
the Big Trees, which are situated four or five miles off the Yo-Semite
track.
"Clark's," where tourists stop for this purpose, is just half-way
between Mariposa and the great Valley. "Clark" himself is one of the
best-informed men, one of the very best guides, I ever met in the
Californian or any other wilderness. He is a fine-looking, stalwart old
grizzly-hunter and miner of the '49 days, wears a noble full beard hued
like his favorite game, but no head-covering of any kind since he
recovered from a fever which left his head intolerant of even a slouch.
He lives among folk, near Mariposa, in the winter, and in summer
occupies a hermitage built by himself in one of the loveliest lofty
valleys of the Sierra. Here he gives travellers a surprise by the nicest
poached eggs and rashers of bacon, home-made bread and wild-strawberry
sweetmeats, which they will find in the State.
Before reaching Clark's we had been astonished at the dimensions of the
ordinary pines and firs, our trail for miles at a time running through
forests where trees one hundred and fifty feet high were very common and
trees of two hundred feet by no means rare, while some of the very
largest must have considerably surpassed the latter measurement.
But these were in their turn dwarfed by the Big Trees proper, as
thoroughly as themselves would have dwarfed a common Green-Mountain
forest. I find no one on this side the continent who believes the
literal truth which travellers tell about these marvellous giants.
People sometimes think they do, but that is only because they fail to
realize the proposition. They have no concrete idea of how the asserted
proportions look. Tell a carpenter, or any other man at home with the
look of dimensions, what you have seen in the Mariposa-County groves,
and his eye grows incredulous in a moment. I freely confess, that,
though I always thought I _had_ believed travellers in their recitals on
this subject, when I saw the trees I found I had bargained to credit no
such story as that, and for a moment felt half-reproachful towards the
friends who had cheated me of my faith under a misapprehension.
Take the dry statistics of the matter. Out of one hundred and thirty-two
trees which have been measured, not one underruns twenty-eight feet in
circumference; five range between thirty-two and thirty-six feet;
fifty-eight between forty and fifty feet; thirty-four between fifty and
sixty; fourteen between sixty and seventy; thirteen between seventy and
eighty; two between eighty and ninety; two between ninety and one
hundred; two are just one hundred; and one is one hundred and two. This
last, before the storms truncated it, had a height of four hundred feet.
I found a rough ladder laid against its trunk,--for it is
prostrate,--and climbed upon its side by that and steps cut in the bark.
I mounted the swell of the trunk to the butt and there made the
measurement which ascertained its diameter as thirty-four feet,--its
circumference one hundred and two feet _plus_ a fraction. Of course the
thickness of its bark is various, but I cut off some of it to a foot in
depth and there was evidently plenty more below that.
To make some rough attempt at a conception of what these figures amount
to, suppose the tree fallen at the gable of an ordinary two-story house.
You propose to cross by a plank laid from your roof to the upper side of
the tree. That plank would perceptibly slope _up_ from your roof-peak.
Through another tree, lying prostrate also, and hollow from end to end,
our whole cavalcade charged at the full trot for a distance of one
hundred and fifty feet. The entire length of this tree before truncation
had been about three hundred and fifty feet. In the hollow bases of
trees still standing we easily sheltered ourselves and horses. We tried
throwing to the top of some of them with ludicrous unsuccess, and
finally came to the monarch of them all, a glorious monster not included
in the above table of dimensions, as most of those measured are still
living, and all have the bark upon them still, while _the_ tree is to
some extent barked and charred. When it stood erect in its live
wrappings, it measured forty feet in diameter,--over one hundred and
twenty in circumference! Estimates, grounded on the well-known principle
of yearly cortical increase, indisputably throw back the birth of these
largest giants as far as 1200 B. C. Thus their tender saplings
were running up just as the gates of Troy were tumbling down, and some
of them had fulfilled the lifetime of the late Hartford Charter-Oak when
Solomon called his master-masons to refreshment from the building of the
Temple. We cannot realize time-images as we can those of space by a
reference to dimensions within experience, so that the age of these
marvellous trees still remains to me an incomprehensible fact, though
with my mind's eye I continue to see how mountain-massy they look, and
how dwarfed is the man who leans against them. We lingered among them
half a day, the artists making color-studies of the most picturesque,
the rest of us _izing_ away at something scientific,--Botany,
Entomology, or Statistics. In Geology and Mineralogy there is nothing to
do here or in the Valley,--the formation all being typical Sierra-Nevada
granite, with no specimens to keep or problems to solve. Of course our
artists neither made nor expected to make anything like a realizing
picture of the groves. The marvellous of size does not go into gilt
frames. You paint a Big Tree, and it only looks like a common tree in a
cramped coffin. To be sure, you can put a live figure against the butt
for comparison; but, unless you take a canvas of the size of Haydon's,
your picture is quite as likely to resemble Homunculus against an
average timber-tree as a large man against _Sequoia gigantea_. What our
artists did do was to get a capital transcript of the Big Trees'
color,--a beautifully bright cinnamon-brown, which gives peculiar gayety
to the forest, "making sunshine in the shady place"; also, their typical
figure, which is a very lofty, straight, and branchless trunk, crowned
almost at the summit by a mass of colossal gnarled boughs, slender plumy
fronds, delicate thin leaves, and smooth cones scarce larger than a
plover's egg. Perhaps the best idea of their figure may be obtained by
fancying an Italian stone-pine grown out of recollection.
Between all the ridges we had hitherto crossed, silvery streams leaped
down intensely cold through the granite chasms,--all of them fed from
the snow-peaks, and charmingly picturesque,--most of them good
trout-brooks, had we possessed time to try a throw; and now, on leaving
Clark's, we crossed the largest of these, a fork of the Merced which
flows through his valley. For twelve miles farther a series of
tremendous climbs tasked us and our beasts to the utmost, but brought us
quite _apropos_ at dinner-time to a lovely green meadow walled in on one
side by near snow-peaks. A small brook running through it speedily
furnished us with frogs enough for an _entrée_. Between two and three in
the afternoon we set out upon the last stage of our pilgrimage. We were
now nearly on a plane with the top of the mighty precipices which wall
the Yo-Semite Valley, and for two hours longer found the trail easy,
save where it crossed the bogs of summit-level springs.
Immediately after leaving the meadow where we dined we plunged again
into the thick forest, where every now and then some splendid grouse or
the beautiful plume-crowned California quail went whirring away from
before our horses. Here and there a broad grizzly "sign" intersected our
trail. The tall purple deer-weed, a magnificent scarlet flower of name
unknown to me, and another blossom like the laburnum, endlessly varied
in its shades of roseate, blue, or the compromised tints, made the
hill-sides gorgeous beyond human gardening. All these were scentless;
but one other flower, much rarer, made fragrance enough for all. This
was the "Lady Washington," and much resembled a snowy day-lily with an
odor of tuberoses. Our dense leafy surrounding hid from us the fact of
our approach to the Valley's tremendous battlement, till our trail
turned at a sharp angle and we stood on "Inspiration Point."
That name had appeared pedantic, but we found it only the spontaneous
expression of our own feelings on the spot. We did not so much seem to
be seeing from that crag of vision a new scene on the old familiar globe
as a new heaven and a new earth into which the creative spirit had just
been breathed. I hesitate now, as I did then, at the attempt to give my
vision utterance. Never were words so beggared for an abridged
translation of any Scripture of Nature.
We stood on the verge of a precipice more than three thousand feet in
height,--a sheer granite wall, whose terrible perpendicular distance
baffled all visual computation. Its foot was hidden among hazy green
_spiculæ_--they might be tender spears of grass catching the slant sun
on upheld aprons of cobweb, or giant pines whose tops that sun first
gilt before he made gold of all the Valley.
There faced us another wall like our own. How far off it might be we
could only guess. When Nature's lightning hits a man fair and square, it
splits his yardstick. On recovering from this stroke, mathematicians
have ascertained the width of the Valley to vary between half a mile and
five miles. Where we stood the width is about two.
I said a wall like our own; but as yet we could not know that certainly,
for of our own we saw nothing. Our eyes seemed spell-bound to the
tremendous precipice which stood smiling, not frowning at us, in all the
serene radiance of a snow-white granite Boodh,--broadly burning, rather
than glistening, in the white-hot splendors of the setting sun. From
that sun, clear back to the first _avant-courier_ trace of purple
twilight flushing the eastern sky-rim--yes, as if it were the very
butment of the eternally blue Californian heaven--ran that wall, always
sheer as the plummet, without a visible break through which squirrel
might climb or sparrow fly,--so broad that it was just faint-lined like
the paper on which I write by the loftiest waterfall in the world,--so
lofty that its very breadth could not dwarf it, while the mighty pines
and Douglas firs which grew all along its edge seemed like mere cilia on
the granite lid of the Great Valley's upgazing eye. In the first
astonishment of the view, we took the whole battlement at a sweep, and
seemed to see an unbroken sky-line; but as ecstasy gave way to
examination, we discovered how greatly some portions of the precipice
surpassed our immediate _vis-à-vis_ in height.
First, a little east of our off-look, there projected boldly into the
Valley from the dominant line of the base a square stupendous tower that
might have been hewn by the diamond adzes of the Genii for a second
Babel-experiment, in expectance of the wrath of Allah. Here and there
the tools had left a faint scratch, only deep as the width of Broadway
and a bagatelle of five hundred feet in length; but that detracted no
more from the unblemished four-square contour of the entire mass than a
pin-mark from the symmetry of a door-post. A city might have been built
on its grand flat top. And, oh! the gorgeous masses of light and shadow
which the falling sun cast on it,--the shadows like great waves, the
lights like their spumy tops and flying mist,--thrown up from the
heaving breast of a golden sea! In California at this season the dome of
heaven is cloudless; but I still dream of what must be done for the
bringing-out of Tu-toch-anula's coronation-day majesties by the broken
winter sky of fleece and fire. The height of his precipice is nearly
four thousand feet perpendicular; his name is supposed to be that of the
Valley's tutelar deity. He also rejoices in a Spanish _alias_,--some
Mission Indian having attempted to translate by "_El Capitan_" the idea
of divine authority implied in Tu-toch-anula.
Far up the Valley to the eastward there rose far above the rest of the
sky-line, and nearly five thousand feet above the Valley, a hemisphere
of granite, capping the sheer wall, without an apparent tree or shrub to
hide its vast proportions. This we immediately recognized as the famous
To-coy-æ, better known through Watkins's photographs as the Great North
Dome. I am ignorant of the meaning of the former name, but the latter is
certainly appropriate. Between Tu-toch-anula and the Dome, the wall rose
here and there into great pinnacles and towers, but its sky-line is far
more regular than that of the southern side, where we were standing.
We drew close to the edge of the precipice and looked along over our own
wall up the Valley. Its contour was a rough curve from our stand-point
to a station opposite the North Dome, where the Valley dwindles to its
least width, so that all the intermediate crests and pinnacles which
topped the perpendicular wall stood within our vision like the teeth of
a saw, clear and sharp-cut against the blue sky. There is the same
plumb-line uprightness in these mighty precipices as in those of the
opposite side; but their front is much more broken by bold promontories,
and their tabular tops, instead of lying horizontal, slope up at an
angle of forty-five degrees or more from the spot where we were
standing, and make a succession of oblique prism-sections whose upper
edges are between three and four thousand feet in height. But the glory
of this southern wall comes at the termination of our view opposite the
North Dome. Here the precipice rises to the height of nearly one sheer
mile with a parabolic sky-line, and its posterior surface is as
elegantly rounded as an acorn-cup. From this contour results a naked
semi-cone of polished granite, whose face would cover one of our smaller
Eastern counties, though its exquisite proportions make it seem a thing
to hold in the hollow of the hand. A small pine-covered _glacis_ of
detritus lies at its foot, but every yard above that is bare of all life
save the palæozoic memories which have wrinkled the granite Colossus
from the earliest seethings of the fire-time. I never could call a
Yo-Semite crag _inorganic_, as I used to speak of everything not
strictly animal or vegetal. In the presence of the Great South Dome that
utterance became blasphemous. Not living was it? Who knew but the
_débris_ at its foot was merely the cast-off sweat and _exuviæ_ of a
stone life's great work-day? Who knew but the vital changes which were
going on within its gritty cellular tissue were only imperceptible to us
because silent and vastly secular? What was he who stood up before
Tis-sa-ack and said, "Thou art dead rock!" save a momentary sojourner in
the bosom of a cyclic period whose clock his race had never yet lived
long enough to hear strike? What, too, if Tis-sa-ack himself were but
one of the atoms in a grand organism where we could see only by monads
at a time,--if he and the sun and the sea were but cells or organs of
some one small being in the fenceless _vivarium_ of the Universe? Let
not the ephemeron that lights on a baby's hand generalize too rashly
upon the non-growing of organisms! As we thought on these things, we
bared our heads to the barer forehead of Tis-sa-ack.
I have spoken of the Great South Dome in the masculine gender, but the
native tradition makes it feminine. Nowhere is there a more beautiful
Indian legend than that of Tis-sa-ack. I will condense it into a few
short sentences from the long report of an old Yo-Semite brave.
Tis-sa-ack was the tutelar goddess of the Valley, as Tu-toch-anula was
its fostering god,--the former a radiant maiden, the latter an
ever-young immortal,--
"amorous as the month of May."
Becoming desperately fascinated with his fair colleague, Tu-toch-anula
spent in her arms all the divine long days of the California summer,
kissing, dallying, and lingering, until the Valley-tribes began to
starve for lack of the crops which his supervision should have ripened,
and a deputation of venerable men came from the dying people to
prostrate themselves at the foot of Tis-sa-ack. Full of anguish at her
nation's woes, she rose from her lover's arms, and cried for succor to
the Great Spirit. Then, with a terrible noise of thunder, the mighty
cone split from heaven to earth,--its frontal half falling down to dam
the snow-waters back into a lake, whence to this day the beautiful
Valley-stream takes one of its loveliest branches,--its other segment
remaining erect till this present, to be the Great South Dome under the
_in-memoriam_ title of Tis-sa-ack. But the divine maiden who died to
save her people appeared on earth no more, and in his agony
Tu-toch-anula carved her image on the face of the mile-high wall, as he
had carved his own on the surface of El Capitan,--where a lively faith
and good glasses may make out the effigies unto this day.
Sometimes these Indian traditions, being translated according to the
doctrine of correspondences, are of great use to the scientific man,--in
the present instance, as embalming with sweet spices a geological fact,
and the reason of a water-course which else might become obscured by
time. You may lose a rough fact because everybody is handling it and
passing it around with the sense of a liberty to present it next in his
own way; but a fact with its facets cut--otherwise a poem--is
unchangeable, imperditable. Seeing it has been manufactured once, nobody
tries to make it over again. The fact is regarded subject to liberal
translation; poems circulate virgin and _verbatim_. In some future
article I may recur to this topic with reference to the Columbia River,
and the capital light afforded to delvers in its wondrous trap-rock by
the lantern of Indian legend.
Let us leave the walls of the Valley to speak of the Valley itself, as
seen from this great altitude. There lies a sweep of emerald grass
turned to chrysoprase by the slant-beamed sun,--chrysoprase beautiful
enough to have been the tenth foundation-stone of John's apocalyptic
heaven. Broad and fair just beneath us, it narrows to a little strait of
green between the butments that uplift the giant domes. Far to the
westward, widening more and more, it opens into the bosom of great
mountain-ranges,--into a field of perfect light, misty by its own
excess,--into an unspeakable suffusion of glory created from the
phoenix-pile of the dying sun. Here it lies almost as treeless as some
rich old clover-mead; yonder, its luxuriant smooth grasses give way to a
dense wood of cedars, oaks, and pines. Not a living creature, either man
or beast, breaks the visible silence of this inmost paradise; but for
ourselves, standing at the precipice, petrified, as it were, rock on
rock, the great world might well be running back in stone-and-grassy
dreams to the hour when God had given him as yet but two daughters, the
crag and the clover. We were breaking into the sacred closet of Nature's
self-examination. What if, on considering herself, she should of a
sudden, and us-ward unawares, determine to begin the throes of a new
cycle,--spout up remorseful lavas from her long-hardened conscience, and
hurl us all skyward in a hot concrete with her unbosomed sins? Earth
below was as motionless as the ancient heavens above, save for the
shining serpent of the Merced, which silently to our ears threaded the
middle of the grass, and twinkled his burnished back in the sunset
wherever for a space he gilded out of the shadow of woods.
To behold this Promised Land proved quite a different thing from
possessing it. Only the _silleros_ of the Andes, our mules, horses, and
selves, can understand how much like a nightmare of endless roof-walking
was the descent down the face of the precipice. A painful and most
circuitous dug-way, where our animals had constantly to stop, lest their
impetus should tumble them headlong, all the way past steeps where the
mere thought of a side-fall was terror, brought us in the twilight to a
green meadow, ringed by woods, on the banks of the Merced.
Here we pitched our first Yo-Semite camp,--calling it "Camp Rosalie,"
after a dear absent friend of mine and Bierstadt's. Removing our packs
and saddles, we dismissed their weary bearers to the deep green meadow,
with no farther qualification to their license than might be found in
ropes seventy feet long fastened to deep-driven pickets. We soon got
together dead wood and pitchy boughs enough to kindle a roaring
fire,--made a kitchen-table by wedging logs between the trunks of a
three-forked tree, and thatching these with smaller sticks,--selected a
cedar-canopied piece of flat sward near the fire for our bed-room, and
as high up as we could reach despoiled our fragrant _baldacchini_ for
the mattresses. I need not praise to any woodsman the quality of a sleep
on evergreen-strewings.
During our whole stay in the Valley, most of us made it our practice to
rise with the dawn, and, immediately after a bath in the ice-cold
Merced, take a breakfast which might sometimes fail in the
game-department, but was an invariable success, considered as slapjacks
and coffee. Then the loyal nephew of the Secesh governor and the
testamentary guardian of the orphan mules brought our horses up from
picket; then the artists with their camp-stools and color-boxes, the
sages with their goggles, nets, botany-boxes, and bug-holders, the
gentlemen of elegant leisure with their naked eyes and a fish-rod or a
gun, all rode away whither they listed, firing back Parthian shots of
injunction about the dumpling in the grouse-fricassee.
Sitting in their divine workshop, by a little after sunrise our artists
began labor in that only method which can ever make a true painter or a
living landscape, _color_-studies on the spot; and though I am not here
to speak of their results, I will assert that during their seven weeks'
camp in the Valley they learned more and gained greater material for
future triumphs than they had gotten in all their lives before at the
feet of the greatest masters. Meanwhile the other two vaguely divided
orders of gentlemen and sages were sight-seeing, whipping the covert or
the pool with various success for our next day's dinner, or hunting
specimens of all kinds,--_Agassizing_, so to speak.
I cannot praise the Merced to that vulgar, yet extensive, class of
sportsmen with whom fishing means nothing but catching fish,--to that
select minority of _illuminati_ who go trouting for intellectual
culture, because they cannot hear Booth or a _Sonata_ of
Beethoven's,--who write rhapsodies of much fire and many pages on the
divine superiority of the curve of an hyperbola over that of a parabola
in the cast of a fly,--who call three little troutlings "_a splendid
day's sport, me boy_!" because those rash and ill-advised infants have
been deceived by a feather-bug which never would have been of any use to
them, instead of a real worm which would. We, who can make prettier
curves and deceive larger game in a dancing-party at home, did not go to
the Yo-Semite for that kind of sport. When I found that the best bait or
fly caught only half a dozen trout in an afternoon,--and those the dull,
black, California kind, with lined sides, but no spots,--I gave over
bothering the unambitious burghers of the flood with invitations to a
rise in life, and took to the meadows with a butterfly-net.
My experience teaches that no sage (or gentleman) should chase the
butterfly on horseback. You are liable to put your net over your horse's
head instead of the butterfly. The butterfly keeps rather ahead of the
horse. You may throw your horse when you mean to throw the net. The idea
is a romantic one; it carries you back to the days of chivalry, when
court-butterflies _were_ said to have been netted from the saddle,--but
it carries you nowhere else in particular, unless perhaps into a small
branch of the Merced, where you don't want to go. Then, too, if you slip
down and leave your horse standing while you steal on a giant _Papilio_
which is sucking the deer-weed in _such_ a sweet spot for a cast, your
horse (perhaps he has heard of the French general who said, "Asses and
_savans_ to the centre!") may discover that he also is a sage, and
retire to botanize while you are butterflying,--a contingency which
entails your wading the Merced after him five several times, and finally
going back to camp in wet disgust to procure another horse and a lariat.
An experience faintly hinted at in the above suggestions soon convinced
me that the great arm of the service in butterfly-warfare is infantry.
After I had turned myself into a modest Retiarius, I had no end to
success. Mariposa County is rightly named. The honey of its groves and
meadows is sucked by some of the largest, the most magnificent, and most
widely varied butterflies in the world.
At noon those of us who came back to camp had a substantial dinner out
of our abundant stores, reinforced occasionally with grouse, quail, or
pigeons, contributed by the sportsmen. The artists mostly dined _à la
fourchette_, in their workshop,--something in a pail being carried out
to them at noon by our Infant Phenomenon. He was a skeleton of thinness,
and an incredibly gaunt mustang was the one which invariably carried the
lunch; so we used to call the boy, when we saw him coming, "Death on the
Pail-Horse." At evening, when the artists returned, half an hour was
passed in a "private view" of their day's studies; then came another
dinner, called a supper; then the tea-kettle was emptied into a pan, and
brush-washing with talk and pipes led the rest of the genial way to
bed-time.
In his charming "Peculiar," Epes Sargent has given us an episode called
the "Story of Estelle." It is the greatest of compliments to him that I
could get thoroughly interested in her lover, when he bore the name of
one of the most audacious and _picaresque_ mortals I ever knew,--our
hired man, who sold us--our----But hear my episode: it is