Vance. The cognomen of the loyal nephew with the Secesh uncle. I will be
brief. Our stores began to fail. One morning we equipped Vance with a
horse, a pack-mule to lead behind him, a list of purchases, and eighty
golden dollars, bidding him good-speed on the trail to Mariposa. He was
to return laden with all the modern equivalents for corn, wine, and oil,
on the fifth or sixth day from his departure. Seven days glided by, and
the material for more slapjacks with them. We grew perilously nigh our
bag-bottoms.
One morning I determined to save the party from starvation, and with a
fresh supply of the currency set out for Mariposa. At Clark's I learned
that our man had camped there about noon on the day he left us, turned
his horse and mule loose, instead of picketing them, and spent the rest
of the sunlight in a _siesta_. When he arose, his animals were
undiscoverable. He accordingly borrowed Clark's only horse to go in
search of them, and the generous hermit had not seen him since.
Carrying these pleasant bits of intelligence, I resumed my way toward
the settlements. Coming by the steam saw-mill, I recognized Vance's
steed grazing by the way-side, threw my lariat over his head, and led
him in triumph to Mariposa. There I arrived at eight in the evening of
the day I left the Valley,--having performed fifty miles of the hardest
mountain-trail that was ever travelled in a little less than twelve
hours, making allowance for our halt and noon-feed at Clark's. If ever a
California horse was tried, it was mine on that occasion; and he came
into Mariposa on the full gallop, scarcely wet, and not galled or jaded
in the least.
Here I found our mule, whose obstinate memory had carried him home to
his old stable,--also the remaining events in Vance's brief, but
brilliant career. That ornament of the Utah and Yo-Semite expeditions
had entered Mariposa on Clark's horse,--lost our eighty golden dollars
at a single session of bluff,--departed gayly for Coulterville, where he
sold Clark's horse at auction for forty dollars, including saddle and
bridle, and immediately at another game of bluff lost the entire
purchase-money to the happy buyer, (Clark got his horse again on proving
title,)--and finally vanished for parts unknown, with nothing in his
pocket but buttons, or in his memory but villanies. Nowhere out of
California or Old Spain can there exist such a modern survivor of the
days of Gil Blas!
Too happy in the recovery of Clark's and our own animals to waste time
in hue-and-cry, I loaded my two reclaimed pack-beasts with all that our
commissariat needed,--nooned at Clark's, on my way back, the third day
after leaving the Valley for Mariposa, and that same night was among my
rejoicing comrades at the head of the Great Yo-Semite. That afternoon
they had come to the bottom of the flour-bag, after living for three
days on unleavened slapjacks without either butter or sirup. I have seen
people who professed to relish the Jewish Passover-bread; but, after
such an experience as our party's, I venture to say they would have
regarded it worthy of a place among the other abolished types of the
Mosaic dispensation. As for me and the mule, we felt our hearts swell
within us as if we had come to raise the siege of Leyden. In that same
enthusiasm shared our artists, _savans_, and gentlemen, embracing the
shaggy neck of the mule as he had been a brother what time they realized
that his panniers were full. Can any one wonder at my early words, "A
slapjack may be the last plank between the woodsman and starvation"?
Just before I started after supplies our party moved its camp to a
position five miles up the Valley beyond Camp Rosalie, in a beautiful
grove of oaks and cedars, close upon the most sinuous part of the Merced
margin, with rich pasture for our animals immediately across the stream,
and the loftiest cataract in the world roaring over the bleak precipice
opposite. This is the Yo-Semite Fall proper, or, in the Indian,
"Cho-looke." By the most recent geological surveys this fall is credited
with the astounding height of twenty-eight hundred feet. At an early
period the entire mass of water must have plunged that distance without
break. At this day a single ledge of slant projection changes the
headlong flood from cataract to rapids for about four hundred feet; but
the unbroken upper fall is fifteen hundred feet, and the lower thirteen
hundred. In the spring and early summer no more magnificent sight can be
imagined than the tourist obtains from a stand-point right in the midst
of the spray, driven, as by a wind blowing thirty miles an hour, from
the thundering basin of the lower fall. At all seasons Cho-looke is the
grandest mountain-waterfall in the known world.
While I am speaking of waterfalls, let me not omit "Po-ho-nó," or "The
Bridal Veil," which was passed on the southern side in our way to the
second and about a mile above the first camp. As Tis-sa-ack was a good,
so is Po-ho-nó an evil spirit of the Indian mythology. This tradition is
scientifically accounted for in the fact that many Indians have been
carried over the fall by the tremendous current both of wind and water
forever rushing down a _cañon_ through which the stream breaks from its
feeding-lake twelve or fifteen miles before it falls. The savage lowers
his voice to a whisper and crouches trembling past Po-ho-nó; while the
very utterance of the name is so dreaded by him that the discoverers of
the Valley obtained it with great difficulty. This fall drops on a heap
of giant boulders in one unbroken sheet of a thousand feet
perpendicular, thus being the next in height among all the
Valley-cataracts to the Yo-Semite itself, and having a width of fifty
feet. Its name of "The Bridal Veil" is one of the few successes in
fantastic nomenclature; for, to one viewing it in profile, its snowy
sheet, broken into the filmy silver lace of spray and falling quite free
of the brow of the precipice, might well seem the veil worn by the earth
at her granite wedding,--no commemorator of any fifty-years' bagatelle
like the golden one, but crowning the one-millionth anniversary of her
nuptials.
On either side of Po-ho-nó the sky-line of the precipice is
magnificently varied. The fall itself cuts a deep gorge into the crown
of the battlement. On the southwest border of the fall stands a nobly
bold, but nameless rock, three thousand feet in height. Near by is
Sentinel Rock, a solitary truncate pinnacle, towering to thirty-three
hundred feet. A little farther are "Eleachas," or "The Three Brothers,"
flush with the front-surface of the precipice, but their upper posterior
bounding-planes tilted in three tiers, which reach a height of
thirty-four hundred and fifty feet.
One of the loveliest places in the Valley is the shore of Lake
Ah-wi-yah,--a crystal pond of several acres in extent, fed by the north
fork of the Valley-stream, and lying right at the mouth of the narrow
strait between the North and South Domes. By this tranquil water we
pitched our third camp, and when the rising sun began to shine through
the mighty cleft before us, the play of color and _chiaroscuro_ on its
rugged walls was something for which an artist apt to oversleep himself
might well have sat up all the night. No such precaution was needed by
ourselves. Painters, sages, and gentlemen at large, all turned out by
dawn; for the studies were grander, the grouse and quail plentier, and
the butterflies more gorgeous than we found in any other portion of the
Valley. After passing the great cleft eastward, I found the river more
enchanting at every step. I was obliged to penetrate in this direction
entirely on foot,--clambering between squared blocks of granite
dislodged from the wall beneath the North Dome, any one of which might
have been excavated into a commodious church, and discovering, for the
pains cost by a reconnoissance of five miles, some of the loveliest
shady stretches of singing water and some of the finest minor waterfalls
in our American scenery.
Our last camp was pitched among the crags and forests behind the South
Dome,--where the Middle Fork descends through two successive waterfalls,
which, in apparent breadth and volume, far surpass Cho-looke, while the
loftiest is nearly as high as Po-ho-nó. About three miles west of the
Domes, the south wall of the Valley is interrupted by a deep _cañon_
leading in a nearly southeast direction. Through this _cañon_ comes the
Middle Fork, and along its banks lies our course to the great
"Pi-wi-ack" (senselessly Englished as "Vernal") and the Nevada Falls.
For three miles from our camp opposite the Yo-Semite Fall the _cañon_ is
threaded by a trail practicable for horses. At its termination we
dismounted, sent back our animals, and, strapping their loads upon our
own shoulders, struck nearly eastward by a path only less rugged than
the trackless crags around us. In some places we were compelled to
squeeze sideways through a narrow crevice in the rocks, at imminent
danger to our burden of blankets and camp-kettles; in others we became
quadrupedal, scrambling up acclivities with which the bald main
precipice had made but slight compromise. But for our light marching
order,--our only dress being knee-boots, hunting-shirt, and
trowsers,--it would have been next to impossible to reach our goal at
all.
But none of us regretted pouring sweat or strained sinews, when, at the
end of our last terrible climb, we stood upon the oozy sod which is
brightened into eternal emerald by the spray of Pi-wi-ack. Far below our
slippery standing steeply sloped the walls of the ragged chasm down
which the snowy river charges roaring after its first headlong plunge;
an eternal rainbow flung its shimmering arch across the mighty caldron
at the base of the fall; and straight before us in one unbroken leap
came down Pi-wi-ack from a granite shelf nearly four hundred feet in
height and sixty feet in perfectly horizontal width. Some enterprising
speculator, who has since ceased to take the original seventy-five
cents' toll, a few years ago built a substantial set of rude ladders
against the perpendicular wall over which Pi-wi-ack rushes. We found it
still standing, and climbed the dizzy height in a shower of spray, so
close to the edge of the fall that we could almost wet our hands in its
rim. Once at the top, we found that Nature had been as accommodating to
the sight-seer as man himself; for the ledge we landed on was a perfect
breastwork, built from the receding precipices on either side of the
_cañon_ to the very crown of the cataract. The weakest nerves need not
have trembled, when once within the parapet, on the smooth, flat
rampart, and looking down into the tremendous boiling chasm whence we
had just climbed.
Above Pi-wi-ack the river runs for a mile at the bottom of a granite
cradle, sloping upward from it on each side at an angle of about
forty-five degrees, in great tabular masses slippery as ice, without a
crevice in them for thirty yards at a stretch where even the scraggiest
_manzanita_ may catch hold and grow. This tilted formation, broken here
and there by spots of scanty alluvium and stunted pines, continues
upward till it intersects the posterior cone of the South Dome on one
side and a colossal castellated precipice on the other,--creating thus
the very typical landscape of sublime desolation. The shining barrenness
of these rocks, and the utter nakedness of that vast glittering dome
which hollows the heavens beyond them, cannot be conveyed by any
metaphor to a reader knowing only the wood-crowned slopes of the
Alleghany chain.
Climbing between the stunted pines and giant blocks along the stream's
immediate margin,--getting glimpses here and there of the snowy fretwork
of churned water which laced the higher rocks, and the black whirls
which spun in the deep pits of the roaring bed beneath us,--we came at
last to the base of "Yo-wi-ye," or Nevada Fall.
This is the most voluminous, and next to Pi-wi-ack, perhaps, the most
beautiful of the Yo-Semite cataracts. Its beauty is partly owing to the
surrounding rugged grandeur which contrasts it, partly to its great
height (eight hundred feet) and surpassing volume, but mainly to its
exquisite and unusual shape. It falls from a precipice the highest
portion of whose face is as smoothly perpendicular as the wall overleapt
by Pi-wi-ack; but invisibly beneath its snowy flood a ledge slants
sideways from the cliff about a hundred feet below the crown of the
fall, and at an angle of about thirty degrees from the plumb-line. Over
this ledge the water is deflected upon one side and spread like a
half-open fan to the width of nearly two hundred feet.
At the base of Yo-wi-ye we seem standing in a _cul-de-sac_ of Nature's
grandest labyrinth. Look where we will, impregnable battlements hem us
in. We gaze at the sky from the bottom of a savage granite _barathrum_,
whence there is no escape but return through the chinks and over the
crags of an Old-World convulsion. We are at the end of the stupendous
series of Yo-Semite _effects_; eight hundred feet above us, could we
climb there, we should find the silent causes of power. There lie the
broad, still pools that hold the reserved affluence of the snow-peaks;
thence might we see, glittering like diamond lances in the sun, the
eternal snow-peaks themselves. But these would still be as far above us
as we stood below Yo-wi-ye on the lowest valley-bottom whence we came.
Even from Inspiration Point, where our trail first struck the
battlement, we could see far beyond the Valley to the rising sun,
towering mightily above Tis-sa-ack herself, the everlasting
snow-forehead of Castle Rock, his crown's serrated edge cutting the sky
at the topmost height of the Sierra. We had spoken of reaching him,--of
holding converse with the King of all the Giants. This whole weary way
have we toiled since then,--and we know better now. Have we endured all
these pains only to learn still deeper Life's saddest lesson,--"Climb
forever, and there is still an Inaccessible"?
Wetting our faces with the melted treasure of Nature's topmost
treasure-house, Yo-wi-ye answers us ere we turn back from the
Yo-Semite's last precipice toward the haunts of men:--
"Ye who cannot go to the Highest, lo, the Highest comes down to you!"