is located the up-to-date, prosperous city of Grants Pass, with a
population exceeding six thousand purely American citizens, enjoying
the charms of picturesque scenery the equal of which is not to be
found elsewhere; the clear, spring-like mountain stream, with its
myriads of trout and salmon, coursing along the southern limits of the
city boundary, affords means of recreation which only few of the vast
American populace are permitted to enjoy.
“Grants Pass is surrounded by rich agricultural and horticultural
lands; the low forest-clad hillsides are being rapidly cleared and
planted to Tokay grape vineyards and peach, pear, and apple orchards;
upon both banks of the Rogue River, for a distance of twenty miles, are
large commercial apple orchards, some in full bearing, consisting of
the Spitzenberg and Yellow Newton Pippin apples, for which the section
is world-famous, and others newly planted or from one to five years
old; large tracts of luscious watermelons, nutmegs, and cantaloupes
are to be seen interspersed with strawberries, blackberries, and other
varieties of small fruit; here a field of corn, nodding its tassels
ten and twelve feet high; there a field of hops, smiling fortune to
its lucky owner; and again, rolling meadows of alfalfa and bunches of
dairy cattle, sleek and trim; the azure blue sky above reaching to
the horizon, the lines of which are broken by the majestic peaks of
the Coast Range Mountains. Truly has this been called ‘The Italy of
America.’
“In the hills close to Grants Pass the sportsman finds grouse, quail,
pheasants, and grey squirrels to his hearts content, whilst along the
river and creeks the angler forgets all care when casting his fly to
the invitation of the rainbow, salmon, and speckled trout, which abound
along the numerous riffles and in the deep pools; farther out in the
timber-clad mountains the huntsman may find deer, bobcat, bear, and
mountain lion. A poor hunter is he who does not have venison for dinner
the first day.
“The standing timber of Josephine County is conservatively estimated
at nine billion feet of fir, sugar pine, spruce, cedar, and yellow
pine. A score or more sawmills are operated in the immediate vicinity
of Grants Pass; the product of these mills is manufactured into fruit
boxes and building material at the two large factories in the city,
which employ several hundred men. Mining for gold and copper is carried
on extensively in all parts of the county to a distance of forty miles;
the Grants Pass district supplying at the present time over one-half of
the gold and copper output of the state. Marble, lime, platinum, fire
clay, and asbestos are among the many lesser mineral products.
“The homeseeker looking for an ideal location and an opportunity to
become independent in a really charming city and valley should not fail
to investigate the merits of Grants Pass and vicinity.”
The completion of a million-dollar sugar factory in the past year
had still farther added to the optimism of Grants Pass people. This,
we were assured, would mean the distribution of perhaps five hundred
thousand dollars annually in the community and reclamation of some six
thousand acres of land with an assured income of at least fifty dollars
per acre. Irrigation is necessary to grow sugar beets in this section
and, fortunately, the water supply is practically unlimited. Naturally,
Grants Pass is exceedingly anxious to have an outlet to the sea, which
is less than one hundred miles distant across the Cascades--and a
bond issue to begin work on a railroad to Crescent City in California
has recently been voted. All of which goes to show that Grants Pass
is honest in its belief of a great future and that no effort will be
omitted by its hustling citizens to realize said future at the earliest
possible moment.
VIII
GRANTS PASS TO EUREKA
We may admit that it was with considerable misgiving that we left
Grants Pass in the early morning for Crescent City on the sea. We had
been discouraged in the attempt by the best posted road authorities in
San Francisco, who declared that the trip was too difficult to be worth
while, and the pleasant young lady who was all there was in sight when
we called at the Portland Automobile Club was even more emphatic in her
efforts to dissuade us.
“Don’t try it,” she said. “The road by the way of Crescent City and
Eureka is a rough mountain trail, with grades as high as thirty-eight
per cent and the rains are likely to catch you at any time from now
on,”--all of which, we may remark parenthetically, proved true enough.
Over against this was the assurance of a veteran motorist whom we met
at Crater Lake Lodge and who had just come from San Francisco over
this route, that there was nothing to give the driver of a Pierce
Forty-eight a moment’s uneasiness; though the road was very heavy and
rough, a staunch, powerful car would have no difficulty. We were also
reassured by the garage owner at Grants Pass, who declared that the
natives thought little of the run to Crescent City and that a motor
stage made the trip nearly every day in the year, though sometimes in
bad weather, he admitted, the nearly obsolete but always reliable horse
had to give them a lift.
We learned enough, however, to feel sure that considerably heavier
work in mountaineering than we had as yet done awaited us, and this
naturally caused us some uneasiness. At times when such feelings seized
us concerning roads traveled by some one almost daily, we tried to
realize the sensations of the pioneers, who confronted these awful
solitudes without road or chart and at best with only treacherous
savages to guide them over well-nigh impassable trails through mountain
and forest. Such reflections made our misgivings about roads and routes
seem little short of cowardly, and perhaps at times rather coerced our
better judgment.
We covered forty miles out of Grants Pass with little hint of the road
terrors we expected to encounter before the close of the day. The
road, fair to excellent, ran at first through cultivated fields and
apple-laden orchards; then it entered rounded hills, where the forests,
fragrant with balsam pine, were interspersed with lovely green
valleys dotted with numerous well-improved ranches. There were signs
of considerable activity in lumbering and we passed two large sawmills
along the way.
At Waldo, a tiny village forty miles from Grants Pass, we recalled that
the famous Oregon caves were only twelve miles eastward and regretted
that our schedule did not permit a day’s delay to visit them. From here
a picturesque trail leads to these so-called Marble Halls of Oregon,
deep in the heart of the rugged mountains. These strange caves were
discovered some fifty years ago by a hunter who pursued a wounded
bear into a cavern in the mountain. The caves have not yet been fully
explored, but there is known to be a series of lofty vaulted chambers
rivaling those of the Mammoth Cave and hundreds of smaller apartments,
with walls, ceilings, and pillars in old ivory and lighter colorings,
all as delicately sculptured as though designed and executed by master
artists. The roar of subterranean rivers is heard, seemingly overhead,
and again beneath one’s feet, echoing from mysterious caverns as yet
unentered even by the adventurous guides.
Beyond Waldo our real mountaineering began, and an incident occurred
that caused us no small perturbation nor, looking back, can we feel
that our uneasiness was unwarranted. Here a stranger walking along the
road hailed us and as we paused in response to his signal, asked us to
give him a lift to the next town. As he looked fairly reputable and
carried no baggage, our first thought was that he might be a ranchman
of the vicinity, and as there were four unoccupied seats in the big
car, it seemed churlish to refuse, despite whatever distrust we might
have of a stranger in such a lonely wilderness. So we bade him climb in
beside the driver and began the ascent of the stupendous grade leading
over the first great range of the Cascades. For nearly ten miles we
followed the rough, stony road which flung its narrow loops around
canyon and headland, often with a deep valley alongside. The steep
slopes above and below us were clad with mighty pines and through these
we caught occasional glimpses of an ever widening prospect. It was only
when we reached the summit of the range that the full magnificence of
the scene broke upon our astonished vision. A vast panorama of rugged
peaks--“a sea of wood in wild, unmeasured miles,” to quote the poet of
the Sierras--stretched way inimitably in the thin, clear atmosphere
until it was lost in a violet-blue haze.
Our enjoyment of the wonderful scene was not unmixed, however, for by
this time it had become clear to us that our self-invited passenger
was a lunatic. He had talked much wild and silly chatter about a
wonderful invention of his and a great fortune awaiting him in San
Francisco, and given evidence by other unmistakable signs that he
was more or less demented. It did not seem practicable to attempt to
get rid of him at the time and we began the descent with increasing
uneasiness as he continued to harass the driver with his wild talk.
And if ever a driver needed to keep his head clear it was during this
same descent; the road, a mere shelf in the rock, crawls along the
precipitous mountainside while a vast abyss yawns below with a mad,
boulder-vexed stream at the bottom. It was made far more trying to the
nerves by the absence of trees or shrubbery to screen the precipice--a
bare foot or two lay between our wheels and a sheer drop of say half a
mile.
Our guest noted our perturbation and, turning to the lady, who had
shrunk into the smallest possible space in the end of the capacious
seat and was studiously refusing to even look at the road, he said,
“Gets on your nerves, doesn’t it? Looks mighty scaly, for a fact!”
It was not made the easier by the knowledge that a lunatic sat beside
the driver, harmless, maybe, but we had no way of knowing that he was.
In any event, when he wasn’t looking I slipped the Colt automatic,
which had been our almost forgotten companion since we started, beneath
our car robe, with the resolve that if he should attempt to lay hands
on our driver on these appalling roads, there would be something doing.
Fortunately, except for his incessant chatter, he was quite inoffensive
and we looked forward anxiously to the next station on the road, where
we determined to drop him, willy nilly.
It was a long, slow crawl to Patrick’s Creek, to which an occasional
signboard directed us, for our cautious driver averaged only seven
or eight miles per hour, and, however anxious we were to get rid of
our passenger, it was quite enough. The scenery was inspiring and
picturesque but the road was more or less nerve-racking every mile of
the way. Passing-places were only occasional, but, fortunately, we met
no one after leaving Waldo.
Patrick’s Creek Hotel proved a small ranch house close by the road
where meals are served and auto supplies sold to tourists. As usual,
we had our lunch, but were glad to supplement it with one of the
landlady’s home-made pies, which proved excellent indeed. For once we
regretted having brought our lunch, since they told us that it was
their practice to fry one of the numerous young chickens running about
the place, “while you wait.” Here we had the peculiar sensation that
comes from paying fifty cents per gallon for gasoline--our top notch, I
believe, except in Longwy, France, some years before.
“I get it by parcel post in sealed five-gallon cans,” said the
innkeeper, who is also forest ranger in this district, “which is the
only way the stage people will accept it for shipment.”
“Do you get much patronage here besides meals?” we asked.
“In the hunting season we do,” he replied, “It’s a famous hunting
ground. We could go up on yonder mountainside and start a dozen deer in
an hour.”
“You ought to have plenty of venison at your hotel,” we ventured.
“Not a bit of it,” he replied in disgust. “The game law forbids serving
it for pay and you are not even allowed to have any portion of a deer’s
carcase on hand longer than ten days; you can’t sell it or ship it out
of the county--there isn’t much sport in killing the poor brutes under
such conditions. Still, hunters come here and kill the limit of three
bucks, but most of the venison goes to waste.”
When we resumed our journey our passenger, with considerable rambling
talk, expressed his willingness to continue with us to San Francisco
and even intimated that we might get a slice of the great fortune he
had in prospect there; he evidently did not object to the car or the
company and was quite willing to become a permanent member of our
party. We succeeded in making him understand that we were not running
a stage and that we felt we had done our share in the thirty-five-mile
lift we had given him. We offered him a little financial assistance,
if needed, but it was indignantly declined. He would soon have wealth
beyond the dreams of avarice. And so we bade him a glad farewell, with
the mental resolve that we would pick up no more unknown pedestrians.
We were afterwards hailed by one or two knights of the road who, no
doubt, thought us stingy snobs as we sailed past them in sublime
indifference--but we had had our lesson. We saw added reason for such a
course when we read later in a San Francisco paper that an autoist had
been held up and robbed in the mountains by two foot pads whom he had
generously given a ride.
Leaving the inn, we followed the yellow road which we could see far
ahead, zigzagging up the rough mountainside before us. It led to
another seemingly endless climb over steep, stony grades along the edge
of precipitous slopes. A short distance from the hotel we saw a doe
eyeing us curiously from the chaparral a few yards from the roadside.
She seemed to realize that a lady deer is safe in California, even in
the hunting season, for she showed little signs of fear. Had she been
legitimate game we might probably have killed her with the Colt.
The climb over a stony road--enough to try every rivet in any
car--continued for several miles. On coming to the summit, we did
not immediately descend, but continued for many miles, with slight
ups and downs, along the crest of the Cascades--or is it the Coast
Sierras?--the ranger said the point is still in dispute as to where one
ceases and the other begins. It was a narrow, precarious trail that we
followed, with only thin shrubbery to screen the forbidding slopes at
its side--but what a magnificent and inspiring vista it opened to our
delighted vision! Beneath us lay a vast, wooded canyon, thousands of
feet in depth, and beyond it stretched an infinite array of pine-clad
summits, seemingly without end, for the day was clear as crystal and
only a thin haze hid the distance. They are building a new highway that
will supersede this mountain trail and future tourists will gladly miss
the thrills of the precarious road, but they will also miss much of the
grandeur and beauty; to see the mountains one must climb the mountains
to their very crests. We shall always be glad that we saw the wild and
inspiring vistas from many of these old-time roads which will pass
into disuse when the improved highway comes.
Again we angled slowly down into a vast valley and climbed two more
ranges before the cool, fresh ocean air struck our faces. To tell of
the beauty and charm of the scenes that presented themselves to our
eyes would be continual repetition; they were much like those we had
encountered ever since entering the mighty hill ranges.
We were conscious of a sudden and overpowering change when we came
within a dozen miles of the destination of our day’s run. Here we
entered the Del Norte redwoods and many were the exclamations of wonder
excited by the majesty and loveliness of these virgin forests. Glorious
individual trees, ten to twenty feet in diameter, towering two to three
hundred feet above us, crowded up to the roadside, standing so thickly
that it was impossible to see ahead for any considerable distance.
But most wonderful was the rank--almost tropical--appearance of the
undergrowth. The ground was green with velvet moss, and huge ferns
with fronds several feet in length, intermingled with the metallic
green of the huckleberry bushes. Many other shrubs and plants unknown
to us joined to make up this marvelous tangle of greenery, the like
of which we had never before seen. Occasionally we came upon a fallen
tree cast down by storms of perhaps a century ago, but the dead giant
had become the abode of riotous life, for every foot of his great
trunk was covered with a rank growth of fern and shrub. We even saw
good-sized trees springing out of these long-dead redwoods. We had seen
the redwoods of Tuolumne, Santa Cruz, and Mariposa, larger trees but
utterly lacking the beauty of the riotous greenery of the groves of Del
Norte.
A clear, green river spanned by a high iron bridge served to enhance
the charm of the scene. We paused to drink of the ice-cold waters of a
little roadside waterfall and to felicitate ourselves that we had not
been dissuaded from the Crescent City road. It is a rough, steep, and
dangerous road, we may admit, but this glorious forest repays one a
thousand times. The accumulation of leaves and pine needles deposited
through the centuries had made the soil beneath the trees a deep,
soft mould, and to make the road passable it had been “corduroyed”
for several miles with redwood slabs, which slowed the car down to a
snail’s pace. This was no hardship, however--surely one who does not
expect to pass over the road again would never wish to hasten through
such delightful scenery.
[Illustration: THROUGH THE DEL NORTE REDWOODS
From painting by Martella Lane]
It was still four miles to Crescent City when we came out of the great
forest and for this distance we ran through rather poorly improved farm
lands. The ocean, which flashed into view as we approached the town,
was indeed a welcome sight after our long exile in the hills. For many
miles as we approached the town the trees at frequent intervals had
borne signs calling attention to the merits of the Bay View Annex,
with the constant reiteration of “hot and cold water” as the chief
attraction. So we sought the Bay View, a rambling, wooden building
looking out on the harbor and were forthwith assigned to rooms in the
“Annex” at the rear. While our quarters were far from elaborate, they
were clean and comfortable, though the much-vaunted hot and cold water
proved principally cold.
We had leisure to look about the town before supper and while there was
little in the plain, straggling, wooden village to excite our interest,
we learned that Crescent City has big ambitions and high hopes for the
future.
“We have one of the best harbors on the whole western coast, about
equally distant from San Francisco and Portland,” said a shopkeeper
from whom we made a few purchases. “It is deep enough for ocean-going
vessels, so that little dredging will be necessary, and only needs
protection of a sea wall to offer safe shelter for a whole fleet of
ships. Congress has been interested in the project and only last year a
committee of several of the leading members came here to investigate.
All agreed that the government could well afford to spend five million
dollars to improve the harbor and that the resources of the country
about here warrant an appropriation. If this is done and the railroad
carried through from Grants Pass, Crescent City will become a city,
indeed. There are two hundred billion feet of standing timber within
a radius of two hundred miles from Crescent City, most of which would
be converted into lumber and find an outlet through Crescent City
Harbor. The rich Rogue River Valley, now at the mercy of the Southern
Pacific Railroad, will gladly seek a cheaper outlet for its products
and though it may not be apparent to a stranger, the agricultural
products of Del Norte County are very considerable. Our butter, for
instance, is considered the finest in the country and the Palace Hotel
at San Francisco will not serve any other. Its excellence is due to the
splendid grazing lands watered by an annual rainfall of sixty-eight
inches. This also gives you the secret of the wonderful greenness of
the great redwood forest which you so admired when coming to our city.
Salmon and other fishing and packing are already very extensive and can
be increased indefinitely. There are immense deposits of copper and
iron ore between here and Grants Pass--particularly in the neighborhood
of Waldo. Marble and other building stone are to be found within easy
shipping distance. We have the finest summer climate on the Pacific
Coast and splendid beaches, so that Crescent City is bound to become
more and more of a summer resort--in fact, a great many people come
here now in the summer time. Do you think our hopes for Crescent City’s
future are ill-founded? Isn’t it reasonable to believe that when this
harbor is improved and a railroad completed to both Grants Pass and
Eureka that we may fairly expect a city of fifty thousand people or
more?”
We did not take issue with our enthusiastic informant, though, indeed,
it was hard to imagine a teeming city on the site of the lonely little
village; but perhaps the same thing might have been said of Portland or
Seattle fifty years ago. A start has really been made toward improving
the harbor, for an initial appropriation of three hundred and ninety
thousand dollars has been made by the War Department, to which Del
Norte County has added the proceeds of a one-hundred-thousand-dollar
bond issue. The chief industry of the town at present is lumbering, one
company employing five hundred men, but the output is limited by the
indifferent shipping facilities.
Crescent City has another ambition which is well worthy of
realization--to have a large section of the magnificent forests near
the town set aside as a national park. It would, indeed, be a calamity
to our whole people to have all of this great grove wiped out by ax
and fire, as has occurred near Eureka. The redwood groves already
reserved do not and can not match the Del Norte forests in beauty and
suitability as a natural playground. Here one can camp under the giants
trees and live near to nature indeed, nor will he be troubled by such
pests as flies, mosquitoes, scorpions, rattlesnakes, and the like, for
they are almost unknown in this section. From our own observation we
can heartily second the declaration of a local writer to the effect
that--
“The importance of this proposed Redwood Park to Humboldt and Del
Norte Counties, the State of California, and to the whole of North
America, even to the whole world, can scarcely be estimated. Within
comparatively a few generations the giant redwood forests of California
will be a thing of the past; the woodsman’s ax and the ravenous
sawmills will have swept them away, even as the great pine and hardwood
forests of Michigan and Wisconsin have been wiped out of existence.
“A billion or more feet of these giant forests preserved and protected
for all time from destruction will form a priceless heritage for future
generations--one of the greatest attractions California will then have,
for it will bring pilgrims from all over the world. It will not be
many generations before all the virgin forests on the North American
Continent, save those protected in national and other forest reserves
will be wiped out of existence.”
It would be hard to express the chagrin which we felt on looking
from the window of the Bay View Annex on the morning following our
arrival to find a heavy fog, almost bordering on a drizzle, enveloping
everything and even shrouding the near-by ocean from view. We were told
that such fogs often lasted a week or more, so it did not seem worth
while to wait another day at the Bay View in hope of clear weather. We
set out with the forlorn hope that the fog might clear away as the sun
rose higher.