After our return from the Yo-Semite Valley, Bierstadt and myself
remained in San Francisco, or its delightful neighborhood, making short
excursions around and across the bay, for more than a fortnight. But
this lotus-eating life soon palled. We burned to see the giant Shasta,
and grew thirsty for the eternal snows of the Cascade Peaks still
farther north. So much of a horseback-ride to the Columbia as brought us
into Oregon I here propose to sketch in brief.
The rest of our party had become sated with travel and gone home. One
glorious September day we took our saddle-bags, note-books, and
color-boxes, put our horses on board the Sacramento steamer, and,
without other baggage or company of any sort, set out for the Columbia
River and Vancouver's Island.
At Sacramento, on the next morning after leaving San Francisco, we
shifted our quarters to a smaller and light-draught boat which was to
take us up the shallow river to its head of navigation. This arrangement
was a great economy of time. The country bordering the Upper Sacramento
for two hundred miles from the Californian capital is level and
comparatively tame, so that no artistic advantage would have resulted
from following the bank on horseback. From the little steamer the view
became a perpetual pleasure. About twenty miles above Sacramento we
passed the mouth of Feather River, disgorging coffee-colored mud from
the innumerable gold-diggings along its course, and came into lovely
blue water, pure as the cradling snow-ridges between which it issued.
The immediate margin began to be thickly wooded with overhanging
willows, oaks, and sycamores. These were alive with birds of every
aquatic description. The shag, a large fowl of black and dingy-white
plumage, apparently belonging to the cormorant family, peopled every
dead tree with a live fruit whose weight nearly cracked its branches;
every snag projecting from the river-bed was studded with a row of the
same creatures at mathematically equal intervals, each possessing just
room enough for his favorite pastime of slowly opening his wings to the
utmost, and then shutting them again in solemn rhythm, like a pupil of
Dr. Dio Lewis's or a patient in the Swedish Movement-Cure. The quiet
embayed pools and eddies swarmed with ducks; every sunny bar or level
beach was a stalking-ground for stately cranes, both white and
sand-hill; and garrulous crows kept the air lively, in company with big
California magpies, above our heads.
The course of the river grew more and more sinuous as we ascended; it
was near the close of the dry season, and there remained none of those
cut-offs which economize distance during the prevalence of the rains.
The Upper Sacramento, especially when softened and rendered illusory by
such a full moon as it was our good-fortune to travel under, perpetually
recalls that loveliest of fairy streams, the higher St. John's, in
Florida. Nothing out of dreams is more peacefully enchanting than the
embowered stretches of clear water rippled into silver arabesque through
a long moonlight night, or the hazy vistas, impurpled by twilight, into
which one swings around the short curves of the Sacramento, amid a
silence that would be absolute but for his own motion, while beyond
either woody margin the great plains spread away untenanted, a waving
wilderness of wild grass and _tule_.
Enjoying the _far-niente_ of a life of such sweet monotone all the more
because it was such a contrast to our rough riding past and future, we
spent two golden days, as many mezzotint twilights, and a pair of silver
nights upon our steamer. On the morning of the third day we reached
Tehama, a dead-and-alive little settlement, seven hours' journey by the
river-windings from Red Bluffs, the head of navigation, but only ten
miles by land. We had now got in sight of mountains; the ethereal blue
of Lassen's Buttes, rimmed with the opal of perpetual snow, bounded our
view northerly; and as every motive for taking to the saddle now
consisted with our desire for economizing time, we here began our
horseback-ride, reaching Red Bluffs several hours before the steamer.
Just out of Tehama we struck into a country whose features reminded us
of the wooded tracts between Stockton and Mariposa. After two days of
_tule_ and wild grass, Nature grew suddenly ennobled in our eyes by
thick and frequent groves of the royal California oak. There was a
feeling of luxury in the change, which none can know who have not had a
surfeit of boundless plains. We bathed our hearts and heads in shadow;
the fever of unbroken light went out of us; our very horses shared in
the relief, and gave themselves up to a sweet somnambulism with which we
had too much sympathy to break it by spurs.
Red Bluffs we found a place of more apparent stir and enterprise than
any Californian town we had seen, except San Francisco and Sacramento.
There was quite a New-England air about the main street,--so much so
that I have forgotten to call it _Plaza_, as I ought. This place is the
starting-point for all overland supplies sent between the Sacramento and
Portland. Immense wagons--shaped like the Eastern charcoal-vehicle, but
dwarfing it into insignificance by a size not much inferior to that of a
Mississippi flat-boat--are perpetually leaving the town, drawn by twelve
mules or horses, and in charge of drivers whose magnificent isolation
has individualized them to a degree not exceeded in the most
characteristic coachman of the Weller tribe, or the typical skipper of
the Yankee fishing-smack. There are few finer places to study _genre_
than the California ranches frequented by the captains of these
"prairie-schooners." At convenient distances for noon halts and nightly
turnings-in, the main freighting-roads of the State are adorned with
gigantic caravanseras offering every accommodation for man and beast,
provided with arcades straddling nearly across the road, under which all
passing wagoners not only may, but must, shelter themselves from the
rigors of rain or sun, and billeted along their fronts with seductive
descriptions of the paradise within, to which few hearts prove obdurate
after being softened by the compulsory magnanimity of the arcade.
In time there must be a railroad all the way from Sacramento to
Portland. There is not a mile of the distance between Red Bluffs and the
Oregon metropolis where it is not greatly needed already. Nearly the
whole intervening region is exhaustlessly fertile,--one of the finest
fruit-countries in the world,--but so entirely without an economical
avenue for its supplies or outlet for its productions, that many of the
ranchmen who have settled in it feel despondent in the midst of
abundance, and leave hundreds of magnificent orchard-acres paved with
rotting apples which would command a "bit" a pound in the San-Francisco
market, if the freight did not more than consume the profit, and the
length of the journey render the fruit unsalable.
The first day out from Tehama we made a distance of nearly forty
miles,--part of the way through oak-groves and part over fine breezy
plains, with the noble mountain-chain out of which Lassen's Buttes rise
into the perpetual-snow region continually in sight on the right hand.
The only incident that occurred to us this day, in any other key than
that of pure sensuous delight in the fact of life and motion under such
a spotless sky and in an air that was such breathable elixir, together
with the artistic happiness which flowed down on us from the noble
neighboring mountains, was our discovery early in the afternoon of a
cloud of dust about half a mile ahead, with the forms of a hundred
horsemen dimly looming through it. Such a sight sets an old overlander
instinctively fumbling at his holsters; fresh as we were from the
horrors of the desert, we felt our scalps begin to detach themselves
slightly from the cranium. But we rode straight ahead, as our only
method of safety was to wear a bold front, if the cavaliers were, as we
half suspected, a party of Humboldt Indians who had lately taken the
warpath between Lassen's Buttes and the coast. I don't recollect ever
having been better pleased with the look of Uncle Sam's cavalry-uniform
than we were, upon coming up with the squad and finding it a detachment
of our own men sent out to chastise the savages.
That night we reached a ranch called the "American,"--and certainly its
title was none too ambitious, for it had the whole horizon to itself,
and to all appearance might have been the only house on the continent.
It was a place unvisited of fresh meat and ignorant of gridirons; but we
were tired enough, after the first day of our return to the saddle, to
sleep soundly in a bed of tea-tray dimensions, and under what appeared
to be a casual selection from a hamper of soiled pocket-handkerchiefs,
when we had despatched the first of that long series of suppers on fried
pork and green-serpentine saleratus-biscuits which stretched between us
and the northern edge of Oregon.
Though the month was September, the heat in the middle of the day upon
the broad rolling plains we now had to traverse was as oppressive as an
Eastern July. During our whole horseback-journey, therefore, we made it
our custom to rise as soon after dawn as possible, breakfast, travel a
stage of fifteen or twenty miles, make a long mid-day halt in some
pleasant nook, and push on twenty miles farther before we unsaddled for
the night. We were just now enabled to make this second stage the most
leisurely and the longest of the two,--for the moon was still in all the
glory of its California brightness and plenitude, and to have travelled
by moonlight between the Sacramento and Mount Shasta is one of the
prominent memories of a lifetime. No patriotic attachment is demanded to
make the Californian say with the Irishman that his country's full-moon
is twice as large and splendid as any other's. Phenomenally, at least,
the bare facts support him.
At noon of the day on which we left the American Ranch, we came up a
rugged hill into the settlement of Shasta. This town is a mining depot
of some importance, chiefly memorable to us for some excellent pie, made
out of the California apple-melon, in wonderful imitation of the Eastern
green-apple tart, and a charge of five dollars and a half in gold made
by the great Californian Express Company for bringing Bierstadt's
color-box (heavy as a small valise) from Red Bluffs, whither we had let
it go on by boat. Why this should have left a memorable impression on
our minds it would be hard to say; for, although the demand was somewhat
more than the stage employed by the Express Company would have charged
to take either one of us the same distance, accompanied by a heavy
trunk, we should by this time have acquired sufficient familiarity with
extortion from the Company's officials to have paid very quietly a bill
of fifty dollars for the same service, and then dismissed the trifling
matter from our minds. But indignation at swindles is sometimes
cumulative.
At the town of Shasta we left the main wagon-road,--finding that it
passed a long way from the most important point on our itinerary, the
base of Shasta Peak. By striking across the country six miles to the
small settlement of Buckeye, we intersected a route little travelled,
but far more picturesque, and leading directly to the great object of
our longings. On the way to Buckeye we again encountered the Sacramento,
here dwindled to a narrow mountain-stream, with bold precipitous banks
and a rock bottom, a smooth and deep, but rapid current, and full of
trout and salmon. We crossed it on a rope-ferry, and climbed the steeps
on the other side, but did not leave it. Thenceforward to Shasta Peak
we were never out of its neighborhood.
By this _detour_ of ours we came into a country better wooded and
watered than any through which we had been travelling. When the sun left
us, we found the moonlight so seductive that we pushed on late into the
evening,--making our all-night halt at a ranch-man's whose name had been
given us by some passing native, who praised his accommodations
unboundedly, but proved much more of a friend to him than to ourselves.
It is a duty to visit the afflicted. It is a misfortune, not a crime, to
have a wife and six children, the latter all under twelve years of age.
It is a still greater and no less irresponsible calamity to have them
all prostrated by chills-and-fever, yet forbidden to yield to its
depressing influence by the stimulus of several million healthy fleas.
Ignorance, not wilfulness, may be at the causal bottom of a batch of
bread which is half saleratus, and a stew of venerable hens which is
one-third feathers. Nor can we regard it as other than a beneficent
arrangement in the grand scheme of Nature's laws, that a pack of noble
hounds should pass the hours of slumber around our humble casement in
the free indulgence of a liberty distinctly authorized by the sacred
Watts as follows,--
"_Let_ dogs delight to bark," etc.
Still, I think public opinion will sustain me in the view that the much
afflicted family were not agreeable to pass the night with.
This is the place for a useful financial statement. Everything on our
present trip cost a dollar. Bed for one, i. e. one's share of a bed for
two,--supper,--each horse's forage,--breakfast,--every several item, a
dollar. No matter how afflicted the family, saleratusy the bread, loud
the dogs,--nothing was furnished under the dollar. When people happen to
have enough dollars, this becomes comic. It reminded us of the Catskill
Mountain House, where in specie-times everything (after hotel-bills) was
twenty-five cents,--from getting a waiter to look at you, to having the
Falls tipped up for you.
The day's journey between the afflicted family and Dog Creek, where we
stopped the third night, is such an affluent remembrance of beauty that
I feel glad while I write about it. We started under circumstances
somewhat tedious. Nobody was going toward Mount Shasta with so much as a
pack-mule. The father of the afflicted family labored under the blight
of his surroundings, and after severe thought gave up the task of
attempting to recall when anybody _had_ been going toward Mount Shasta.
It was also too much for him to calculate when anybody would be going.
We paid him his dollars,--wished that his shadow might never be less,
which it couldn't very well, unless the ague can dance on a mathematical
line,--and set out with the color-box carried alternately before us on
our pommels. It had been our _bete noire_ from the time five dollars and
fifty cents ransomed it at Shasta. We now began to wonder whether the
Express Company also had carried it on a pommel,--in which case we
thought we could forgive the Express Company. The morning was sultry,
and as we started our horses forth upon a walk,--for the box could not
stand jolting,--we looked forward to a tiresome day.
As we went on, Nature seemed determined to kiss us out of the sulks.
Just as we broke into fresh grumbles, which we wanted to indulge, and
our horses into fresh trots, which we desired, but could not tolerate,
we entered some lovely glen, musical with tinkling springs, its walling
banks tapestried with the richest velvet of deep-green grass, brocaded
with spots of leaf-filtered sunshine. When we began to swelter, we came
into the dense shadow of great oaks, or caught the balmiest wind in the
world through aromatic pine and cedar vistas along the crown of some
lofty ridge. It was impossible to be vexed with the step-mother, Fate,
when the fingers of our mother, Nature, were straying through our hair.
To drive away the last elf of ill-humor, and make us thenceforth agree
to regard the box as an ornamental appendage which we were good-natured
enough to let each other enjoy by turns. Pitt River, the last fork of
the Upper Sacramento, came glancing into our landscape, the very
perfection of fluent freedom and gladness. Every rod of the journey
along its west bank disclosed a new picture. The misty blue mountains of
the range toward Shasta Peak formed the abiding background of every
view. Steep, fir-battlemented banks of one generic form, but endless
variety in the beauty of the tree forms and groups which rose from their
_glacis_, mile after mile, framed in some new loveliness of
light-and-shadow-flecked bend, deep sepia-dark pool, singing shallow, or
brawling rapid of the clear stream. Eagles were sailing, like a placid
thought in a large heart, far over our heads in the intimacy of a
spotless sky; the great ground-squirrel flashed like a gray gleam over
the gnarled mossy roots at the side of our narrow dug-way; and in
brilliant blots or darting shafts of Magenta fire, we recognized among
the tree-tops that loveliest bird of the North-American forest, the
great crested woodpecker. Here and there, to introduce a human element,
came cleared spaces by the river's brink, where pointed wands stood
impaling flakes of red salmon-flesh,--the open-air curing-house and
out-door store-room of the Pitt-River Indians. Once in the course of the
day we lighted on a picturesque ragged hut, where the purveyors of this
meat were soaking themselves in full side-hill sunlight,--where little
savages of every degree of gauntness in their limbs, ochriness on their
cheeks, shockiness in their heads, and protuberance in their
abdomens, were gorging themselves to still more hideous ventral
_embonpoint_,--where white men, lower than the lowest Diggers they
herded with, had forgotten the little they ever knew of civilization,
and stood glaring at us like half-sated Satyrs as we passed. Other bits
of _genre_ hourly came into the picture with pappoose-carrying squaws
who hunted yew-berries along the road-side fringe of woods, youngsters
wearing no attire but a party-colored acorn-basket of deft finger-work,
which they carried loaded on their shoulders, or listlessly trailed
empty at their sides. Dr. Prichard has some hideous pictures of Papuans
and Australians; but if Ethnology were a match-game, we could give him
those two points, and beat him easily by playing a few of the Digger
women whom we saw that day. They reached the ugliness of aboriginal
specimens which we had encountered on the west verge of the Goshoot
country; and if any earthly pilgrimage, short of the mountains of
Nightmare, can reveal _their_ rivals, I should like to get into a prime
state of health and be allowed a peep at them through a spy-glass.
The condition of the white men who live and make alliances with these
poor creatures is too heart-sickening to print. The law that governs all
associations of culture with barbarism, where the latter is in dynamic
excess, holds rigorously true in California. The higher race recollects
only the cultivated evil of the state whence it fell,--and carrying to
its savage mates subtler means of accomplishing vice than they knew
before, presently gives rise to a combination from which all the
simplicity of the low race is eliminated, and into which enter all the
devils of mature civilization. Nor do these devils come accompanied by a
single grace or angel which softened or restrained crime in the
developed community. The attachment of this region's older settlers for
their savage comrades is something incredible. To enjoy their society
they cheerfully embrace a life as impure, uncleanly, free from all
humanizing influences, as that of the lowest Digger with whom they
consort. Sometimes a strange incongruous romance, like moonlight on a
puddle, lights up these mongrel _liaisons_, and infuses into them a
burlesque of sentiment. We found one old hunter whose squaw ran away
from him into the mountains at regular six-months' intervals, and who
invariably spent hundreds of dollars and no end to hardships in hunting
her up and restoring her to his wigwam. Another, who had kept an Indian
seraglio from the time of the earliest gold-discoveries, had repeatedly
been to the nearest legal officer, (two or three days' journey off,) and
besought him, without effect, to marry him to one of his squaws in
Christian fashion. It certainly did seem hard that the poor fellow
should be forbidden to make the only reparation in his power for wrongs
of twelve years' standing; but the aesthetic, naturally enough to those
who have seen Diggers, predominated over the legal and moral in the
judicial mind, and he was finally sent away with an injunction never to
show his face again while "this court continued to know herself" in the
Shasta region.
As often happens in the discipline of human life, the thorn in the flesh
was withdrawn as soon as we had learned the lesson of bearing it
resignedly. At the last crossing of the Sacramento, we learned from the
ferryman that a providential wagoner was just ahead of us, going
certainly to Dog Creek, and presumably, if we made it an object, all the
way to Strawberry Valley, at the foot of Shasta. The one whose turn it
was not to carry the color-box galloped ahead, and detained the wagoner
until the heavy dragoon had time to come up. With a deep sigh of relief,
we stowed our box in the "prairie-schooner,"--made a contract to have it
packed on mule-back from Dog Creek to Shasta, in consideration of one
among a gross of cheap watches which we had brought for trade with
Indians and Trappers,--and, relieving our horses by the first canter
they had enjoyed that day, sped away with the deep conviction that the
man who first called chrome and white-lead _light_ colors must have been
indulging the subtile irony of a diseased mind.
The seven miles of our journey from the last Sacramento crossing to Dog
Creek were even grander in their scenery than our morning stage. The
road was a dug-way from one to seven hundred feet above the base of a
winding castellated cliff, here and there cut in rugged sandstone, but
often both walled and buttressed with steep slopes of virgin turf kept
emerald by innumerable trickling springs, ice-cold and crystal-clear,
while here and there it passed through woods as dark as twilight. The
slope on which we travelled formed one side of a valley, green at its
bottom as a New-England meadow, and watered by a picturesque affluent of
the Sacramento. About dark we came to the Dog-Creek Ranch, where we had
such a delicious supper of trout, cooked in the good old Green-Mountain
fashion with an Indian-meal night-gown on, as made us "forget the steps
already trod," followed by a really nice _pair_ of beds, wherein we took
long and ample preparation to "onward urge our way" upon the morrow.
At Dog Creek we were encamped round about by the largest and most
prosperous Indian tribe that we had seen on our trip. Their bows and
arrows were elegant in shape and color: the former stained in a variety
of patterns, sometimes carved, and wrapped as well as strung with
deer-sinews; the latter headed with nicely cut pieces of a black
obsidian which abounds in the vicinity of Shasta Peak, and which of
itself is an unerring test of the original volcanic character of the
mountain. The quivers of this Dog-Creek tribe were the most beautiful
preparations of whole mink, otter, and sable skins, which I have seen in
Indian hands anywhere on the continent. One of the men had a great cap
made out of an entire grizzly cub-skin, the claws very nicely preserved
and dangling behind, while the head curved forward on top like the crest
of an old Greek helmet. Nowhere did we find neater, more ornamental
berry-baskets, or more carefully worked dishes and basins, than those
woven or scooped and stained by this tribe. In wandering through their
stick-and-bark lodges we found some tolerably good-looking men, far
above the average brutality of the Diggers, with simple, pleasant
expressions, and not afraid to look one in the eye. In one lodge
crouched a man and woman who without exception were the oldest-looking
people I ever saw. The husband was blind, the wife palsied; but they had
been left in charge of a sprawling family of their fifth generation,
which haste and the warm weather forbade our counting. I gave the old
lady a plug of tobacco, and watched, as she put it up against her
husband's face, to see which of the wrinkles was his mouth; while, on
her filling a pipe and smoking with grunts of evident approbation
directed to myself, I felt pleasant and Biblical, as if I had been doing
a good turn to Methuselah's aunt.
Only forty miles more stretched between us and Shasta Peak. We had now
reached an elevation where it was visible to us in its full majesty from
the southwestern side. All day, after our leaving Dog Creek, its giant
cone, snow-wrapt half-way to the base, kept surprising us through clefts
in the surrounding crags at the end of long wooded vistas, or on some
clear, treeless height to which we had climbed, forgetting the mountain
in our heat and labor. The country about us was becoming wilder and
wilder: our road was sometimes a mere trail, half obliterated by springs
or traversing rivulets. We now rode in the woods most of the time, and
found the shadow, stillness, and fragrance all delicious. Beside all the
springs we discovered the southernwood of our Eastern gardens growing
wild, its strawberry-scented and maroon-colored buds much larger than
those of our variety, and, though a trifle less intense in their
perfume, still sufficiently sweet to make every nook in which they grew
delicious for yards around. Here and there the woods showed some
symptoms of autumnal change; there were hectic spots now and then on the
maple-leaves; but nothing approaching in loveliness the
forest-euthanasia of our Eastern fall appeared until we had crossed the
boundary of Oregon. Shasta Peak is, by the track, nearly eighty miles
from that line. To-day, just as the sun got down to the tree-tops, the
wooded slope suddenly receded from our left, and towered into one of
those noble crags which all over the continent go by the name of "Castle
Rock," but which include no instance more truly deserving the name than
this bold mass of pinnacles and bastions, bare as a Yo-Semite precipice,
which lifted itself apparently about a thousand feet above the green
_glacis_ of the slope, stern and gray at the base, but etherealized
along its crest and battlement by sunset spendors of red and gold.
Simultaneously with the Castle's appearance, our leafy covert parted
before us, and disclosed in level light, which made its snow opalescent,
and bathed its vast, rugged masses of stone and earth in one inclusive
winy glow, the glorious giant of California which had drawn us hither
through the wilderness. The height of Shasta is variously stated. It is
certainly over sixteen thousand feet, and may likely be nearer eighteen
thousand. The last geological survey pronounced it the highest mountain
in the Nevada range,--a statement taking into account Mount Hood and the
other great peaks of the Cascade system, which itself is but an Oregon
reappearance of the Sierra Nevada. The distance from which Hood, Saint
Helen's, and Rainier could be seen with the naked eye led us afterward
to regard this statement with some doubt; but certainly no peak which we
met in all our large experience of the mountains of the continent ever
compared with Shasta in producing the effect of vast height. All the
others which we have seen, with the exception of Lander's Peak, whether
in the Rocky, the Nevada, the Cascade, or the Pacific Coast range, have
suffered, visually, from modulation through their gradually ascending
tiers of foothills, or by the blending of their outlines with the
neighboring peaks. This is especially so with Pike's Peak, which,
despite its being one of the loftiest mountains in America, has its
proportions most dissatisfyingly disguised, in all but a single point of
view, in the _canon_ of the Fontaine-qui-Bouille. Shasta is a mountain
without mediations. It sits on the verge of a plain, broken for a
hundred miles to the northward only by pigmy volcanic cones heaped
around extinct _solfataras_. We approached it in the only direction
where there were anything like foothills to climb; but even upon us, on
reaching Strawberry Valley, at its southwestern foot, the wonderful peak
broke with as little feeling of gradual approach as if we had not seen
its head glowing grander and more real out of the blue distance
repeatedly during the last three days. When we first saw the whole of it
distinctly, it seemed to make no compromise with surrounding plains or
ridges, but rose in naked majesty, alone and simple, from the grass of
our valley to its own topmost iridescent ice.
That view was not accorded to us on our first day out from Dog Creek. It
was nearly dark when we reached the Soda Springs, nine miles south of
Strawberry,--took a draught of the most delicious mineral-water I ever
drank, more piquant than Kissingen, and cold as ice,--resisted the
seductions of a small, premature boy of eight, who issued from the
Springs Ranch to dilate agedly on the tonic properties of the water, the
relaxing virtues of the beds, and the terrors of the grim forest which
lay for us in the black night between there and Strawberry,--and,
clapping spurs to our tired horses, pushed forward with stern
determination to reach Sisson's that evening.
I think that a darker night than presently lapped us among the thick
evergreens was never travelled in. There were some streaks of blackness
a mile long, in which, literally, I could not see my horse's head. But
we had learned confidence in our animals' sagacity, and walked them,
cheerily whistling to keep each other informed of our whereabouts,
through at least six miles of road utterly unknown to and unseen by us.
It was what Eastern people call very "poky"; but the language addressed
to us by the premature boy had made it a matter of personal self-respect
for us to get to Sisson's that night. With a certain sense of triumph
over that unpleasant and dissuasive child, we saw a lantern gleam from a
corral about ten P. M., and had our interrogative hail of "Sisson's?"
answered in welcome affirmative by Sisson himself.
At Sisson's, or exploring with him in the neighborhood of Shasta, we
passed one of the most delightful weeks in our diary of travel through
any land. His house was a low, two-story building, which had run like a
verbena in all directions over a grassy level,--putting out a fresh arm
at every new suggestion of domestic convenience, until it had become at
once the most amorphous and the most comfortable dwelling in the
California wilds. His herds were populous and prosperous; only the
merest pretence of fences broke their dream, without affecting their
reality, of limitless pasture. His ranch ostensibly consisted of a few
hundred acres; but Old Shasta was his only surveyor of landmarks, and
his base of supplies was coextensive with the base of the mountain. His
family consisted of an admirably energetic and thrifty wife, who had
accompanied him from Illinois, where he used to be a schoolmaster, and
one pretty little baby-girl indigenous to Strawberry Valley. The
presence of this mother and child in a wilderness which otherwise howled
chiefly with rough sporadic men and equally rough ubiquitous bears, was
a perpetual delight to us, so far from our domestic communications. We
admired Shasta all the more for looking at it over a little, gentle,
pink-and-white baby who lay asleep in its shadow, like a cherub pressed
to the bosom of one of the Djinn. Escaping from the poetical ground, I
may observe, that, between the chief French _restaurant_ of Sacramento
City and the Dennison House in Portland, Oregon, no family whom we
encountered lived in such wholesome and homelike luxury as Sisson's. If
a Society for the Diffusion of Gastronomic Intelligence among the
Heathen is ever founded in California and Oregon, (and how bitterly such
a philanthropic enterprise is needed my diary spotted with the
abominable grease of universal _frying_ bears abundant witness,) I hope
that the first tract which it publishes will be a biography of Mrs.
Sisson, the first point insisted on by that tract, "This excellent and
devoted woman used a gridiron." Bless her! how she could broil things!
No man who has not built up his system during a long expedition with
brick after brick of pork fried hard in its own ooze,--who has not
turned all his brain's active phosphorus into phosphate of soda by
alkali-biscuits drawn from the oven in the hot-dough stage,--who has not
drunk his pease-coffee without milk at the tables of repeated Pike
settlers too shiftless to milk one of their fifty kine,--who has not
slept myriads in a bed with _Cimex lectularius_ and his livelier
congener of the saltatory habits,--can imagine what a blissful bay in
the iron-bound coast of bad-living Sisson's seemed to us both in
fruition and retrospection. We occasionally had beef, when Sisson, or
some near neighbor ten miles off, "killed a critter" and distributed it
around; excellent mountain-mutton, flavorous as the Welsh, was not
lacking in its turn; but the great stand-by of our table was venison,
roast, broiled, made into pasties, treated with every variety of
preparation save an oil-soak in the pagan frying-pan of the country. As
for chickens and eggs, it "snewe in Sisson's house" of that sort of
"mete and drinke,"--he was Chaucer's Franklin transported to Shasta.
Cream flowed in upon us like a river; potatoes were stewed in it; it was
the base of chicken-sauce; the sirupy baked pears, whose secret Mrs.
Sisson had inherited from some dim religious ancestor in the New-England
past, were drowned in it; and we took a glass of it with magical shiny
rusk for nine-o'clock supper, just to oil our joints before we relaxed
them in innocent repose. Our rooms were ample, our beds luxurious, our
surroundings the grandest within Nature's bestowal. Our capital host and
hostess became our personal friends; and all that they did for us was so
heartily kind and so cheerily comfortable, that, if we were asked where,
on the whole, we passed the pleasantest, as distinct from the grandest,
week in California, I think we should answer, "At Sisson's, in
Strawberry Valley."
Sisson was, without exception, the best rifle-shot I ever saw. I have
seen him bring down a hawk soaring as high as I could see it. Before a
target, at any distance usual for such experiments, his aim was
practically unerring. He possessed, in addition, two other prime
qualities of a first-class woodsman,--keen sight for game in covert, and
soft-footedness in stealing on it,--to a degree so unequalled in my
acquaintance that I feel justified in calling him, not only the best
shot, but the best hunter I ever knew. We spent three days in exploring,
sketching, and deer-stalking with him, during all which time he was
never once taken by surprise, but invariably saw his game before it
scented him, and as invariably cracked it over before ourselves, or
another old huntsman with us, had time to say, "Where is it?" Our main
excursion led us about a dozen miles from the house to a lofty ridge,
populous with game, thickly wooded with evergreens, and on its bold
prominences giving us splendid views of Shasta. No height that we could
attain dwarfed the grandeur of the mountain by sinking its base, and no
lateral variation of our standing-points produced any change in its
shape. New delicacies of rock and snow network came out as we shifted,
and the sunlight produced different beauties of color and chiaroscuro in
the glacier-like cradles of its upper ice; but so far as height and form
were concerned, it seemed to have no more parallax than a fixed star.
This fact is of course partly due to its being a nearly regular cone,
but much of it depends on the intrinsic grandeur of a mountain standing
lonely on the plain, full sixty miles in cincture, and in stature nearly
eighteen thousand feet.
We came back from our expedition with an abundance of venison, a number
of interesting color-studies, and memories of California scenery
surpassed only by the Yo-Semite. We had struggled through miles of
_chaparral_, after which no abatis that I ever saw on the Potomac would
have been any discouragement to us, provided only we had the same
wonderful horses. To get some idea of this peculiarly Californian
institution as we encountered it, imagine a side-hill which would have
given the best horse a hard pull, even had it been bare of undergrowth,
and set this hill as thick as it will hold with _manzanita_ and
burr-oak: the former, as its name implies, like a little apple-tree,
only more viciously gnarled, leathery, and complicated in its boughs
than the most picturesque old russet in a New-England orchard, and
ramifying at once from the root without any main trunk; the latter, an
oak-bush of the same general characteristics, having its swarming
acorn-cups covered with spikes like the chestnut. When these have
interlocked with each other till the earth is invisible and the whole
tract has become a lattice of springes and pitfalls, push a horse
through it three miles up a slope of forty-five degrees, the breast-high
twigs scourging him at every step; and if you get out, as we did,
without a fall or a broken leg to either man or beast, you will not only
have acquired a just idea of the California _chaparral_, but an
admiration for the California horse which will last you to your
dying-day. To repay us for this struggle, we had found one lake lying in
a precipitous gorge, only twice before visited by white men; while
Bierstadt, always the indefatigable explorer of every party we were in
together, climbed with his color-box to still another lake, of which he
was the first discoverer, and whose lovely lineaments he preserved in
one of the best studies of our trip. Besides these results of our
expedition, we brought away the satisfaction of having leaped our horses
across the Sacramento River. Where it flowed at the bottom of one deep
ravine we had to traverse, it was a foot deep and ten feet wide. The
twig which cracked under my horse's hoof, and fell into the stream as he
sprang over, a month hence might be dashing about in the scud under the
foot of some Pacific whaler, or, still farther off in time, drift into
the harbor of Hong Kong. Rivers always seem to me like the nerves of
Nature: there is no conductor of thought and impression like that little
silver thread which leads out from the ganglion of a deep forest-spring,
to spread, many leagues off, upon the sensory surface of the Oceanic
World. In an earlier article I spoke of the mighty emotions which came
thronging on me at the heads of the Platte and the Colorado: I felt them
only less powerfully when my horse jumped across the Sacramento's
birthplace.
After a day's rest at Sisson's, we bade the capital fellow and his
excellent wife a good-bye which had more regret in it than we ever felt
before for comrades of a single week's standing, and resumed our
northward journey,--Bierstadt's color-box the fuller by a score of
Shasta studies taken under every possible variety of position, sky, and
time of day.
The country continued thickly wooded for nearly twenty miles from
Strawberry, and the forest-trail was every now and then drowned out of
sight by streams rushing from the snow of Shasta. When we emerged from
the timber, we found ourselves on a plain opening widely to the north
between diverging ridges, and scattered here and there with black
_scoriae_ like the slag of a furnace. In some places an attempt had been
made to mend the road with lava, and as it crunched under our horses'
hoofs we could almost imagine ourselves making the circuit of Vesuvius,
so evident was it from the look and feel of things that Pluto has at no
very remote period boiled his dinner-pot on the hob of Shasta Peak.
The day was fine,--the air more bracing than we had found since leaving
the Yo-Semite. Our week of comparative rest at Sissons had brought our
horses into splendid condition for the road; both we and they were
boiling over with animal spirits; and it was still early in the
afternoon when we rode the fortieth mile of our way into Yreka, on the
full gallop. I need not say that we had made other arrangements than
our pommels for the transportation of our heavy baggage to the next
place where we should need it. Sisson, always full of resources, had
taken good care of that for us both.
Neither to the traveller nor the _raconteur_ is Yreka a place to linger
in. It consists of one long street, with a tolerable brick hotel at one
end, and a kennel of straggling houses swarming with Chinese of ill odor
and worse repute at the other,--intersected by half a dozen narrow
lanes, devoted principally to stables, gambling-shops, and liquor-dens.
I only quote the language of all the inhabitants whom I conversed with,
when I say that such glory as it once held among the northern
mining-towns has entirely departed from it. The discovery of the Boise
and John-Day mines to the far northeast has attracted away all the
principal gold-seekers who once dug and panned in the vicinity; and if
there ever was a place which had nothing intrinsic to fall back upon, it
is Yreka. We were glad to leave it after one night's rest.
The day we evacuated it was atmospherically the most glorious that we
enjoyed upon our whole trip. The air had a golden look, as if it not
merely transmitted, but were stained with sunshine. The sky was
spotless, the weather as warm as our mid-June, but without the least
languor. The landscape was that broad plain I have mentioned, with
Shasta on its verge, intersected by low rolling ridges, and broken by
the cones of extinct volcanic spiracles, sometimes grouped, but oftener
isolated. Shasta himself seemed to have gained rather than lost in
majesty by our forty and now steadily increasing miles of distance.
Either from atmospheric effect, or because we now saw a new and more
irregular portion of his crown, the snow upon it became opalescent to a
degree which I have never seen surpassed by any such effect. The light
reflected from it seemed to gleam like a softened flame deep down
beneath some pearly medium, rather than any rebound of sunlight from a
surface.
The rugged hillocks between which we rode were bare and craggy at their
tops, but all about their base, and far down into the plain, grew
abundance of a plant wonderfully like the heather in its size as well as
in the shape and color of its blossoms. Broad, exquisitely claret-tinted
streaks and patches of this lovely thing softened the landscape
everywhere. We seemed to be travelling in a beautiful confusion of
Nature, where the Scottish Highlands had got together under a California
sky with the Roman Campagna. Throughout this sweet desolation reigned a
visible and audible quiet which made our horses' hoofs seem noisy.
Between Yreka and the Klamath River--a narrow, rapid stream, recalling
some portions of the Housatonic, which we intersected about noon, and
along which we rode for an hour--we met only two or three silent
horsemen and as many eremitic wood-choppers.
Turning north from the Klamath, we dined at a miserable settlement
called Cottonwood, around which for miles in every direction departed
gold-hunters had burrowed till the ground was a honey-comb, or more
properly a last-year's hornets'-nest, since there was no sign of honey
in the cells, and, from what a most dejected native told us of the
yield, never had been any to speak of.
Leaving dreary Cottonwood with even greater pleasure than we had felt in
abandoning Yreka, we began ascending the slope toward the Oregon line.
At every mile the country grew lovelier. California seemed determined to
make our last impressions of her tender. The bare, brown rocks became
densely wooded with oaks and evergreens. Late in the afternoon we came
to broad meadows of such refreshing deep-green grass as we had not seen
before since we left the rich farming-lands of the Atlantic side, and
the level golden bars which lay on them between forest-edges made us
homesick with memories of peaceful Eastern lawns at sunset. After
crossing several miles of such meadows, and the quiet brooks which ran
through them, we traversed a number of strange low ridges, undulating in
systematic rhythm, like a mountain-chain making a series of false starts
prior to the word "go," reached the true base of the Siskiyou Mountains,
and began our final climb out of the Golden State.
The road was very uneven, rocky, cut up by rivulets from the higher
ridges, and in most places only a rude dug-way, with a rocky wall on one
side, and a butment of thickly wooded _debris_ steeply descending to a
black brawling torrent on the other. But we did not trouble ourselves
with the road. The wild beauty of the forest absorbed us on either hand;
and we were astonished at the rapid transition which the leaves suddenly
took on, from the dry, burnt look, characteristic of the end of the
California dry season, to autumnal splendors of red and yellow, hardly
rivalled by the numberless varieties of tint in our own October woods.
Just as the sun sank out of sight, we reached a lofty commanding ridge,
stopped to rest, turned around and saw Shasta looming grandly up out of
the valley-twilight, his icy forehead all one mass of gold and ruby
fire. It was one of the grandest mountain-sights I ever looked on: such
a purple hush over the vast level below us; such colossal broad shadows
on the giant's foot; such a wonderful flame on that noble, solitary
head, which, but for the unbroken outlines leading up to it out of the
twilight, might have been only some loftier cloud catching good-night
sun-glimpses at half-way up the firmament. Goodnight from Shasta! Alas,
not only to the sun, but to us! We felt a real pang, as we confessed to
ourselves that we were now looking upon this noblest and serenest, if
not loftiest, of all the mountains in our travel, for the last time in
years,--perhaps the last forever. We gazed wistfully till admonished by
the deepening twilight; then, as Shasta became a shadow on the horizon,
plunged silently into the dense woods again, climbed to the Siskiyou
summit, and, descending through almost jetty darkness, were in Oregon.