In one thing Chautauqua and California are alike—each is a climax, and
both are “made up of every creature’s best.” My sufficient consolation
for missing one of them this year is, that I saw the other. Let us
speed onward, then, taking Chautauqua as our point of departure, in a
Pickwickian sense only, unless for the further reason that it has the
high prerogative of making all its happy denizens believe it to be
the center of gravity (and good times) for one planet at least; the
meridian from which all fortunate longitude is reckoned and all lucky
time-pieces set. Our swift train, “outward bound,” races along through
the old familiar East and the West no longer new.
“Through the kingdoms of corn,
Through the empires of grain,
Through dominions of forest;
Drives the thundering train;
Through fields where God’s cattle
Are turned out to grass,
And his poultry whirl up
From the wheels as we pass;
Through level horizons as still as the moon
With the wilds fast asleep and the winds in a swoon.”
From a palace car with every eastern luxury, we gaze out on the
dappled, pea-green hills of New Mexico and the wide, empty stretches
of Arizona, stopping in Santa Fe—Columbia’s Damascus, in Albuquerque—a
pocket edition of Chicago, and in Tucson—the storm-center of
semi-tropic trade. But the “W. C. T. U.” is a plant of healing as
indigenous to every soil for good as the saloon for evil, and in the
first city the Governor’s wife has accepted leadership; in the second
that place is held by a lovely Ohio girl, the wife of a young lawyer;
and in the third a leading woman of society and church work, whose
husband is one of Arizona’s most honored pioneers, consents to be our
standard-bearer. These way-side errands, with their delightful new
friendships and tender gospel lessons over, we hasten on to California.
Some token of its affluent beauty comes to us on Easter Sabbath in the
one hundred calla-lilies sent from Los Angeles, five hundred miles
beyond, to adorn the church where we worship in Tucson, that marvelous
oasis in the desert. “Go on, and God be with you,” says the friend who
escorts us to the train; “you’ll find Los Angeles a heaven on earth.”
And so, indeed, we did, coming up out of the wilderness on a soft
spring day, between fair, emerald hills that stood as the fore-runners
of the choicest land on which were ever mirrored the glory and the
loveliness of God.
We visited the thirty leading centers of interest and activity in the
great Golden State during the two months of our stay, but when the
courteous mayor of this “city of the angels” welcomed us thither,
and children heaped about us their baskets of flowers, rare, save
in California, we told “His Honor” that of all the towns we had yet
visited—and they number a thousand at least—his was the one most fitly
named.
Southern California, and this its exquisite metropolis, have been a
terra incognita even to the intelligent, until the steam horse lately
caracoled this way. Now it is thronged by emigrants and tourists, men
and women of small means reaping from half a dozen acres here what a
large farm in Illinois could hardly yield, and invalids hitherto only
an expense to their friends, finding the elixir of life in this balmy
air, and joyously joining once more the energetic working forces of
the world. Flowers are so plenty here that banks and pyramids alone
can satisfy the claims of decorative art; baskets of roses are more
frequent than bouquets or even _boutonnieres_ with us. Heliotropes and
fuchsias climb to the apex of the roof, while the common garden trees
are oranges, lemons, limes, citrons, figs, olives and pomegranates.
Strawberry short-cake can be had all the year round from the fresh
fruit of one’s own garden, and oranges at the rate of nine thousand
to one tree, and in some cases fifteen inches in circumference, have
been raised in this vicinity. Riverside and Pasadena are adjacent
colonies and bear a stronger resemblance to one’s ideal Garden of Eden
than any other places I ever expect to see. Through groves of rarest
semi-tropic fruit trees you ride for miles, in the midst of beautiful,
modern homes, for the American renaissance is not more manifest in the
suburbs of Boston or Chicago than in Southern California. Fences are
nowhere visible, the Monterey cypress furnishing a hedge which puts
to blush the choicest of old England; the pepper tree with drooping
branches, and the Australian gum tree, tall and umbrageous, outlining
level avenues whose vistas seem unending. Above all this are skies
that give back one’s best Italian memories, and for a background the
tranquil amplitude of the Sierra Madre Mountains. What would you more?
“See Naples and die” is an outworn phrase. “See California and live”
has been the magic formula of how many restored and happy pilgrims! The
tonic of cold water has electrified this soil, seven years ago an utter
desert, so that now three years of growth will work a transformation
that fifteen would fail to bring about east of the Mississippi. To
my thinking this result is but a material prototype of the heavenly
estate that shall come to our America when its arid waste of brains
and stomachs, usurped by alcohol, shall learn the cooling virtues of
this same cold water. In Riverside my host planted in May of 1880,
two thousand grape cuttings (not roots, remember), and in September,
1881, gathered from them two hundred boxes of grapes. Pasadena was
founded by a good man from Maine, and is exempt from saloons by the
provisions of its charter. Here, from six acres, a gentleman realized
thirteen hundred dollars, clear of all expenses, last year, by drying
and sacking his grapes, instead of sending them to the winery. “The
profits were so much larger that hereafter his pocket-book will counsel
him, if not his conscience, to keep clear of the wine trade,” said the
wide awake temperance woman who gave me the item. In Pasadena, Mrs.
Jennie C. Carr, whose fruit ranche and gardens, largely tilled by her
own hands, disclose every imaginable variety which the most extravagant
climate can produce, sells at three thousand dollars per acre, land
purchased by her for a mere song six years ago. In Santa Ana and San
Bernardino, also near Los Angeles, there is the same luxuriance and
swift moving life. A county superintendent of schools told me he had
one school district that includes 160 miles of railroad, and has a town
of 800 people, where three months ago there was silence and vacancy.
At San Diego, the most southerly town in California, we found the _ne
plus ultra_ of climate for consumptives, its temperature ranging from
fifty-five to seventy-five degrees, and its air dry. San Diego is
the oldest town in the State, having been established as a Catholic
“Mission” in 1769. It is now altogether modernized and is Nature’s own
sanitarium, besides being a lovely land-locked harbor of the Pacific.
Santa Barbara, which we missed seeing, has a grape vine sixty years
old, and a foot through, which in 1867 bore six tons of grapes, some
of whose clusters weighed five pounds each. The railroad will soon
make this beautiful town accessible to rapid tourists to whom the
ocean is unkind. Twenty-one missions were founded over a century ago
by Franciscan friars in Southern California. They brought with them
from Spain the orange and the vine. They were conquerors, civilizers,
subduers of the soil. They brought cattle, horses, sheep, and—alas!
hogs. They conquered the land for Spain without cruelty, baptizing
the Indians into the church and teaching them the arts of peace. Then
followed the Mexican, then our own conquest of their territory, and now
the Anglo-Saxon reigns supreme in a land on which Nature has lavished
all she had to give. Upon his victory over the alcohol habit, depends
the future of this goodly heritage. If he raises grapes he will
survive; if he turns them into wine he must succumb.