and almost under the shadow of the Four Peaks, is the great Roosevelt
Dam—the last word, as it were, in the American chapter of Arizona’s
history. Those who know whereof they speak have estimated that four
fifths of the State is fitted, so far as the potentialities of the soil
is concerned, for agriculture, but hitherto the lack of rainfall has
reduced the available area to that which lay within the capabilities of
the somewhat meagre streams to irrigate. This was particularly true of
the region of which Phœnix is the centre. Came then quiet, efficient men
who proceeded to perform a modern version of the miracle of Moses, for,
behold, they smote the rock and where there had been no water before
there was now water and to spare. Across a narrow cañon in the mountains
they built a Gargantuan dam of sandstone and cement to hold in check
and to conserve for use in the dry season the waters of the river which
swirled through it. The great artificial lake, twenty-five square miles
in area, thus created, holds water enough to cover more than a million
and a quarter acres with a foot of water and assures a permanent supply
to the two hundred and forty thousand acres included in the project.
The farmers of the Salt River valley, which comprises the territory
under irrigation, forming themselves into an association, entered into a
contract with the government to repay the cost of the dam in ten years,
whereupon it will become the property of the landowners themselves; the
water, under the terms of the agreement, becoming appurtenant to the
land. Just as the crumbling ruins at Casa Grande serve as a reminder of
a race long since dead and gone, and as the white mission at Tucson is a
memorial to the Spaniards who came after them, so is the mighty dam at
Roosevelt, together with its accompanying prosperity, a monument to the
courage, daring, and resource of the American. It is a very wonderful
work that is being done down there in Arizona, and to the toil-hardened,
sun-tanned men who are doing it I am proud to raise my hat. Such men are
pioneers of progress, carpenters of empire, and they are chopping a path
for you and me, my friends, “to To-morrow from the land of Yesterday.”
IV
THE LAND OF DREAMS-COME-TRUE
“It lies where God hath spread it,
In the gladness of His eyes,
Like a flame of jewelled tapestry
Beneath His shining skies;
With the green of woven meadows,
And the hills in golden chains,
The light of leaping rivers,
And the flash of poppied plains.
...
Sun and dews that kiss it,
Balmy winds that blow,
The stars in clustered diadems
Upon its peaks of snow;
The mighty mountains o’er it,
Below, the white seas swirled—
Just California stretching down
The middle of the world.”
IV
THE LAND OF DREAMS-COME-TRUE
Because it is at the very bottom of the map and almost athwart the
imaginary line which separates the Land of Mañana from the Land of
Do-It-Now, the Imperial Valley seems the logical place to begin a journey
through southern California. The term “southern California,” let me
add, is usually applied to that portion of the State lying south of
the Tehachapis, which would probably form the boundary in the event of
California splitting into two States—an event which is by no means as
unlikely as most outsiders suppose. No romance of the West—and that is
where most of the present-day romances, newspaper, magazine, book, and
film, come from—excels that of the Imperial Valley. These half a million
sun-scorched acres which snuggle up against the Mexican boundary, midway
between San Diego and Yuma, have proven themselves successors of the
gold-fields as producers of sudden wealth; they are an agricultural Cave
of Al-ed-Din. Now, the trouble with writing about the Imperial Valley
is that if you tell the truth you will be accused of being a booster.
But, to paraphrase Davy Crockett: “Be sure your facts are right, then go
ahead.” And I am sure of my facts. You may believe them or not, just as
you please.
Not much more than a decade ago two brothers, freighting across the
Colorado Desert from Yuma to San Diego, stumbled upon twelve human
skeletons, white-bleached, upon the sand—grim tokens of a prospecting
party which had perished from thirst. To-day the Colorado Desert is no
more. Almost on the spot where those distorted skeletons were found a
city has risen—a city with cement sidewalks and asphalted streets and
electric lights and concrete office-buildings and an Elks’ Hall and
moving-picture houses; a city whose municipal council recently passed
an ordinance prohibiting the hitching of teams on the main business
thoroughfare, “to prevent congestion of traffic,” as a local paper
explained in breaking the news to the farmers. About the time that we
changed the date-lines on our business stationery from 189- to 190- this
was as desolate, arid, and hopeless-looking a region as you could have
found between the oceans—and I’m not specifying which oceans either.
Even the coyotes, as some one has remarked, used to make their last
will and testament before venturing to cross it. In 1902 the United
States Department of Agriculture sent one of its soil experts—at least
he was called an expert—to this region to investigate its agricultural
possibilities. Here is what he reported: “Aside from the alkali, which
renders part of the soil practically worthless, some of the land is
so rough from gullies or sand-dunes that the expense of levelling it
is greater than warranted by its value. In the one hundred and eight
thousand acres surveyed, 27.4 per cent are sand-dunes or rough land....
The remainder of the level land contains too much alkali to be safe,
except for resistant crops. One hundred and twenty-five thousand acres
have already been taken up by prospective settlers, many of whom talk
of planting crops which it will be absolutely impossible to grow. They
must early find that it is useless to attempt their growth.” If the
sun-bronzed settlers had followed this cock-sure advice, the Imperial
would still be a waste of sun-swept sand. But pioneers are not made that
way. Instead of becoming discouraged and moving away after reading the
report of the government expert, they merely grinned confidently and
went on clearing the sage-brush from their land—for sixty miles to the
eastward, across a country as flat as a hotel piazza, the Colorado River,
with its wealth of water, rolled down to the sea. And water was all that
was needed to turn these thirsty sands into pastures and orchards and
gardens. The government curtly declining to lend its aid, the settlers
went ahead and brought the water in themselves. It took determination
and perspiration, a lot of both, to dig a diversion canal across those
threescore miles of burning desert, but by the end of 1902 the work
was done, the valley was introduced to its first drink of water, and
the first crops were begun. To-day the Imperial Valley, with its seven
hundred miles of canals, is the greatest body of irrigated land in the
world. In 1900 the government was offering land there for a dollar and
a quarter an acre. In 1914 land was selling (_selling_, mind you, not
merely being offered) for _just a thousand times that sum_.
[Illustration: How Mr. and Mrs. Powell saw Arizona.
“One comes upon it suddenly, standing white and solitary and lovely
between the desert and the sky.”
SCENES IN THE MOTOR JOURNEY THROUGH ARIZONA.]
Its soil is, I suppose, everything considered, the most fertile and
versatile in the world. Its one hundred and twenty-five thousand acres of
alfalfa yield twelve crops a year. I was shown a patch of thirty-three
acres from which forty-five head of cattle are fed the year round. Later
on another proud and prosperous husbandman showed me some land which
had produced two and a half bales of long-staple cotton to the acre.
Early in February the valley growers begin to export fresh asparagus;
their shipments cease in April, when districts farther north begin
to produce, and start again in the fall when asparagus has once more
become a luxury. Pears ripen in December; figs are being picked at
Christmas; grapes are sent out by the car-load in early June, six weeks
before they ripen elsewhere save under glass. The valley is famous for
its cantaloups, which are protected during their early growth by paper
drinking cups. It would seem, indeed, as though Nature was trying to
recompense the Imperial Valley for the unhappiness of her earlier years
by giving her the earliest and the latest crops. A restricted region in
the northeastern part of the valley is the only spot in the New World in
which the Deglet Noor date—a variety so jealously guarded by the Arabs
that few samples of it have ever been smuggled out of the remote Saharan
oases of which it is a native—matures and can be commercially grown.
Barely a dozen years have slipped by since the Imperial Valley was
wedded to the Colorado River. From that union have sprung five towns
which are now large enough to wear long pants—Imperial, El Centre,
Calexico, Holtville, and Brawley—while several other communities are
in the knickerbocker stage of development. Though scarcely a decade
separates them from the yellow desert, they resemble frontier towns
about as much as does Gary, Ind. The wooden shacks and corrugated-iron
huts so characteristic of most new Western towns are wholly lacking
in their business districts. The buildings are for the most part of
concrete in the appropriate Spanish mission style; every building
is designed to harmonise with its neighbours on either side; every
building has its _portales_, or porticoed arcade, over the sidewalk,
thus providing pedestrians with a welcome protection from the sun; for,
though the valley boosters never cease to emphasise the fact that there
is practically no humidity, they forget to add that in summer the air is
like a blast from an open furnace door.
When I was in the valley I dined with a friend one night on the terrace
of the very beautiful country club of El Centro. Pink-shaded candles cast
a rosy glow upon the faultless napery and silver of our table and all
about us were similar tables at which sat sun-tanned, prosperous-looking
men in white flannels and women in filmy gowns. Silent-footed Orientals
slipped to and fro like ghosts, bearing chafing-dishes and gaily coloured
ices and tall, thin glasses with ice tinkling in them. When the coffee
had been set beside us we lighted our cigars and, leaning back in great
contentment, looked meditatively out upon the moonlit countryside. Amid
the dark patches of alfalfa and the shadow-dappled plots which I knew to
be truck-gardens; through the ghostly branches of the eucalyptus, whose
leaves stirred ever so gently in the night breeze, gleamed the cheerful
lights of many bungalows.
“A dozen years ago,” said my host impressively, “that country out there
was a howling wilderness. Its only products were cactus and sage-brush.
Its only inhabitants were the coyote, the lizard, and the snake. The man
who ventured into it carried his life in his hands. Look at it now—one of
the garden spots of the world! It’s one of God’s own miracles, isn’t it?”
And I agreed with him that it was.
* * * * *
From El Centro to San Diego is something over a hundred miles, but until
very recently it might as well have been three hundred, so far as freight
or passenger traffic between the two places was concerned, that being the
approximate distance by the roundabout railway route. Though a railway is
now in course of construction which will eventually give the valley towns
direct communication with Yuma and San Diego, the enterprising merchants
of the latter city had no intention of waiting for the completion of
the railway to get the rich valley trade. So they raised a quarter of a
million dollars and with that money they proceeded to build a highway
into the Imperial Valley. Over that highway, which is as good as any
one would ask to ride on, rolls an unending procession of motor-trucks,
bearing seeds and harness and farming implements and phonographs and
pianos and brass beds from San Diego stores to Imperial Valley ranches,
and poultry and early fruit and grain from those ranches back to San
Diego. That illustrates the sort of people that the San Diegans are. It
is almost unnecessary to add that the road has already paid for itself
with interest.
To understand the peculiar geography of San Diego, and of its joyous
little sister Coronado, you must picture in your mind a U-shaped harbour
containing twenty square miles of the bluest water you will find anywhere
outside a bathtub. Strewn upon the gently sloping hillsides which form
the bottom of the U are the chalk-white buildings and tree-lined,
flower-banked boulevards which make San Diego look like one of those
imaginary cities which scene-painters are so fond of painting for
back-drops of comic operas. The right-hand horn of the U corresponds to
the rocky headland known as Point Loma, where Madame Tingley and her
disciples of the Universal Brotherhood theosophise under domes of violet
glass; and in the very middle of the U, or, in other words, in the middle
of San Diego harbor, on an almost-island whose sandy surface has been
lawned and flower-bedded and landscaped into one of the beauty-spots of
the world, is Coronado.
Coronado isn’t really an island, you understand, for it is connected with
the mainland by a sandy shoe-string a dozen miles long and so narrow that
even a duffer could drive a golf-ball across it. There is nothing quite
like Coronado anywhere. It may convey something to you if I say that it
is a combination of Luxor, Sorrento, and Palm Beach. And then some. It
is one of those places where, unless you have on a Panama hat and white
shoes and flannel trousers (in the case of ladies I don’t insist on the
trousers, of course), you feel awkward and ill-dressed and out of the
picture. You know the sort of thing I mean. There are miles of curving,
asphalted parkways, bordered by acres of green-plush lawns; and set down
on the lawns are quaint stone-and-shingle bungalows with roses clambering
over them, and near-Tudor mansions of beam and plaster, and the most
beautiful villas of white stucco with green-tiled roofs, which look as if
they had been brought over entire from Fiesole or the Lake of Como. Over
near the shore is the Polo Club, which does not confine its activities
to polo, as its name would imply, but, like the Sporting Club of Cairo,
caters to the golfer and the tennis player, and the racing enthusiast
as well. Every afternoon during the polo season _tout le monde_ goes
pouring out to the Polo Club in motors and carriages, on horseback, on
street-cars, and afoot, to gossip along the side lines and swagger about
in the saddling paddock and cheer themselves hoarse when eight young
gentlemen in vivid silk shirts and white breeches and tan boots, and
hailing from London or New York or San Francisco or Honolulu or Calgary,
as the case may be, go streaking down the field in a maelstrom of dust
and colour and waving mallets and flying hoofs. After it is all over
and the colours of the winning team have been hoisted to the top of the
flagstaff and the losers have drunk the health of the victors from a
Gargantuan loving-cup, every one goes piling back to the great hostelry,
whose red-roofed towers and domes and gables rising above the palm groves
form a picture which is almost Oriental as they silhouette themselves,
black, fantastic, and alluring, against the kaleidoscopic evening sky.
There are certain hotels which, because of the surpassing beauty of their
situation or their historic or literary associations or the traditions
connected with them, have come to be looked upon as institutions,
rather than mere caravansaries, which it is the duty of every traveller
to see, just as he should see Les Invalides and the Pantheon and the
Alcazar, and, if his purse will permit, to stop at. In such a class I
put Shepheard’s in Cairo, the Hermitage at Monte Carlo, the Danieli
in Venice, the Bristol in Paris, the Lord Warden at Dover, the Mount
Nelson at Cape Town, Raffles’s at Singapore, the Waldorf-Astoria in New
York, the Mission Inn at Riverside, the Hotel del Monte at Monterey,
and the Hotel del Coronado. It is by no means new, is the Coronado, nor
is it particularly up-to-date, and from an architectural standpoint
it leaves much to be desired, but it shares with the other famous
hotels I have mentioned that indefinable something called “atmosphere”
and it stands at one of those crossways where the routes of tourist
travel meet. To find anything to equal the brilliant scene for which
its great lobby is the stage you will have to go to the east coast of
Florida or Egypt or the Riviera. From New Year’s to Easter its spacious
corridors and broad verandas are thronged with more interesting types
of people than any place I know save only Monte Carlo. Suppose we sit
down for a few minutes, you and I, and watch the passing show. There
are slim, white-shouldered women whose gowns bespeak the Rue de la Paix
as unmistakably as though you could read their labels, and other women
whose gowns are just as unmistakably the products of dressmakers in
Schenectady and Sioux City and Terre Haute. There are well-groomed young
men, well-groomed old men, and overgroomed men of all ages; men bearing
famous names and men whose names are notorious rather than famous. There
are big-game hunters, polo players, professional gamblers, adventurers,
explorers, novelists, mine owners, bankers, landowners who reckon their
acres by the million, and cattlemen who count their longhorns by the tens
of thousands. There are English earls, and French marquises, and German
counts; there are women of Society, of society, and of near-society; men
and women whose features the newspapers and bill-boards have made as
familiar as the faces of Dr. Woodbury and Mr. Gillette, and, mingling
with all the rest, plain, every-day folk hailing from pretty much
everywhere between Portland, Ore., and Portland, Me., and whose money it
is, when all is said and done, which makes this sort of thing possible.
They come here for rest, so they take pains to assure you, but they are
never idle. They bathe in the booming breakers when the people beyond the
Sierras are shivering before their bathtubs; they play golf and tennis as
regularly as they take their meals; they gallop their ponies madly along
the yellow beach in the early morning; they fish off the coast for tuna
and jewfish and barracuda; they take launches across the bay to see the
flying men swoop and circle above the army aviation school; they watch
the submarines dive and gambol like giant porpoises in the placid waters
of the harbour; they play auction bridge on the sun-swept verandas or
poker in the seclusion of the smoking-room; and after dinner they tango
and hesitate and one-step in the big ballroom until the orchestra puts
up its instruments from sheer exhaustion. At Coronado no one ever lets
business interfere with pleasure. If you want to talk business you had
better take the ferryboat across the bay to San Diego.
San Diego’s history stretches back into the past for close on four
hundred years. Her harbour was the first on all that devious coast-line
which reaches from Cape San Lucas to the Straits of Juan de Fuca in which
a white man’s anchor rumbled down and a white man’s sails were furled.
In her soil were planted the first vine and the first olive tree. The
first cross was raised here, and the first church built, and beneath the
palms which were planted by the _padres_ in the valley that nestles just
back of the hill on which the city sits the first lessons in Christianity
were taught to the primitive people who inhabited this region when the
paleface came. Here began that remarkable chain of outposts of the church
which Father Junipero Serra and his indomitable Franciscans stretched
northward to Sonoma, six hundred miles away. And here likewise began El
Camino Real, the King’s Highway, which linked together the one-and-twenty
missions and which forms to-day the longest continuous highway in the
world, and, without exaggeration, the most beautiful, the most varied,
and the most interesting.
I don’t know the population of San Diego, because a census taken
yesterday would be much too low to-morrow. The San Diegans claim that
they arrive at the number of the city’s inhabitants by the simple method
of having the census enumerators meet the trains to count the people when
they get off. For, as they ingenuously argue, any one who once comes to
San Diego never goes away again, unless it be to hurry back home and pack
his things. In a country where both population and property values have
increased like guinea-pigs, the growth of San Diego is spoken of with
something akin to awe. In the year that Grant was elected President, a
second-hand furniture dealer named Alonzo Horton closed his little shop
in San Francisco and with the savings of a lifetime—some say two hundred
and sixty dollars, some eight hundred—in a belt about his waist, took
passage on a steamer down the Californian coast. With this money he
bought, at twenty-six cents an acre, most of what is now San Diego. Some
of those lots which the shrewd old furniture dealer thus acquired could
not now be bought for less than a cool half million! Two decades later
came John D. Spreckels, bringing with him the millions he had amassed
in sugar, and gave to San Diego a street-railway, electric lights, a
water-system, one of the most beautiful theatres on the continent, and a
solid mile of steel-and-concrete office-buildings of uniform height and
harmonious design.
The people of San Diego are adamantine in their conviction that theirs
is a city of destiny. They assert that within a single decade the name
of San Diego will be as familiar on maps, and newspapers and bills of
lading as New Orleans or Genoa or Yokohama or Calcutta or Marseilles.
And they have some copper-riveted facts with which to back up their
assertions. In the first place, so they will tell you, they have the
harbour; sixteen miles long, forty to sixty feet deep, and protected
from storms or a hostile fleet by a four-hundred-foot wall of rock. When
the fortifications now in course of construction are completed San Diego
will be as safe from attack by sea as though it were on the Erie Canal.
Secondly, San Diego is the first American port of call for westbound
vessels passing through the Panama Canal, and one of these days, unless
the plans of the Naval Board of Strategy miscarry, it will become a
great fortified coaling station and naval base, for it is within easy
striking distance of the trans-Pacific lanes of commerce. Thirdly, it is
the logical outlet for the newly developed sections of the Southwest,
the grade between Houston and San Diego, for example, being the lowest
on the continent—and commerce follows the lines of least resistance.
Fourthly (this sounds like a Presbyterian sermon, doesn’t it?), San
Diego will soon have a rich and prosperous hinterland, without which
all her other advantages would go for nothing, to supply and to draw
from. Experts on agricultural development have assured me that the day
is coming when the Imperial Valley, of which San Diego is already the
recognised _entrepôt_, will support as many inhabitants as the Valley
of the Nile. Nor is this assertion nearly as visionary as it sounds,
for the zone of cultivation in the Nile country is, remember, only a
few miles wide. Beyond the Imperial Valley lie the constantly spreading
orchards and alfalfa fields which are the result of the Yuma and Gila
River projects. East of Yuma is the great region, of which Phœnix is
the centre, which acquired prosperity almost in a single night from the
Roosevelt Dam. East of Phœnix again the Casa Grande irrigation scheme is
converting good-for-nothing desert into good-for-anything loam. Beyond
Casa Grande the great corporation known as Tucson Farms is redeeming
a large area by means of its canals and ditches, while still farther
eastward the titanic dam at Elephant Butte, which the government is
building to conserve the waters of the Rio Grande, will snatch from the
clutches of the New Mexican desert a region as large as a New England
State. And these are not paper projects, mind you. Some of them are
completed and in full swing; others are in course of construction, so
that by 1920 an almost continuous zone of irrigated, cultivated, and
highly productive land will stretch from San Diego as far eastward as the
Rio Grande. And, as the San Diegans gleefully point out, the settlers on
these new lands will find San Diego nearer by from one hundred to two
hundred miles than any other port on the Pacific Coast as a place to ship
their products and to do their shopping. But the people of San Diego
are such notorious boosters that before swallowing the things they told
me I sprinkled them quite liberally with salt. In fact, I wasn’t really
convinced of the genuineness of San Diego’s prospects until I happened
to meet one evening on a hotel terrace a member of America’s greatest
banking-house—a house whose credit and prestige are so unquestioned that
its support is a hall-mark of financial worth.