carelessly, as we sat over our cigars. “Is it another Egyptian bubble
which will shortly burst?”
“That was what I thought it was when I came out here,” he answered, “but
since investigating conditions I have changed my mind. It looks so good
to us, in fact, that we intend to back up our judgment by investing
several millions.”
So far as attracting visitors is concerned, San Diego’s most valuable
asset is her climate. Though the southernmost of our Pacific ports and
in the same latitude as Syria and the North African littoral, it has the
most equable climate on the continent, the records of the United States
Weather Bureau showing less than one hour a year when the mercury is
above 90 or below 32. According to these same official records, the sun
shines on three hundred and fifty-six days out of the three hundred and
sixty-five, so that rain is literally a nine days’ wonder. San Diego’s
climate is that of Alaska in summer and of Arabia in winter, and, if you
don’t believe it, the San Diegans will prove it by means of a temperature
chart, zigzagging across which are two lines, one bright red, the other
blue, which denote summer and winter climates circling the globe and
which converge at only one point on it—San Diego. As a result of these
unique climatic conditions, San Diego, unlike most resort cities, has
two seasons instead of one. The Eastern tourists have hardly taken
their departure in the spring before the hotels and boarding-houses
begin to fill up with people who have come here to escape the torrid
heat of a Southwestern summer. Many of these summer visitors are small
ranchers from Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah, and from across the line
in Chihuahua and Sonora, to whom the rates charged at the hotels would
be prohibitive. To accommodate this class of visitors there has sprung
into being on the beach at Coronado a “tent city.” The “tents” consist
for the most part of one or two room bungalows with palm-thatched roofs
and walls and wooden floors and equipped with running water, sanitary
arrangements, and cooking appliances. The Coronado Tent City contains
nearly two thousand of these dwellings which can be rented at absurdly
low figures. For those who do not care to do their own cooking the
management has provided a restaurant where simple but well-cooked meals
can be had at nominal prices; there is a dancing pavilion for the young
people, a casino on whose verandas the mothers can gossip and sew and
at the same time keep an eye on their children playing on the sand, and
a club house with pool-tables and reading-matter for the men. The place
is kept scrupulously clean, it is thoroughly policed, hoodlumism is not
tolerated, and, everything considered, it seemed to me a most admirable
and inexpensive solution of the perennial summer-vacation problem for
people of modest means.
* * * * *
Because I wanted to see something more than that narrow coastwise
zone which comprises all that the average winter tourist ever sees of
California; because I wanted to obtain a more intimate knowledge of
the country and its people than comes from a car-window point of view;
because I wanted to penetrate into those portions of the back country
still undisturbed by the locomotive’s raucous shriek and eat at quaint
inns and sleep in ranch-houses and stop when and where I pleased to
converse with all manner of interesting people, I decided to do my
travelling by motor-car. And so, on a winter’s sunny morning, when the
flower vendors in the plaza of San Diego were selling roses at ten
cents a bunch and the unfortunates who dwelt beyond the Sierras, rim
were begging their janitors for goodness’ sake to turn on more steam,
I turned the nose of my car northward and stepped on her tail, and
with a rush and roar we were off on a journey which was to end only at
the borders of Alaska. As, with engines purring sweet music, the car
breasted the summit of the Linda Vista grade our breath was almost taken
away by the startling grandeur of the panorama which suddenly unrolled
itself before us. At our backs rose the mountains of Mexico, purple,
mysterious, forbidding, grim. Spread below us, like a map in bas-relief,
lay the orchard-covered plains of California; to the left the Pacific
heaved lazily beneath the sun; to the right the snow-crowned Cuyamacas
swept grandly up to meet the sky, and before us the beckoning yellow road
stretched away ... away ... away.
I have never been able to resist the summons of the open road. I always
want to find out what is at the other end. It goes somewhere, you see,
and I always have the feeling that, far off in the distance, where
it swerves suddenly behind a wood or disappears in the depths of a
rock-walled cañon or drops out of sight quite unexpectedly behind a
hill, there is something mysterious and magical waiting to be found.
About the road there is something primitive and imperishable. Did it
ever occur to you that it has been the greatest factor in the making
of history, in the spread of Christianity, in the march of progress?
Some one has said, and truly, that the rate and direction of human
progress has always been determined by the roads of a people. For a time
the marvel of modern inventions caused the road to be forgotten. The
steamship sailed majestically away in contempt of the road upon the shore
and the locomotive sounded its jeering screech at every crossing along
its right of way. But still the road stayed on. But now the miracle of
the motor-car has brought the road into its own again and started me
ajourneying in the latest product of twentieth-century civilisation,
with the strength of threescore horses beneath its throbbing hood, up
that historic highway which has been travelled in turn by Don Vasquez
del Coronado and his steel-clad men-at-arms, by Padre Serra in his
sandals and woollen robe, by Jedediah Smith, the first American to find
his way across the ranges, by Frémont the Pathfinder, by the Argonauts,
by Spanish _caballeros_ and Mexican _vaqueros_ and American pioneers,
by priests afoot and soldiers on horseback and peasants on the backs of
patient burros, by lumbering ox-carts and white-topped prairie-schooners
and six-horse Concord stages—and now by automobiles. In El Camino Real
is epitomised the history and romance of the West. It is to western
America what the Via Appia was to Rome, the Great North Road to England.
It has been in turn a trail of torture, a course of conquest, a road of
religion, a route to riches, a path of progress, a highway to happiness.
He who can traverse it with no thought for anything save the number of
miles which his indicator shows and for the comforts of the hotel ahead;
who is so lacking in imagination that he cannot see the countless phantom
shadows who charge it with their unseen presence; who is incapable of
appreciating that in it are all the panorama and procession of the West,
had much better stay at home. The only thing that such a person would
understand would be a danger-signal or a traffic policeman’s club.
I am convinced that if the several thousand Americans who go on annual
motor trips through Europe, either taking their cars with them or hiring
them on the other side, could only be made to realise that on the edge
of the Western ocean they can find roads as smooth and well built as the
English highways or the _routes nationales_ of France, and mountains as
high and sublimely beautiful as the Alps or the Pyrenees, and scenery
more varied and lovely than is to be found between Christiania and Capri,
and vegetation as luxuriant and hotels more luxurious than on the Côte
d’Azur, and a milder, sunnier, more equable climate than anywhere else
on the globe, they would come pouring out in such numbers that there
wouldn’t be garages enough to hold their cars. In 1913 the legislature of
California voted eighteen millions of dollars for the improvement of the
roads, and that great sum is being so judiciously expended in conjunction
with the appropriations made by the other coast states that by early in
1915 a motorist can start from the Mexican border and drive northward
to Vancouver—a distance considerably greater than from Cherbourg to
Constantinople—with as good a road as any one could ask for beneath his
tires all the way.
It is very close to one hundred and forty miles from San Diego to
Riverside if you take the route which passes the rambling, red-tiled,
adobe ranch-house famous as the home of _Ramona_; dips down into Mission
Valley, where from behind its screen of palms and eucalyptus peers
the crumbling and dilapidated façade of the first of the Californian
missions; swirls through La Jolla with its enchanted ocean caverns;
climbs upward in long sweeps and zigzags through the live-oak groves
behind Del Mar; pauses for a moment at Oceanside for a farewell look at
the lazy turquoise sea, and then suddenly swings inland past Mission
San Luis Rey and the mission chapel of Pala and the Lake of Elsinore.
That is the route that we took and, though it is not the shortest, it is
incomparably the most beautiful and the most interesting. We found by
experience that one hundred and forty miles is about as long a day’s run
as one can make with comfort and still permit of ample time for meals
and for leisurely pauses at places of interest along the way. Once, in
the French Midi, I motored with a friend who had chartered a car by the
month with the agreement that he was to be permitted to run four hundred
kilometres a day. It mattered not at all how fascinating or historically
interesting was the region we were traversing, we must needs tear through
it as though the devil were at our wheels. We couldn’t stop anywhere, my
host explained, because if we did he wouldn’t be able to get the full
allowance of mileage to which he was entitled. Some day, however, I’m
going through that same country again and see the things I missed. Next
time I think that I shall go on a bicycle. With highways as smooth as the
promenade-deck of an ocean liner it is a temptation to burn up the road,
of course, particularly if your car has plenty of power and your driver
knows how to keep his wits about him. But that sort of thing, especially
in a country which has so many sights worth seeing as California, smacks
altogether too much of those impossible persons who boast of having
“done” the Louvre or the Pitti in an hour. Half the pleasure of motoring,
to my way of thinking, is in being able to stop when and where you
please—_and stopping_.
Between San Diego and Oceanside the road hugs the coast as though it
were a long-lost brother. It is wide and smooth and for long stretches
led through acres and acres of yellow mustard. This, with the vivid blue
of the sea on one side and the emerald green of the wooded hillsides on
the other, made the country we were traversing resemble the flag of some
Central American republic. I think that the most beautiful of the little
coast towns through which the road winds is Del Mar, perched high on a
cypress-covered hill looking westward to Cathay. This is the home of the
Torrey pine, which is found nowhere else in the world. In the springtime
the mesas above the sea are all aflame with yellow dahlias and the
hillsides at the back are as gay with wild flowers as a woman’s Easter
bonnet. Del Mar is an interesting example of the rehabilitation of a
down-and-out town. A few years ago it was little more than a straggling,
grass-grown street lined with decrepit, weather-beaten houses. A
far-sighted corporation discovered the ramshackle little hamlet, bought
it, subdivided it, laid out miles of contour drives and a golf course,
and built a little gem of a hostelry, modelled and named after the
inn at Stratford-on-Avon, on the hill above the sea. Now the place is
awake, animated, prosperous. Bathers dot its ten-mile crescent of silver
sand; artists pitch their easels beneath the shadow of the friendly
live-oaks; on the flower-carpeted hill slopes have sprung up the villas
and bungalows of the rich. A few miles farther up the coast you can lunch
beneath the vine-hung pergolas of the quaint Miramar at Oceanside, nor
does it require an elastic imagination to pretend that the hills behind,
grey-green with olive groves, are those of Amalfi and that the lazy,
sun-kissed sea below you is the Mediterranean instead of the Pacific.
Four miles inland from Oceanside, in a swale between low hills, stands
all that is left of the Mission of San Luis, Rey de Francia, which, as
its name denotes, is dedicated to Saint Louis, King of France. Begun when
Washington was President of the United States and Alta California was
still a province of New Spain, completed when the nineteenth century was
but a two-year-old, and secularised by the Mexican authorities after the
expulsion of the Spaniards in 1834, the historic mission has once again
passed into the hands of the Franciscan Order which built it and is now
a training-school for priests who wish to carry the cross into foreign
lands. The ruins of the mission—which, thanks to the indefatigable
efforts of the priest in charge, are being restored to a semblance of
their original condition as fast as he is able to raise the money—are
among the most picturesque in California. We stopped there on a golden
afternoon, when the sunlight, sifted and softened by the interlacing
branches of the ancient olive trees, cast a veil of yellow radiance upon
the crumbling, weather-worn façade and filtered through the arches of
those cloistered corridors where the cowled and cassocked brethren of
Saint Francis were wont to pace up and down in silent meditation, telling
their beads and muttering their prayers.
Nestling in a hollow of the hills, twenty miles northeast of San Luis
Rey, over a road which is comparatively little travelled and only
indifferently smooth, is the _asistencia_ or mission chapel of San
Antonio de Pala. Even though it were not on the road to Riverside,
it would be well worth going out of one’s way to see because of its
picturesque _campanario_, with a cactus sprouting from its top, and
the adjacent Indian village with its curious burial-ground. The little
town, which centres, of course, about the chapel, the agency, and the
trader’s, stands on the banks of the San Luis Rey River, with high
mountains rising abruptly all around. Here, in sheet-iron huts provided
by a paternal government and brought bodily from the East and set up in
this secluded valley, dwell all that is left of the Palatingwa tribe—a
living refutation of our boast that we have given a square deal to the
Indian. Once each year the Palatingwas are visited by their friends of
neighbouring tribes, and for a brief time the mountain valley resounds to
the barbaric clamour of the tom-toms and to the plaintive, pagan chants
which were heard in this land before the paleface came. The mission
chapel, after standing empty for many years, once more has a priest, and
at sunset the bell in the ancient campanile sends its mellow summons
booming across the surrounding olive groves and the copper-coloured
villagers, just as did their fathers in Padre Serra’s time, come trooping
in for evening prayer.
[Illustration: _From a photograph by Avery Edwin Field._
_From a photograph by Avery Edwin Field._
NOT IN CATALONIA BUT IN CALIFORNIA.
“A great hotel which combines the architectural features of the
Californian missions—cloisters, patios, brick-paved corridors, bell-hung
campaniles, ivy-covered buttresses—with an Old World atmosphere and
charm.”]
But of all the California missions, from San Diego in the south to
Sonoma in the north, the one I like the best is the Mission Miller at
Riverside—and any one who has ever stopped there will unhesitatingly
agree with me. Its real name, you must understand, is the Mission
Inn, and there is no hostelry like it anywhere else in the world.
At least I, who am tolerably familiar with the hotels of five-score
countries, know of none. In it Frank Miller, the Master of the Inn, as
he loves to be called, has succeeded in commercialising romance to an
extraordinary degree. He might be said, indeed, to have taken the cent
from sentiment. In other words, he has built a great hotel which combines
the architectural features of the most interesting of the Californian
missions—cloisters, patios, quadrangles, brick-paved corridors, bell-hung
campaniles, ivy-covered buttresses, slender date-palms with flaming
macaws screeching in them—with an Old World atmosphere and charm, and in
such a setting he dispenses the same genial and personal hospitality
which was a characteristic of the Spanish _padres_ in the days when the
travellers along El Camino Real depended on the missions for food and
shelter.
V
WHERE GOLD GROWS ON TREES
“Dost thou know that sweet land where the orange flowers grow?
Where the fruits are like gold and the red roses blow?”
V
WHERE GOLD GROWS ON TREES
It was in the heyday of the Second Empire. The French army was at its
autumn manœuvres and the country round about Rheims was aswarm with
troopers in brass helmets and infantry in baggy red breeches. Louis
Napoleon was directing the operations in person. Riding one day through
a vineyard at the head of a brigade, he suddenly pulled up his horse and
turned in his saddle.
“Halt!” he ordered. “Column right into line! Attention! Present ... arms!”
“But who are you saluting, sire?” inquired one of his generals in
astonishment, spurring alongside.
“The grapes, _mon général_,” replied the Emperor; “for do they not
represent the wealth and prosperity of France?”
* * * * *
It was the astonishing prosperity of the orange belt which brought the
incident to mind. For an entire morning we had been motoring among the
orange groves which make of Riverside an island in an emerald sea. The
endless orchards whose shiny-leaved trees drooped under their burden of
pumpkin-coloured fruit; the chalk-white villas and the blossom-smothered
bungalows of which we caught fleeting glimpses between the ordered rows;
the oiled roads, so smooth and level that no child could look on them
without longing for roller-skates; the motor-cars standing at almost
every doorstep—all these things spelled prosperity in capital letters.
“It seems to me,” I remarked to the gentleman who was acting as our
guide (these same orange groves had made him a millionaire in less than
a decade), “that it would not be unbefitting if the people of Riverside
followed the example of Louis Napoleon when he saluted the grapes”; and I
told him the story of the Emperor in the vineyard.
“You are quite right,” said he. “Would you mind stopping the car?” and,
standing in the tonneau very erect and soldierly, he lifted his hat.
“My Lady Citrona,” he said gravely, “I have the honour to salute you, for
it is to you that the prosperity of southern California is chiefly due.”
* * * * *
What its harbour has done for San Diego, what its climate has done for
Santa Barbara, its oranges have done for Riverside. Thirty years ago you
could not have found it on the map. To-day it is the richest community
_per caput_—which is the Latin for inhabitant—between the ice-floes of
the Arctic and the Gatun Dam. At least that is what Mr. Bradstreet—the
gentleman, you know, who publishes the large green volume which tells
you whether the people you meet are worth cultivating—says, and he
ought to know what he is talking about. Though it can boast few if any
“show-places” such as are proudly pointed out to the open-mouthed tourist
in Pasadena and Santa Barbara, it is a pleasant place in which to dwell,
is this happy, sunny, easy-going capital of the citrus kingdom. It is
as substantial-looking as a retired banker; it is as spick and span as
a ward in a hospital; it is as satisfying as a certified cheque—and,
incidentally, it is as dry as the desert of Sahara. You are regarded
with suspicion if you are overheard asking the druggist for alcohol for
a spirit-lamp. It is, moreover, the only place I know that has foiled
the exaggeratory tendencies of the picture post-card makers. Its oranges
are so glaringly yellow, its trees so vividly green, its poinsettias so
flamingly red, its snow-topped mountains so snowily white, its skies so
bright a blue that the post-card artists have had to be truthful in spite
of themselves.
I think that the spirit of Riverside is epitomised by two great
wrought-iron baskets which flank the entrance to the dining-room of its
famous hostelry, the Mission Inn. One of them is filled with oranges, the
other with flowers. And you are expected to help yourself; not merely to
take one as a souvenir, you understand, but to fill your pockets, fill
your arms. “That’s what they’re there for,” the Master of the Inn will
tell you. That little touch does more than anything else to make you
feel that southern California really is a land of fruit and flowers and
that they are not hidden behind the garden walls of the rich but can be
enjoyed by everyone. It goes far toward counteracting the unfavourable
impression a stranger receives in a certain ornate hotel in Los Angeles
where he is charged forty cents for a sliced orange!
Ciceroned by the orange millionaire, we motored up a zigzag boulevard,
with many horseshoe bends and hairpin turns, to the summit of Mount
Rubidoux, a domesticated and highly landscaped mountainette within the
city limits. Moses and his footsore Israelites, looking down upon the
Promised Land, could have seen nothing fairer than the view which greeted
us on that winter’s Sunday morning. I doubt if there has been anything
more peacefully enchanting than a Sunday morning in southern California
in the orange season since a “To Let” sign was nailed to the gates of the
Garden of Eden. It suggests, without in any way resembling, such a number
of things: a stained-glass window in a church, for example; an Easter
wedding; Italy in the springtime ... but perhaps you don’t grasp just
what I mean.
From Rubidoux’s rocky base the furrowed orange groves, looking exactly
like quilted comforters of bright-green silk, stretch away, away, until
they meet just such a yellow arid desert as Riverside used to be before
the water came, and the desert sweeps up to meet tawny foot-hills, and
the foot-hills blend into amethystine mountain ranges and these rise
into snowy peaks which gleam and sparkle against a sapphire sky. And
from the orange groves rises that same subtle, intoxicating fragrance
(for you know, no doubt, that orange-trees bear blossoms and fruit at
the same time) that you get when the organist strikes up the march from
“Lohengrin” and the bride floats up the aisle. The significant thing
about it all, however, is not the surpassing beauty and extraordinary
luxuriance of the vegetation, but the fact that there is any vegetation
here at all. No longer ago than when women wore bustles this region was a
second cousin to the Sahara, dry as a treatise on mathematics, dusty as a
country pike on circus day, but which now, thanks to the faith, patience,
energy, and courage of a handful of horticulturists, has been transformed
into a land which is a cross between a back-drop at a theatre and a
fruit-store window.
* * * * *