and considerably farther by the shortest railway route, the Angelenos
have done their best to mitigate this unfortunate circumstance by
attempting to convert the indifferent harbour of San Pedro, twenty miles
away, into a great artificial seaport. Everything that money can do has
been done. The national government has dredged and improved the harbour
and built a huge breakwater at enormous cost, and Los Angeles, which
has extended her municipal limits so as to include San Pedro, has spent
millions more in the construction of several miles of concrete quays
and the installation of the most powerful and modern electric loading
machinery. There is even under serious consideration a plan for digging
a ship-canal from San Pedro to Los Angeles so that seagoing vessels can
discharge and take on cargo in the heart of the commercial district.
Though in time, as a result of the impetus provided by the completion
of the Panama Canal and the astounding growth of Los Angeles, which
now has a population of considerably over half a million (in 1890 it
had only fifty thousand), San Pedro will doubtless develop into a port
of considerable importance for coastwise commerce, its limitations are
not likely to permit of its ever becoming a dangerous rival of its great
sister ports of San Francisco and San Diego. The attitude of the San
Franciscans toward the laudable efforts of Los Angeles to get a harbour
of her own is amusingly illustrated by a story they tell upon the coast.
When the big breakwater was completed and San Pedro was ready to do
business, Los Angeles celebrated the great event with a banquet, among
the guests of honour being a gentleman prominent in the civic life of
San Francisco. Toward the close of an evening of self-congratulation and
of fervid oratory on Los Angeles’s dazzling future as one of the great
seaports of the world, the San Franciscan was called upon to respond to a
toast.
“I have listened with the deepest interest, gentlemen,” he began, “to
what the speakers of the evening have had to say regarding your new
harbour at San Pedro, and I have been impressed with a feeling of regret
that this magnificent harbour, which you have constructed at so great an
expenditure of money and effort, is not more easy of access from your
beautiful city. Now it strikes me, gentlemen, that you could overcome
this unfortunate circumstance by laying a pipe-line from Los Angeles to
San Pedro. Then, if you would suck as hard as you have been blowing this
evening, you would soon have the Pacific Ocean at your front door.”
* * * * *
Strung along the coast of California, from Point Loma to Point
Concepcion, are the Channel Islands. Counting only the larger ones, they
number twelve: three Coronados, four Santa Catalinas, and five in the
Santa Barbara group; but if you include them all, small as well as large,
there are thirty-five distinct links in the island chain which stretches
from wind-swept San Miguel to the Coronados. What the Azores, Madeira,
and the Canaries are to Europe, these enchanted isles are to the Pacific
Coast. They have the climatic charm of the Riviera without its summer
heat; the delights of its winters without the raw, cold winds which sweep
down from the Maritime Alps. With their palms and semitropic verdure they
have all the appearance of the tropics, yet they have not a tropical
climate, the winters having the crispness of an Eastern October and the
summers being cooler than any portion of the Atlantic seaboard south of
Nova Scotia.
Southernmost of the chain and not more than ten miles southwest from San
Diego as the sea-gull flies is the group of rock-bound islets known as
Los Coronados, which belong to Mexico. Though uninhabited and extremely
rough, they are surrounded by forests of kelp and form famous fishing
grounds for the big game of the deep. About a hundred miles to the
northward, off the coast of Los Angeles County, is the group of which
Santa Catalina is the largest and the most famous. Though Santa Catalina
is only twenty-seven miles from San Pedro, the port of Los Angeles,
it takes the _Cabrillo_, owing to her tipsy gait and the choppy sea
which generally prevails in the channel, nearly three hours to make the
passage, which is as notorious for producing _mal de mer_ as that across
the Straits of Dover.
The prehistoric people who inhabited Santa Catalina during the Stone Age,
and of whom many traces have been found in the kitchen-middens which dot
the island, were first awakened to the fact that the world contained
others than themselves when the Spanish sea-adventurer Cabrillo dropped
the anchors of his caravels off their shores. Nearly a century passed
away and then Philip III gave the island to one of his generals as a
present. Some two hundred years were gathered into the past before Pio
Pico, the Mexican governor of Alta California, sold the island for the
price of a horse and saddle. In later years various other transfers took
place from time to time, James Lick, who lies buried under his great
telescope on Mount Hamilton, being for a period lord of the island. Later
it was purchased as a prospective silver mine by an English syndicate,
but the ore ran out and the disgusted Britishers were glad to dispose of
it to the Banning Company, which is the present owner.
Santa Catalina, which is about twenty-seven miles long, is shaped,
with great appropriateness, like a fish, the smaller portion, which
corresponds to the tail, being connected with the main body of the
island by a sandy isthmus. The island is surrounded on all sides by a
dense jungle of kelp and other marine plants, whose wonders visitors are
able to view from glass-bottomed boats. The topography of the island
is scarcely less striking than the sea gardens which surround it. From
the mountain peaks which rise to a height of two thousand feet or more,
V-shaped cañons, their ridges pitched like the roof of a Swiss chalet,
sweep down, ever widening, to the silver beaches of the sea. On the
southern slopes cactus and sage-brush, grim offspring of the desert,
cling to the naked, sun-baked rocks; on the other, the cooler side,
dense, growths of mountain lilac, manzanita, chaparral, elder and other
flowering shrubs form a striking contrast. Most of the vast acreage of
the island is a sheep ranch and wild-goat range, but one cañon at the
eastern end is devoted to the visitor and filled by the charming town
of Avalon with a winter population of seven or eight hundred, which
in summer increases to that many thousand. Avalon is unlike any other
place that I know. It is built on the shore of a crescent-shaped bay
at the mouth of a deep cañon which almost bisects the island. At the
upper end of this cañon a great wall formed by a mountain ridge protects
the town from ocean winds and gives it what is probably the nearest
approach in the world to the “perfect climate.” The quaint houses of
the town, many of them of charming and distinctive design, cling to the
rocky hillsides and dot the slopes of the cañons, adapting themselves,
with characteristic Americanism, to circumstances and conditions.
Along the water-front are the large hotels, a concert pavilion, and
the aquarium—which, by the way, has a larger variety of marine animals
than the famous aquarium at Naples; farther up the beach is a large and
handsome bath-house where hundreds bathe daily, and in the cañon at the
back of the town are the picturesque and sporting golf-links and the
tennis-courts. Though the island offers the visitor an extraordinary
diversity of amusements, Avalon’s _raison d’être_ is angling with rod and
reel and everything is subservient to that. To it, as big-game hunters
go to Africa, come fishermen from the farthermost corners of the world
in quest of the big game of the sea. From the south side of the Bay of
Avalon a long pier wades out into the water. Just as the bridge across
the Arno in Florence is the resort of the gold and silver smiths, so this
pier is the resort of the professional tuna boatmen. Along it, on either
side, are ranged their booths or stands, each with its elaborate display
of the paraphernalia of deep-sea fishing; a placard over each booth bears
the owner’s name and his power-boat is anchored close by. At the end of
the pier is a singular object which resembles a gallows. Beside it is a
locked scales. On the gallows-like affair the great game-fish are hung
and photographed, and on the scales all the fish taken in the tournaments
are weighed by the official weighers of the Tuna Club.
If you will glance to starboard as the _Cabrillo_ steams slowly into
Avalon Harbour, you will notice a modest, brown frame building, with a
railed terrace dotted with armchairs, built on piles above the water.
This is the Tuna Club, the most famous institution of its kind in the
world. To become eligible to membership in this unique club one must take
on a rod of not over sixteen ounces or under six feet and with a line
of not more than twenty-four threads, a fish weighing over one hundred
pounds. If elected one receives the coveted blue button, which is the
angler’s Legion of Honour and to obtain which has cost many fishermen
thousands of dollars and years of patience, while others have won it
in a single day. The club holds organised tournaments throughout the
fishing season, offering innumerable trophy cups and medals of gold,
silver, and bronze for the largest tuna, albacore, sea-bass, yellowtail,
and bonito caught by its members. I might mention, in passing, that the
largest tuna ever taken was caught off Santa Catalina by Colonel C. P.
Morehouse, of Pasadena, in 1899; when placed on the official scales the
indicator registered two hundred and fifty-one pounds. I know of no more
interesting way in which to pass an evening than to sit on the terrace
of the Tuna Club, looking out across the moonlit bay, and listen to
the tales told by these veterans of rod and reel: of Judge Beaman, who
hooked a tuna off Avalon and was towed by the angry monster to Redondo,
a distance of thirty miles, or of Mr. Wood, who played a fish for seven
hours before it could be brought to gaff. I have yarned with professional
elephant and lion hunters in the clubs at Mombasa and Zanzibar, and I
give you my word that their stories were not a whit more fascinating than
the tales of battles with marine monsters which I listened to on the
terrace of the Tuna Club at Avalon.
Santa Catalina’s nearest neighbour is San Clemente, twenty miles long,
whose northern shore is a wonderland of grottoes, caves, and cliffs and
on whose rolling upland pastures browse many thousand head of sheep. A
hundred miles or so to the northward are the islands composing the Santa
Barbara group: Anacapa, Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, and San Miguel. The coast
of Anacapa—“the ever-changing”—is a maze of strange caverns gnawed from
the rock by the hungry sea, one of them, of vast size, having once served
as a retreat for the pirates who formerly plied their trade along this
coast, and now for sea-lions and seals, a skipper from Santa Barbara
doing a thriving business in capturing these animals and selling them for
exhibition purposes, the seals of Santa Cruz being in demand by showmen
all over the world because of their intelligence and willingness to
learn. The island, which is arid and deserted, is a sheep ranch; the fact
that there is little or no water on it apparently causing no discomfort
to the sheep, as their coats become so soaked at night as a result of the
dense fogs that by morning each animal is literally a walking sponge.
Barring Santa Catalina, Santa Cruz is by far the most interesting and
attractive of the Channel Islands, being worthy of a visit if for no
other reason than to see its painted caves, which have been worn by the
waves into the most fantastic shapes and dyed by the salts gorgeous and
varied colors. Viewed from the sea, Santa Cruz appears to be but a jumble
of lofty hills, sheer cliffs, and barren, purple mountains, gashed and
scarred by cañons and gorges in all directions. But once you have crossed
this rocky barrier which hems the island in, you find yourself in the
loveliest Valley that the imagination could well conceive, with palms and
oleanders and bananas growing everywhere and a climate as perfect and
considerably milder than that of Avalon. The island is the property of
the Caire estate; its proprietor is a Frenchman, and French and Italian
labourers are employed exclusively on the ranch and in the vineyards
which cover the interior of the island. When you set foot within the
valley you leave America behind. The climate is that of southern France.
The vineyard is a European vineyard. The brown-skinned folk who work in
it speak the patois of the French or Italian peasantry. The ranch-houses,
of plastered and whitewashed brick, with their iron balconies and their
quaint and brilliant gardens, might have been transplanted bodily from
Savoy, while the great flocks of sheep grazing contentedly upon the
encircling hills complete the illusion that you are in the Old World
instead of within a hundred miles of the newest metropolis in the New.
There are two distinct seasons at Santa Cruz—the sheep-shearing and the
vintage—when the French and Italian islanders are reinforced by large
numbers of Barbareños, from Santa Barbara across the channel, who pick
the grapes in September and twice yearly shear the sheep. Though the
surface of the island is cut in every direction by cañons, gulches,
and precipices, the Barbareño horsemen, who are descended from the old
Mexican vaquero stock, mounted on the agile island ponies, in rounding up
the sheep, ride at top speed down precipitous cliffs and along the brinks
of giddy chasms which an ordinary mortal would hesitate to negotiate with
hobnailed boots and an alpenstock. It is a thrilling and hair-raising
exhibition of horsemanship and nerve and, should you ever happen to be
along that coast at shearing time, I would advise you to obtain a permit
from the Caire family and go over to Santa Cruz to see it.
Sport in the Channel Islands is not confined to fishing, for there is
excellent wild-goat shooting on Santa Catalina and wild-boar shooting
on Santa Cruz. Though both goats and boars are doubtless descended from
domestic animals introduced by the early Spaniards, they have lived so
long in a state of freedom that they provide genuinely exciting sport.
These wild pigs are dangerous beasts for an unmounted, unarmed man to
meet, however, for they combine the staying qualities of a Georgia
razor-back with the ferocity of a Moroccan boar and will charge a man
without the slightest hesitation.
Taking them by and large, the Channel Islands are, I believe, unique.
Where else, pray, within a half day’s sail of a city of six hundred
thousand people, can one explore pirates’ caves, pick bananas from the
trees, shoot wild goat and wild boar, angle for the largest fish in
existence, and, no matter what the season of the year, dwell in a climate
of perpetual spring?
VI
THE COAST OF FAIRYLAND
“All in the golden weather, forth let us ride to-day,
You and I together on the King’s Highway.
The blue skies above us, and below the shining sea;
There’s many a road to travel, but it’s this road for me.
...
It’s a long road and sunny, it’s a long road and old,
And the brown _padres_ made it for the flocks of the fold;
They made it for the sandals of the sinner folk that trod
From the fields in the open to the mission-house of God.
...
We will take the road together through the morning’s golden glow,
And we’ll dream of those who trod it in the mellowed long ago;
We will stop at the Missions where the sleeping _padres_ lay,
And we’ll bend a knee above them for their souls’ sake to pray.
We’ll ride through the valleys where the blossom’s on the tree,
Through the orchards and the meadows with the bird and the bee,
And we’ll take the rising hills where the manzanitas grow,
Past the grey tails of waterfalls where blue violets blow.
Old conquistadores, O brown priests and all,
Give us your ghosts for company when night begins to fall;
There’s many a road to travel, but it’s this road to-day,
With the breath of God above us on the King’s Highway.”
VI
THE COAST OF FAIRYLAND
Following the example of the late J. Cæsar, Esquire, the well-known Roman
politician, who districted Gaul into three parts, California might be
divided into three provinces of pleasure: the Sierras, the Sequoias, and
the Sands. Though nowhere separated by a journey of more than a single
day at most, these three zones are as dissimilar in their physical and
climatical characteristics and in the recreations they offer to the
visitor as the coast of Brittany is from the Engadine, as the Black
Forest is from the Italian Lakes, or, coming nearer home, as unlike
each other as the White Mountains are unlike Atlantic City, as Muskoka
is unlike Bar Harbour. Within the confines of a region five hundred
miles long and barely two hundred wide may be found as many varieties of
climate, scenery, and recreation as are provided by all the resorts of
eastern America and Europe put together.
That California’s summer climate is even more delightful than its
whiter climate is a fact which not one outlander in a hundred seems
able to comprehend. Because the paralysing cold of an Eastern winter
is equalised by a correspondingly sweltering summer, your average
Easterner, who has heard all his life of California’s winter climate,
finds it impossible to disabuse himself of the conviction that a region
which is so climatically blessed by Nature during one half of the year
must, as a matter of course, be cursed with intolerable weather during
the other half, so as to strike, as it were, an average. A climate
which is equally inviting in January and in July is altogether beyond
his comprehension. He fails to understand why Nature does not treat
California as impartially as she does other regions, making her pay for
balmy, cloudless winter days with summers marked by scorching heat and
torrential rains. Summer in California is really equivalent to an Eastern
June. The nights are always cool, and the blankets, instead of being
packed away in moth balls, cover you to the chin. There is no humidity
and the air, which in most summer climates is about as invigorating
as lemonade, is as crisp and sparkling as dry champagne. Nor is there
any rain. This is literal. There is, I repeat, no rain. Each August
the Bohemian Club of San Francisco produces its famous Grove Play in a
natural amphitheatre formed by the rocks and redwoods of the Californian
forest. The cost of the production runs into many thousands of dollars
and involves many months of effort, but the preparations are made with
the absolute assurance that the performance will be unmarred by rain.
In a quarter of a century the club members have not been disturbed by
so much as a sprinkle. Did you ever plan a motor trip or a picnic or
a fishing excursion during an Eastern summer only to be awakened on
the morning of the appointed day by the rain pattering on the roof?
That sort of thing doesn’t happen in California any more than it does
in Egypt. Pick out your midsummer day, no matter whether it is a week
or a month or a year ahead, and on that morning you will find the
weather waiting for you at the front door. This absence of rain is not
an entirely unmitigated blessing, however, for it means dust. And such
dust! I have never seen any region so intolerably dusty as is the Great
Valley of California in midsummer except the Attic Plain. A jack-rabbit
scurrying across the desert sends up a column of dust like an Indian
signal-fire. Along the coast, however, the dust nuisance is ameliorated
to some extent by the summer fogs which come rolling in from the sea
at dawn, leaving the countryside as fresh and sparkling as though it
had been sprinkled by a heavy dew. The farther up the coast you go,
the heavier these fogs become, until, north of Monterey, they resemble
the driving mists so characteristic of the Scottish highlands. For the
benefit of golfers I might add that these moisture-laden fogs make
possible the chain of splendid turf golf-links which begin at Monterey,
the courses farther south, where there is but little moisture during the
summer, being characterised by greens of oiled sand and fairways which
during six months of the year are as dry and hard as a bone. Artists will
tell you that the summer landscapes of California are far more beautiful
than its winter ones, and I am inclined to believe that they are right,
for in June the countryside, with its unnumbered _nuances_ of green and
purple, is transformed, as though by the wave of a magician’s wand, into
a dazzling land of russets and burnt oranges and chromes and yellows.
California may best be described as a great walled garden with one
side facing on the sea. It is separated from those unfortunate regions
which lie at the back of it by the most remarkable garden wall in all
the world. This wall, which is, on an average, two miles high, is five
hundred miles long, having Mount San Jacinto for its southern and Mount
Shasta for its northern corner. At the back of the garden rises, peak on
peak, range on range, the snow-clad Sierra Nevada. Gradually descending,
the high peaks give way to lesser ones, the ranges dwindle to foot-hills,
the foot-hills run out in cañons and grassy valleys, the valley slopes
become clothed with forests, the forests merge into groves of gnarled,
fantastic live-oaks, and these in turn to gorse-covered dunes which
sweep down to meet the sea. The whole of this vast garden—mountain,
forest, and shore—is dotted with accommodations for the visitor which
are adapted to all tastes and to all purses and which range all the way
from huge caravansaries which rival those of Ostend and Aix-les-Bains,
of Narragansett and Lake Placid, to tented cities pitched beneath the
whispering redwoods or beside the murmuring sea.
Unless you have seen the Lago di Garda at its bluest, unless you have
loitered beneath the palms which line the Promenade des Anglais at Nice,
unless you have bathed on the white sands of Waikiki, unless you have
motored along the Corniche Road, with the sun-flecked Mediterranean on
the one hand and the dim blue outline of the Alps upon the other, you
cannot picture with any degree of accuracy the beauties of this enchanted
littoral. From Cannes, where the Mediterranean Riviera properly begins,
to San Remo, where it ends, is barely one hundred miles, every foot of
which is so built over with hotels and villas and straggling villages
that you feel as though you were passing through a city, the impression
being heightened by the gendarmes who stare at you suspiciously and by
the admonitory notices which confront you at every turn. From Coronado,
where the Californian Riviera begins, to the Golden Gate, where it
ends, is six hundred miles, and every foot of that six hundred miles
is through a veritable garden of the Lord. Along this coast date-palms
and giant cacti give place to citrus groves ablaze with golden fruit
and these, in turn, merge into the grey-green of the olive; the olive
groves change to orchards of peach and apricot and prune, and these lose
themselves in time in hillsides green with live-oaks, and the live-oaks
turn to redwoods and the redwoods yield to pines. Bordering this historic
coastal highway—El Camino Real, it is still called—are vast ranches
whose hillsides are alive with grazing flocks and herds; great estates,
triumphs of the landscape-gardener’s skill, with close-clipped hedges and
velvet lawns from amid which rise Norman châteaux and Italian villas and
Elizabethan manor-houses; quaint bungalows with deep, cool verandas,
half hidden by blazing gardens; and, of course, hotels—dozens and dozens
of them, with roses tumbling in cascades of colour over stucco walls and
cool terraces shaded by red-striped awnings. It is indeed an enchanted
coast, and I, who had always boasted to myself that I had seen too many
of the world’s beauty-spots to give my allegiance to any one of them,
have—I admit it frankly—fallen victim to its spell.
* * * * *
Between Los Angeles and Ventura lies one of the most flourishing
agricultural regions in the State, the districts through which we sped
on the wings of the winter morning being variously noted for their
production of hay, walnuts, olives, beets, and beans. Ventura is the
railroad brakeman’s contraction of San Buenaventura—it is obvious that
a trainman could not spare the time to enunciate so long a name—the
picturesque coast town and county-seat owing its origin to the mission
which the Franciscan _padres_ founded here a year after the Battle of
Yorktown and which is still in daily use. From Ventura we made a detour
of fifteen miles or so for the purpose of visiting the Ojai Valley (it
is pronounced “O-hi” if you please), a little place of surpassing beauty
which not many people know about, like Thun in the Bernese Oberland, or
Annecy, near Aix-les-Bains. The road to the Ojai strikes directly inland
from the coast, following the devious course of the Matilija, climbing
up and up and up, through forests of live-oaks and mountain meadows
carpeted with wild flowers, until it suddenly debouches into the valley
itself. Because the Ojai is so very beautiful, and is at the same time so
simple and sylvan and unpretending, it is a little difficult to give an
accurate idea of it in words. Though Mount Topotopo, the highest of the
peaks which hem it in, is not much over six thousand feet, it can best
be compared, I think, to some of the Alpine valleys, such as Andermatt,
for example, or the one below Grindelwald. I do not particularly like
the idea of continually dragging in Europe as a standard of comparison
for things American, but so many of our people have come to know Europe
better than they do their own country that it is the only means I have of
making them realise the beauties and wonders on which, with the coming of
each summer, they habitually turn their backs.