the mountains by a zigzag road into a secluded river valley whose peace
and pastoral loveliness were as grateful, after the stirring grandeur of
the Gaviota, as is the five-o’clock whistle to the workman after a busy
day. By this same pass the trail of the _padres_ ran when, a century
ago, they walked between the missions, so that it was with peculiar
appropriateness that there rose before us, as we swung around a shoulder
of the mountain, the Mission of Santa Ynez, its white colonnades gleaming
like ivory in the morning sunlight, its pottery roof forming a splendid
note of colour against the lush, green fields, its cross-surmounted
campanile pointing heavenward, just as the fingers of its cassocked
builders were wont to do. Thanks to the patience and perseverance of
Padre Alejandro, the priest in charge, the famous mission, which was
in a deplorable state of neglect when he came there a dozen years ago,
has been reroofed and in a large measure restored, the south corridor,
which runs the length of the _convento’s_ front, where the brown-robed
monks were wont to pace up and down in silent meditation, having been
transformed into a sort of loggia, bright with sunshine and fragrant with
flowers. It is a pleasing survival of the spirit of the old monastic days
that no one, derelict, hobo, or tramp, who applies at the Mission Santa
Ynez for food or shelter is ever turned away. I think the thing that
brought home to me most vividly the hardships endured by the cowled and
sandalled founders of these missions was a great umbrella of yellow silk,
bordered with faded blue, which caught my attention in the sacristy.
“What was this umbrella used for, father?” I inquired.
“That, my son,” said Padre Alejandro, “was used by the _padres_ to shield
themselves from the sun on their journeys between the missions, for they
were not permitted to ride but were compelled by their vows to go always
afoot. Though Father Serra was lame, and every step that he took caused
him the extremest anguish, he not once but many times walked the six
hundred miles which lay between San Diego and his northernmost mission at
Sonoma.”
One would naturally suppose that the people of California would be
inordinately proud of these crumbling missions which have played so
great a part in the history of their State and would take steps to have
them preserved as national monuments, just as the French Government
preserves its historic châteaux. But, for some unexplainable reason, just
the opposite is true, the priests in charge of several of the missions
assuring me that they had the greatest difficulty in obtaining funds to
effect even the most imperative repairs, depending very largely on the
contributions of Eastern visitors. We Americans excuse ourselves for this
unpardonable neglect by explaining that we are still a young people,
which, of course, is true. It is equally true, however, that by the time
we are old enough to appreciate their historic significance and value,
there will be no missions left to preserve.
Should you who read this follow in our tire tracks, you should not fail
to stop for luncheon at a hamlet, not far from Santa Ynez, called, from
the olive orchards which surround it, Los Olivos. There is a little inn
there kept by a Frenchman named Mattei—a Basque he is, if I remember
rightly—who will serve you just such a meal as you can get at one of
those wayside _fondas_ in the Pyrenees. The country adjacent to Los
Olivos is noted for its fishing and shooting, so that instead of the
roast-beef-mashed-potatoes-pie-and-coffee luncheon which the motorist
learns to expect, we had set before us brook-trout fried in flour and
bread-crumbs, ripe brown olives which had been soaked in garlic and oil,
roast quail as plump as young chickens, an omelet _à la Espagnole_, and
heaping bowls of wild strawberries, the whole washed down with a wine
rarely seen in America—real white Chianti. It is the very unexpectedness
of such meals which makes them stand out like white milestones along the
gastronomical highway.
More Spanish in character and atmosphere even than Santa Barbara is
Monterey, three hundred miles farther up this enchanted coast. Careless
of the changes which are being wrought about it, it lazes on its
sun-kissed hillside, its head shaded by groves of palm and live-oak,
its feet laved by the tepid waters of the bay. The town is built on the
slopes of a natural amphitheatre, looking down upon a U-shaped harbour
containing the bluest water you ever saw. Rising steeply behind the town
is the hill where the Spanish _castillo_ used to stand, which is now
surmounted by grim, black coast-defence guns and by the yellow barracks
which house the garrison. At the foot of Presidio Hill is the sheltered
cove where Vizcaino landed to take possession of this region in the
name of his Most Catholic Majesty of Spain, and where, years later,
Padre Serra also landed to take possession of it in the name of a far
mightier King. Here, on clear days, you can see on the harbour bottom
the bleached and whitened bones of the frigate _Natalia_, on which
Napoleon escaped from Elba. Down by the water-front, where the soiled
and smelly fishing-boats with their queer lateen sails rub shoulders
with the spotless, white-hulled yachts, the old custom-house stands in
the shadow of a patriarchal cypress. It has looked on many strange and
thrilling scenes, has this balconied building of whitewashed adobe; it
has seen the high-prowed caravels swinging at anchor in this bay with
the red-and-yellow flag of Spain drooping from their carven sterns; it
has seen the swarthy Spanish governors reviewing their steel-capped and
cuirassed soldiery in the sun-swept plaza; it has seen the _fiestas_ and
other merrymakings which marked the careless Mexican régime; and on that
July day in 1846 it saw the marines in their leather chacoes and the
blue-jackets in their jaunty hats land from the American frigates, saw
them form in hollow square upon the plaza, saw their weapons held rigid
in burnished lines of steel as a ball of bunting crept up the flagstaff,
and heard the roar of cheers as it broke out into a flag of stripes and
stars.
In historic interest and significance this little town of Monterey is
to the West what Boston is to the East. Here was planned the conquest
of California; here the first American flag was raised upon the shores
of the Pacific; here was the first capital and here was held the first
constitutional convention of California. Follow Alvardo Street up the
hill, between rows of adobe houses with pottery roofs and whitewashed
walls set in gardens aglow with roses, fuchsias, and geraniums, to the
group of historic buildings at the top. Here you will be shown the Larkin
house, where dwelt the last American consul in California and in which
were hatched the plots which led up to the American occupation; the
picturesque home of the last Spanish governor of the Californias; Colton
Hall, in which the first constitutional convention assembled on the day
of California’s admission to the Union; the little one-roomed dwelling
that Sherman and Halleck occupied when they were stationed here as young
lieutenants and the other house where dwelt the beautiful señorita
whom Sherman loved long years before he won imperishable fame beneath
the eagles at Shiloh; and, by no means least in interest, the wretched
dwelling where that immortal genius Robert Louis Stevenson lodged for a
year or more, and the little restaurant where he took his meals, and the
green pathways which he wandered.
In the edge of the town stands the church of San Carlos, one of the
best preserved mission churches of California, whose sacristy contains
the most precious religious relics in the State; for here the priest in
charge will reverently show you Father Serra’s own chasuble, cope, and
dalmatics and the altar service of beaten silver which was brought out
for him from Spain. The _padre-presidente_ preferred Carmel over the
hill to all his other missions, however, and it was there, where the
Carmel River ripples down between the silent willows to its mother, the
sea, that he came back to die. There, beneath the altar of the ancient
mission, his ashes lie buried in the land which his labours transformed
from a savage wilderness to a vineyard of the Lord.
From Monterey you may motor or drive or street-car or foot it to Del
Monte, which is only a mile away. Whichever method you choose, I should
take the longest way around if I were you, so as to approach the hotel
through the glorious wild-wood by which it is enveloped. And after you
have twisted and turned for a mile or more through a wilderness of
bloom and foliage, like the children in the story-book in search of
the enchanted castle, and after you have concluded that you have lost
your way and are ready to abandon the quest, all unexpectedly you catch
a glimpse of its red-roofed towers and spires and gables rising above
the tree tops. Built in the Queen Anne style of thirty years ago, huge
and rambling and not unpicturesque, surrounded by acres of lawn and the
finest live-oaks I have ever seen, it bears a quite striking resemblance
to the Gezireh Palace—now a hostelry for tourists—which the Khedive
Ismail built on an island in the Nile. Del Monte suggests not one, but
many places, however. Its lawns and live-oaks, the perfection of which is
the result of more than a third of a century of care, in many respects
recall the famous country-seats of England, though the vegetation, of
course, is very different; the gardens, which offer a continual feast
of colour, remind one of Cintra, outside of Lisbon, while the cypress
maze is a duplicate of that at Hampton Court. The artificial lake,
surrounded by subtropical vegetation and approached by a palm-bordered
esplanade, has about it a suggestion of a Damascus garden that I know,
while from the golf-links—than which there are none better in the
West—looking across the tree tops to where the white houses of Monterey
overhang the bay, it is difficult to believe that you are not on the
hill behind Mustapha Superieur, looking down upon the white buildings
of Algiers. Although Del Monte is an enchanted garden at any time of
the year, the “high season” is in July and August, when the golfing,
polo-playing set flock down from Burlingame and San Mateo exactly as
the corresponding section of society on the other side of the continent
flocks to Newport and Bar Harbour. During these two months the polo field
resounds to the thunder of galloping hoofs and the click of mallet and
ball; the golf-links on the rolling downs above the sea are alive with
players taking part in the great midsummer tournament which is the most
important golfing fixture on the Pacific Coast; and in the evenings
white-shouldered women and white-shirted men dip and whirl and glide to
fervid music upon a glassy floor or stroll amid the gardens which the
light of the summer moon and the fragrance of the flowers transform into
a fairyland.
The logical way to follow El Camino Real is from south to north, as we
did, for that was the way of the _padres_; so it was quite natural that
our next stop after leaving Monterey and its Mission of Carmel should be
at the secluded and almost forgotten Mission of San Juan Bautista. San
Juan Bautista—Saint John the Baptist—is just such a lazy, sleepy, pretty
little hamlet as you can find at almost every turning of a Catalonian
road. Along its lanes—they are too narrow and straggling to be dignified
with the name of streets—stand quaint adobe houses smothered in jasmine
and passion-vine, hedged in by fences of prickly pear, and shaded by
cypress and untidy eucalyptus trees. Though the plaza up the hill, where
the Spanish soldiery, and after them the Mexican, used to parade and
where the _fiestas_ used to be held, is weed-grown and lonely, it is not
deserted, for the townsfolk still go flocking to mass in obedience to the
summons of the mission bells, and, thanks to the renaissance of the rural
districts caused by the ubiquitous motor-car, the dining-room of the
hotel, once the barracks of the Mexican garrison, is nearly always filled
with guests. Close by the hotel is the old adobe building which served as
the headquarters of General Castro, the Mexican commander, and back of
the town rises the hill known as the Hawk’s Nest, where Frémont and his
handful of American frontiersmen fortified themselves and defied Castro
and his soldiers to come and take them. San Juan Bautista is a place
where I could have loitered for a week instead of a day, for who, with a
spark of romance in his soul, could resist the appeal at the top of the
hotel note-paper: “A relic of the distant past, when men played billiards
on horseback and the trees bore human fruit”?
VII
THE VALLEY OF HEART’S DELIGHT
“He touched my eyes with gladness, with balm of morning dews,
On the topmost rim He set me, ’mong the hills of Santa Cruz,
And I saw the sunlit ocean sweep, I saw the vale below—
The Vale of Santa Clara in a sea of blossomed snow.”
VII
THE VALLEY OF HEART’S DELIGHT
I first heard about the place from the captain of a little coasting
steamer in the Indian Ocean. It was moonlight, I remember, and we were
leaning over the rail, watching the phosphorescent waves curl away from
the vessel’s bow. We had both seen more than our shares of the world
and we were exchanging opinions of what we had seen over the captain’s
Trichinopoli cheroots. Perhaps it was the effect of the moonlight on the
silent waters, but I am more inclined to think it was the brandy which
his silent-footed Swahili steward had just served us, which caused him to
grow confidential.
“A few more voyages and I’m going to quit the sea,” he remarked.
“Yes?” said I interrogatively. “And what will you do then? Get a berth as
harbour master at Shanghai or port captain at Suez or somewhere?”
“No,” said he, “I’m going to build a house for myself and the missis in
a valley that I know; a house painted white with green blinds and with a
porch as broad as a ship’s deck, and I’m going to have a fruit orchard
and a flower garden with red geraniums in it, and I’m going to raise
chickens—white Wyandottes, I think, but I’m not quite certain.”
“Of all things!” I ejaculated. “My imagination isn’t elastic enough for
me to picture an old sea-dog like you settled down in a white farmhouse
raising fruit and chickens. Where is all this going to be?”
“In the Santa Clara,” said he.
“It sounds like the name of a Pullman car or a tune in the hymn-book,”
said I.
“It’s neither,” said he; “it’s a valley in California.”
“Tell me about it,” I suggested.
“I can’t,” said he. “It’s too beautiful—in the spring the whole valley
is a sea of blossoms, like cherry season in Japan; and beyond are green
hillsides that might be those of Devonshire; and looming up back of the
hills are great brown-and-purple mountains that look like those at the
back of Cintra, in Portugal (that’s some place, too, believe _me_); and
there is always the smell of flowers in the air, such as you get in
Bulgaria in the attar-of-rose season; and I’ve never seen a sky as blue
anywhere else except in the Ægean; and——”
“That’s enough,” I interrupted. “That’s where I’m going next. Any place
that will make a hardened old sea captain become poetical must be worth
seeing.”
* * * * *
Months later, in Algiers, I found myself sitting at a small iron table on
a sun-bathed terrace overlooking the orange-and-olive-and-palm-fringed
shores of the Mediterranean. There are only five views to equal it in all
the world. As I sat gazing out across the waters toward France a fellow
countryman strolled up and dropped into the seat beside me. I knew that
he was an American by the width of his hat brim and because he didn’t
wait for an introduction.
“Fine morning,” I remarked pleasantly. “Wonderful view from this terrace,
isn’t it? And the sunshine is very warm and cheering.”
“Pretty fair,” he assented gloomily; “pretty fair for this place. But in
the part of the world I come from fine mornings and wonderful views and
sunshine are so darned common that it never occurs to us to mention them.”
“Where is your home, may I ask?” I inquired, for want of anything better
to say.
“In the Santa Clara Valley of California,” he answered proudly. “God’s
favourite country, sir! He took more pains with it than any place he ever
made, not even barring the original Eden. This is a very pleasing little
view, I admit; a very pleasing one, but I wish I could take you up on the
slopes of Mount Hamilton just before sunset and let you look across the
valley to Los Gatos when the prune orchards are in blossom. As for the
climate, why, say, my friend——”
“Yes, yes, I know,” I said soothingly, for when a man gets a lump in his
throat while talking about his native land it’s time to change the topic
of conversation. “I know; I’ve heard all about it before. Fact is, I’m on
my way there now.”
“You _are_?” he exclaimed incredulously, and, leaning back in his chair,
he clapped his hands until the Arab waiter came running. “Garsong,” said
he, “bring us a bottle of the best wine you’ve got.” When the amber
fluid was level with the rims we touched our glasses:
“It’s poor stuff compared with the wine we make in California,” he said,
“but it’ll do to drink a toast in.” He stood up, bareheaded and very
straight, as British officers do when they drink to the king.
“Friend,” said he, and his voice was husky, “here’s to God’s favourite
valley—here’s to the Santa Clara.”
* * * * *
If you go to the Santa Clara when I did, which was in March, when the
unfortunates who live beyond the Sierra Nevada are still waking up to
find ice in their water-pitchers, you will find that the people of the
valley are celebrating the Feast of the Blossoms. It is a very beautiful
festival, in which every man, woman, and child in this fifty-mile-long
garden of fruit and flowers takes part, but you cannot appreciate its
true significance until you have climbed to a point on the slopes of
the mountains which form the garden wall, where the whole enchanting
panorama lies before you. Did you ever see one hundred and twenty-five
square miles of trees in snow-white blossom at one time? No, of course
not, for nowhere else in all the world can such a sight be seen. I, who
have listened to the voice of spring on five continents and in more than
five-score countries, assure you that it is worth the seeing.
Personally, I shall always think of the Santa Clara as a sleeping maiden,
fragrant with perfume and intoxicatingly beautiful, lying in a carven
bed formed by the mountains of Santa Cruz, curtained by fleecy clouds,
her coverlet of eiderdown tinted with rose, quilted with green, edged
with yellow; her pillow the sun-kissed waters of San Francisco Bay. When
you come closer, however, you find that the coverlet which conceals her
gracious form is in reality an expanse of fragrant blossoms; that the
green tufts are the live-oaks which rise at intervals above the orchards
of cherry, peach, and prune; and that the yellow edging is the California
poppies which clothe the encircling hills.
Sentimentally and commercially it is fitting that the people of the
Santa Clara Valley should celebrate the coming of the blossoms, for they
are at once its chief beauty and its chief wealth. In a single season
these white and fragrant blossoms have provided the breakfast tables of
the world with one hundred and thirty million pounds of prunes, to say
nothing of those luscious pears, peaches, cherries, and apricots which
beckon temptingly from grocers’ windows and hotel buffets from Salt Lake
City around to Shanghai. No other single fruit of any region, not even
the fig of Smyrna, the date of Tunis, the olive of Spain, or the currant
of Greece, is so widely distributed as the prune of the Santa Clara
Valley. The people of the valley will assure you very earnestly that the
reason their wives and daughters have such lovely complexions is because
they make it a point to eat prunes every morning for breakfast. Whether
due to the prunes or not, I can vouch for the complexions.
Barring the coast of Tripolitania, where it is harvest time all the year
round, but where the Arabs are offering no inducements to settlers, and
the Imperial Valley, whose summer heat makes it undesirable as a place
of permanent residence, the Santa Clara Valley has more crops, through
more months of the year, than any place I know. Ceres makes her annual
appearance in February with artichokes—the ones that are priced at a
dollar a portion on the menus of New York’s fashionable hotels; in March
the people of the valley are having spring peas with their lamb chops;
April brings strawberries, although, as a matter of fact, they are to
be had almost every month of the year; in May the cherry pickers are at
work; the local churches hold peaches-and-cream sociables in June; by
the ides of July the valley roads are alive with teams hauling cases
of pears, plums, and apricots to the railway stations; August, being
the month of prunes, is marked with red on the Santa Clara calendars;
September finds the presses working overtime turning grapes into wine,
and the prohibitionists likewise working overtime trying to turn “wet”
communities into “dry” ones; in October the men are at work in the
orchards picking apples and the women are at work in the kitchens baking
apple pies; the huge English walnuts which wind up dinners half the
world around are harvested in November; while in December and January
the prodigal goddess interrupts her bounty just long enough to let the
fortunate worshippers at her shrine observe the midwinter holidays. After
such a recital it is almost needless to add that the valley boasts both
the largest fruit-drying houses and the largest fruit canneries in the
world, for in the Santa Clara they dry what they can and can what they
can’t.
The _chef-lieu_ of the valley is San José. It may interest Easterners to
know that Don Caspar de Portola and his men, marching up from the south
in their search for the lost Bay of Monterey, had looked down from the
valley’s mountain rim upon the spot where the city now stands four years
before the Boston Tea Party; while that indomitable Franciscan, Father
Junipero Serra, had established the great Mission San José, and was hard
at work Christianising and teaching the Indians of this region before
the ink was fairly dry on the Declaration of Independence and while the
three thousand miles of country which lies between the valley of the
Santa Clara and the valley of the Connecticut was still an unexplored
wilderness. The last time that the gentlemen with the census books
knocked at San José’s front doors they reported that the city had forty
thousand people, and it keeps agrowing and agrowing. It has about four
times as many stores as any place of its size that I can recall, but that
is because the local merchants depend on the trade of the rural rather
than the urban population, for the hardy frontiersmen who rough it in
this portion of the West run in to do their shopping by automobile or
trolley-car or else give their orders over the telephone. There are two
things about the city which I shall remember. One is the street-cars,
which have open decks forward and aft, with seats running along them
lengthwise, on which the passengers sit with their feet hanging over
the side, as though on an Irish jaunting-car. In pleasant weather the
display of ankles on the street-car makes them look, from the sidewalks,
like moving hosiery advertisements. The other municipal feature which
riveted my attention was a sort of attenuated Eiffel Tower, sliced off
about half-way up, which straddles the two main streets of the city at
their intersection, and from the top of which a powerful search-light
signals to the traveller on the valley highroads, to the shepherd on the
mountains, to the fisherman on San Francisco Bay: “Here is San José.”