Lake Tahoe and, historically as well as scenically, there is little to
choose between them. The Placerville route, though considerably the
longer, traverses the country immortalised by Bret Harte and inseparably
associated with the “Forty-Niners.” From Sacramento to Folsom the
highway follows the route of the first railroad built in California,
this jerk-water line, constructed in 1854 to take the miners in and
the gold-dust out, being the grandfather of those great systems which
now cover the State with a cobweb of steel. At Folsom, built on the
edge of a sheer cliff high above the waters of the American River, is
the stone-walled château where a thousand or more gentlemen who have
emerged second best from arguments with the law are dwelling in enforced
seclusion at the expense of the State. Placerville is the historic
“Hangtown” of early days, having gained its original name from the fact
that the sacredness of law and order was emphasised there in the good old
days by means of frequent entertainments known as “necktie parties,” the
hosts at these informal affairs being committees of indignant citizens.
At them the guest of honour made his positively last appearance. It
was here that “Wheelbarrow John” Studebaker, by sticking to his trade
of wheelwright instead of joining in the mad stampede to the diggings,
laid the foundation for that great concern whose vehicles are known
wherever there are roads for wheels to run on. At Coloma, not far from
Placerville, a heroic statue does honour to the memory of John Marshall,
the news of whose discovery of yellow sand in a mill-race brought fortune
seekers flocking Californiaward from every quarter of the globe. Though
fruit growing has long since succeeded mining as the chief industry of
this region, and though the buildings mentioned in the stories of Bret
Harte and Mark Twain have for the most part gone to wrack and ruin,
these towns of the “Mother Lode” still retain enough of their old-time
interest and picturesqueness so that it does not require a Bausch &
Lomb imagination to picture them as they were in the heyday of their
existence, when their streets and barrooms and dance halls were filled
with the flotsam and jetsam of all the earth: wanderers from dim and
distant ports, adventurers, seafarers, soldiers of misfortune, gamblers,
absconding bank clerks, farmers, unsuccessful merchants, out-at-elbows
professional men, men of uneasy conscience and women of easy virtue,
world without end.
When Congress put an end to hydraulic mining the mining men made an
outcry that rose to heaven. The prosperity of California was ended.
The State was going to the bow-wows. There was nothing but gloom and
disaster ahead. The companies that owned the water-rights along the
American River planted their properties to grape-vines and used their
hydraulic apparatus to water them with. But always they were tormented
with the knowledge that under the roots of the vines was gold, gold,
gold. Spurred on by this knowledge, there was devised a new process of
gold extraction; a process that not only did not deposit any débris in
the rivers but which proved to be far more profitable than the old.
Ground that had not yielded enough gold to pay for its being worked
was turned into “pay dirt” through the agency of the giant gold dredger
invented in New Zealand and later developed to its highest efficiency in
California. Picture to yourself a boulder-strewn field, covered with the
tailings of old mining operations, with here and there a pit as large
as the foundation for a sky-scraper made by the hydraulic miners. Each
successive layer of gravel in this field, straight down to bed-rock,
bears gold in small quantities—gold brought there ages ago by the waters
of the river. To extract this gold by the old methods was obviously as
unprofitable as it was illegal. So they tried the new method imported
from the gold-fields of New Zealand. It is not easy to explain the
workings of a modern gold dredger unless you have seen one. Go out into
the middle of a field and dig a pit—a pit large enough to contain a city
office-building. Run water into the pit until it becomes a mud-hole. Then
build in that mud-hole a great steel caisson of several thousand cubic
tons displacement. There you have the basis of the mammoth contrivances
which have supplanted the ’Forty-Niner’s pick and pan. Each of these
dredgers costs a quarter of a million dollars to build and labours night
and day. The business end of the dredger consists of an endless chain
of buckets, each of which weighs two tons when empty, which burrow down
into the mud-hole until they strike bed-rock. The gravel which they
bring up, after being saturated with water, is passed over quicksilver
tables which collect the gold, and runs out again at the bottom of the
pit, thus reversing the natural arrangement of the soil, the dirt
being left on the bottom and the gravel and cobbles on top. It costs
in the neighbourhood of seven thousand dollars a month to operate one
of these dredgers, but the resultant “clean-up” pays for this several
times over. Not only is the gold extracted from the earth as effectually
as a bartender squeezes the juice out of a lemon, but rock crushers
convert the mountains of cobbles into material for building highways
all over the surrounding region, and on the aerated and renovated soil
which the dredgers leave behind them any crop on earth will thrive. Thus
has mechanical genius succeeded in turning those hereditary enemies,
Agriculture and Mining, into coworkers and friends.
[Illustration: LAKE TAHOE FROM THE SLOPES OF THE HIGH SIERRAS.]
Because we wished to follow the route which the overland emigrants
had taken in their epoch-making march, we did not go to Tahoe through
Placerville, which is connected with Tallac, at the southern end of the
lake, by one of the finest motor highways in California, but chose the
more direct and equally good road which climbs over the Sierras by way
of Colfax, Dutch Flat, and Emigrant Gap. Upward and upward wound our
road, like a spiral stairway to the skies. One of the most characteristic
features of this Sierra region is that the traveller can see at a glance
the lay of the whole land. Nowhere else, so far as I am aware, not from
the Saint Bernard, or Ararat, or even from Darjeeling, can one command
such comprehensive views as are to be had from the rocky promontory
known as Cape Horn, or from Summit, which, as its name implies, is at
the top of the pass. At our feet, like a map spread out upon the ground
for our inspection, lay California. The dense forests which clothed the
upper slopes of the Sierras gave way to orchards of pear and apple, and
these changed to the citrus groves which flourish on the lower, balmier
levels, and the green of the orange zone ended abruptly in the yellow
of the grain-fields, and this merged into the checker-board of the
truck-gardens, and through these we could dimly descry the blue ribbon of
the Sacramento turning and twisting and doubling on its tortuous way to
the sea.
The summit of the pass is one hundred and five miles from Sacramento,
and in that distance we had ascended just seven thousand feet, or seven
hundred feet higher than Mount Washington, the highest peak east of the
Rockies. From Summit to Truckee is fourteen miles and we coasted all
the way, the rush of mountain air in our faces as we swept silently and
smoothly down the long diagonals recalling the sensation on the Cresta
Run at Saint Moritz. Swinging suddenly around a shoulder of the mountain
at the “Three Miles to Truckee” sign, we found ourselves looking down
upon a lake, a very gem of a lake, so scintillatingly blue amid the
encircling forest that it looked like a sapphire set in jade. So smiling
and pure and beautiful it was that it seemed impossible to associate it
with the ghastliest and most revolting incident in Californian history.
Yet this was Donner Lake and those who have heard the terrible tale of
the Donner party, for whom it was named, are not likely to forget it.
A party of some eighty emigrants—men, women, and children—making their
way to California by the Overland route, and delayed by an ill-advised
detour, reached the site of the present town of Truckee late in the
autumn of 1846. While attempting to cross the pass a blinding snow-storm
drove in upon them. The story of how the less robust members of the party
died, one by one, from starvation, and of how the survivors were forced
to eat the bodies of their dead comrades—Donner himself, it is claimed,
subsisted on the remains of his grandmother; of the “Forlorn Hope” and of
its desperate efforts to reach the settlements in the Sacramento Valley,
in which only seven out of the twenty-two who composed it succeeded; of
the successive relief expeditions sent out from Sutter’s Fort; and of the
final rescue in the spring of 1847 of the pitiful handful of survivors,
illustrates as nothing else can the incredible hardships and perils
encountered by the American pioneers in their winning of the West. A grim
touch of humour is lent to the tragedy by the fact that two Indians in
charge of some cattle which Sutter had sent to them were killed and eaten
by the starving emigrants, on the theory of the frontiersman, no doubt,
that the only good Indian is a dead one. The hospitable Sutter, in a
statement published some months later, complained most bitterly of this
ungrateful act, saying that they were welcome to the cattle but that they
were unjustified in depriving him of two perfectly good Indians.
Truckee still bears all the earmarks of a frontier town, for miners,
cow-punchers, and lumbermen, bearded to the eyes, booted to the knees,
and in several cases quite evidently loaded to the neck, lounged in the
shade of the wooden awnings and swapped stories and spat tobacco juice
as they waited for the train bringing the San Francisco papers to come
in; while rows of saddle ponies, heads drooping and reins trailing in
the dust, waited dejectedly at the edge of the raised wooden sidewalks
for their masters. From Truckee to Tahoe our way led through the Truckee
cañon, running for a dozen miles or more so close to the banks of the
sparkling, tumbling mountain river that we could have cast for the
rainbow-trout we saw in it without having to leave the car. Dusk fell,
and hard on its heels came its mother, the Dark, but still the yellow
road, turned by the twin beams of the headlights to silver now, wound
and turned and twisted interminably on, now swerving sharply as though
frightened by the ghostliness of a thicket of white birches, then
plunging confidently into the eerie darkness of a grove of fir-trees and
emerging, all unexpectedly, before a great, low, wide-spread building,
its many windows ablaze with lights and its long verandas outlined by
hundreds and hundreds of scarlet paper lanterns. A wave of fragrance and
music intermingled was wafted to us from where an orchestra was playing
dreamy music in the rose gardens above the lake, whose silent, sombre
waters reflected a luminous summer moon. Music and moonlight I have known
in many places—beneath the cypresses of Lago Maggiore, along the Canale
Grande, off the coasts of Africa, in the gardens of the Taj Mahal—but I
have never seen, nor do I ever expect to see, anything quite as beautiful
as that first night on Tahoe, when the paper lanterns quivered in the
night breeze, and the violins throbbed, oh, so softly, and the pale moon
shone down upon the snow-capped mountains and they in turn were reflected
dimly in the darkened waters of the lake.
IX
THE INLAND EMPIRE
“I watched the sun sink from the west,
I watched the sweet day die;
Above the dim Coast Range’s crest
I saw the red clouds lie;
I saw them lying golden deep,
By lingering sunbeams kissed,
Like isles of fairyland that sleep
In seas of amethyst.
...
“Then through the long night hours I lay
In baffled sleep’s travail,
And heard the outcast thieves in grey—
The gaunt coyotes—wail.
With seaward winds that wandering blew
I heard the wild geese cry,
I heard their grey wings beating through
The star-dust of the sky.
...
“Yet, with the last grim, solemn hour,
Stilled were the voices all,
And then, from poppied fields aflower,
Rang out the wild bird’s call;
The glad dawn, deep in white mists steeped,
Breathed on the day’s hushed lyre,
And far the dim Sierras leaped
In living waves of fire.”
IX
THE INLAND EMPIRE
Along in January, after the holiday festivities are over, and the
youngsters have gone back to school or college, and the Christmas
presents have been paid for, Mr. American Business Man and his wife, to
the number of many thousands, escape from the inclemency of an Eastern
winter by “taking a run out to the coast.” They usually choose one of the
southern routes—the trip being prefaced by an animated family discussion
as to whether they shall go via the Grand Cañon or New Orleans—getting
their first glimpse of the Golden State at San Diego. After taking
a shivery dip in the breakers at Coronado so as to be able to write
the folks back home that they have gone in bathing in midwinter, they
continue their leisurely progress northward by the _table-d’hôte_ route,
picking oranges at Riverside, taking the mountain railway up Mount Lowe
from Pasadena, stopping off at Santa Barbara to see the mission and the
homes of the millionaires at Montecito, playing golf and whirling round
the Seventeen Mile Drive at Del Monte, visiting Chinatown, the Cliff
House, and the Barbary Coast in San Francisco, and returning to the East
in the early spring via Salt Lake City or the “C. P. R.,” having, as
they fondly believe, seen pretty much everything in California worth the
seeing.
They turn their faces homeward utterly unconscious of the fact that
they have only skirted along the fringe of the State; that of the great
country at the back, which constitutes the real California, they have
seen absolutely nothing. To them Sacramento, Stockton, Merced, Fresno,
Bakersfield, Lake Tahoe, the San Joaquin, the Big Trees, the Yosemite,
the High Sierras are but names. They do not seem to appreciate, or it may
be that they do not care, that the narrow coast zone dedicated to the
amusement of the winter tourist is no more typical of California than
the Riviera is typical of France. Though it is true that the Californian
hinterland has no million-dollar “show places” and no huge hotels with
tourists in white shoes and straw hats taking tea upon their terraces,
it has other things which are more significant and more worth seeing.
The visitor to the back country can see the orchards which supply the
breakfast-tables of half the world with fruit and the vineyards which
supply the dinner-tables of the other half with grapes and wine and
raisins; he can see flocks of sheep so large that the hills on which they
are grazing seem to be covered with snow; he can see oil-fields which
produce enough petroleum to keep all the lamps in the world alight until
the crack of doom. And, if this is not sufficient inducement, he can
motor along the foot of the highest mountain range in America, he can
visit the most beautiful valley in all the world, he can picnic under
the biggest trees in existence. A country of big things: big distances,
big mountains, big trees, big ranches, big orchards, big crops, big pay,
big problems—that’s the hinterland of California.
Now, that you may the more easily follow me in what I have to say, I
will, with your permission, refer you to the map of the regions described
in this volume. (See end of book.)
The mountain systems, as you see, form a gigantic basin which comprises
about three fifths of the total area of the State. The eastern rim
of this basin is formed by the Sierra Nevada and the western rim by
the Coast Range, these two coming together at the northern end of
the basin in the great mountain wall which separates California from
Oregon, while to the south they sweep inward in the form of a gigantic
amphitheatre, being joined by a minor range known as the Tehachapis.
Reaching Mexicoward is the continuation of the Coast system known as
the San Bernardino Range, forming, as it were, a sort of handle to the
basin. The only natural entrance to the basin is the Golden Gate, through
which the two great river systems—the San Joaquin and Sacramento—reach
the sea. Lying between the Coast Range and the Pacific is that narrow
strip of pleasure land, with its orange groves, its silver beaches, its
great hotels and splendid country houses, which is the beginning and
end of California so far as the tourist is concerned. The northern part
of the great basin, which is drained by the Sacramento River, is called
the Sacramento Valley, while its southern two thirds, whose streams
run into the San Joaquin River, is commonly known as “the San Joaquin,”
the whole forming the Great Valley of California. “Valley” is, however,
a misnomer. One might as fittingly call Mount McKinley a hill, or Lake
Superior a pond. It is a plain rather than a valley; a plain upon whose
level reaches Belgium would be lost and Holland could be tucked away in
the corners. From the rampart of the Sierra Nevada on the east to the
wall of the Coast Range on the west the rich brown loam has an average
width of half a hundred miles. North and south it extends upward of
four hundred miles—as far as from Pittsburg to Chicago. What Rhodesia
is to South Africa, what its prairie provinces are to Canada, the Great
Valley, with its millions of incredibly fertile acres, level as a floor
and checker-boarded with alfalfa, fruit, and vine, is to California—the
storehouse of the State.
Before the railway builders came the Great Valley was one of the most
important cattle-ranges in the West, and hundreds of thousands of
longhorns grazed knee-deep in its lush grass. With the railway came the
homesteaders, who, despite the threats of the cattlemen, drove their
stakes and built their cabins and started to raise wheat. Then a dry
year came, and on top of that another, a heart-breaking succession of
them, and the ruined wheat growers sold out to the cattle barons. In
such manner grew up the big ranches—holdings ranging all the way from
ten thousand to half a million acres or more—a few of which still remain
intact. But a drought that will kill wheat will kill cattle, too, and
after one terrible year a hundred thousand horned skeletons lay bleaching
on the ranges. And so the cattlemen evacuated the valley in their turn
and their places were taken by the diggers of ditches. Now the Lord
evidently built the Great Valley to encourage irrigation. He filled it
with rich, alluvial loam, tilted it ever so slightly toward the centre,
brought innumerable streams from the mountains and glaciers down to the
edge of the plain, ordered the rain and the blizzard to stay away and
the sun to work overtime. All this he did for the Great Valley, and
the ditch did the rest—or, rather, the ditch allied to hard work, for
without sweat-beaded brows, calloused hands, aching backs, the ditch is
worthless. A social as well as an agricultural miracle was performed
by the watering of the thirsty land. The great ranches were subdivided
into farms and orchards. Settlers came pouring in. Communities of hardy,
industrious, energetic folk sprang up everywhere and these grew into
villages and the villages became towns and the towns expanded into
cities. School bells clanged their insistent summons to the youth of the
countryside, church spires pointed their slender fingers toward the sky,
highways stretched their length across the plain, and before this onset
of civilisation the moral code of the frontier crumbled and gave way. The
gun-fighter took French leave, the gambler silently decamped between two
days, and in many communities the saloon-keeper tacked a “For Sale” sign
on his door and took the north-bound train. Civilisation had come to the
Great Valley, not with the dust of hoofs or beat of train, but with the
gurgle of water in an irrigating ditch—and it had come to stay.
Of the effect produced by this spreading of the waters we saw many
evidences as we fled southward from Sacramento across the oak-studded
plain. Throwing wide the throttle, the car leaped forward like a live
thing. The oiled road slipped away from our wheels like an unwinding
bolt of grey silk ribbon. The grain-fields were wide, the houses few.
Constables there were none. Vineyards and orchards, trim rows of
vegetables, neatly fenced farms alternated with seas of barley undulating
in the wind. Such a country, however prosperous, offers little to detain
a motorist, and we went booming southward at a gait that made the
telegraph poles resemble the palings in a picket fence. Occasionally a
torpedo-shaped electric car, a monstrous thing in a dull, hot red, the
faces of its passengers grotesquely framed by the circular port-holes
which serve as windows, tore past us with the wail of a lost soul. Whence
it came or whither it went was a matter of small moment.
The factory whistles were raucously reminding the workers that it was
time to take the covers off their dinner pails when we swung into the
plaza of the city whose name perpetuates the memory of the admiral who
added California to the Union and drew up before the entrance of the
Hotel Stockton. If you should chance to go there, don’t let them persuade
you into lunching in the restaurant with its fumed oak wainscotting
and the Clydesdale furniture which appears to be inseparable from the
mission style of decoration, but insist on having a table set on the
roof-garden with its vine-hung pergola and its ramparts of red geraniums.
That was what we did, and the meal we had there, high above the city’s
bustle, became a white milestone on our highway of memories. Had it
not been for the advertisements of chewing-gum and plug tobacco which
stared at us from near-by hoardings, I would not have believed that we
were in the United States at all, so different was the scene from my
preconceived notions of the San Joaquin Valley. We might have been on the
terrace of that quaint old hotel—I forget the name of it—that overlooks
the Dam in Rotterdam. Stockton, you see, is at the head of navigation
on the San Joaquin River, and the hotel stands at the head of one of
the canal-like channels which permit of vessels tying up in the very
heart of the city, so that from the terrace on its roof you look down
on as animated and interesting a water scene as you will find anywhere:
pompous, self-important tugs, launches with engines spluttering like
angry washerwomen, stern-wheel passenger steamers, little sisters of
those upon the Mississippi, and cumbersome, slow-moving barges, their
flat decks piled high with bagged or barrelled products of the valley on
their way to San Francisco Harbour, there to be transshipped for strange
and far-off ports.
As a result of the Powers That Be at Washington having recently had a
change of heart in respect to motor-cars entering the Yosemite, every
valley town between Stockton and Visalia has announced itself as the one
and only “official gateway to the valley,” and has backed up its claims
with tons of maps and literature. As a matter of fact, the Department of
the Interior has announced that motorists desiring to visit the Yosemite
must enter and leave it by the Coulterville road, and this road can be
reached from any one of half a dozen valley towns with equal facility.
Coming, as we did, from the north, the most convenient route led through
Modesto. As a result of the sudden prosperity produced by a modern
version of the Miracle of Moses, water having been brought forth where
there was no water before by a prophet’s rod in the form of an irrigating
ditch, the little town is as up to date as a girl just back from Paris.
Its lawns and gardens have been Peter-Hendersonised until they look like
the illustrations in a seedsman’s catalogue; the architecture of its
schools and public buildings is so faithful an adaptation of the Spanish
mission style that they would deceive old Padre Serra himself; and its
roads would do credit to the genius of J. MacAdam.