the servant-girl gets up to go to early mass you should, even allowing
for the five-thousand-foot climb, reach Crocker’s Sierra Resort, which
is the nearest stopping place to that entrance of the Yosemite assigned
to motorists, before the supper table is cleared off. It is necessary to
spend the night at Crocker’s, as the government regulations, which are
far more inflexible than the Ten Commandments, permit motorists to enter
the valley only between the hours of ten and one. Leaving Crocker’s at
a much more respectable hour than we did Modesto, we reached the first
military outpost at Merced Big Tree Grove shortly before ten, where a
very businesslike young cavalry officer put me through a catechism which
made me feel like an immigrant applying for admission at Ellis Island.
If your answers to the lieutenant’s questions correspond to those in the
back of the book and your car is able to do the tricks required of it—to
test the holding power of its brakes you are ordered to take a running
start and then throw the brakes on so suddenly that the wheels skid—you
are permitted the pleasure of paying five dollars for the privilege of
entering the jealously guarded portals. They stamp your permit with the
hour and minute at which you leave the big trees, and if you arrive at
the next military post, which is nine miles distant, at the foot of
the Merced River Cañon, in a single second under an hour and seventeen
minutes you are fined so heavily that you won’t enjoy your visit. I
remember that we sneered at these regulations as being unnecessary and
absurd—but that was before we had seen the Merced Cañon grade. As my
chauffeur remarked, it is a real hum-dinger. It is nothing more or less
than a narrow shelf chopped out of the face of the cliff.
“I wonder if those soldiers were quite as careful in examining our brakes
as they should have been?” anxiously remarked one of my companions,
glancing over the side of the car into the dizzy gorge below and then
looking hurriedly away again.
“Oh, there are some perfectly lovely wild flowers!” suddenly exclaimed
the Lady, who had been choking the life out of the cushions. “If you
don’t mind I’ll get out and pick them ... and please don’t wait for
me, I’ll walk the rest of the way down. Yes, indeed, I’m very fond of
walking.”
It is only fair to warn those who propose to follow in our tire
tracks that, entering the Yosemite by automobile, you do not get one
of those sudden and overwhelming views which cause the beholder to
“O-o-o-oh-h-h-h-h!” and “A-a-a-ah-h-h-h-h!” like the exhaust of a
steam-engine. On the contrary, you sneak into the famous valley very
unostentatiously indeed, along a winding wood road which might be in New
England. Nor are you permitted to tear about the floor of the valley
whither you list, for no sooner do you reach the Sentinel Hotel than a
khaki-clad trooper steps up and orders you to put your car in the garage
and keep it there until you are ready to leave.
The Yosemite is not, properly speaking, a valley. That word suggests a
gentle depression with sloping sides, a sort of hollow in the hills,
which have been moulded by the fingers of ages into flowing and
complaisant lines. The Yosemite is nothing of the sort. It is a great
cleft or chasm, hemmed in by rocky walls as steep as the prices at a
summer hotel and as smooth as the manners of a confidence man. It is
the exact reverse of that formation so characteristic of the Southwest
known as a mesa: it is a precipice-walled plain. One might imagine it
to be the work of some exasperated Titan who, peeved at finding the
barrier of the Sierras in his path, had driven his spade deep into the
ridge of the range and then moved it back and forth, as a gardener does
in setting out a plant, leaving a gash in the mountains eight miles
long and a mile deep. When flocks of wild geese light in the Yosemite,
so John Muir tells us, they have hard work to find their way out again,
for, no matter in which direction they turn, they are soon stopped by the
wall, the height of which they seem to have an insuperable difficulty in
gauging. They must feel very much like a fish in an aquarium which is for
ever battering its nose against the glass walls of its tank. The wall
looks to be only about so high, but when they should be far over its top,
northward or southward according to the season, back they find themselves
once more, beating against its stony face, and it is only when, in their
bewilderment, they chance to follow the downward course of the river,
that they hit upon an exit.
Standing in the centre of the valley floor, on the banks of the winding
Merced, is the Sentinel Hotel, which, barring several camps, is the only
hostelry in the valley. It is a cosy, homelike, old-fashioned place,
the fashion in which the rooms open onto the broad verandas which run
entirely around both the lower and the upper stories recalling the
old-time taverns of the South. As there are neither dance pavilions
nor moving-picture houses in the Yosemite, the young women employed as
waitresses at the Sentinel Hotel frequently find their unoccupied time
hanging heavy on their hands, this tedium occasionally leading them
into exploits calculated to make the hair of the observer permanently
pompadour. One of these girls, a slender, willowy creature, anxious to
outdare her companions, climbed to Glacier Point and on the insecure
and scanty foothold afforded by the Overhanging Rock, which juts from
the face of the sheer cliff, three thousand two hundred feet above the
valley floor, proceeded to dance the tango! Evidently feeling that this
exhibition, which had sent chills of apprehension up the spines of the
beholders, was too tame, she balanced herself on one foot on the ledge’s
very brink and extended the other, like a _première danseuse_, over three
fifths of a mile of emptiness.
An unobtrusive but interesting feature of the Yosemite which may well
escape the notice of the casual tourist is the little settlement of
Indians, who dwell in a collection of wretched shacks at the base of the
valley’s northern wall. Like all the California Indians, this remnant
of the Yosemite tribe are entirely lacking in the picturesqueness of
dress and bearing which characterises their kinsmen of the Southwest.
Their presence in the Yosemite possesses, however, a certain romantic
interest, for, had it not been for them, it may well be that the famous
valley would still remain unfound. Their story is an interesting and
pathetic one. As a result of the injustices and outrages committed
upon the peaceful Californian Indians by the settlers who came flocking
into the State upon the discovery of gold, the tribes were driven to
revolt, and in 1851 the government found itself with a “little war” upon
its hands. The trouble ended, of course, by the complete subjugation
of the Indians, who were transferred from their hereditary homes to a
reservation near Fresno. The Yosemites proved less tractable than the
other tribes, however, and, instead of coming in and surrendering to
the palefaces, they retreated to their fastnesses in the High Sierras,
and it was while pursuing them that a troop of cavalry discovered the
enchanted valley which bears their name. They were captured and carried
to Fresno, but the humid climate of the lowlands wrought such havoc among
these mountain-bred folk that the survivors petitioned the government for
permission to return to their old home. Their petition was granted, and
during the half century which has passed since their return to the valley
which was the cradle of their race they have never molested the white man
and have supported themselves by such work as the valley affords and by
basket weaving.
[Illustration: THE YOSEMITE—AND A LADY WHO DIDN’T KNOW FEAR.
“She balanced herself on one foot on the ledge’s very brink and extended
the other, like a _première danseuse_, over three fifths of a mile of
emptiness.”]
It was quite by chance that I stumbled upon these copper-coloured
stragglers from another era. While riding one afternoon along the foot
of the sheer precipice which hems the valley in, my eye was caught by
three strange objects standing in a row. They resembled—as much as they
resembled anything—West African voodoo priests in the thatched garments
which they wear on ceremonial occasions. Upon questioning the Indian
woman who appeared, however, I elicited the information that they were
_chuck-ahs_, and were built to store acorns in. The Yosemite _chuck-ah_
looks like a huge edition of the hampers they use in the lavatories
of hotels to throw soiled towels in, thatched with fir branches and
twigs, covered with a square of canvas to shed the rain, and mounted on
stilts so as to place its contents beyond the reach of rodents. As the
Yosemites, who are bitterly poor, largely subsist upon a coarse bread
made from meal produced by pounding the bitter acorn, the _chuck-ah_ is
as essential to their scheme of household economy as a flour barrel is to
ours. The copper-coloured lady who painstakingly explained all this to
me in very disconnected English told me that her name was Wilson’s Lucy.
Whether she was married to Wilson or whether she was merely attached,
like her name, I did not inquire. Flattered by my obvious interest in her
domestic affairs, she disappeared into the miserable hut which served as
home, to reappear an instant later carrying what at first glance I took
for a small-sized mummy, but which, upon closer inspection, proved to be
a very black-haired, very bright-eyed, very lusty youngster, bound to
a board from chin to ankle with linen bandages which served the double
purpose of making him straight of body and keeping him out of mischief.
“What’s his name?” I inquired, proffering a piece of silver.
“My name Wilson’s Lucy,” the mother giggled proudly. “He name Woodrow
Wilson.”
So, should the President see fit to present a silver spoon to his
copper-coloured namesake, he can address it care of Yosemite Valley
Post-Office, California.
[Illustration: In midwinter, when the Yosemite is deep in snow, skis
and sledges provide the only means of giving the baby an airing.
“What’s his name?” I inquired. The mother giggled proudly: “He name
Woodrow Wilson.”
YOSEMITE YOUNGSTERS, WHITE AND RED.]
* * * * *
Of the Yosemite, Herr Karl Baedeker, to whose red guide-books every
travelling American clings as tenaciously as to his letter of credit,
and whose opinions he accepts as unreservedly as a Mohammedan accepts
the Koran, has said: “No single valley in Switzerland combines in so
limited a space such a wonderful variety of grand and romantic scenery.”
Aside from its unique scenic beauties, the chief attraction of the
Yosemite, to my way of thinking, is the altogether unusual variety of
recreation which it affords. Excursions afoot, ahorseback, or acarriage
to a dozen points of charm in the valley and its environs; trail rides
along the dizzy paths which the government has built to skirt the cañon’s
rim; fishing in the icy mountain streams, in whose shaded pools half a
dozen varieties of trout—Steelheads, Speckled, Brook, Rainbow, Dolly
Varden, and others—await the fly; _al fresco_ luncheons in the leafy
recesses of the Happy Isles, with the pine-carpeted earth for a seat, a
moss-covered boulder for a table, and the mingled murmur of waterfalls
and wind-stirred tree tops for music; it is days spent in such fashion
which makes of a visit to the Yosemite an unforgettable memory.
A half-day’s journey south by stage from the Yosemite brings one to
the lovely Sierran meadow of Wawona, above which are marshalled that
glorious company of Sequoias known as the Mariposa Big Tree Grove. Just
as Ireland has its lakes, and Switzerland its mountains, and Norway its
fiords, so California has its Sequoias, and in many respects they are
the most wonderful of all. The Big Trees, as they are called, are of
two _genera_: the _Sequoia gigantea_, found only in the lower ranges of
the high Sierras, and the _Sequoia sempervirens_, which are peculiar to
the region lying between the Coast Range and the sea. There is no more
fascinating trip on the continent than that from the Yosemite to the Big
Trees of Mariposa, the road, which in the course of a few miles attains
an elevation of six thousand five hundred feet, commanding magnificent
retrospects of the Bridal Veil Falls, El Capitan, Cathedral Spires, and
Half Dome, then plunging into the depths of a forest of cedar, fir,
and pine, crossing the south fork of the brawling Merced, passing the
hospitable verandas of the Wawona Hotel, and ending under the shadow of
the redwood giants, traversing, en route, a tunnel cut through the heart
of a living Sequoia. In their exploitation of the Big Tree groves, the
railway companies have had the rather questionable taste to advertise
these monarchs of the forest by means of pictures showing six-horse
coaches being driven through them, or troops of cavalry aligned upon
their prostrate trunks, or good-looking young women on horseback giving
equestrian exhibitions upon their stumps. To me this sort of thing
smacks too much of the professional showman; it is like making a Bengal
tiger jump through a paper hoop or a lion sit up on his hind legs and
beg like a trick dog. The Sequoias are too magnificent, too awesome to
thus cheapen. When once you have stood in their solemn presence and have
attempted to follow with your eye the course of the great trunks soaring
skyward, higher than the Flatiron Building in New York, half again the
height of the shaft on Bunker Hill; when you have made the circuit of
their massive trunks, equal in circumference to the spires of Notre
Dame; when you have examined their bark, thicker than the armour of the
dreadnought _Texas_; you will agree with me, I think, that the Big Trees
of California need no circus performances to emphasise their proportions
and their majesty.
According to the rules promulgated by the government, motorists are
permitted to leave the Yosemite only between the hours of six and
seven-thirty in the morning. After I had crawled out of a warm bed into
the shiveryness of a Sierran dawn—for the early mornings are bitterly
cold in the High Sierras—I felt inclined to agree with Madame de
Pompadour that “travelling is the saddest of all pleasures.” But when we
were sandwiched in the tonneau of the car again, with the long and trying
grade by which we had entered the valley safely behind us and the river
road to Merced stretching out in long diagonals in front, we soon forgot
the discomforts of the early rising, for the big car leaped forward like
a spirited horse turned loose upon the countryside, and the crisp, clear
air dashed itself into our faces until we felt as buoyant and exhilarated
as though we had been drinking champagne. After “checking out” at the
Big Tree military outpost, we turned down the road which leads through
Coulterville to Merced, the walls of the cañon gradually becoming less
precipitous and the rugged character of the country merging into orchards
and these in turn to farms and vineyards as we debouched into the San
Joaquin again.
Leaving Merced in the golden haze behind us, we swung southward, through
the land of port wine and sherry, to Madera, the birthplace of the
American raisin, and so down the splendid Kearney Boulevard—fifteen miles
of oiled delight running between hedges of palms and oleanders—to Fresno,
the geographical centre of California and the home of the American raisin
and sweet-wine industry, which in little more than a dozen years has
elbowed Spain out of first place among the raisin growers of the world
and has caused ten thousand homes to spring up out on the sandy plain.
Unleashing the power beneath the throbbing bonnet, we tore southward and
ever southward, at first through growing grain-fields and then across
vast barren stretches, waiting patiently for reclamation. Draped along
the scalloped base of the moleskin-coloured foot-hills, where they rise
abruptly from the plain, was a bright green ribbon—the citrus belt of the
San Joaquin, where the orange groves nestle in the sheltered coves formed
by the Sierras’ projecting spurs. In the region lying between Visalia
and Porterville frost is an almost negligible quantity and, as a result,
it is threatening the supremacy of the Riverside-Pasadena district as a
producer of the golden fruit.
Visalia is the starting-point for the Sequoia and General Grant Big Tree
Groves, which have recently been opened to automobilists. The route to
the Sequoia Park lies through Lemon Cove and then over a moderately good
road, extremely dusty in summer, to Rocky Gulch, on the Giant Forest
Road, where the motorist is halted by a cavalry patrol and the customary
five-dollar admittance fee to national parks exacted. From Visalia to
Camp Sierra, in the heart of the Sequoia, is fifty-five miles, to cover
which, allowing for the mountain grades, the indifferent condition of
the roads, and the delay at the park boundary, will require a full
half day. The monarch of the Sequoia Grove is the redwood known as
“General Sherman,” two hundred and eighty feet in height and ninety-five
feet in circumference. Taking height and girth together, the “General
Sherman” is, I believe, the largest tree in the world, though in the
little-visited Calaveras Grove, the northernmost of the Californian
groups of big trees, the “Mother of the Forest” is three hundred and
fifteen feet high and the prostrate “Father of the Forest” is one hundred
and twelve feet in circumference. If, however, the size of a tree is
gauged by its girth only, there are several trees larger than any of the
Californian Sequoias—the gigantic cypress near Oaxaca, in Mexico, known
as the “Great Tree of Tule,” whose trunk measures one hundred and sixty
feet in circumference but whose height is barely more; the great banyan
in the botanical garden at Calcutta, and the “Chestnut Tree of a Hundred
Horses”—said to be the largest tree in the world—at the foot of Mount
Etna. I do not know whether these bald figures convey anything to you,
but they certainly do not to me and I am not going to burden you with
more of them. I have done my duty in giving you the dimensions of the
largest of the Sequoias, which, I might add, is almost the exact height
of the Flatiron Building. A vast deal of nonsense has been written about
the age and other features of the Californian redwoods. It is not enough
for the visitor to learn that the oldest Sequoia was probably a sapling
when Rameses drove the Israelites out of Egypt, but the guide must needs
draw upon his imagination and add another six or seven thousand years on
top of that. The Sequoia, the noblest living thing upon our continent
to-day, would appear, even at the age of five-and-twenty centuries, to
be capable of much added lustre, for I was gravely assured that it was
probably from these very groves that Solomon obtained the pillars for his
temple.
It is in the neighbourhood of fourscore miles from Visalia to the delta
of the Kern, most southerly of the Sierra’s golden streams, along whose
banks rise the gaunt, black skeletons of the oil-derricks. So vast is
the extent of the Great Valley of California that, though it contains
the greatest petroleum fields in all the world, the traveller may
zigzag through it for many days without seeing a sign of the industry
which lights the lamps and provides the motive power for trains, boats,
and motor-cars from the Straits of Behring to the Straits of Magellan.
It is not an attractive region. Hungry and bare are the tawny hills,
viscous the waters of the stream that meanders between them, weird and
gibbet-like the forest of derricks which crowns them. There is a smell
of coal-oil in the air, and the few habitations we passed were, by their
very ugliness, obviously connected with this, the unloveliest of the
earth’s products.
Bakersfield marks the virtual end of the Great Valley, a few miles south
of it the converging ranges of fawn-coloured plush being linked by the
Tehachapi, which is the recognised boundary between central and southern
California. Bakersfield owes its abounding prosperity to the adjacent
oil-fields, its streets being lined by the florid residences and its
highways resounding to the arrogant _honk honk_ of the high-powered
motor-cars of the “oil barons,” as the men who have “struck oil” are
termed. I like these oil barons because with their loud voices and their
boisterous manners and the picturesqueness of their dress they typify a
phase of life in the “Last West” which is rapidly disappearing. There
is something rough-and-ready and romantic about them; something which
recalls their get-rich-quick fellows in Dawson and Johannesburg and Baku.
Most of them have acquired their wealth suddenly; most of them have
worked up from the humblest beginnings; and most of them believe in the
good old proverb of “Easy come, easy go—for there’s more where this came
from.” Red-faced, loud-voiced, with a predilection for broad-brimmed hats
and gaudy ties, you can see them playing poker for high stakes in the
back rooms of the saloons or leaning over the hotel bars in boisterous
conversation. After I had watched them for a time I no longer doubted
the assertion that Bakersfield buys more spittoons than any city in the
country.
Although from the gilded cupola of Bakersfield’s truly beautiful
court-house you can look out across a quarter of a million irrigated
acres, though you can see a solid block of alfalfa covering forty squares
miles and fattening twenty-five thousand head of steers a year, these
form but a patch of green on the yellow floor of the valley’s gigantic
amphitheatre. As a matter of fact, the development of the country around
Bakersfield has been seriously retarded by the enormous holdings of two
or three great landowners who neither improve their properties nor sell
them. One of these great landlords, who numbers his Californian acres
alone in the millions and who boasts that his cow-punchers can drive
a herd of his steers from the Mexican frontier to the Oregon line and
camp on his own land every night, obtained his enormous holdings near
Bakersfield long years ago under the terms of the Swamp and Drowned Lands
Act, which provided that any one who applied could obtain title to any
land which he had gone over in a boat. So he put a boat on a wagon and
had it hauled over hundreds of thousands of acres which he has since
reclaimed. He was an ingenious fellow.
[Illustration: A “gusher” near Bakersfield spouting two and a half
million gallons of oil a day.
The Kern River oil fields, near Bakersfield, Cal.
THE GREATEST OIL FIELDS IN THE WORLD.]
You will need to journey far to find a region more desolate and
forbidding than that lying between Bakersfield and the summit of the
Tehachapi. Never shall I forget the deadly monotony of that long,
straight road along which we pushed in the teeth of a buffeting wind,
with its whistling telegraph-poles, its creaking iron windmills at
regular intervals, and its barbed-wire fences all converging to a
vanishing-point which looked to be perhaps five miles ahead but at which
we never seemed to arrive. There are no trees to obstruct the view of
the barren hills which rim the distance, and for many miles there is not
enough cover to hide a grasshopper, for the soil is poisoned by alkalis
and the poor, thin grass dies of a broken heart. But as the car panted
its tortuous way from the floor of the valley up the face of the mountain
wall which hems it in, the scenery became more varied and interesting.
Great patches of the mountainside were clothed with masses of lupin of
the coldest, brightest blue you ever saw. Once we ran through a forest
of tree yuccas whose spiked, fantastic branches looked as though they
were laden with hedgehogs. Sometimes the road would dip quite suddenly
into a charming little hollow in the hills, shaded by venerable live-oaks
and with a purling brook running through it, only to emerge again and
zigzag along the face of the mountain, clinging to the bare rock as a
fly clings to the ceiling. Several times we had to stop for flocks of
sheep—thousands and thousands of them—moving to pastures new, driven
by shaggy, bright-eyed sheep-dogs which hung upon the flanks of the
flock and seemed to anticipate every order of the Basque shepherds. I
noticed that all these herdsmen wore heavy revolvers at their hips and
had Winchesters slung at the pommels of their saddles, for the ancient
feud between cattlemen and sheepmen still exists upon these Sierran
ranges, and there is many a pitched battle between them of which no news
creeps into the columns of the papers. The frequency of these flocks
considerably delayed our progress, for the road is narrow and to have
driven through the woolly wave which at times engulfed the car would have
meant driving scores of sheep over the precipice to death on the rocks
below.
[Illustration: “We ran through a forest of tree-yuccas whose spiked,
fantastic branches looked as though they were laden with hedgehogs.”
“Our progress was frequently delayed by woolly waves which at times
engulfed the car.”
OVER THE TEHACHAPIS.]