was almost startling in its suddenness. Gone were the dreary, wind-swept
plains; gone was the endless vista of telegraph-poles; gone the dun and
desolate hills. We found ourselves, instead, at the entrance to a valley
which might well have been the place of exile of Persephone. Symmetrical
squares of bay-green oranges, of soft gray olives and of yellowing vines
turned its slopes into chessboards of striking verdure. Rows of tall,
straight eucalyptus trees made of the highway a tunnel of blue-green
foliage. The mountains, from foot to summit, were clothed with lupins of
a blue that dulled the blue of heaven. The oleanders and magnolias and
palms and clumps of bamboo about the ranches gave to the scene an almost
tropical luxuriance. This was the vale of Santa Clara—not to be confused
with the valley of the same name farther north—perhaps the richest and
most prosperous agricultural region for its size between the oceans and
certainly the least advertised and the least known. Unlike the residents
of other parts of California, its residents issue no enticing literature
depicting the surpassing beauties and attractions of their valley as
a place of residence, for the very good reason that they do not care
to sell, unless at prohibitive prices. They have a good thing and they
intend to keep it. Less than twoscore miles in length, the Santa Clara
Valley, which begins at Saugus and runs westward to Ventura-by-the-Sea,
comes nearer to being frostless than any region in the State, save only
the Imperial Valley. But its industries are by no means restricted to
the cultivation of citrus fruits, for the walnuts it produces are finer
than those of England, its figs are larger than those of Smyrna, and its
olives more succulent than those grown on the hills of Greece.
As with engines droning like giant bumblebees we sped down the
eucalyptus-bordered highway which leads to Santa Paula, the valley was
flooded with the rare beauty of the fleeting twilight of the West. The
sky, a moment before a dome of lapis lazuli, merged into that exquisite
ashes-of-roses tint which is the foremost precursor of the dark, and
then burst, all unexpectedly, into a splendid fiery glow which turned
the western heavens into a sheet of rosy coral. But, like most really
beautiful things, the Californian sunsets are quick to perish. A few
moments only and the rose had dulled to palest lavender and this to
amethyst and this in turn to purple and then, at one bound, came the
night, and our head lamps were boring twin holes in the velvety,
flower-scented darkness. Before us the street lights of Santa Paula burst
into flame like a diamond necklace clasped about the neck of a lovely
woman.
* * * * *
The region of which Lake Tahoe is the centre is difficult to describe;
one is drawn illusively into over-praising it. Yet everything about
it—the height of the surrounding mountains, the vastness of the forests,
the size of the trees, the beauty of the wild flowers, the grandeur of
the scenery, the colourings of the lake itself—is so superlative that,
to describe it as it really is, one must, perforce, lay himself open to
the charge of exaggeration. There is no lake in Switzerland or, for that
matter, anywhere else in Europe which is Tahoe’s equal. To find its peer
you will need to go to Lake Louise, in the Canadian Rockies, or, better
still, to some of the mountain lakes of Kashmir. Here, set down on the
very ridge-pole of the High Sierras, is a lake twenty-two miles long by
ten in width, the innumerable pleasure craft whose propellers churn its
translucent waters into opaline and amaranthine hues being nearly a mile
and a quarter above the surface of the Pacific. To attempt to describe
its ever-changing and elusive colourings is as futile as to describe
the colours of a sunset sky, of a peacock’s tail, of an opal. Looked at
from one point, it is blue—the blue of an Ægean sky, of a baby’s eyes,
of a turquoise or of a sapphire—but an hour later, or from another
angle, it will be green: a gorgeous, glorious, dazzling green, sometimes
scintillating like an emerald of incredible size, sometimes lustreless
as a piece of jade. In the bays and coves and inlets which corrugate its
shores its waters become even more diverse in colouring: smoke grey,
pearl grey, bottle green, Nile green, yes, even apple green, lavender,
amethyst, violet, purple, indigo, and—believe me or not, as you choose—I
have more than once seen Tahoe so rosy in the reflected _alpenglow_ of
twilight that it looked for all the world like a sheet of pinkest coral.
Its shores are as diverse as its colourings, pebbly beaches alternating
with emerald bays; pine-crowned promontories; snug coves on whose silver
beaches bathers disport themselves and children gambol; moss-carpeted
banks shaded by centenarian trees; cliffs, smooth as the side of a house,
rising a thousand feet sheer above the water; and, here and there, deep
and narrow inlets so hemmed in by vertical precipices of rock that to
find their like you would have to go to the Norwegian fiords. Completely
encircling the lake, like watchful sentinels, rise the snow peaks—not
the domesticated mountains of the Adirondacks or the Alleghenies, but
towering monsters, ten, twelve, fifteen, thousand feet in height and
white-mantled throughout the year—the monarchs of the High Sierras.
From the snow-line, which is generally about two thousand feet above the
surface of the lake and ten thousand feet above the level of the sea,
the coniferous Sierran forests—the grandest and most beautiful in the
world—clothe the lower slopes of the mountains in mantles of shaggy green
which sweep downward until their hems are wet in the waters of the lake.
One of the most distinguishing and pleasing characteristics of these
Sierran forests is their inviting openness. The trees of all the species
stand more or less apart in groves or in small, irregular groups,
enabling a rider to make his way almost anywhere, along sun-bathed
colonnades and through lush, green glades, sprinkled with wild flowers
and as smooth as the lawns of a city park. Now you cross a forest garden
ariot with wild flowers, now a mountain meadow, now a fern-banked,
willow-shaded stream, and ever and anon emerge upon some granite pavement
or high, bare ridge commanding superb views of majestic snow-peaks rising
grandly above the intervening sea of evergreen. Every now and then you
stumble upon mountain lakes tucked away in the most unexpected places,
gleaming amid the surrounding forest like sapphires which a jeweller
has laid out for inspection upon a green plush cloth. The whole number
of lakes in the Sierras is said to be upward of fifteen hundred, not
counting the innumerable smaller pools and tarns. Another feature of the
High Sierras are the glacier meadows: smooth, level, silky lawns, lying
embedded in the upper forests, on the floors of the valleys, and along
the broad backs of the ridges at a height of from eight to ten thousand
feet above the sea. These mountain meadows are nearly as level as the
lakes whose places they have taken and present a dry, even surface, free
from boulders, bogs, and weeds. As one suddenly emerges from the solemn
twilight of the forest into one of these dreamy, sunlit glades, he looks
instinctively for the dainty figures of Watteau shepherdesses or for the
slender forms of sportive nymphs. The close, fine sod is so brightly
enamelled with flowers and butterflies that it may well be called a
meadow garden, for in many places the plushy turf is so thickly strewn
with gentians, daisies, ivesias, forget-me-nots, wild honeysuckle, and
paint-brush that the grass can scarcely be seen.
In certain of these mountain meadows I noticed a phenomenon which I
have observed nowhere else save in Morocco: the flowers, instead of
being mixed and mingled in a huge bouquet, grew in distinct but adjacent
patches—a square of blue forget-me-nots here, a blanket of white daisies
there, a strip of Indian paint-brush over there, and beyond a dense clump
of wild lilac—so that from a little distance the meadow looked exactly
like a great floral mosaic. It was very beautiful. On the higher slopes
the scarlet shoots of the snow-plant dart from the soil like tongues
of flame. Around it hangs a pretty native legend. Two young braves,
so the legend runs, made desperate love to an Indian princess, who at
length chose the one and turned away the other. On the marriage day
the rejected lover ambushed himself in the forest, and, as his rival
went riding past to claim his bride, sent an arrow twanging into his
breast. But, though wounded unto death, the lover clung to his horse and
raced through the forest to die in the arms of his bride. As he sped his
heart’s blood, welling forth, left a trail of crimson splotches on the
ground behind him. And wherever a drop of blood fell, there a blood-red
flower sprang into bloom. If you doubt the story you can see and pick
them for yourself.
Set high on the western shore of Tahoe, and so appropriately designed
that it seems to be a part of the forest which encircles it, is Tahoe
Tavern—a long, low hostelry of shingles, stone, and logs, its deep
verandas commanding an entrancing view of the lake and of the mountainous
Nevada shore, for the California-Nevada boundary runs down the middle
of the lake. Just as the smart set along the Atlantic seaboard flock
to Newport, Narragansett, and Bar Harbour in the summer, so the
corresponding section of society upon the Pacific Coast may be found at
Tahoe from July to September. A narrow-gauge railway, leaving the main
line of the Southern Pacific at Truckee, two hundred miles or so east of
San Francisco, hugs the brawling Truckee to the Tavern, a distance of a
dozen miles, whence steamers convey the visitor to the numerous hotels,
camps, and cottages which dot the shores of the lake. The summers are
never warm on Tahoe, nor, for that matter, ever uncomfortably cool,
while the air is as crisp and invigorating as extra-dry champagne. From
the first of July to the first of October it almost never rains. And yet
ninety-nine Easterners out of a hundred pity the poor Californians who,
they imagine, are sweltering in semitropic heat.
One never lacks for amusement at Tahoe. Lean power-boats tear madly from
shore to shore, their knife-like prows ploughing the lake into a creamy
furrow. Hydroplanes hurtle by like leaping tunas. There is angling both
in Tahoe and the maze of adjacent lakes and lakelets for every variety
of trout that swims. There is bathing—if one doesn’t mind cold water.
At night white-shouldered women and white-shirted men dip and hesitate
and glide on the casino’s glassy floor to the impassioned strains of
“Get Out and Get Under” and “Too Much Mustard.” But trail riding is the
most characteristic as it is the most exciting, diversion of them all.
It is really mountaineering on horseback—up the forested slopes, across
the gaunt, bare ridges, and so to the icy summits, on wiry ponies which
are as sure-footed as mountain-goats and as active as back-yard cats.
The narrowness of many of the trails, the slipperiness of ice and snow,
the giddiness of the sheer cliffs, the thought of what would happen if
your horse _should_ stumble, combine to make it an exciting amusement.
You can leave the shores of the lake, basking in a summer climate, with
flowers blooming everywhere, and in a two hours’ ride find yourself amid
perpetual snow. It is a novel experience, this sudden transition from
July to January, and not to be obtained so readily anywhere else that I
know, unless it be in a cold-storage plant. On the Fourth of July, for
example, after a late breakfast, the Lady and I waved _au revoir_ to our
white-flannelled friends on the Tavern’s veranda and before noon were
pelting each other with snowballs on a snow-drift forty feet deep, with
Lake Tahoe, gleaming beneath the sun like a gigantic opal, three thousand
feet below us. There may, of course, be more enchanting vacation places
than this Tahoe country—higher mountains, grander forests, more beautiful
lakes, a better climate—but I do not know where to find them.
X
“WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON”
“I hear the far-off voyager’s horn;
I see the Yankee’s trail—
His foot on every mountain pass,
On every stream his sail.
...
“I hear the mattock in the mine,
The axe stroke in the dell,
The clamour from the Indian lodge,
The Jesuit chapel bell!
“I see the swarthy trappers come
From Mississippi’s springs;
And war-chiefs with their painted brows
And crests of eagle wings.
“Behind the scared squaw’s birch canoe
The steamer smokes and raves;
And city lots are staked for sale
Above old Indian graves.
...
“Each rude and jostling fragment soon
Its fitting place shall find—
The raw material of a State,
Its muscle and its mind.”
X
“WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON”
With a rattle of wheels and a clickety-clack of hoofs the coach bore down
upon us, its yellow body swaying drunkenly upon its leathern springs.
It was a welcome sight, for since early morning we had been journeying
through a region sans sign-posts, sans houses, sans people, sans
everything. I threw up my hand, palm outward, which is the recognised
halt sign of the plains, and in obedience to the signal the sombreroed
driver pulled his wheelers back on their haunches and jammed his brakes
on hard. Half a dozen bearded faces peered from the dim interior of the
vehicle to ascertain the reason for the sudden stop.
“Are we right for the Columbia?” I asked.
“You betcha, friend,” said the driver, squirting a jet of tobacco juice
with great dexterity between the portals of his drooping moustache. “All
ye’ve got to do is keep ’er headed north an’ keep agoin’. You’re not more
nor sixty mile from the river now. How fur’ve ye come with that there
machine, anyway?”
“From Mexico,” I replied a trifle proudly.
“The hell you say!” he responded with open admiration. “An’ where ye
bound fur, ef I might make so bold’s to ask?”
“As far north as we can get,” I answered. “To Alaska, if the roads hold
out.”
“Waal, don’t it beat the Dutch what things is acomin’ to anyway,” he
ejaculated, “when ye kin git into a waggin like that there an’ scoot
acrost the country same’s ye would on a railroad train? I’ve druv this
old stage forty year come next December, but the next thing ye know
they’ll be wantin’ an autermobile, an’ me an’ the critters’ll be lookin’
fer another job. But that’s progress, an’ ’tain’t no manner o’ use tryin’
to buck it. These old Concords hev done a heap toward civilisin’ the
West, but their day’s about over, I reckon, an’ the autermobile will come
along an’ take up the job where they left off. Come to think on it, it’s
sorter ’s if the old style was shakin’ hands an’ sayin’, ‘Glad tew meet
you’ to the new. But I’ve got your Uncle Sam’l’s mail to deliver an’ I
can’t be hangin’ ’round here gossipin’ all day.”
He kicked off his brake, and his long whip-lash, leaping forward like a
rattlesnake, cracked between the ears of his leaders. “Get to work there,
ye lazy, good-fer-nothin’ sons o’ sea-cooks, you!” he bellowed.
“S’long, friend, an’ good luck to ye,” he called over his shoulder. The
whip-lash cracked angrily once more, wheelers and leaders settled into
their collars, and the coach tore on amid a rolling cloud of dust.
[Illustration: THE OVERLAND MAIL.
“With a rattle of wheels and a clickety-clack of hoofs the coach bore
down upon us.”]
“That was perfectly wonderful,” said the Lady, with a little gasp of
satisfaction. “That was quite the nicest thing we’ve seen since we left
Mexico. I didn’t know that that sort of thing existed any more outside of
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.”
“It won’t exist much longer,” said I. “This Oregon hinterland is the last
American frontier, but the railway is coming and in a few more years the
only place you will be able to see a Concord coach like the one we just
met will be in a museum or on a moving-picture screen. The old fellow was
perfectly right when he said that our meeting typified the passing of the
old and the coming of the new.”
“I’m awfully sorry for them,” remarked the Lady abstractedly.
“Sorry for whom?” I asked.
“Why,” she answered, “for the people who can only see this wonderful West
on moving-picture screens.”
* * * * *
We took the back-stairs route to Oregon. When we turned the bonnet of
the car northward from Lake Tahoe, we had the choice of two routes to
the Columbia. One of these, which we would have taken had we followed
the advice of every one with whom we talked, would have necessitated our
retracing our steps across the High Sierras to Sacramento, where we would
have struck the orthodox and much-travelled highway that runs northward
through the Sacramento Valley, via Marysville and Red Bluff and Redding,
enters the Siskiyous at Shasta and leaves them again at Grant’s Pass, and
keeps on through the fertile and thickly settled valleys of the Rogue,
the Umpqua, and the Willamette, to Portland and its rose gardens. The
other route, which is ignored by the road-books and of which those human
road-books who run the garages seemed to be in total ignorance, strikes
boldly into the primeval wilderness that lies to the north of Tahoe,
parallels for close on two hundred miles the western boundary of Nevada,
crosses the Oregon border at Lower Klamath Lake, and then, hugging the
one hundred and twenty-second parallel like a long-lost brother, climbs
up and up and up over the savage lava beds, through the country of the
Warm Springs Indians, across the fertile farm lands of the Inland Empire,
and so down the Cañon of the Deschutes to where the rocky barrier of The
Dalles says to the boats upon the Columbia: “You can go no further.”
This is the famous Oregon Trail, which lies like a long rope thrown idly
on the ground, abandoned by the hand that used it. Though the people
with whom we talked urged us not to take it, prophesying long-neglected
and impassable roads and total lack of accommodation and all manner of
disaster, we stubbornly persisted in our choice, lured by the romantic
and historic memories that hover round it; for was it not, in its day,
one of the most famous of all the routes followed by mankind in its
migrations; was it not the trail taken by those resolute frontiersmen who
won for us the West?
We were warned repeatedly, by people who professed to know whereof
they spoke, that, if we persisted in taking this unconventional and
therefore perfectly ridiculous route, we would experience great
difficulty in crossing the mountains, and, as some of our informants
cheeringly observed, it was dollars to doughnuts that we wouldn’t be
able to cross them at all. But as we had had experiences with these
brethren of calamity howlers while motoring in Rhodesia and in Grande
Kabylie and in the Anti-Lebanon, their mournful prognostications did not
trouble us in the least. In fact, they but served to whet our appetites
for the anticipated adventures. As a matter of fact, throughout the
entire thousand miles that our speedometer recorded between Tahoe and
The Dalles, not once did we cross any mountains worthy of the name, for
our route, which had been carefully selected for its easy gradients
long years before our time by men who traversed it in prairie-schooners
instead of motor-cars and whose motive power was oxen instead of engines,
lay along the gently rolling surface of that great mile-high plateau
which parallels the eastern face of the Cascade Range and comes to a
sudden termination in the precipitous cliffs which turn the upper reaches
of the Columbia into a mighty gorge.
Turning our tonneau upon Truckee and its brawling trout-stream, we
struck into the forest as the compass needle points, with Susanville
one hundred and fifty miles away, as our day’s objective. (Who Susan
was I haven’t the remotest idea, unless she was the lady that they
named the black-eyed daisies after.) For hour after hour the road wound
and turned and twisted through the grandest forest scenery that can
be found between the oceans. To our left, through occasional breaks in
the giant hedge of fir and spruce and jack-pine, we caught fleeting
glimpses of Pilot Peak, whose purple summit has doubtless served as a
sign-post for many an Oregon-bound band of pioneers. To us, who had seen
only the tourist California and the highly cultivated valleys of the
interior, these Californian highlands proved a constant source of joy
and self-congratulation. We felt as though we were explorers and, so far
as motoring for pleasure in that region is concerned, we were. But the
greatest revelation was the road. We had expected to need the services
of an osteopath to rejoint our dislocated vertebræ and, to modify the
anticipated jolts, I had had the car equipped with shock-absorbers and
had taped the springs. We could, however, have gone over that road
with no great discomfort in a springless wagon, for, upon a roadbed
undisturbed for close on half a century by any traffic worthy of the
name, had fallen so thick and resilient a blanket of pine-needles that we
felt as though a strip of Brussels carpet had been laid for our benefit,
as they do in Europe when royalty has occasion to set foot upon the
ground. The sunbeams, slanting through the lofty tree tops, dappled the
tawny surface of the road with golden splotches and fleckings, squirrels
chattered at us from the over-arching boughs; coveys of grouse, taken
unaware by the stealth of our approach, rocketed into the air, wings
whirring like machine guns, only to settle unconcernedly as soon as we
had passed; an antlered stag bounded suddenly into the road, stood for
an instant motionless as though cast from iron, with wide-open, startled
eyes, and disappeared in panic-stricken flight; once, swinging silently
around a turning, we came upon a black bear gorging himself at the
free-lunch counter that the wild blackberries provide along the road;
but before we could get our rifles out of their cases he had crashed
his way into underbrush too dense for us to follow. Nor did we have any
great desire to follow. The smoothness and silence of the road were too
enchanting. Hour after hour we sped noiselessly along without a glimpse
of a human being or a human habitation. There were no sign-posts to point
the way and we wanted none.
But all good things must end in time, and our pine-carpeted road
debouched quite unexpectedly into the loveliest valley that you ever saw.
Perhaps it is because its sylvan serenity is undisturbed as yet by the
jeering screech of the locomotive, but you will need to use much gasoline
and wear out many tires before you will happen upon anything more idyllic
than those cloistered and incredibly fertile acres that sweep down from
the summit of the Iron Hills to the margin of Honey Lake. The trim white
farmhouses that peep coquettishly, like bashful village maidens, from
amid the fragrant orchards at the passer-by; the fields green-carpeted
with sprouting grain; the barns whose queer hip-roofs made them look as
though they were aburst with stored-up produce, as, indeed, they are;
the sleek cattle, standing knee-deep in a lake as clear as Circe’s
mirror—all these things spell p-r-o-s-p-e-r-i-t-y so plainly that even
those who whirl by, as we did at forty miles an hour, may read.
Susanville, which is built on a hill at the end of Honey Lake Valley,
very much as the Italian hill towns command the tributary countryside,
is a quiet rural community that has been stung by the bee of progress
and is running around in circles in consequence. When we were there a
railroad was in course of construction for the purpose of tapping the
wealth of this rich but hitherto unexploited region, and the main street
of the town, which we reached on a Saturday evening, was alive with
farmers who had come in to do their week-end shopping, cow-punchers in
gaudy neckerchiefs and Angora chaps, fresh from the ranges, engineers in
high-laced boots and corduroy trousers, sun-tanned labourers from all
four corners of Europe and the places in between. As a result of this
week-end influx, the only hotel that Susanville possessed was filled to
the doors.
“I can’t even fix you up with a pool-table, gents,” said the
shirt-sleeved proprietor, mopping the perspiration from his forehead with
a violent-hued bandana; “and what’s more, every blame boardin’-house in
town’s just as full up as we are.”
“But we _must_ find some place to sleep,” I asserted positively. “We’ve a
lady with us, you see, and she can’t very well sleep in the open—or on a
pool-table either, can she?”
“A lady? God bless my soul! Why didn’t you say so? Well, now, that’s too
durned bad. But hold on a minute, friends. I wouldn’t be s’prised if Bill
Dooling, the barber, could fix you up. He’s got a cottage down the road a
piece and I’ll send a boy along with you to show you where he lives.”