follow the example of the Arabs and wind themselves tightly from chest
to hips with bandages like those with which trainers wrap the legs of
race-horses. This, to put it inelegantly but plainly, is done to prevent
their bursting from the violent and sustained shaking to which they are
subjected by the roughness of the camel’s gait. When I said good-bye to
the Sudan, taking it for granted that I would have no further use for my
spiral corselet in the presumably civilised country to which I was going,
I left it behind me in Khartoum. How was I to know that I would need it
far more than I ever had in Africa while journeying in so essentially
Occidental a conveyance as a motor-car through a region where camels are
confined to circuses and Turkish-rug advertisements? But long before we
had traversed the forty atrocious miles which make the distance between
Portland, Ore., and Kalama, Wash., seem more like four hundred, I would
have given a good deal to have had my racked and aching body snugly
wrapped in it again. I have had more than a speaking acquaintance with
some roads so bad that they ought to have been in jail—in Asiatic Turkey
and in Baja California and in other places—but to the Portland-Kalama
road I present the red-white-and-blue championship ribbon. Roll down
a rocky hillside in a barrel; climb into an electric churn and tell
the dairyman to turn on the power; ride a bicycle across a railroad
trestle and you will have had but the caviare course of the dinner of
discomfort that was served to us. As, after five hours of this sort of
thing, we bumped our way down a particularly vicious bit of hill road,
every joint and bolt in the car squealing in agonised complaint, I saw a
prosperous-looking farmer in his shirt-sleeves leaning comfortably over
the front gate, interestedly watching our progress.
“St-t-t-op a m-m-m-inute,” I chattered to the chauffeur, as we jounced
into the thank-ye-marms and rattled over the loose stones, “I w-w-want to
t-t-t-t-ell this m-m-m-an-n-n w-what I think of the r-r-r-oad.”
As we drew up in front of the gate, the farmer, taking a straw out of his
mouth, drawled:
“Say, stranger, you might like to know that you’ve just come over the
most gol-damnedest piece of road north o’ Panama.”
So, unless the gentlemen who have the say in this portion of the State of
Washington have repaired the road since we passed over it, I would advise
those automobilists who are Seattle-bound to keep on the Oregon side
of the Columbia as far as Goble (I think that is the name of the tiny
hamlet), where they can put their car on a barge and hire the ferryman to
tow them across the river to Kalama. This will cost them five dollars,
but it’s worth it.
[Illustration: A road near the Columbia as it was.
A road near the Columbia as it is.
WHAT THE ROAD-BUILDERS HAVE DONE IN WASHINGTON.]
Were one to prejudge a country by the names of its villages and towns
and counties he would form a peculiar conception of Washington, for I do
not recall ever having heard anything quite so outlandish as the names
which some one—the Siwash aborigine, presumably—has wished upon it. How
would you like to get this sort of a reply to your question as to some
one’s antecedents? “Me? Oh, I was born near Wahkiacus, down in Klickitat
County, and I met my wife, whose folks live up Snohomish way, in Walla
Walla, and later on we moved to Puyallup, but I’ve a sort of notion of
goin’ into the cannery business at Skamokawa, over in Wahkiakum County,
though the wife, she’s been a-pesterin’ me to buy an apple orchard up in
the Okanogan.” Still, it’s more interesting to motor through a country
like that, always wondering what bizarre, heathenish name is going to
turn up next, than to tour through a region sprinkled with Simpson’s
Centres and Cranberry Crossroads and New Carthages and Hickory Hollows
until you feel as though you were an actor in “The Old Homestead.”
Throughout our trip through Washington we were caused untold annoyance,
and in several instances were compelled to travel many weary and needless
miles, because of the wanton destruction of the sign-posts by amateur
marksmen. Up in that country every boy gets a gun with his first pair
of pants, and, when there is nothing else to shoot, he makes a target
of the enamelled guide-posts which have been erected for the benefit of
tourists. More than once, coming to a crossroads in the forest, we found
these placards so riddled with bullets that we were compelled to guess
which road to take—and we usually guessed wrong. “I wish to goodness,”
said my friend in exasperation, after we had gone half a dozen miles out
of our way on one of these occasions, “that they would declare a close
season on sign-posts, just as they have on elk, and then give the man the
limit who is caught shooting them.”
It would be a grave injustice to place undue emphasis upon the crudities
and inconveniences which annoy the traveller in certain portions of
Washington, for, when you get down to bed-rock facts, its farmers are
still wrestling with the wilderness—and in most instances they have had
to put up a desperate resistance to keep the wilderness from shoving
them off the mat. We passed through many a community, far removed from
the railway (for the railway builders have done little more than nibble
at the crust of the Washington pie) where the people were living under
conditions almost identical with those which confronted the Pilgrim
settlers of New England. Many a farmstead that we passed was chopped
out of the virgin forest, the house being built from the trees that had
grown upon its site. Cleared land, as an Eastern or Middle Western farmer
knows the term, seemed almost non-existent. Black and massive stumps
rose everywhere, like gravestones to the dead forest. “There’s so danged
many stumps in this country,” one of these pioneer farmers remarked,
“that sometimes I think that the Lord never intended for it to be cleared
at all.” The problem of getting rid of these stumps is one of the most
perplexing with which the Northwestern farmer has to contend, the expense
of clearing land averaging in the neighbourhood of seventy-five dollars
an acre. So inimical to colonisation has the question of land clearing
become, indeed, that the State has found it necessary to step in and
finance the stump-pullers in districts established in accordance with
recent legislation. Though Washington is a country of hustle and hard
work, no one who spends any length of time in it can fail to be impressed
with the belief that it has a promising future. The climate is, as a
whole, attractive. Though the cold is never extreme, the climate does not
lack vigour, and, as a result of the Oregon mists, there is plenty of
moisture. “We call ’em Oregon mists,” a farmer explained to me, “because
they missed Oregon and hit here.” They are really more of a fog than a
rain, and no one pays the slightest attention to them, even the womenfolk
scorning to use umbrellas. These mists, taken with the verdancy of the
vegetation and the pink-and-white complexions of the women, constantly
reminded me of Ireland and the south of England. In striking contrast
to the _arroyos secos_ to which we became accustomed in many parts of
California are the streams of Washington, which flow throughout the year,
enough water-power going to waste annually to run a plant that would
supply the nation.
As the Pacific Highway goes, it is close to a hundred and fifty
miles from Portland to Tacoma, but we made a slight detour so as to
see Olympia, which is the capital of the State. Beyond its rococo
State-house, which is surmounted by a statue of a female—it might be
Justice and it might be Mrs. Pankhurst in her peignoir—there is nothing
to distinguish Olympia from any one of a score of other pretty little
towns whose back doors open onto the primeval forest. Because there was a
moon in the heavens as big and yellow as a Stilton cheese, we decided to
push on to Tacoma, which is thirty miles from Olympia, that night. I’ll
not soon forget the beauty of that ride. With our engines purring like a
contented cat we boomed down the radiant path that our headlights cut out
of the darkness; the night air, charged with balsamic fragrance, beat in
our faces; the black walls of the forest rose skyward on either hand, the
tree tops bordering with ghostly hedges a star-sprinkled lane of sky. I
wish you might have been there ... it was so enchanting and mysterious.
The theatres were vomiting their throngs of playgoers when we rolled
under the row of electric arches which turns Tacoma’s chief thoroughfare
into an avenue of dazzling light and drew up beneath the grotesque and
towering totem-pole in the square in front of our hotel. Tacoma is as
up-and-doing a city as you will find in a week’s journey through a busy
land. It does not need to be rapped on the feet with a night-stick to be
kept awake. Magnificently situated on a series of terraces rising above
an arm of Puget Sound, its streets, instead of defying the steepness
of the hills, as do those of San Francisco and Seattle, sweep up them
in long diagonals, like the ramps at the Grand Central Terminal in New
York. Tacoma is peculiarly fortunate in being girdled by a series of
so-called natural parks, a zone ten miles in width in which the landscape
architect has not been permitted to improve on the lakes and woods and
wild-flower-carpeted glades provided by the Creator. But Tacoma’s chief
boast and glory is, of course, a mountain whose graceful, snow-capped
cone, which bears an astonishing resemblance to Fujiyama, rises like
an ermine-mantled monarch above the encircling forest. The name of the
mountain is Rainier or Tacoma, according to whether you live in Seattle
or Tacoma, an acrimonious dispute having been in progress between the
people of the two cities over the question for some time, the citizens
of Seattle claiming that the mountain is far too beautiful to be used as
an asset in Tacoma’s municipal advertising campaign, while the people
of the latter city assert that, as the British Admiral Rainier, for
whom the peak was originally named, fought against the Americans in the
Revolution, he does not deserve to have his name tacked onto an American
mountain.
For thirty miles or more the road from Tacoma to Mount Rainier (for that
is the name to which the Federal Government has given its approval)
strikes across a wooded country as level as the top of a table, until,
reaching the base of the mountain, it sweeps upward in long and graceful
spirals which were laid out by army engineers, for the region has been
taken over by the government under its new and admirable policy of
protecting the beauty-spots of the country through the formation of
national parks. Nowhere, not even in the Alps, have I driven over a
finer mountain road, the gradients being so gradual and the curves so
skilfully designed that one scarcely appreciates, upon reaching National
Park Inn, in the heart of the reservation, that he has climbed upward
of five thousand feet since leaving tide-water at Tacoma. We spent the
night at the Inn, a low-roofed, big-fireplaced tavern which has an air of
cosiness and comfort in keeping with the surroundings. Everything about
it reminded us of hotels we knew in the Alpine valleys, and when I drew
up the shade in the morning the illusion was complete, for the great
peak, its snow-clad flanks all sparkling in the morning sunlight, towered
above us, just as Mont Blanc towers above Chamonix, dazzling, majestic,
sublime. Leaving the Inn after an early breakfast, we motored up the
mountain road as far as the snout of the great Nisqually Glacier, which
is as far as automobiles are permitted to go. Take my word for it, this
glacier—the largest on the continent outside of Alaska—is one of the most
worth-while sights in all America. A river of ice, seven miles long and
half a mile wide, it coils down the slope of the mountain like a mammoth
boa-constrictor whose progress has been barred in other directions by
the encircling wall of forest. We left the car at the glacier’s snout,
and, after an hour’s hard climbing over loose rubble and slippery rock,
succeeded, in defiance of the danger signs, in reaching a flat shelf of
rock from which we could look directly down upon the ice torrent, and
there we ate the lunch that we had brought with us to the accompaniment
of the intermittent crashes which marked the glacial torrent’s slow
advance.
We descended to the road in time to catch the four-horse stage which runs
twice daily from the Inn to Paradise Valley, which the Lady insisted that
we must visit, “because,” she said, “there are snow-fields and fields of
wild flowers side by side.”
“But you’ve seen much the same sort of thing in Switzerland,” I objected.
“Don’t you remember that place above the Lake of Geneva, Territet, I
think it was, where people in furs were skating on one side of the hotel
and other people were having tea under big red parasols on the other?”
“I remember it, of course,” she answered, “but that was in Switzerland
and this is in my own country, which makes all the difference in
the world. Evidently you have forgotten that German baron we met at
Grindelwald, who asked us if we didn’t think that the view from Paradise
Valley was finer than the one from Andermatt, and we had to admit that we
didn’t know where Paradise Valley was. I’m not going to let that sort of
thing happen again. The next time I meet a foreigner I’m not going to be
embarrassed to death by finding that he knows more about my own country
than I know myself.”
So she had her way and, leaving the car behind us, we took the creaking
stage up the steep and narrow road to the valley, where we gathered
armfuls of wild flowers one minute and pelted each other with snowballs
the next, and peered through the telescope—at a quarter a look—at the
thirteen glaciers which radiate from the mountain’s summit, and aroused
perfectly shameless appetites for supper, and slept as only healthily
tired people can sleep, and the next morning, half intoxicated with the
combination of blazing sunlight and sparkling mountain air, we rattled
down again to the Inn and the waiting car.
The run from Rainier National Park, through Tacoma, to Seattle is as
smooth and exhilarating as sliding down the banisters of the front
stairs. Auto-intoxicated by the perfection of the roads, I stepped
on the accelerator and in obedience to the signal the car suddenly
leaped into its stride and hurtled down the highway at express-train
speed, while farmhouses and barns and fields and orchards swept by us
in an indistinguishable blur. It was glorious while it lasted. But
out of the distance came racing toward us a big white placard, “City
Limits of Seattle,” and I slowed down to a pace more conformable with
the law and rolled over the miles of trestles which span the swamps
and lowlands adjacent to Seattle as sedately as though a motor-cycle
policeman had his eye upon us. The builders of Seattle must have been
men of resource as well as courage, for those portions of the city that
have not been reclaimed from the tide-lands have been blasted out
of the rocky hillsides, so that the city gives one the impression of
clinging precariously to a slippery mountain slope midway between sea
and sky. Instead of propitiating the hills, as is the case in Tacoma,
the streets go storming up them at angles which give a motorist much the
same sensation a rider has when his horse rears and threatens to fall
over backward. Though Seattle is very big and very busy, with teeming
streets and huge department stores and miles of harbour frontage and
one of the tallest sky-scrapers in existence and a park and boulevard
system probably unequalled anywhere, it gave me the impression of being a
little crude, a trifle _nouveau riche_, and not yet entirely at home in
its resplendent garments. Between Seattle and Portland the most intense
rivalry exists, the two cities running almost neck-and-neck as regards
population, although this assertion will be indignantly denied by the
citizens of both of them. Standing at one of the world’s crossways, the
terminus of several transcontinental railways and several trans-Pacific
steamship lines, with a superb harbour and the recognised gateway to
Alaska, Seattle has a tremendous commercial advantage over her Oregonian
rival, but from a residential standpoint Portland, exquisitely situated
on the Willamette near its junction with the Columbia, with its milder
climate, its greater number of theatres and hotels, and its older
society, has rather a more metropolitan atmosphere, a more assured air
than its northern neighbour.
Seattle is the natural portal to the Puget Sound country, that
wilderness of mountains, glaciers, forests, lakes, lagoons, islands,
bays, and inlets which makes the upper left-hand corner of the map of the
United States look like a ragged fringe. It is not an easy country to
describe. Southward from the Straits of Juan de Fuca, an eighty-mile-long
arm of the Pacific penetrates the State of Washington—that is Puget
Sound. On its eastern shore are the cities of Seattle and Tacoma, at the
head of the sound is Olympia, the capital of the State, and bordering
the western shore rise the splendid peaks of the unexplored Olympic
Range. If your imagination will stand the further strain of picturing
an archipelago four times the size of the Thousand Islands, clothed
with forests of cedar, fir, and pine, and indented with countless bays,
harbours, coves, and inlets, dropped down in this body of water, you will
have a hazy conception of the island labyrinth of Puget Sound, which
is generally admitted, I believe, to be the most beautiful salt-water
estuary in the world. Despite the narrowness of many of its channels,
the water is so deep and the banks so precipitous that at many points a
ship’s side would touch the shore before its keel would touch the ground,
which, taken in conjunction with its innumerable excellent harbours,
makes it the most ideal cruising ground for power-boats on our coasts.
I can conceive, indeed, of no more enchanting summer than one spent
in a well-powered, well-stocked motor-boat cruising in and about this
archipelago, loitering from island to island as the fancy seized one,
dropping anchor in inviting harbours for a day or a week, as one pleased.
There are deer and bear in the forests and trout in the rivers and
salmon in the deeper waters, and, if those did not provide sufficient
recreation, one could run across to the mainland and get the stiffest
kind of mountain climbing on Mount Olympus or Mount Rainier. During the
summer months scores of small steamers, the “mosquito fleet,” ply out of
Seattle and Tacoma, hurrying backward and forward between the city wharfs
and the fishing villages, farming communities, lumber camps, sawmills,
and summer resorts that are scattered everywhere about the archipelago’s
inland waterways, so that the camper on their shores, seemingly far
off in the wilds, need never be without his daily paper, his fresh
vegetables, or his mail.
Let us give ourselves the luxury of imagining—for, to my way of
thinking, there is about as much enjoyment to be had in imagination as
in realisation—that we have a fortnight at our disposal on which no
business worries shall be permitted to intrude, that we have the deck of
a sturdy power-boat beneath our feet, and that the placid, island-dotted
waters of Puget Sound lie before us, asparkle on a summer’s morning.
Leaving Seattle, seated on her stately hills, astern, and the grim,
grey fighting ships across the Sound at the Bremerton Navy Yard abeam,
we will push the wheel to starboard and point the nose of our craft
toward Admiralty Inlet, the Straits of Juan de Fuca, and the open sea.
Our first port of call will be, I think, at Dungeness, whose waters
are the habitat of those Dungeness crabs which tickle the palates and
deplete the pocketbooks of gourmets from Vancouver to San Diego. At the
back of Dungeness is Sequim Prairie, whose seventy odd thousand acres of
irrigated lands produce “those great big baked potatoes” which are so
prominent an item on dining-car menus in the Northwest. It is nothing
of a run from Dungeness to Port Angeles, which is the most convenient
gateway to the unexplored Olympics. A score or so of miles southward
from Port Angeles by automobile, a portion of which is by ferry across
the beautiful mountain Lake Crescent, and over a road which is a marvel
of mountain engineering, are the Sol Duc Hot Springs, whose great
modern hotel is in startling contrast to the savagery of the region
which surrounds it. Laying our course from Port Angeles straight into
the setting sun, we coast along the rock-bound, heavily timbered shores
of the Olympic Peninsula to Neah Bay, where a crew of Macah Indians
will take us in one of their frail canoes close around the harsh face
of Cape Flattery, which is the extreme northwest corner of the United
States. Westward of Cape Flattery we may not go, for beyond it lies
the open sea; but, steering eastward again, we can nose about at will,
loitering through the romantic scenery of Deception Pass and Rosario
Straits, dropping in at Anacortes, whose canneries supply a considerable
portion of the world with salmon, and coming thus to Friday Harbour,
the county-seat of the San Juan Islands, which, despite the Robinson
Crusoe-ness of its name, looks exactly like one of those quaint,
old-fashioned seaport towns which dot the coast of Maine. The San Juan
Islands, which are a less civilised and more beautiful edition of the
Thousand Islands of the Saint Lawrence, like their counterparts on the
other side of the continent, lie midway between the American and the
Canadian shores. They were the scene of numerous exciting incidents in
the boundary dispute of the late fifties, being for a number of years
jointly occupied by British and American troops; but, though several
crumbling British blockhouses still rise above the island harbours,
the nearest British soil is Vancouver Island, across the Strait of
Georgia. That the Stars and Stripes, and not the Union Jack, fly to-day
over this picturesque archipelago is due, curiously enough, to the
Emperor Frederick, father of the present Kaiser, who was asked to act as
arbitrator between England and the United States and decided in favour of
the latter.
[Illustration: THE UNEXPLORED OLYMPICS.
A forest fire sweeping across the flanks of the Olympic range near Lake
Chelan. In the foreground is a sea of glacial ice.]
Did you ever, by any chance, drop into a sporting-goods store only
to find yourself so bewildered by the amazing number and variety of
implements for sports and recreations displayed upon its shelves that you
scarcely knew what to choose? Well, that is precisely the sensation I had
the first time I visited the Puget Sound country. I felt as though I had
been turned loose in a gigantic sporting-goods store with so many things
to choose from that I couldn’t make up my mind which to take first. And,
mark you, everything is comparatively close at hand. If a Londoner wants
to get some mountain climbing he has to go to Chamonix or Zermatt, which
means a journey of at least two days. If, getting his fill of precipices
and glaciers and crevasses, he wishes some bear shooting, he must turn
his face toward the Caucasus, to reach which will require seven or eight
days more. Should he suddenly take it into his head that he would like
some salmon fishing he will have to spend ten days and several hundred
dollars in recrossing Europe to reach the fishing streams of Norway—and
then pay a good round sum for the privilege of fishing in them when he
gets there. On the other hand, one can leave Tacoma by train or motor-car
and reach the slopes of the second highest peak in the United States,
a mountain higher and more difficult of ascent than the Jungfrau, as
quickly and as easily as one can go from New York to Poughkeepsie. From
Seattle one can reach the country of the big grizzlies as easily as a
Boston sportsman can reach the Maine woods. From Victoria, the island
capital of British Columbia, a gallon of gasoline and a road as smooth
as a billiard-table will take one to the banks of a stream where the
salmon are too large to be weighed on pocket scales in less time than a
Chicagoan spends in getting out to the golf-links at Onwentsia.