and now has built a rival hotel on a smaller scale near by. Yank is
eighty-two years of age, and he presents a unique sight, standing
upright in his boat, propelling it with one oar and jerking his
fish-line with the other hand. His clothes are greasy rags and
tatters, and he himself boasts that his baths are about as frequent
as the blossoming of the century plant. Yet his cheeks are rosy, his
frame vigorous, his voice firm, and eyes sparkling, bearing eloquent
testimony to the tonic value of the combined lake and mountain air of
Tahoe. He has lived here more than a quarter of a century. With pride
he showed me some boats lying in the yard which he had constructed and
painted with his own hands, and the use of which was to be free to the
guests (this was aimed at the other hotel). He seemed to feel somewhat
conscious of his tramplike appearance, and explained that those were
only his winter clothes, and that as the season opened he would have to
dress up “on account of the ladies.” An enormously fat and large dog is
his companion. “Fat?” he exclaimed, echoing my exclamation,—“fat? You
ought to see my wife!”
The salubrious Tahoe air is responsible for an appetite which would
fatten a consumptive. But if the dinner-bell coincides with sunset and
its concomitant celestial fireworks, it would be an exhibition of the
purest animality to go and eat. The end of the long pier is a good
place to see the colored sunset clouds, but better still is it to take
a boat and row a mile or two from shore. About sunset the wind usually
subsides, and Tahoe becomes as placid and perfect a mirror as the
famous Mirror Lake in the Yosemite, but on an infinitely larger scale.
Here are not only mountain peaks and pine-wooded shores reflected in
the water, but the whole sky, with its sunset clouds, more brilliantly
colored and more fantastically shaped than anywhere in the world, is
mirrored below. The earth no longer seems a hemisphere, but a perfect
symmetrical globe with the spectator in the centre, floating on the
invisible water like a disembodied spirit. I have never been up in a
balloon, but I do not believe that even ballooning can make one so
vividly realize what must be the sensations of an eagle soaring with
outspread, motionless wings through the azure ether. However, Tahoe
does not need these colored cloud reflections as borrowed plumes to
adorn itself with. Its own varied and ever-changing surface-colors
are equally enchanting, though more sombre and melancholy. There
are several zones of color. The shore is lined with sand, coarse
as bird-shot and clean as the water itself, and for a distance of
several hundred yards this sand is visible as we row into the lake,
corrugated by the waves like the tiny furrows in the palms of our
hands, and giving the water a yellowish tint. Farther in, it becomes
blue, gradually shading into so deep a hue that we are ready to believe
that a ship with a cargo of indigo must have gone down here, and feel
tempted to dip a pen into it to see if it will do to write with; but
dip up a glassful, and it is as clear and colorless as if it had just
spouted from an artesian well, and as cold.
An artist endowed with the courage to reproduce these colors
realistically would surely be denounced by the critics as a visionary
idealist. But no artist could ever paint them as they appear to the
eye, because no palette has ever held colors so rich and deep and at
the same time so delicate and transparent. And still less than the
sombre brilliancy of these colors could a painter reproduce an idea of
their movements, in which lies half their charm. Cloud shadows climbing
up a mountain side are a fascinating sight, but not to be compared
with the spectacle of the irregular patches of color that are chased
by the wind across the crests of the Tahoe wavelets, like semi-liquid
purple, green and violet mists, vanishing in the distance into air,
and followed by other color-waves in rapid succession. The best place
to enjoy this unique spectacle is not in front of the hotel, where the
trees act as a wind-break, but to the left, near the first bridge.
As I stood here the first morning, a brisk breeze was blowing, with
a clear blue sky overhead. Looking leewards, the water nearest the
shore appeared gray, bordered by a light violet, with yellowish and
purple patches; then came a deep green streak, followed by a broader
indigo band, and finally a deep violet field, bounded by a faint mist
raised a little above the surface of the water and slightly veiling the
mountains. Every morning the details were new, and would have been so,
no doubt, had I remained four hundred instead of four days. Tourists go
into raptures over the waving motions of the Western wheatfields, but
what are these monochromes to the polychromatic waves that chase one
another across Tahoe?
In making the circuit of the lake, we had passed a place where a
railway was seen climbing up the steep lake-side, not far from the
little town of Glenbrook. This railroad is a connecting link between
Lake Tahoe and the distant silver mines at Virginia City. At first
sight the connection between an inclined railway on the shore of Lake
Tahoe and the Virginia City silver mines seems as enigmatic as that
pointed out by Darwin as existing between old maids and clover-fields.
But the mystery is easily explained. Nevada is as treeless as the
greater part of Spain; wherefore the miners have to come to California
for fuel, and for planks to build their shafts. Lake Tahoe is
surrounded by densely wooded hills which are gradually being denuded
to supply the demands of the Nevadan miners. The logs are floated
across the lake, hauled up the hill on the railway, and cut up into
boards and planks, which are thence floated down in a V-shaped flume to
Carson, whence they are taken by another mountain railroad to Virginia
City. No visitor to Tahoe should fail to follow these planks to Carson
and beyond—not necessarily in the flume, but by taking the stage at
Glenbrook. The stage road to Carson is dusty, but most interesting.
The first half of it is all up hill, the second half of it is all down
hill, and the distance fourteen miles. Just before we reach the summit,
Tahoe once more shows its face and casts a parting glance at us. Then
we get a splendid view of the Carson Valley, deep down below us, and
walled in on the other side by chain upon chain of bare, desolate,
lofty mountain ridges. Unprotected by tree or stump, the snow has
melted from even the highest peaks, and the snow-peaks which we see
later (and which seem to justify the name of Nevada or “snowy”) are in
California. We stop at a wayside inn for a moment, and a comely young
girl asks the driver if there is “room for one more.” But a stage is
not a street-car, and the driver had to confess that he was “afraid
not, Nellie, unless one of the men will hold you on his lap.” Nellie
looked non-committal; and if none of the passengers spoke and offered
to take her, this was surely owing to bashfulness, and not to a lack of
gallantry.
Once or twice the driver stopped to collect a letter that had been
placed in a box fixed on a post by the roadside. To prevent useless
stoppages and delay, these letter-boxes are uncovered, and the
depositor has to take his chances of rain, which, however, are hardly
worth considering in summer. Frequently we cross the flume, or drive
alongside of it, but of course it makes a shorter cut to Carson than
the stage-road, and in some places descends at such a steep angle
that the timber in it is said to be carried along at railroad express
speed. Half a million feet of timber can be thus floated down in a day,
provided there are none of those jams which sometimes extend for half
a mile along the flume and cause much trouble. Just before entering
Carson we come to the end of the flume, where the timber is dropped,
and piled up in rows of interminable length. The Carson Valley, through
which we had been passing, is dry, dusty, and entirely devoid of trees,
and the town, therefore, with its surrounding green meadows and fine
rows of shade trees lining the streets, seemed like an oasis in the
desert.
Carson, the capital of Nevada, has some good public buildings, and
about four thousand inhabitants, but is not likely ever to have many
more. It was crowded on this occasion with visitors from the country,
and Piute Indians with their squaws and pappooses were loitering at
every street corner. The monstrous, startling circus posters pasted
everywhere explained this influx from the country and neighboring
towns. It was nothing more nor less than Sells Brothers’ “Enormous
United Shows”; “A Grand Olympian Festival”; “The Eureka of Canvas
Entertainments”; “Prodigious, Overshadowing, and Enormous”; “Gigantic,
Sweeping, and Brilliant Centralization of Sterling and World-Endorsed
Entertainments”; “Fully a Century in Advance of all Contemporaries.” I
bowed my head in awe on reading these announcements.
The appearance of the women and girls in this circus crowd did not seem
to indicate that the climate of Carson Valley is invigorating, or its
resources fattening. Though they wore white dresses, they looked so
thin and sharp that it seemed a wonder the strong wind did not carry
them off bodily. On account of the circus there were extra trains,
but not enough cars, so that half the passengers had to stand. ’Twas
always so, said a local privileged jester; “You never can get enough
of Carson.” This train, en route for Virginia City, took home those
who had attended the matinée. For the evening performance another
extra train was to be sent down all the way from Virginia City, which
appears not to have held out sufficient inducements to the circus
company to come up, so that “it served them right if they got left and
had to come down to Carson,” as one of the passengers remarked, with
much feeling. This railroad from Carson to Virginia affords one of the
most marvellous and entertaining rides in the world. The puffing of
the engine would tell a blind man how steep is the grade all the way
up; and how crooked and winding the road is, may be inferred from the
printed notice to employees that fifteen miles an hour is the highest
speed allowed. Sometimes the engineer might almost shake hands with
a man on the last platform; and there is a story of an engineer who
jumped off the locomotive on seeing a red light straight ahead, which
proved to be the lantern on his last car. Some one has added these
curves together and found that between Carson and Virginia passengers
travel seventeen times round the circle. Several miserable shanty
villages are passed, half buried in empty tin cans, and as we get up
higher the outlooks become more and more desolate and rugged. Even
Arizona has nothing more bleak and naked than these endless vistas of
Nevadan mountains. No tree or other vegetation, except coarse sage
bush. Yet the soil is said to be fertile, and to need only water to
make it valuable. Deep down in the cañon below us, where the Carson
River winds along, this statement is verified by the green fields and
orchards which border it. Interminable wooden steps lead down from the
railroad stations to these oases. “With water,” says a Nevadan, “all
the mountain sides may be made veritable hanging gardens”; and all
that is needed for this metamorphosis is to store the winter water in
artificial cañon-reservoirs for summer tapping.
We are also told that between these forbidding bare mountain ranges
lie valleys from one to thirty miles in width, but hidden by the
intervening ridges, so that the State as a whole is really not so
forbidding as it looks. Little, however, has been done so far in
agricultural development, and Nevada is still almost exclusively a
mining State. Were it not for the mines and the mineral deposit in dry
lake-beds, there would be no railway except the Central Pacific; and
as the mines now worked are much less productive than formerly, it
is not surprising that Nevada should be the only Western State whose
population is decreasing.
It cost about three million dollars to build the Virginia and Truckee
Railroad, from Reno, on the Central Pacific, to Virginia City—a
distance of fifty-two miles, although a bee-line would make it only
about seventeen miles. Three millions may seem a big sum for so short a
road, but it led to a region whence more than three hundred and fifty
million dollars in gold and silver have been taken by mule, ox-team,
stage, and rail, since the discovery of the Comstock Lode, thirty years
ago. Should the mines ever become exhausted, it would be worth while,
though it might not pay, to keep up the road as a scenic route. As we
near the mining regions, the mountain scenery becomes more and more
stupendous. We pass through a few tunnels, and suddenly a most unique
view is spread out before us: a series of immense wooden buildings
scattered picturesquely along the mountain sides, like mediæval
castles, though without towers or other architectural features. Smoke
is belched forth from the high chimneys, and by the side of every such
building is a huge gray mound of waste ore,—the accumulation of years.
Other mounds are seen where there are no buildings, but only holes
into the mountain side, looking as if some gigantic animal had been
burrowing and thrown out the soil. These mounds are graves in which
some miners’ dreams of millions are buried.
As the train winds along and up the hill-side, these sights disappear
and reappear repeatedly, in different groupings, till at last we come
to Silver City, the first of the three towns which perch closely
together on the side of the silver mountain, Mt. Davidson, about
seventeen hundred feet above the river, and as far from the summit.
Mining is not as profitable here as it was formerly, and as it is now
a few miles beyond; but there are many small gold veins. “Nearly every
head of a family in the town,” says the guide-book, “has his own mine;
and when he wants money, he shoulders his pick, goes out to his mine,
and digs it, as a farmer in the East digs a ‘mess’ of potatoes.”
Two miles beyond Silver City is Gold Hill, which once had as many
inhabitants as Virginia City has now,—eight thousand,—but has only
about three thousand at present. At Virginia City, many pleasant
surprises are in store for us. In this aërial town, built like an
eagle’s nest on the side of a rocky mountain, surrounded in all
directions by similar bleak mountains without a sign of civilization
or habitation on them, you naturally expect to take up lodging in a
one-story shanty, eat canned beef, and sleep on a cot; but nothing of
the sort. Crawling up the hill—everything is up and down hill here—a
few hundred steps, you come to the International Hotel, six stories
high, with elegantly furnished rooms, and fare good enough for the very
reasonable charges. It stands in the principal business street, which
is lined on both sides with not only such indispensable places as drug
stores, grocers’ and butchers’ shops, but with fine jewelry and fancy
stores, and even book and music stores. Elegantly dressed women, many
of refined appearance, promenade the streets, bent on shopping; and, by
way of contrast, there are groups of squaws sitting on the rubbish on
corner lots, or following their lords and masters.
Every block, of course, has its saloon; for aside from the naturally
bibulous propensities of miners, the great dryness of the air at this
elevation creates an irresistible thirst every hour, so that the
bar-keepers must do a thriving business. Excepting this elevation of
over six thousand feet, there is little here to mitigate the action
of the sun’s rays, which in summer must be intolerable. The trees are
not high enough to afford much shade, having been destroyed, like
everything else, in the great fire of 1875. But that fire, which
annihilated the town, as usual taught a good lesson, and now there
is a hydrant at every corner whence water can be forced high above
the highest building by its own pressure, no engine being needed.
The waterworks of Virginia are perhaps the most interesting in the
world—both above and below ground. The pipe which bridges the Washoe
Valley is seven miles long and has a capacity of over two million
gallons a day. This water had to be brought over to Mt. Davidson from
the main range of the Sierra Nevada, because there was not enough on
the surface of Davidson. Below the surface, on the other hand, there
was an ocean of unwelcome water, hot and cold, which constantly filled
up the shafts and had to be pumped out at an enormous expense. To
overcome this trouble, the Sutro tunnel was built 1650 feet below the
surface, and almost four miles in length. Ten million gallons of water
have passed through this tunnel in twenty-four hours. A day or two can
be profitably spent in seeing these hydraulic wonders, besides the
reducing mills, with their ingenious machinery, in which electricity is
yearly playing a more important part, economizing power by transmitting
it at different points from the Sutro tunnel, and preventing waste by
superior processes of amalgamation. Of course no tourist must fail to
don a miner’s suit in order to experience a sensation like that of
falling from a balloon in descending a shaft, and to feel a heat more
stifling than a desert blast. It is the strangest thing about this
strange mountain city that you need only walk a block or two from any
given point to find a place where you can descend from two to three
thousand feet into the bowels of the earth, till the six-foot opening
at the top appears no bigger than a hand.
The miners only work a few hours every day, and you understand why
when you come back to daylight bathed in perspiration. After waiting
long enough to cool off, climb to the top of Davidson. Contrasts are
always pleasant; and none more so than this transition from half a mile
in the dark interior of this planet to the summit of a mountain which
rises a mile and a half above sea-level. Davidson is isolated, like
the Rigi, and the view is therefore very extensive, embracing a large
portion of Nevada. On one side is a fine circle of Sierra snow-peaks;
on another, Washoe Lake, and the green meadows along the Truckee River;
all of which, however,—snow, meadow, and lake,—form mere oases amid the
barren wastes of illimitable gray mountain ranges. A flag-pole has been
erected on the summit of Davidson, and the way in which it is fastened
by means of granite blocks piled on high and iron chains on every side,
indicates the strength of the winter storms at this altitude.
X.
MT. SHASTA AND CRATER LAKE.
THE OREGON AND CALIFORNIA RAILROAD—CALIFORNIA’S GRANDEST
MOUNTAIN—ISOLATED PEAKS OF THE CASCADE RANGE—VOLCANIC
REMNANTS—SISSON’S—INDIANS AT HOME—SOURCES OF THE
SACRAMENTO—EFFECTS OF RAIN—OREGON’S NUMEROUS RIVERS—FISH AND
CRAW-FISH—SOUTHERN OREGON—A MYSTERIOUS MOUNTAIN LAKE—THE OREGON
NATIONAL PARK—THE WILLAMETTE VALLEY—OREGON WHEAT AND FRUIT.
With the exception of the Canadian Pacific and the Rio Grande, there
is no railway on this continent which offers to tourists such a unique
and imposing variety of mountain and forest scenery as the Oregon
and California, or Shasta Route, which connects San Francisco with
Portland. For many hours after leaving Sacramento, the train follows
the banks of the Sacramento River, whose water in this upper part of
its course is as clear as the Rhine in Switzerland. No fewer than
eighteen times does the train cross the winding river, which at every
turn offers a new picturesque view. But it is not till Mt. Shasta
comes into view that the real grandeur of this route is made evident.
Mr. Bryce, in his “American Commonwealth,” insinuates that there is
little fine scenery in this country; but if there is another railroad
in the world which skirts the base of an isolated snow-mountain over
fourteen thousand feet in height, and so vast in circumference that
it takes the train five or six hours to get around it, I have not seen
it or heard of it; and Shasta is only one of half-a-dozen snow-peaks
which may be admired on this route and its continuation north to
Tacoma and Seattle. There is something absolutely unique about what
may be called the Oregon System of mountain peaks (since Oregon once
embraced all this region), beginning with Shasta (14,440 feet), in
Northern California, and including the Three Sisters (8,500), Mts.
Jefferson (9,000) and Hood (11,200) in Oregon, and Mts. St. Helen’s
(9,750), Adams (9,570), and Tacoma (14,444) in Washington. Elsewhere,
as in Switzerland, or along the Canadian Pacific Railway, snow-peaks
are always adjacent or jumbled together in irregular groups; and this
is the case even in the Sierra Nevada of Central California. But
the ‘Oregon’ earth-giants, from Shasta to Tacoma, are all isolated
peaks, separated by many miles from other peaks, with only a low
range of mountains to connect them; and this gives them a grandeur
and individuality which is lacking in peaks that simply form one of
an irregular group. As Mr. Joaquin Miller poetically puts it: “Here,
the shining pyramids of white, starting sudden and solitary from the
great black sea of firs, standing as supporting pillars to the dome of
intense blue sky, startle, thrill, and delight you, though you have
stood unmoved before the sublimest scenes on earth.”
It is owing to this isolation that Shasta is the grandest mountain
in California. Mt. Whitney is several hundred feet higher, but it
stands in a region where there are a hundred peaks each over thirteen
thousand feet in height, and therefore is not able to assert itself
properly. Moreover, Whitney is several hundred miles further south,
where the solar heat disposes of the snow-fields every summer, and does
not compel them to seek the valley in the shape of glaciers; whereas
Shasta has five glaciers, one of which is more than three miles long.
Jefferson, Hood, and Tacoma also have fine glaciers, easily accessible.
As compared with the mountains of Switzerland, Shasta has this
advantage: that whereas the former rarely, even in summer, have the
advantage of standing out against a clear blue sky, which adds so
very much to the sublimity of the scene, Shasta rears its snowy head
day after day and month after month into the cloudless azure. Late in
summer, however, it loses some of its grandeur through the melting of
most of its snow-fields; and in this respect Mt. Hood is superior to
Shasta, as it keeps its snow-mantle throughout the usual Oregon summer.
Besides the California sun, the snows of Shasta have another enemy
in the internal volcanic heat which has not yet subsided. Shasta has
its big craters, and there are a score of smaller ones in the lower
neighboring cones. A few hundred feet below the summit there is a hot
sulphur spring, to whose heat John Muir and Jerome Fay, being caught in
a snow-storm in 1875, owed the preservation of their lives.
One of the best ways to realize the great height of Shasta, is by
noting the very long time the sun lingers on the mountain side after it
has set at Sisson’s, in Strawberry Valley,—fully half an hour. After
it has gone down, on dark nights in May, a solitary star will arise
immediately over the summit, looking at first as if some venturesome
climber had started a fire, dwarfed by the distance. One does not
realize how jagged are the ridges of Shasta until the evening sun
casts their gray silhouettes on the adjacent white snow-fields.
All this can be seen from the porch of Mr. Sisson’s hotel—the same
hotel that used to feed the passengers and the horses of the stages so
many years before the Oregon and California Railroad was built; and the
same Mr. Sisson who, twenty years ago, served as Clarence King’s guide
up the mountain. Mr. Sisson now has the satisfaction of seeing quite a
respectable village which has grown up in the picturesque spot selected
by him a quarter of a century ago; but he no longer has the strength to
act as guide; nor does he need to, as he is well-to-do. Accordingly, I
had to content myself with one of the Indians in his employ, as guide
up the mountain side. May is too early to make the complete ascent,
but we thought we could get above the timber line at any rate. But
even this proved impossible, owing to the deep masses of snow which
carpeted the sombre forest at a height of eight thousand feet. Yet the
trip proved worth taking without the final climb. The path led through
the densest imaginable forest, and was impeded every five minutes by a
fallen tree. In looking at the millions of dead trees which rot on the
ground in these California and Oregon forests, one cannot suppress the
thought, “What a blessing this wood would be to the starving, freezing
thousands in our large cities, during the winter months!”
[Illustration: MOUNT SHASTA.]