Transcriber's Note:
Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the original document have
been preserved. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.
On page 18, "arroya" should possibly be "arroyo."
On page 53, "gaumet" should possibly be "gamut."
On page 134, the text is "Noriegas'." The Index shows "Noriega's."
"Tamalpias" should possibly be "Tamalpais."
[Illustration: THE THREE BROTHERS, YOSEMITE VALLEY]
CALIFORNIA
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
THE LAND OF LITTLE RAIN
A WOMAN OF GENIUS
THE LOVELY LADY
ETC.
AGENTS
America The Macmillan Company
64 & 66 Fifth Avenue, New York
Australasia The Oxford University Press
205 Flinders Lane, Melbourne
Canada The Macmillan Company of Canada, Ltd.
St. Martin's House, 70 Bond Street,
Toronto
India Macmillan & Company, Ltd.
Macmillan Building, Bombay
309 Bow Bazaar Street, Calcutta
CALIFORNIA
THE LAND OF THE SUN
PAINTED BY
SUTTON PALMER
DESCRIBED BY
MARY AUSTIN
ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK
4, 5, & 6 SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W.
_Published Autumn 1914_
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. The Sparrow Hawk's Own 1
II. Mothering Mountains 25
III. The Coasts of Adventure 45
IV. The Port of Monterey 61
V. Old Spanish Gardens 85
VI. The Land of the Little Duck 105
VII. The Twin Valleys 125
VIII. The High Sierras and the Sage-brush Country 147
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1. The Three Brothers, Yosemite Valley _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
2. San Diego, looking across the Bay toward Point Loma 9
3. Redlands, looking toward San Bernardino Range 16
4. A Eucalyptus Grove 33
5. Glendale, Valley of the San Gabriel 40
6. A Cañon in the Sierra Madre 49
7. The Cemetery, Santa Barbara Mission 56
8. Sycamores, a Coast Range Cañon 59
9. Tall Chaparral, Santa Cruz 62
10. Looking down on Monterey and the Bay 65
11. Pescadero, a Chinese Fishing Village, Monterey Bay 72
12. Cypress Point, near Carmel 75
13. Santa Cruz Mountains, the Coast Range 78
14. The Patio, Old Spanish Residence 88
15. The Golden Gate and Black Point, from Hyde Street,
San Francisco. (Site of the Panama Exposition,
1915) 107
16. Tamalpias 110
17. Mill Valley, and Backwater of San Francisco Bay 113
18. Waiting for Duck--Los Baños 120
19. Mirror Lake, Yosemite 129
20. Among the Redwoods of the Great Twin Valleys 131
21. Clear Lake, Lake County 134
22. Castle Crag, Rattlesnake Cañon 136
23. McCloud River, Upper Sacramento Valley 139
24. Donner Lake, on the old Emigrant Trail 142
25. Laurel Lake, Upper Sacramento 145
26. Yosemite Falls 152
27. Blue Lake, Lake County 155
28. Lake Tahoe, the High Sierras 158
29. Mount Shasta--Sierra Glow 161
30. Valley of the Yosemite 163
31. The Half Dome, Yosemite 166
32. Shasta--Snow Clouds 168
_Sketch Map at end of Volume._
I
THE SPARROW-HAWK'S OWN
For a graphic and memorable report of the contours of any country, see
always the aboriginal account of its making. That will give you the lie
of the land as no geographer could sketch it forth for you. California
was made by Padahoon the Sparrow-Hawk and the Little Duck, who brooded
on the face of the waters in the Beginning of Things.
There is no knowing where the tale comes from, for Winnenap the
Medicine-Man who told it to me, was eclectic in his faiths as in his
practice. Winnenap was a Shoshone, one of the group who had been forced
southward into Death Valley when the great Pah Ute nation had split
their tribes like a wedge. In the last of their wars he had been taken
as a hostage by the Paiutes and brought up by them. He might have
remembered the story, or his wife might have told him. She was a tall
brown woman out of Tejon, and _her_ mother was of that band of captives
taken from San Gabriel by the Mojaves, Mission-bred. Wherever it came
from, the tale has its roots deep in the land it explains.
Padahoon, being wearied of going to and fro under the heavens, said
to the Little Duck that it was time there should be mountains; so the
Little Duck dived and brought up the primordial mud of which even the
geographers are agreed mountains are made.
As he brought it the Sparrow-Hawk built a round beautiful ring of
mountains enclosing a quiet space of sea. Said the Little Duck, "I
choose this side," coming up with his bill full of mud toward the west.
Whereupon the Sparrow-Hawk built the other side higher. When it was all
done and the Little Duck surveyed it, he observed, as people will to
this day, the discrepancy between the low western hills and the high
Sierras, and he thought the builder had not played him fair. "Very
well, then," said the Sparrow-Hawk, "since you are resolved to be so
greedy," and he bit out pieces of the Sierras with his bill, and threw
them over his shoulder.
You can see the bites still deep and sharp about Mt. Whitney.
But the Little Duck would not be satisfied; he took hold by the great
bulk of Shasta and began to pull, and Padahoon pulled on his side until
the beautiful ring was pulled out in a long oval and began to break on
the west where the bay of San Francisco comes in. So they were forced
to divide the mountain range north and south and make what they could
of it. But the Sparrow-Hawk, remembering the pieces he had thrown over
his shoulder, chose the south, where you can still see him sailing any
clear day about four in the afternoon, over all his stolen territory.
There you have the bones of the land as neatly laid out for you as they
could do it in Kensington Museum: the long oval, breaking seaward, the
high, bitten, westward peaks, and the Sparrow-Hawk's Own, tailing south
like the quirk of an attenuated Q.
They serve, these fragmentary ranges, for the outposts of habitableness
between the sea wind and the forces of pure desertness. Always there
is skirmish and assault going on about them. Showers rush up the slope
of San Jacinto, all their shining spears a-tilt. Great gusts of wind
roar through the Pass of San Gorgiono, the old Puerto de San Carlos.
Seasonally they are beleaguered by stealthy rushes of the fogs that
from the Gulf hear the peaks about Whitney calling, or by the yellow
murk of sand-storms on which the whole face of the desert is lifted up
as it travels toward its destiny in orchard row and vineyard. Always
the edge of the wind is against the stone. They shine, the frontlets of
the sentinel saints, in that keen polish, as the faces of saints must
with benignity.
Just beyond the pilæ of the broken mountains--the Pillars of Hercules
of the West--the desert winds about the eastern bases of the range in
deep indented bays, white-rimmed with the wave marks of its ancient
sea. Out a very little way, where the shuddering heat-waves trick the
imagination, it seems about to be retaken by the ghost of tumbling
billows. Nothing else moves in it; nothing sounds. Plantations of
growing things near the Pass lean all a little toward it, edging,
peering--the wild, spiny, thorny things of the desert to enter the
rain-fed paradise, the full-leafed offspring of the sea wind plotting
to take the unfriended sandy spaces. They creep a little forward or
back as the years run wet or dry. The green things stand up, they
march along the cliffs, they balance on the edge of precipices, but
desperation is in every contorted stem of _mesquite_ and _palo verde_.
And with all this struggle, so still! East on the desert rim the
Colorado ramps like a stallion between its walls, westward the Pacific
rings the low foreshore with thunder; but the land never cries out,
quartz mountains disintegrate but they do not murmur.
It is odd here in a land rife with the naked struggle of great pagan
forces, to find the promontories so lend themselves to the gentle
names of saints. Perhaps the Padres were not so far from nature as one
thinks; in the southerly range which, with San Bernardino on the north,
sentinels the Pass by which the iron-rimmed Emigrant trail enters the
coast valleys, they rendered for once the pagan touch. San Jacinto--St.
Hyacinth--was he ever anything but a Christianised memory of a Grecian
myth, or does it matter at all so long as there are men to see, in
the deep purple light that dies along the heights, the colour of blood
that is shed for love? Perhaps the best thing beauty can say to Greek
or Christian is that there are still things worth dying for. No doubt
the veins of Padre Jayme Bravo were as rich in martyr passion as the
stained air of the mountain is in purples, paling to rose at morning,
thinning at noon to pure aerial blues.
Seen from the coast the range has a finny contour as of some huge
creature risen from the sea, with low hills about it like dolphins
playing; but the prevailing note of the landscape is always blue,
repeating the tints of the wild brodiæa that may be found on the lomas
early in April, sending up its clustered heads between two slender
curving spears.
Near at hand the masking growth is seen to be green, the dark
olivaceous green of the chamisal. Nowhere does one get the force of
the Spanish termination _al_--the place where--as in that word. The
chamisal is the place of the chamise: miles and miles of it, with
scarcely another shrub allowed, spread over the mesa and well up
into laps and bays of the hills. It grows breast high, man high in
the favoured regions; but even where under the influence of drouth
and altitude it creeps to the knees, it abates nothing of its social
character. Its ever-green foliage has a dull shining from the resinous
coating which protects it from evaporation, and a slight sticky feel,
characteristics that no doubt won it the name of "greasewood" from the
emigrants who valued it chiefly because it could be burned green. The
spring winds blowing up from the bay whip all its fretted surface to
a froth of panicled white bloom, that, stirring a little as the wind
shifts, full of bee-murmur, touches the imagination with the continual
reminder of the sea. Higher up the thick lacy chaparral flecks and
ripples, showing the light underside of leaves, and tosses up great
fountain sprays of ceanothus, sea-blue and lilac-scented.
[Illustration: SAN DIEGO, LOOKING ACROSS THE BAY TOWARD POINT LOMA]
All the human interest of this region centres about the city on the bay
of San Diego, a low locked harbour with a long spit of sand breaking
the mild Pacific swell, as it bides its time for the shipping of the
south-western world. It has already waited longer than most people
suppose. Just fifty years after the landing of Columbus on the Bahamas,
Cabrillo discovered it; Sir Francis Drake, romping up that coast with
his buccaneers, must have seen it though he left no note of any visit,
and in 1602 Sebastian Viscaino anchored there and gave it its present
name. Just about the time the mixed Dutch and English on the Atlantic
coast were beginning to think of themselves as Americans and to act
accordingly, the Franciscan _Frailes_ settled on San Diego bay. Nobody
will know why it was reserved for the brown-skirted brothers of St.
Francis to undertake the subjugation of Alta California, until it is
known why the King of Spain quarrelled with the Jesuits. They were
accused of plotting against His Majesty, but in those days it was
possible to accuse the Jesuits of almost anything without going very
far wrong in the popular estimate. I have my own opinion about it,
which is that a great land, like a great lady, has her way with men.
And no land has called its own as has California:--poet or painter
or pioneer, the world's rim under. No better patron could be found
for this blossoming West than Francis of Assisi, who preached to his
little brothers of the air and would have made a convert of the coyote.
Perhaps the first settlers of a country leave their stripe on all the
land's later offspring: if it was a way the West took to breed fervour
and faith and the spirit of prophecy in the young generation, who shall
say she has not succeeded?
In January of 1769 two expeditions by land and sea set forth in the
name of God and the King of Spain, under the patronage of Señor San
Jose, indubitable patron of all journeys since the flight into Egypt.
In April the ship _San Antonio_ anchored in the placid bay, there to
await the live stock driven up from Velicatá. So the old world came to
the new with a whole collocation of sainted personages flocking like
doves to her banners.
But it was not saints that the land wanted so much as the stuff that
goes to make them. The expedition starved, sickened; their eyes were
holden. Governor Portola, with the greater part of the expedition, made
a long _pasear_ on foot to find the lost port of Monterey, and came
back, with armour rust on his doublet sleeves and nothing much gained
beside, to declare the expedition a failure. But Padre Serra--Junipero
Serra, father president of Missions, juniper of God's own planting,
sapling of that stock of which the founder of the order had wished
for a whole forest full--Padre Serra claimed a churchman's privilege.
He demanded time for a _novena_, a nine days' cycle of prayer to the
patron who was so unaccountably hiding the relief ship in the fogs
and indecisions of the uncharted coast. It is my belief that the Padre
chose the _novena_ simply because it was the longest possible time he
could hope to delay the return of the expedition. Nine days they drew
in their belts and told their beads, and on the last hour of the last
day, far on the sea rim, behold the white wings of succour!
The Patron, who could never be at a loss for an expedient, contrived
that the ship should lose an anchor which compelled it to put in at San
Diego, where they had no expectation of finding any of the party. It
was so that the land tried them out and approved, for from that day the
founding went forward steadily.
There is a fine growing city now on the site of the early landing,
regularly stratified through all the architectural periods of
California, from the low thick-walled adobe of the Spanish occupation
to the newest shingle-stained bungalow of the latest one-lunged
millionaire; but the land has not lost, in a century and a half, one
mark by which the brown-skirted _Frailes_ found their way about in
it. It has its distinctive mark, the Sparrow-Hawk's land, the seal of
a private and peculiar affection. Here about the mouth of one of its
swift seasonal rivers, and touching as with a finger-tip the opposing
shore of the island of Santa Rosa, is the habitat of the Torrey pine.
Japanesque, unrelated, drinking the sea air, never spreading inland,
it hugs the sea-worn edges of La Jolla, as though, as some botanists
believe, the species came to life there out of the jewel-tinted water
and the spirit of the desert dust.
It is also possible to think of it as a relict of the land of which
the broken Channel Islands were made, but in any case it is a pity that
science could not have retained for this lonely, restricted species the
name the _Frailes_ gave to its fostering waters, Soledad--the solitary.
Behind the town the mesa rises abruptly, knife-cut by the gullies of
intermittent streams; and far back where the mountains break down into
foothills, and these into the lomas--little low mounds of detritus--the
sea air collects all the blue rays of the diffused light and holds
them there all day in the hollows, in memory of the sea from which they
rose.
In April of the year of the Occupation the white panicles of the
chamise would be tossing here and there, and the yellow violets run
thin lines as of fire among the grasses. You would not believe there
were so many yellow violets in the world as a day's riding will still
show you. At this season, _islay_, the wild cherry, will be shaking out
its fine white spray of bloom, the button willow begins, the sycamore,
the buckthorn, _cascara sagrada_; the great berried manzanita, which
shed its waxen bells as early as December, will be reddening its
apples. Here also the chia, the true sage, the honey-maker, bread of
the wild tribes, makes itself known by the penetrating pungent odour
of its unfolding foliage. Binding all the leafy thickets, runs the
succulent starry bloom of the megarrhiza that, from its hidden root,
as large as a man's body, sends up smothering tendrils so sensitive
to their opportunity that you have only to sit down beside them on
one of these long growing afternoons, to find all their tips curling
in your direction and the stems moving sensibly across the grass in
the direction of support. As early as February the foot-long vines
can be seen locating the nearest shrub or the cañon wall, farther
away than you could detect it by any tactile sense. And how quickly,
once the objective is sensed, the questing Force is withdrawn from
the unsuccessful members! Perhaps this one to the right may keep on
in the direction in which it has caught the invisible communicating
thread from the nearest buckthorn, but the other three or four green
tentacles, finding no invitation from any quarter, not only stop
growing but seem to shrink and dwindle in the interests of the climbing
brother. Sometimes in a particularly lusty growth, all the young vines
will be drawn toward some conspicuous support, so that by the third
day those that lay out starlike, with inquiring tips raised a little,
delicately feeling, will swing through all their points to the one
hopeful direction. These warm sensuous days toward the end of April,
just after rain, when the very earth is full of a subtle intoxication,
one has but to thrust a finger among the bourgeoning tips and tendrils
of the megarrhiza to see them stir with live response. One must
suppose, since the megarrhiza is of no discoverable use to anybody,
that the Force uses it to its own ends, an ascending, uprearing Force,
rehearsing itself for a more serviceable instrument.--This, however,
is a digression; probably the Padres found no time for philosophising
about anything, much less so useless a specimen as the wild cucumber.
What the Franciscans saw first in Alta California was what all pioneers
look for in new lands--the witness of their faith. They saw the
waxberry bush from which they were to gather the thin coating of the
berries into candles for their improvised altars, saw the crepitant,
aromatic _yerba buena_, and the shrubby, glutinous-leaved herb of the
Saints, given to them for healing.
More than all else they must have seen in the month of the Virgin
Mother, high on the altar slopes of San Jacinto and San Bernardino, the
white thyrses of the yucca, called The Candles of Our Lord. Back where
the green exclusiveness of the chamise gives place to the chaparral,
the tall shafts arise. They grow in blossoming, the bells climbing
with the aspiring stalk until as many as six thousand of them may hang
pure and stiff along the lance-like stem between the bayonet-bristling
leaves. Long after the white flame has burnt out, the stalks remain,
rank on rank, as though battalions of Spanish spearmen had fallen
there, holding each his spear aloft in his dead hand.
It is only back there where the yuccas begin, that the small, swift
life of the mesa goes on, very much as it did in the days of the
Spanish _Frailes_. The doves begin it, voicing the mesa dawn in notes
of a cool blueness; then the sleek and stately quail, moving down in
twittering droves to the infrequent water-holes. The rhythm of a flock
in motion is like the ripple of muscles in the sides of a great snake.
After them the road runner, _corredor del camino_, the cock of the
chaparral, crest down, rudder aslant, swifter than a horse, incarnate
spirit of the hopeful dust through which he flirts and flits. Then
the blueness is folded up, it lies packed in the cañons, the mountains
flatten; high in his airy haunts the Sparrow-Hawk sails, and the furry,
frisk-tailed folk begin the day's affairs.
[Illustration: REDLANDS, LOOKING TOWARD SAN BERNARDINO RANGE]
The secret of learning the mesa life is to sit still, to sit still and
to keep on sitting still. The only other secret is to be learned in the
wattled huts stuck like the heaps of the house-building rats in the
dry washes, inwoven with the boughs of buckthorn and _islay_, except
for size scarcely distinguishable from them. For the Indian has gone
through all that green woof with the thread of kinship and found it an
ordered world. He is choke-full as is the chamisal of wild life, of
the tag ends of instincts and understandings left over from the days
when he was brother to the beast--those sleek-bellied rats, stealing to
lay another foot-long, dried stick to the characterless heap of their
dwelling,--bad Indians to him, trying to remember their ways when they
were men; that brown feathered bunch, in and out of the chia bush,--she
was present at the making of man. Your aboriginal has the true sense of
proportion: not size but vitality. You can cover the sage wren with the
hollow of your hand, but you cannot hop so far for your size nor be so
brave about it.
Very different from the spring flutter and fullness, must have been the
look of the land in the year of the martyrdom of Padre Jayme Bravo,
which was the year of Bunker Hill and the Republic. The green of the
chamisal was overlaid then by the brown tones of its seeding. _Islay_
had shed its crimson drupes; the cactus fires had died down to the dull
purples of the fruiting prickly pear; the sycamores by the dwindling
waters of the arroya had scarcely a palsied leaf to wag. The Mission
had been moved, for what reasons must be guessed by whoever has had
occasion to observe the effect of a standing army on the subjugated
peoples, back from the sea marsh to a little valley of what is known
now as Mission River. Sixty converts had come down out of the hills
to receive the Medicine of the Soft-Hearted God. That is the way they
must have looked at it--rood and cup and sprinkling water, and the
bells louder than the medicine drums. Back in the dry gullies the
drums would have been going night and day where the _tingaivashes_, the
Medicine-Men, lashed themselves into a fury over this apostasy. Certain
of the renegades heard them between their orisons; they fled back to
the muttering roll and the pound of the dancing feet. In the night
after that, eight hundred of the Dieguenos, clothed in frantic fervour
and very little else, came down to make an end of the "long gowns." How
the soul of Padre Jayme must have leaped up as he heard them yelling
outside his unguarded hut: the appetite for martyrdom is deeper than
all our dreaming. He ran toward them with arms extended. "Love God, my
children!" he cried, and received their arrows. When it was reported
to the Padre President at Monterey, "Thank God," he said; "now the
soil is watered." It did indeed repay them such a crop of souls as any
watering produces in that soil; but at San Juan Capistrano, where a new
foundation was in progress, they buried the bells and returned to the
presidio.
Few people understand why Californians so love their Missions, the
meagre ruins of them, scant as a last year's nest. But two priests, a
corporal, and three men in the unmapped land with eight hundred angry
savages--it is the mark of the Western breed to love odds such as that!
It is not to the campanile at Pala nor the ruined arches of San Luis
Rey that men made pilgrimages but to the spirit of enterprise that
built the West.
All about the upper mesa there are traces, scarcely more evident to the
eye than the Missions, that the inhabitants of it have been dreamers,
dreaming greatly. I do not now refer to the court of San Luis Rey,
from the roofs of which a joyous populace once cheered a governor
of California in the part of toreador, in a neighbourhood where
Raphael-eyed muchachitos who have never heard of the Five Little Pigs
that Went to Market can still repeat you the rhyme that begins
Up in Heaven there is a bull fight,
The bull has horns of silver and a tail of gold.
Heaven enough under those conditions to the children of the Occupation!
Nor am I thinking of a road on which, when there is a light wind
moving from the sea, you can still hear at midnight the pounding feet
of the Indian riders galloping down to the bay, only to see their
beloved Padre blessing them from the ship's side in departing. I do
not think even--because I make a practice of thinking as little as
possible of a matter so discreditable to us as our Indian policy--of
the procession of the evicted _Palatingwas_, even though the whole
region of Warner's ranch is still full of the shame of it and the
rending cry. The struggle of men with men is at best a sick and squalid
affair for one of the parties; but men contriving against the gods
for possession of the earth is your true epic. The brave little towns
which start up there with their too early florescence of avenue and
public square, the courageous acres which the vineyardist clears in the
chamisal and the chamise takes again! All along the upper mesa, Pan
and the homesteader keep up the ancient fight. And with what unequal
weapons! The wild gourd, the bindweed, the megarrhiza, at the mere
rumour of a cleared space, come beckoning and joining hands. Though
he goes gunning all day without finding one young rabbit for his pot,
the bark of the homesteader's orchard trees will be gnawed by them at
the precise sappy moment. At dawn the quail may be heard with soft
contented noises between the rows of bearing vines, plunging their
beaks in the ripest berries. Then the mule-deer will spend the night
in the carefully fenced enclosure, ruining the largest bunches with
selective bites; after which the homesteader, if he is wise, will know
that he is beaten. The mule-deer can go over any fence, though usually
he prefers to go between the wires, which he can do without altering
his stride. Detected, even at its most leafless, the antlered chaparral
makes cover for him until, after hours of following, he is glimpsed
at last, scaling at his stiff bounding gait some inaccessible rocky
stair from which nothing comes back but the bullet's deflected whine.
Now and then some pot-hunter who remembers when the mule-deer could be
heard barking to the does in any deep gully, when the moon rose hot on
the flushed trail of the October day, will tell you that there are no
more of his kind on San Jacinto. But so long as there are homesteaders
to be fended from the hill borders, the mule-deer will come back. And
when the mule-deer is gone there will still be drouth. Let the coast
currents swing out a few degrees, or the Gulf winds blow contrarily for
consecutive seasons, and the stoutest homesteader fails. After a few
years you can guess where he has been by finding the chamise growing
taller in the ploughed places.
Incurable wild hills and wild sufficing sea, and the little strip
between which they give to one another--Indian giving!--conceded by the
years of rain and demanded back by drouth; shoals that the tide piles
and the sea eats again! It lies like a many-coloured dancer's scarf,
and hearts are still caught in its folds as in the days of the Spanish
Occupation.
There's a stripe of aquamarine turning to chrysoprase, that's for
the sea; amber then for the hollow cliffs of La Jolla and San Juan,
smugglers' cliffs eaten well under the shore; a stripe of scarlet,
spangled with viscid diamond dew, that's for the mesembryanthemums
crowding the foreshore; pale green of the lupins with a white thread
through it of the highway, green again for the chamisal, and blue of
the mountains' unassailable sea thought.
Nature is a great symbolist; what she makes out of her own materials is
but the shadow of what man in any country will make finally of his. San
Diego by the sea dreams of a great sea empery. What by all the signs
she is bound to produce, is a poet. There in the scarf-coloured, low
shore is the vocal forecast of him in the night-singing mocking-bird.
Especially in the fringing island of Coronado out of the waxberry bush
he can be heard gurgling like a full fountain with jets and rushes
of pure crystal sound. From moonrise on until dawn he scatters from a
tireless throat, music like light and laughter. It is as impossible to
close the eyes under it as in the glare of the sun. And if the moon,
the measurer, be gone on a journey to the other side of the world,
still he sings, all his notes muffled by the dark; he sways and sings,
dozes and sings, dreaming and wakes to sing. So it should be with poets
whether anybody wishes them to or not. "The lands of the sun expand the
soul," says the proverb.
II
MOTHERING MOUNTAINS
It is all part of that subtle relation between the observer and the
landscape of the west, which goes by the name of "atmosphere," that
one returns again and again to the reality of Christian feeling in the
Franciscan Pioneers, as witnessed by the names they left us--one of the
most charming proofs, if proof were wanted, of the power of religion
to illuminate the mind to a degree often denied to generations of art
and culture. How many book-fed tourists rounding the blue ranks of San
Jacinto to face the noble front of the Coast Range as it swings back
from the San Gabriel valley, would have found for it a name at once so
absolute, so understanding as Sierra Madre, Mother Mountain?
There you have it all in one comprehensive sweep: the brooding,
snow-touched, virginal peaks, visited and encompassed by the sacred
spirit of the sea, and below it the fertile valley, the little
huddling, skirting hills fed from her breast. The very lights that
die along the heights, the airs that play there, the swelling fecund
slopes, have in them something so richly maternal; the virtue of
the land is the virtue that we love most in the mothers of men. And
if you want facts under the poetry, see how the Sierra receives the
rain and sends it down laden with the rich substance of her granite
bosses, making herself lean to fatten the valleys. The great gorges
and swift angles of the hills which fade and show in the evening
glow, are wrought there by the ceaseless contribution of the mountain
to the tillable land. And what a land it has become! There have been
notable kingdoms of the past of fewer and less productive acres. Yet
even in the great avenues of palms that flick the light a thousand
ways from their wind-stirred, serrate edges, is a reminder of the
host of bristling, spiny growth the land once entertained. It is as if
the sinister forces of the desert lurked somewhere not far under the
surface, ready at any moment to retake all this wonder of fertility,
should the beneficence of the Mother Mountain fail. The Padre pioneers
must have felt these two contending forces many a time when they lay
down at night under the majestic Sierra, for they named the first
spot where they made an abiding place, in honour of the protecting
influence, _Nuestro Señora, Reina de Los Angeles_, Our Lady the Queen
of the Angels. There she hovered, snow-whitened amid tall candles of
the stars, while south and west the coyote barked the menace of the
unwatered lands. Now this is remarkable, and one of the things that go
to show we are vastly more susceptible to influences of nature than
some hard-headed members of society suppose, that in this group of
low hills and shallow valleys between the Sierra Madre and the sea,
the most conspicuous human achievement has been a new form of domestic
architecture.
This is the thing that most strikes the attention of the traveller:
not the orchards and the gardens, which are not appreciably different
in kind from those of the Riviera and some favoured parts of Italy,
but the homes, the number of them, their extraordinary adaptability to
the purposes of gracious living. The Angelenos call them bungalows,
in respect to the type from which the later form developed, but they
deserve a name as distinctive as they have in character become. These
little thin-walled dwellings, all of desert-tinted native woods and
stones, are as indigenous to the soil as if they had grown up out of
it, as charming in line and the perfection of utility as some of those
wild growths which show a delicate airy florescence above ground, but
under it have deep, man-shaped, resistant roots. With their low and
flat-pitched roofs they present a certain likeness to the aboriginal
dwellings which the Franciscans found scattered like wasps' nests among
the chaparral along the river,--which is only another way of saying
that the spirit of the land shapes the art that is produced there.
One must pause a little by the dry wash of this river, so long ago
turned into an irrigating ditch that it is only in seasons of unusual
flood it remembers its ancient banks, and finds them, in spite of
all that real estate agencies have done to obliterate such natural
boundaries. This river of Los Angeles betrays the streak of original
desertness in the country by flowing bottom-side up, for which it
receives the name of _arroya_, and even _arroya seca_ as against the
_rio_ of the full-flowing Sacramento and San Juan. A _rio_ is chiefly
water, but an _arroya_, and especially that one which travels farthest
from the Mothering Mountains toward the sea, is at most seasons of
the year a small trickle of water among stones in a wide, deep wash,
overgrown with button willow and sycamores that click their gossiping
leaves in every breath of wind or in no wind at all. Tiny gold and
silver backed ferns climb down the banks to drink, and as soon as the
spring freshet has gone by, brodiæas and blazing stars come up between
the boulders worn as smooth as if by hand.
Farther up, where the stream narrows, it is overgrown by willows,
alders, and rock maples, and leaps white-footed into brown pools for
trout. Deer drink at the shallows, and it is not so long ago that
cinnamon bear and grizzlies tracked the wet clay of its borders. This
is the guarantee that this woman-country is in no danger of too much
mothering. No climate which is acceptable to trout and grizzlies is in
the least likely to prove enervating; men and beasts, they run pretty
much to the same vital, sporting qualities.
All that country which extends from the foot of the Sierra Madre to the
sea, is so cunningly patterned off with ranks of low hills and lomas
that its vastness is disguised, or rather revealed by subtle change and
swift surprises as a discreet woman reveals her charms. This renders it
one of the most delightful of motoring countries. The car swings over a
perfect road into snug little orchard nooks as safe and secret seeming
as a nest, climbs a round-breasted hill to greet the wide horizon of
the sea, or a mesa stretching away into blue and amber desertness,
which when adventured upon, discloses in unsuspected hollows white,
peaceful towns girt by great acres of orange groves, or the orderly
array of vines trimmed low and balancing like small, wide-skirted
figures in a minuet. And then the ground opens suddenly to deep, dry
gullies where little handfuls of the grey soil gather themselves up and
scuttle mysteriously under the cactus bushes, and dried seeds of the
megarrhiza rattle with a muffled sound as the pods blow about. Here one
meets occasionally the last survivors of the old way of life before men
found it: _neotoma_, the house-building rat, with his conical heap of
rubbish; or a road runner, tilting his tail and practising his short,
sharp runs in the powdery sand under the rabbit brush; here, too, the
lurking desert shows its spiny tips like a creature half-buried in the
sand, not dead, but drowsing.
[Illustration: A EUCALYPTUS GROVE]
As artists know colour, and poets know it, this is the most colourful
corner of the world. The blue and silver tones of the Sparrow-Hawk's
land give place to airy violets, fawns, and rich ambers. It is curious,
that obstinate preference which a locality has for colour schemes
of its own adoption; man can break up and re-form them, but he can
never quite overcome the original key. Here the bright, instant note
of the geraniums that shore up the bungalows, even the insult of the
magenta-coloured Bougainvillea is subdued by the aerial softness
that lies along the hills like the bloom on fruit. The sheets of
Eschscholtzia gold that once spread over miles of the San Gabriel
valley, and still linger in torn fragments about Altadena, have been
sheared by the plough, to vanish and reappear again in the solid globes
of orange, distilled from the saps and juices of the soil.
One of the most interesting of the instruments by which the cultivated
landscape has gathered up and fixed the evanescent greens that spread
thinly yet over the uncropped hills in spring, is the eucalyptus.
All the tints are there, from the olive greens of the chaparral to
the sombre darkness of the evergreen oak; young shoots of it have the
silvery finish of the artemisia which once gave the note of the mesas
about Riverside and San Bernardino. No other imported tree has quite
to such a degree the air of the _habitué_; one wonders indeed if it
could have been half so much at home in Australia, from whence it has
returned like some wandering heir to the ancestral acre.
It proves its blood royal by its facile adaptiveness to the prevailing
lines of the landscape, taking the rounded, leaning outline of the live
oaks on the wind-driven hills, or in sheltered ravines springing upward
straight as the silver firs. Perhaps its most charming possibilities
are revealed in the middle distance where, lifted high on columnar
stems, its leaf crowns take on the blunt, flowing contours of the
hills. At all times it has a beautiful resilience to the wind, bowing
with a certain courtliness without compulsion, and recovering as if
by conscious harmonious movement. The pepper tree, however, most
magnificent specimens of which may be found lining the avenues of
Pasadena, or in some unexpected corner of the hills marking the site of
some old Spanish hacienda, is always an alien. It is like the Spaniards
who brought it, perhaps, in its drooping grace, in the careless
prodigality with which it sheds its fragile crimson fruits. Something
of old-worldliness persists in its spicy odours, and in the stir of its
lacy shadows; when the moon comes over the mountain wall and the wind
is moving, there is the touch of mystery one associates with lovely
señoritas leaning out of balconies. One fancies that the pepper tree
will last so long as the dying race of Dons and Doñas, and with them
will cease to be a feature of local interest.
There is hardly more than a trace in the modern city of Los Angeles of
_Nuestra Señora, Reina de los Angeles_. The last time I passed through
the old plaza, the streets of offence encroached upon it from the east,
and a corner of the sacred precinct had been sacrificed to the trolley.
The Church of Our Lady, over whose door may still be traced the fading
inscription from which the city takes its name, was never a mission,
but one of the six chapels or _asistencias_ centred about the Mission
San Gabriel. It was here the first expedition passed northward looking
for the port of Monterey, on the day of the feast of Our Lady in the
year when the Atlantic Colonies were making up their minds to fight the
English. It was close to this spot and along Downey Street were enacted
the most pitiful of all the tragic incidents which marked the recession
of the aboriginal races. Bereft of their lands and the protection of
their Church, they became a prey to the greed of the dominant peoples,
and used regularly to be incited to drunkenness upon their wages on
Sunday, arrested while in that condition, and sold each Monday morning
for the amount of their fines to the neighbouring ranchers. Things
like this lurking under the surface of commercial enterprise, as the
desert lies in wait in sandy stretches, advise us that much of our
insistence on democracy grows out of our inability to trust ourselves
to deal equitably with our fellows under any other conditions. We can
keep to the rules of the game we have set up more easily than to the
unfenced humanities. Here in the old plaza full of sleepy light, which
still retains the indefinable stamp of the people to whom to-morrow was
always a better day for doing things, one sighs for the short-sighted
self-interest which so wasted the native children of the soil.
But after all the land couldn't have loved them as it does the race
for which it brings forth its miraculous harvests. Not that there
weren't miracles in those days; in fact they began here, or rather at
San Gabriel, six miles or so beyond the river which in those days was
called Porcincula, a name that linked the old world with the new by
way of the little chapel in Italy in which the beloved Francis received
such heavenly favours. The miracle of San Gabriel relates to a display
of a canvas presentiment of Our Lady, at the mere sight of which the
wild tribes experienced exceeding grace. Looking up suddenly at the
Mother Mountain brooding above the plain, it is easy to understand
how the symbol of aloof but solicitous care came home to the primitive
mind, always peculiarly open to suggestions of humaneness in nature.
The heads of the Sierra Madre are rounded, the contours of great
dignity. The appeal it makes to the eye is of mass and line. Its
charms, and it has many, of forested slope, leaping waters, and lilied
meadows, do not offer themselves to the casual glance, but must be
sought after with great pains. The bulk of the range is of warm,
grey granite, clothed with atmospheric colour as with a garment. It
borrows more from the sky than the sea, taking on at times an aerial
transparency, the soul of the mountain about to pass trembling into
light. Pinkish tones are discoverable in even the bluest shadows,
and at times the peaks are touched with the rich, roseate orange of
the Alpine-glow. But the variations of temperature and atmospheric
conditions are not sufficiently pronounced to present themselves to
the sense as the source of its aspects of tenderness, of majesty,
of virginal aloofness. Rather such changes seem to be occasioned by
palpitations of the Mountain Spirit, remote in sacred meditation,
glowing, dimming, defining itself from within.
It may be that the immense vitality of the land, its abundance, the
bursting orchards, the rich variety of native growth, somehow dwarfs
the earliest impression of the Sierra Madre, since few, if any, gather
at first an adequate idea of the actual mass and height it represents.
It is only after appreciation of the really amazing activities of the
Angelenos is a little dulled by familiarity, at early morning when
the groves are sleeping and the bright plantations of the gardens lack
the sun to flash their brilliance on the sight, or at evening when a
sea mist covers the teeming land, one is prepared to hear that many of
these peaks are higher than the Simplon, and that it would be possible
to wander for months in the intricacies of its cañons without having
time to grow familiar with a single one of them.
Sometimes the mere mechanics of the land, the pull of the wind up the
narrow gorges as you pass, advises the open mind of power and immensity
residing in the thinly forested bulks. Passing what appears a mere
shadowy gulf in the mountain wall, you are aware of a murmurous sound
as of the sea in a shell, and feel suddenly the push of the draught
on your windshield like a great steady hand. In places above San
Bernardino, the steady pouring of invisible wind rivers has swept the
soil for miles and defied three generations of artificial plantations.
And sometimes the mountain speaks directly to the soul. I recall such
an occasion one late spring. We had been skirting the range toward
Riverside all afternoon, having the fall of the land seaward always
in view, noting how, in spite of the absurd predilection of men for
square fields and gridiron arrangements, the main lines of cultivation
were being pulled into beauty by the sheer necessity of humouring
the harvest. It was that lagging hour between the noon splendour and
the gathering of the light for its dramatic passage into night. The
orange orchards lay dead green in the hollows, unplanted ridges showed
scarcely a trace of atmospheric blueness; unlaced, unbuskined, the
land rested. And all in the falling of a leaf, in the scuttle of a
horned toad in the dust of the roadway, it lifted into eerie life. It
bared its teeth; the veil of the mountain was rent. Nothing changed,
nothing stirred or glimmered, but the land had spoken. As if it had
taken a step forward, as if a hand were raised, the mountain stood
over us. And then it sank again. While the chill was still on us, the
grip of terror, there lay the easy land, the comfortable crops, the red
geraniums about the bungalows. But never again for me would the Sierra
Madre be a mere geographical item, a feature of the landscape; it was
Power, immanent and inescapable. Shall not the mother of the land do
what she will with it?
Entering the cañons of the San Gabriel, one is struck with the
endearing quality of their charm. In a country which disdains every
sort of prettiness, and dares even to use monotony as an element of
beauty, as California does, it is surprising to find, cut in the solid
granite wall, little dells all laced with fern and saxifrage, and
wind swung, frail, flowery bells. Little streams come dashing down the
runways with an elfin movement, with here and there a miniature fall
"singing like a bird," as Muir described it, between moss-encrusted
banks.
[Illustration: GLENDALE, VALLEY OF THE SAN GABRIEL]
Into the open mouths of such cañons have retreated the hosts of
wildflowers that once in the wet seasons overran all that country from
San Bernardino to the sea,--the white sage, most honeyful of all the
sages, the poppies, gilias, cream cups, nemophilias which twenty-five
years ago were as common as meadow grass, as thick as the planted
fields of alfalfa which have usurped them. Settlers who came into
this country when the trail over the San Gorgiono had not yet hardened
between iron rails, tell of riding belly deep for miles in wild oats
and waving bloom, and where the trail goes out over the San Fernando,
toward Camulas, the yellow mustard reached its scriptural height, and
the birds of the air built their nests in it. Now and then in very
wet years a faint yellow tinge, high up under the bases of the hills,
is all that is left of the seed which, by report, the Padres sowed
along the coastwise trails, to mark where they trod the circuit of the
Missions.
Everywhere within the cañons, honeyful flowers abound, and up from the
rocky floors the slopes are stiff with chaparral. This characteristic
growth, which, seen from the open valley flooded by dry sun, appears as
a mere scurf, a roughened lichen on the mountain wall, is in reality a
riot of manzanita, mahogany, ceanothus, cherry and black sage, from ten
to fifteen feet high, all but impassable. Elsewhere in the ranges to
the north, the chaparral is loose enough to admit fern and herbaceous
plants, carpeting the earth, but here the rigid, spiny stems contend
for three or four feet, thick as the carving in old cathedral choirs,
before they attain light and air enough to put forth leaf or twig. On
the seaward side of the mountains, miles and miles of this dense growth
flow over the ranges, parted here and there by knife-edge ridges, or
by huge bosses of country rock, affording a great sweep to the eye,
reaching far to seaward. From here the lower country shrinks to its
proper proportion--a toy landscape planted with Noah's Ark trees--and
the noise of men is overlaid by the great swells of the Pacific which
come thundering in, lifting far and faint reverberations along the
ranges.
On either side of these vast conning towers it is still possible to
trace the indefinite tracks which wild creatures make, running clear
and well defined for short distances and then melting unaccountably
into the scrub again. Occasionally still they discover traces of the
wild life in which the Sierra Madre once abounded. Deer are known to
take advantage of such natural outlooks in protecting themselves from
their natural enemies, and from the evidence of frequent visits here,
bears and foxes and bobcats must have made much the same use of them.
From such high escarpments the Indians would have seen Cabrillo's
winged boats go by, and from them, all up the coast, ascended the
pillars of smoke that attended the galleon of Francis Drake.