early California establishment, the raised grill or cooking platform,
and the ramada, the long vine-covered trellis where one took wine
with one's friends, or the ladies of the family sat sewing at their
interminable drawn work, _enramada_. The single vine which covered the
twenty-foot trellis was of Mission stock, and had been planted by Dona
Ina's father in the year the Pathfinder came over Tejon Pass into the
great twin valleys. In Dona Ina's childhood a wine-press had stood in
the corner of the patio where now there was a row of artichokes, which
had been allowed to seed in order that their stiff silken tassels,
dyed blue and crimson, might adorn the pair of china vases on either
side the high altar. Dona Ina was nothing if not religious. In the
corner of the patio farthest from the gallery, a fig-tree--this also
is indispensable--hung over the tiled wall like a cloud. There was a
weeping willow in the midst of the garden, and just outside, on either
side the door, two great pepper trees of the very stock of the parent
of all pepper trees in Alta California, which a sea captain from South
America gave to the Padre at San Luis Rey. Along the east wall there
were pomegranates.
A pomegranate is the one thing that makes me understand what a pretty
woman is to some men--the kind of prettiness that was Dona Ina's in the
days when she danced _la jota_. The flower of the pomegranate has the
crumpled scarlet of lips that find their excuse in simply being scarlet
and folded like the petals of a flower; and then the fruit, warm from
the sunny wall, faintly odorous, dusky flushed! It is so tempting when
broken open--that sort opens of its own accord if you leave it long
enough on the bush--the rich heart colour, and the pleasant uncloying,
sweet, sub-acid taste. One tastes and tastes--but when all is said and
done there is nothing to a pomegranate except colour and flavour, and
at least if it does not nourish neither does it give you indigestion.
That is what suggests the comparison; there are so many people who
would like to find a pretty woman in the same category. Always when
we sat together nibbling the rosy seeds, I could believe, even without
the evidence of the ankles, that Dona Ina had had her pomegranate days.
Only, of course, she would not have smelled so of musk and--there is
no denying it--of garlic. Thick-walled old adobes of the period of the
Spanish Occupation give off a faint reek of this compelling condiment
at every pore, and as for the musk, it was always about the gallery in
saucers and broken flower-pots.
And yet Dona Ina was sensitive to odours: she told me that she had had
the datura moved from the place where her mother had planted it, to the
far end of the patio, where after nightfall its heavy, slightly fetid
perfume, unnoticeable by day, scented all the air. She added that she
felt convicted by this aversion of a want of sentiment toward a plant
whose wide, papery-white bells went by the name of "Angels' trumpets."
On the day that she told me about the datura, which I had only
recognised by its resemblance to its offensive wayside congener, the
"jimson weed," the Señora Echivarra had been washing her hair with a
tonic made of oil expressed from the seeds of the megharizza after a
recipe which her mother had had from _her_ mother, who had it from an
Indian who used to peddle vegetables from the Mission, driving in every
Saturday in an ancient caretta. I was interested to know if it were
any more efficacious than the young shoots of the golden poppy fried
in olive oil, which I had already tried. So we fell to talking of the
virtues of plants and their application.
We began with the blessed "herb of the saints," dried bunches of which
hung up under the rafters of the gallery as an unfailing resort in
affections of the respiratory tract, and _yerba buena_, in which she
was careful to distinguish between the creeping, aromatic _del campo_
of the woodlands and the _yerba buena del poso_, "herb of the well,"
the common mint of damp places. When she added that the buckskin bag on
the wall contained shavings of _cascara sagrada_, the sacred bark of
the native buckthorn, indispensable to all nurseries, I knew that she
had named two of the three most important contributions of the west to
the modern pharmacopœia. This particular bag of bark had been sent from
Sonoma County, for south of Monterey it grows too thin to be worth the
gathering. The Grindelia, she told me, had come from the salt marshes
about the mouth of the Pajaro, where Don Gaspar de Portola must have
crossed going northward.
"And were you then at such pains to secure them?"
"In the old days, yes," she assured me. In her mother's time there
was a regular traffic carried on by means of roving Indians in healing
herbs and simples; things you could get now by no means whatever.
"As for instance----?" I was curious.
Well, there was creosote gum, which came from the desert beyond the
Sierra Wall, valuable for sores and for rheumatism. It took me a moment
or two, however, to recognise in her appellation of it (_hideondo_,
stinking) the shiny, shellac-covered _larrea_ of the arid regions.
There were roots also of the holly-leaved barberry, which came from wet
mountains northward, and of the "skunk cabbage," which were to be found
only in soggy mountain meadows, where any early spring, almost before
the frost was out of the ground, bears could be seen rooting it from
the sod, fairly burying themselves in the black, peaty loam.
But when it came to _yerba mansa_, Dona Ina averred, her mother would
trust nobody for its gathering. She would take an Indian or two and
as many of her ten children as could not be trusted to be left at
home, and make long _pasears_ into the coast ranges for this succulent
cure-all. I knew it well for one of the loveliest of meadow-haunting
plants; wherever springs babbled, wherever a mountain stream lost
itself under the roble oaks, the _yerba mansa_ lifted above its
heart-shaped leaves of pale green, quaint, winged cones on pink,
pellucid stems. But I had never heard one half of the curative wonders
which Dona Ina related of it. Efficacious in rheumatism, invaluable in
pulmonary complaints, its bruised leaves reduced swellings, the roots
were tonic and alterative.
I spare you the whole list, for Dona Ina was directly of the line of
that lovely Señorita who had disdainfully described the English as the
race who "pay for everything," and to her mind it took a whole category
of virtues to induce so much effort as a trip into the mountains
which had not a _baile_ or a _fiesta_ at the end of it. Other things
that were sought for by the housewives of the Spanish Occupation were
_amole_, or soap-root, the bulbs of a delicate, orchid-like lily which
comes up in the late summer among the stems of the chaparral, and the
roots of the wild gourd, the _chili-cojote_, a powerful purgative.
Green fruit of this most common pest, said Dona Ina, pounded to a pulp,
did wonders in the way of removing stains from clothing.
Then there was artemisia, romero, azalea, the blue-eyed grass of our
meadows, upon an infusion of which fever patients can subsist for days,
and elder, potent against spells, and there was Virgin's bower, which
brought us back to the patio, for a great heap of it lay on the roof
of the gallery, contesting the space there with the yellow banksia
roses. I had supposed, until the Señora Echivarra mentioned it, that
its purpose was purely ornamental, but I was to learn that it had come
into the garden as _yerba de chivato_ about the time the barbed-wire
fences of the gringo began to make a remedy for cuts indispensable to
the ranchero who valued the appearance of his live stock. When the eye,
travelling along its twisty stems and twining leaf-stalks, came to a
clump of yarrow growing at the root of it I began at once to suspect
the whole garden. Was not the virtue of yarrow known even to the
Greeks?
There was thyme flowering in the damp corner beyond the dripping
faucet, and pot-marigold, lavender, rosemary, and lemon verbena, all
plants that grow deep into the use and remembrance of man.
No friend of our race, not even the dog, has been more faithful. The
stock of these had come overseas from Spain--were not the Phœnicians
credited with introducing the pomegranate into Hispaniola?--and thence
by way of the Missions.
All the borders of Dona Ina's garden were edged with rosy thrift, a
European variety; and out on the headlands, a mile away, a paler,
native cousin of it bloomed gaily with beach asters and yellow
sand verbenas, but there was no one who knew by what winds, what
communicating rootlets, they had exchanged greetings.
Observation, travelling by way of the borders, came to the datura,
which was to set the conversation off again, this time not of plants
curative, but hurtful. We knew of the stupefying effects of the bruised
pods and roots of this species, and--this was my contribution--how
the Paiute Indians used to administer the commoner variety, called
_main-oph-weep_, to their warriors to produce the proper battle frenzy,
and especially to young women about to undergo the annual ordeal of the
"Dance of Marriageable Maidens."
Every year, at the spring gathering of the tribes, the maidens piled
their dowries in a heap, and for three days, fasting, danced about it.
If they fell or fainted, it was a sure sign they were not yet equal to
the duties of housekeeping and childbearing; but I had had Paiute women
tell me that they would never have endured the trial without a mild
decoction of _main-oph-weep_.
"It was different with us," insisted Dona Ina; "many a time we have
danced the sun up over the mountain, and been ready to begin again the
next evening...." But I wished to talk of the properties of plants, not
of young ladies.
The mystery of poison plants oppressed me. One may understand how a
scorpion stings in self-protection, but what profit has the "poison
oak" of its virulence? It is not oak at all, but _Rhus trilobata_, and
in the spring whole hillsides are enlivened by the shining bronze of
its young foliage, or made crimson in September. But the pollen that
floats from it in May in clouds, the sticky sap, or even the acrid
smoke from the clearing where it is being exterminated, is an active
poison to the human skin, though I had not heard that any animal
suffered similarly. Dona Ina opined that there was never an evil plant
let loose in the gardens of the Lord but the remedy was set to grow
beside it. A wash of manzanita tea, Grindelia, or even buckthorn, she
insisted, was excellent for poison oak. Best of all was a paste of
pounded "soap root." She knew a plant, too, which was corrective of
the form of madness induced by the "loco" weed, whose pale foliage and
delicately tinted, bladdery pods may be found always about the borders
of the chaparral. For the convulsions caused by wild parsnip there was
the wonder-working _yerba del pasmo_. This she knew also as a specific
for snake-bite and tetanus. So greatly was it valued by mothers of
families in the time of the Spanish Occupation, that when a clearing
was made for a house and patio, in any country where it grew, a plant
or two was always left standing. But it was not until I had looked for
it, where she said I would find it between the oleander and the lemon
verbena, that I recognised the common "grease-wood," the chamise of the
mesa country.
"But were there no plants, Dona Ina, which had another meaning, flowers
of affection, corrective to the spirit?"
"Angelica," she considered doubtfully. Young maids, on occasions of
indecision, would pin a sprig of it across their bosoms, she said,
and after they had been to church would find their doubts resolved;
and there was yarrow, which kept your lover true, particularly if you
plucked it with the proper ceremony from a young man's grave.
Dona Ina remembered a fascinating volume of her mother's time, the
_Album Mexicana_, in which the sentimental properties of all flowers
were set forth. "There was the camelia, a beautiful woman without
virtue, and the pomegranate----"
"But the flowers of New Spain, Dona Ina, was there nothing of these?"
I insisted.
"Of a truth, yes, there was the cactus flower, not the opunta, the
broad-leaved spiny sort, of which hedges were built in the old days,
but the low, flamy-blossomed, prickly variety of hot sandy places. If
a young man wore such a one pinned upon his velvet jacket it signified,
'I burn for you.'"
"And if he wore no flower at all, how then?"
Dona Ina laughed, "_Si me quieros, no me quieros_"; she referred to the
common yellow composite which goes by the name of "sunshine," or in the
San Joaquin, where miles of it mixed with blue phacelias brighten with
the spring, as "fly-flower." "In the old Spanish playing-cards," said
Dona Ina, "the Jack of spades had such a one in his hand, but when I
was a girl no caballero would have been caught saying, 'Love me, love
me not!' They left all that to the señoritas."
There was a Castilian rose growing beside me. Now a Castilian rose
is not in the least what you expect it to be. It is a thick, cabbagy
florescence, the petals short and not recurved, the pink hardly deeper
than that of the common wild rose, the leafage uninteresting. One has
to remember that it distinguished itself long before the time of the
tea and garden hybrids, and, I suspect, borrowed half its charm from
the faces it set off. For there was never but one way in the world for
a rose to be worn, and that is the way Castilian beauties discovered so
long ago that centuries have not made any improvement in it. Set just
behind the ear and discreetly veiled by the mantilla, it suggests the
effulgent charm of Spain, tempered by mystery. The Señora Echivarra had
followed my glance, and nodded acquiescence to my thought. "In dressing
for a _baile_, one would have as soon left off the rose as one's fan.
One wore it even when the dress was wreathed with other flowers."
"And did you, then, go wreathed in flowers?"
"Assuredly; from the garden if we had them, or from the field.
I remember once I was all blue larkspurs, here and here ..." she
illustrated on her person, "and long flat festoons of the _yerba buena_
holding them together."
"It would have taken hoop skirts for that?" I opined.
"That also. It was the time that the waltz had been learned from the
officers of the American ships, and we were quite wild about it. The
good Padre had threatened to excommunicate us all if we danced it
... but we danced ... we danced...." Dona Ina's pretty feet twitched
reminiscently. The conversation wandered a long time in the past before
it came back to the patio lying so still, divided from the street by
the high wall, the clouding fig, and the gnarly pear tree. Beyond the
artichokes a low partition wall shut off the vegetable plot; strings
of chili reddened against it. There was not a blade of grass in
sight, only the flat, black adobe paths worn smooth by generations of
treading, house and enclosing walls all of one earth.
"But if so much came into the garden from the field, Señora, did
nothing ever go out?"
Ah, yes, yes--the land is gracious; there was mustard of course, and
pepper grass and horehound, blessed herb, which spread all over the
west with healing. The pimpernel, too, crept out of the enclosing
wall, and the tree mallow which came from the Channel Islands by way
of the gardens and has become a common hedge plant on the sandy lands
about the bay of San Francisco. Along streams which ran down from
the unfenced gardens of the _Americanos_, callas had domesticated
themselves and lifted their pure white spathes serenely amid a tangle
of mint and wild blackberries and painted cup. The almond, the rude
stock on which the tender sorts were grafted, if allowed to bear
its worthless bitter nuts would take to hillsides naturally. It is
not, after all, walls which hold gardens but water. This is all that
constrains the commingling of wild and cultivated species; they care
little for man, their benefactor. Give them water, said Dona Ina,
and they come to your door like a fed dog, or if you like the figure
better, like grateful children. They repay you with sweetness and
healing.
A swift darted among the fig, marigolds, and portulacca of the
inevitable rock-work which was the pride of the old Spanish gardens.
Great rockets of tritoma flamed against the wall, on the other side of
which traffic went unnoted and unsuspecting.
"But we, Dona Ina, we Americans, when we make a garden, make it in the
sight of all so that all may have pleasure in it."
"Eh, the _Americanos_ ..." she shrugged; she moved to give a drink
to the spotted musk, flowering in a chipped saucer; the subject did
not interest her; her thought, like her flowers, had grown up in an
enclosure.
[Illustration: THE GOLDEN GATE AND BLACK POINT, FROM HYDE STREET, SAN
FRANCISCO. (SITE OF THE PANAMA EXPOSITION, 1915)]
VI
THE LAND OF THE LITTLE DUCK
Where the twin rivers set back the tides from the bay, the Land of the
Little Duck begins. The tides come head-on past the Golden Gate and the
river answers to their tremendous compulsion far inland, past the point
where the Sacramento and San Joaquin flow together. On the lee side
of the headland which makes the southern pilaster of the Gate, sits
San Francisco, making of the name she borrowed from the bay a new and
distinguished thing, as some women do with their husbands' titles. A
better location for a city is Carquinez Strait; the Mexican comandante
resident at Sonoma would have had it there, bearing the name of his
wife, Francesca. Said he to the newly arrived American authorities,
"Do so, and I will furnish you the finest site in the world, with State
house and Residence complete." But it appears the land has chosen its
own name.
All the years after the Pope had divided the New World between Spain
and the Portuguese, the harbour lay hidden. Cabrillo, Drake, Maldonado,
Juan de Fuca, Viscaino passed it in the night or veiled in obscuring
fogs. And then Saint Francis showed it clear and lovely to Don Gaspar
Portola, having for that revelation led him with holden eyes past his
journey's objective. Likewise, when the time was ripe, he put it into
the mind of the Yankee alcalde at Yerba Buena, a trading-post in the
neighbourhood of Mission Dolores, that if the hamlet should be called
San Francisco it might catch by implication the vessels clearing all
ports of the world for San Francisco bay.
O Chance, Chance! says the historian and turns another page. But it
is my opinion that among the birds to which Saint Francis preached was
included the Little Duck.
The piers of the city front east, they face the Berkeley Hills,
the Oaklands, the lands of the Sycamore, or, as the first settlers
named them, the Alamedas. From thence vast settlements take their
name, feeding the city as sea-birds do, from their own breasts.
Back and forth between them the shuttling ferries weave thin webs of
glistening wakes, duck-bodied tugs chugg and scuttle, busy still at
world-building. From the promontory which makes the northern barrier of
the Gate, Tamalpias swims out of atmospheric blueness. On its seaward
slope, hardly out of reach of the siren's bellowing note, Muir Park
preserves the ancient forest, rooted in the litter of a thousand years.
And round about the foot of city and mountain the waters of the bay
are blue, the hills are bluer. The hills melt down to greenness in the
spring, the water runs to liquid emerald, flashing amber; the hills are
tawny after rains, the waters tone to the turbid, clayey river-floods;
land and sea they pursue one another as lovers through changing moods
of colour; they have mists for mystery between revealing suns. Unless
these things count for something, San Francisco is the very worst
site in the world for a city. You take your heart in your mouth every
time you go out to afternoon tea in the tram-cars that dip and swing
like cockles at sea. They cut across streets so steep that grass grows
between the cobbles where no traffic ever passes, to plunge down lanes
of dwellings perched precariously as sea-birds' nests on the bare bones
of hills that for true hilliness shame Rome's imperial seven. The bay
side of the peninsula is mud, the Pacific side is sand. There great
wasteful dunes blow up, they shift and pile, they take the contours of
the wind-lashed waters--the very worst site in the world for a great
city's pleasure-ground, and yet somehow it is there.
For this city is one of those which have souls; it is a spirit sitting
on a height, taking to itself form and the offices of civilisation.
This is a thing that we know, because we have seen the land shake it
as a terrier shakes a rat, until the form of the city was broken; it
dissolved in smoke and flame. And then as a polyp of the sea draws out
of the fluent water form and perpetuity for itself, we saw our city
draw back its shapes of wood and stone, and statelier, more befitting
a spirit that has endured so much. Nobody knows really what a city is
except that it is something more than a collocation of houses. From
Telegraph Hill, where the old semaphore stood, which signalled the
far-between arrivals of ships around the Horn, you can see the trade
of the world pass and repass the pillars of the Gate, the wall-sided
warships. But none of these things really explain how San Francisco
came to be clinging there to the leeward of a windy spit of land, like
a great, grey sea-bird with palpitating wings.
[Illustration: TAMALPIAS]
True to her situation, San Francisco is nothing if not dramatic. One
recalls that the earliest foundation was dedicated to Our Lady of
Dolors, _Nuestro Señora de Dolores_; the Indians fought here as they
did nowhere else against Christian dominion. There were more burials
than baptisms, and in the old cemetery of Yerba Buena the dead were
so abandoned of all grace that the sand refused to hold them. One who
spent his boyhood in the shifting purlieus of the old Laguna told me
how in the hollows where the scrub oaks shrugged off the wind and the
sand waved like water, the nameless coffins were covered and uncovered
between a night and day. But if the dead could not hold their tenancy,
the living succeeded. They did it by the very force of that dramatic
instinct awakened by the plot and counterplot of natural forces.
No Greek tragedy moved to more relentless measures than the moral
upheaval of '56, when the whole city, in solemn funeral train behind
the victim of one of those wild outbursts of lawlessness peculiar to
the "gold rush," saw the lifeless bodies of the perpetrators hanging
from the upper windows of the Vigilance Committee. Fifty years later
came a wilder rout, down streets searched out by fire, snatching
at humour as they ran, as so many points of contact for the city's
rebuilding.
The very worst location in the world, as I have remarked, is this windy
promontory past which the grey tides race, but so long as a city can
dramatise itself, one situation will do as well as another in which to
render itself immortal.
The bay of San Francisco with its contingencies is one of the most
interesting of inland yachting waters, full of adventurous weather. It
is possible to sail in one general direction from Alviso to the city of
Sacramento, a hundred and fifty miles, and that without attempting the
thousand miles of estuary and slough through which the waters slink and
wind.
At this season of the year the river is pushed backward by the tide a
matter of ten miles or more above Sacramento City: on the San Joaquin
it is felt as far as Crow's Landing. At Antioch it begins to be
saltish, and down through Suisun and Carquinez the river-water fights
its way as far as San Pablo before its identity is wholly lost. At
flood-times it may be traced, a yellowish, turgid streak, as far as
Alcatraz. This is the islet of the albatross which lies south of the
tide race, as Tiburon is on the north, fragments all of them of that
salt-rimed ledge outside the gate where hoarse sea-lions play, and
brother to the castellated cloud far along on the sea's horizon, the
very capital of the kingdom of the Little Duck.
[Illustration: MILL VALLEY, AND BACKWATER OF SAN FRANCISCO BAY]