of "fruit-hands" and the army of the bees, following its successive
waves of fruit and bloom. Gangs of pruners, pickers, and packers
are shifted and shunted as the crop demands. Interesting economic
experiments transact themselves under the worried producer's eye; alien
race contending with alien race. The jarring interests of men have by
no means worked out the absolute solution, but the bees have long ago
settled their business. They kill the drones and gather the honey for
the gods who kindly provide them with hives--the more fortunate perhaps
in knowing what their particular gods require.
Wherever along the belt the rivers fail, the pumps take up the work;
strenuous little Davids contending against the Goliaths of drouth. They
can be heard chugging away like the active pulse of the vineyards,
completing the ribbon of greenness that spans from ridge to ridge of
the down-plunging hills.
And then one must take account of the cities of the plain! Twenty-five
years ago they fringed the Sierra base, mere feeders to the mines, the
cattle ranches, the sheep country. They had the manners of the frontier
and the decaying, tawdry vices that filtered down from San Francisco,
sluiced out by intermittent spasms of reform. They were "wide open."
Hairy little herders with jabbering tongues knifed one another in the
shearing season, vaqueros "shot up the town" occasionally; it is still
within memory that prominent citizen "packed a gun" for prominent
citizen. Twenty years ago the last, most southerly, of the chain of
settlements was a very cesspool of the iniquities driven to a last
stand by the influx of home-seekers. I who went through the years of
change with it could tell tales if I would--but, thank Heaven, nobody
would believe them! Now in those old places of unsavoury renown rise
handsome "business blocks," the true mark of cities. Homes heaped
with roses spread on either side of miles of palm-fringed boulevard.
Over it all flows the clear, inspiring current of Sierra-cooled air,
sliding down from the ranked peaks that, whitened from flank to flank
by perpetual snows, hover like phalanxes of protecting wings.
[Illustration: CASTLE CRAG, RATTLESNAKE CAÑON]
Into the very thick of the cities drop down from the high Sierras
trails to all its places of delight, the sequoia groves, King's River
cañon, and all the lordly peaks about Mt. Whitney and Yosemite; and
setting hillward from San Francisco the old Stockton-Sonora road
along which surged the undisciplined rout of the gold-seekers of
'forty-nine. It leads, this earliest of valley highways, across the
basin of the Stanislaus, past places made famous by the red-shirted,
lusty miners, the sleek-coated gamblers of Bret Harte. It passes the
twenty-eight Mile House where Jack Hamlin ran a poker game, and many a
scene rendered memorable by the gay ladies of Poker Flat. It reaches,
by way of a deep-rutted, ancient track, choked with the characteristic
red dust of the country, Table Mountain, the home of Truthful James.
Table Mountain, having consideration for the near-by Sierras, is a hill
merely, with a flat deposit of _malpais_, the "black rock" of regions
far north and east. Beyond Sonora lie the old placer "diggings," every
foot of which has been combed and sifted for gold. The bones of the
earth are laid bare; all the masking clay, tossed and tumbled, clogged
with rusty pipes and decaying sluices, lies in heaps and depressions
where the gold-seekers cast it. The sense of violation is heightened by
the hue of the soil, redder than the hills of Devon, redder than a red
heifer--but the river furnishes the more descriptive figure, the martyr
hue of the Sacrament. In the flood season it carries the tint of its
ensanguined clays far down into the bay's blueness.
The remnant of that riotous life,--the abandoned cabins, the towns
falling into dissolution,--like the remaining specimens of the fir and
redwood forests cut off to timber the Mother Lode, is left standing by
unfitness. The best of it is a little nugget of remembrance of Francis
Bret Harte and Mark Twain.
[Illustration: McCLOUD RIVER, UPPER SACRAMENTO VALLEY]
It was at Angels in the foothills of Calaveras that Twain, to his
everlasting fame, was so impressed with the performance of the Jumping
Frog. But life at Angels and all up and down that placer country is
as heavy with desuetude as the frog was after the bar-keeper had fed
him with buckshot. As well try to get a draught of that old time as a
drink at any of the dismantled bars, high, ornate, black walnut affairs
across which, in dust and nuggets, passed and repassed probably as much
gold as would serve to buy the orange belt of the San Joaquin--and for
a figure of magnificence you would find nothing more acceptable to its
inhabitants.
Much of the history of that country is written in the names. Here the
soft Spanish locutions give place to harsher, but not less descriptive,
Americanisms--Jimtown, Jackass Hill, Squaw Creek; the cañons become
"gulches," the mesas "flats." Later both of these were overlaid by
-villes and -tons, the plain rural names of Anglo-Saxon derivation,
Coulterville, Farmington, Turlock. They smell of orchards. Prosperity
is coming back on the surface of the fruitful waters, but the redwood
forests have not come back. Centuries, nothing less, are required for
the building of one of these towers of greenness, and it is barely
forty years since all that district was one roaring blast of mining
life, rioting, jostling, snatching each from each. In the language
of the country, the Italian truck gardeners will "beat them to it."
They have smoothed over the old "slickens" and comforted the land with
crops.
As one travels north, the bulk of the Sierra lessens, the pines climb
higher, the oaks march well down into the middle valley to catch the
wet coast winds, the character of the plantations change, there are
more grain fields, more neat little farms. Finally the old Overland
emigrant trail climbs down from Donner Lake and Emigrant Gap, and you
find yourself deep in the Valley of the Sacramento.
By an air-line from the meeting of the waters, its geographical
frontier is passed in the neighbourhood of Sonora; perhaps the bridge
over the Mokelumne is a better indicator, since that river joins the
San Joaquin at the estuary, but it is not until the Overland road is
crossed that the character of the country definitely betrays the upper
valley.
Ascending the river, the works of man are less and less, the forest
and the mountains more. The rapid rise of the wooded slopes keeps
the Sacramento troublous. Tributaries, not large but swift and of
tremendous volume, pour into it. Occasionally from dark cañons is
heard the steady pound of the quartz mill, working some ancient lead,
or a smelter blocks out a whole forested slope with its poisonous
exhalations; but for the most part the northern valley is given over to
brooding quiet, to unending green, and streams as swift as adders.
In Mendocino county, on the coast side, the Range begins to lift
toward the snow-line; on the Sierra side the alpine crest shears away.
From time to time the "logging" industry cuts a wide track down the
redwood forest. One hears above the singing rivers, the clucking of
the donkey-engine or the rip of a mill still going in the midst of its
self-created, sawdust desert. The glutting of the lumber region has
been accomplished as wastefully, as violently, as the search for gold.
All up the valley tall prophets of the rain have been butchered to
make a lumberman's fat purse. But, link by link, the forestry bureau
is closing in the line of the reserves against the lumber "kings," the
Ahabs of a grasping time.
The hills fall into a certain order, serried rank on rank. Deciduous
growth of the lower slopes gives way to redwoods and Shasta fir. Miles
upon miles of them stand so thick that when one dies it does not fall
but remains erect in the arms of its brothers. Great columnar boles
rise out of the river-basins, soaring high over what, except for their
dwarfing proportions, would be a considerable grove of graceful oak
and bay and glistening, magnolia-leafed, crimson-shafted madroño.
Over these the redwoods rise, as over the heads of worshippers the
clustered columns of Milan seek the dome. High up the tops are caught
in a froth of pale-green foliage through which the sunlight filters
blue. This characteristic refraction from their yellowish, inch-long
needles dwells about the redwood as an aura, and far on the horizon
distinguishes their ranks from the hill-slopes masked with pines. So,
blue ridge on ridge, they advance on the imperious height of Shasta.
[Illustration: DONNER LAKE, ON THE OLD EMIGRANT TRAIL]
Shasta is a brother of Fuji and Tacoma, one of those solitary crater
peaks whose whiteness is the honourable age of fiery youth, a good
mountain dead and gone to heaven. Do not go up on it; you will see
a great deal more of what you have seen, wooded hills on hills and
perhaps the sapphire belt of the sea, the glitter of lovely, sail-less
lakes, but you will not understand it any better, for Shasta has no
more to do with the abutting ranges than a great genius with the stock
which produced him. This is a prophet among mountains, a vent from
the burning heart of creation. One is not surprised to learn that the
Indians hereabout count their descent from the Spirit of Shasta and
the Grizzly Bear. That dark belt of forest circling the mountain's
base looks to be the proper haunt for him, the lumbering, little-eyed
embodiment of brute creation. It is well to think of those two things
together, the rip of those mighty claws with a ton or two of brute bulk
behind them, and the awful witness towering to the blue, and suffer the
soul-satisfying fear that lies in wait for man in the great places of
the earth. All our modern fears are mean, fears of the common opinion
and the bill collector. Shasta will have done its best for you if it
enables you to quake in the very marrow of consciousness.
After this it is well to turn southward along the Coast Range, camping
by the trout-abounding rivers, losing yourself in the stiff laurels and
azaleas of Mendocino, fishing at the clear lakes cupped in the hollows.
If the season is right there will be salmon running in Klamath and
Trinity rivers or deer in the steep-sided cañons. And everywhere there
will be the redwoods. It is not, however, in the crowds that the tree
reveals itself. Far down the deforested hills of Sonoma, in isolated
groves, in small groups or singles on the tops of bossy, brass-coloured
hills, it takes on character and charm.
A redwood grove is a three-story affair. On the ground floor, turned
rusty brown, as though the sunlight filtering through had mellowed
there a thousand years, creep the wild ginger, the rosy-flowered
oxalis, trilliums, and violets. All these lower rooms are crowded with
dogwood, with the great berried manzanitas, woodwardias, man-high,
and glistening bays, silver-tipped with light. By one of those
strange but charming affinities of wild life, the redwood grove is
the peculiar haunt of lilies. Every variation of the soil--the peat
bogs of the coast, the high sandy ridges, the damp meadows--has each
its appropriate variety; and not merely lilies, but droves of them,
hundreds of swaying stems, files of them up the line of seeping springs
or round the bases of great boulders, lilies breast high, lilies
overhead, ruby-spotted, golden-throated, shining white, dowered with
the special genius of perfume. Along the chaparral-covered slope and
deep within the cañons one tracks them by the subtle, intoxicating
scent spreading, as I am persuaded no other perfume does, by a
conscious distillation on the melting air.
[Illustration: LAUREL LAKE, UPPER SACRAMENTO]
The second redwood story, that wondrous space of blue-diffusing sun,
between the deciduous underforest and the fairy web of redwood green,
is bird and squirrel haunted. Jays flash back and forth, bright
flickers of the humming-bird go buzzing by. Woodpeckers may be heard
calling the ever-missing "Jacob, Jacob!" who must in their opinion
be concealing himself somewhere about the upper story. The wire-drawn
warble of the brown creeper follows the singer up and down the deeply
corrugated trunks. Wrens, sparrows, juncos, all manner of little
feathered folk in whose coats the tones of brown predominate, frequent
the pillared middle rooms. Once I heard what I thought to be a hermit
thrush, singing out of the dusk of Muir Wood. But I have not the art
of knowing birds by note. People who live much in the redwoods find
them silent; I think it might more easily be that the great trunks
and green-shot glooms have the same quality of dwarfing sound as size.
Redwoods, as I know them, are really lighter and more alive than any
other coniferous forests, but the _effect_ of umbrageous stillness is
induced by vast proportions.
As for what goes on in the upper rooms, who has been there? What birds
arise to their three- or four-hundred-foot heights? The few and slight
boughs, the feathery layers of foliage rounding in age to sloping
crowns, who knows them but the wind and the snows that neither stir nor
are stayed by them? There are some matters that the great Twin Valleys
keep even from the men for whom they have borne an empire.
VIII
THE HIGH SIERRAS AND THE SAGE-BRUSH COUNTRY
The proper vehicle for mountain study is not yet available. A great
mountain range is like a great public character, there is much more
to it than is presented to the observation, and it is not open to
familiarity. But if one could fly high and wide over its cloud-lifting
summits, one might learn something of its private relations.
From such a vantage it would instantly appear how distinct are the
Nevadas (_nieve_, snowy) among the Sierras of California. A very
Bonaparte of mountains, new-born and lording it over the ancient
ranges, not content with its vast empery but swinging north into the
unpre-empted icy regions. San Bernardino and San Jacinto are as far
from it as the Faubourg St. Germain from an island in the sea. Sierra
Madre is of the Coast Range; Shasta a fire-hole, a revolutionist; the
true Sierra is the midriff of a continent. From its northern extremity
one sees the sun in a circle and the Northern Lights; that portion of
it we know as Sierra Nevada swings into the state above Honey Lake,
and ends southward in a tumble of blunt peaks below Kern River. This
is quite enough, however, for Californians to make free with, and more
than they can appreciate.
Geographically the range begins on the south at Tehachapi, but at
Walker's Pass, a day's journey to the north, is the first appearance
of its most salient characteristic, the great Sierra Fault. In its
youth the range suffered incredible cataclysms. For two hundred
miles the great eastern plain dropped; weighted as it was with its
withered aristocracy of hills--how weazened and old you can see to
this day--it tore sharply downward, and the depth of that fall from
the heaven-affronting peak of Whitney to the desert valley of Inyo is
a matter of two miles of sheer descent.
The whole Sierra along the line of faultage has the contour of a
wave about to break. It swings up in long water-shaped lines from
the valley of the San Joaquin, and rears its jagged crest above the
abrupt desert shore. Seen from close under, some of these two- and
three-thousand-foot precipices have the pitch of toppling waters. As
they rose new-riven from the earth their proportions must have been
more than terrifying.
Later the Ice Age bore downward from the north, and through
immeasurable years carved the fractured granite into shapes of enduring
beauty. It rounded the great jutting fronts, it insured them against
the tooth of time with the keen icy polish with which they shine
still against the morning. It gouged narrow wall-sided cañons, cut the
course of rivers, and sinking like a graver's tool into the heart of
the range, scooped out deep wells of pleasantness. Afterward, when the
ice was old, it must have moved more slowly, for the lines it left,
retreating northward, are more flowing, the hill-crowns rounder. And
then the mountain was besieged with trees. They stormed it, scaled its
free precipices; you can see by the thick mould of the valleys what
ranks and ranks of them went down, and along the snow-line how by the
persistence of assault they are bent and contorted.
This is the whole effect of the sombre swathes of pine that mask the
Sierra slopes. They march along the water-courses, they climb up sheer
precipices in staggering files, trooping in the passes; across the
smooth meadow spaces they lock arms, they await the word of command.
By a very little observation they are seen to be ranged in orderly
companies. Here a warm current of air travelling steadily from the
superheated valleys carries the life zone higher, there a defiant
bony ridge drops it a few thousand feet, but the relative arrangement
of species does not greatly vary. The broad oaks, like reverend
grandsires, from the foothills see the procession go by, they follow
as far as the gates of the mountain, crutched and bowed. All the lower
cañons are full of a rabble of deciduous trees, chinquapins, scrub oak,
madroño, full of gay camp-followers, lilac, dogwood, azaleas, strumpet
penstemons, flaunting lupins, monk's-hood, columbine.
[Illustration: YOSEMITE FALLS]
The grey nut pine, wide-branched, unwarlike but serviceable, opens
the ranks of conifers. Then the long-leaved pines begin, _ponderoso_,
_Coulteri_, and the slender, arrowy, fire-resisting _attenuata_. On the
western slope, increasing as they go northward, the redwood holds all
the open country, but it is no climber like _monticola_, the largest
of all true pines, the captain of the Sierra forests. The firs usurp
the water-borders and the low moraines; clannish, incommunicable, they
seem not to find it worth while to grow unless they grow stately. Above
all these range the thin-barked pines, the lodgepole, Douglas spruce,
librocedrus, and hardy junipers in windy passes. About the meadows and
lake-borders the quaking asps push like children between the knees
along the line; and highest, most persistent, the creeping-limbed,
wind-depressed white-barked pine, under whose matted boughs the wild
sheep bed.
The trees have each their own voice--a degree of flexibility or length
of needles upon which the wind harps to produce its characteristic
note. The traveller in the dark of mountain nights knows his way among
them as by the street cries of his own city. The creaking of the firs,
the sough of the long-leaved pines, the whispering whistle of the
lodgepole pine, the delicate frou-frou of the redwoods in a wind, these
come out for him in the darkness with the night scent of moth-haunted
flowers. But there is one tree that for the footer of the mountain
trails is voiceless; it speaks no doubt, but it speaks only to the
austere mountain-heads, to the mindful winds and the watching stars.
It speaks as men speak to one another and are not heard by the little
ants crawling over their boots. This is the "big tree," the sequoia. In
something less than a score of forest patches about the rim of the Twin
Valleys, the sequoia abides, out of some possible preglacial period,
out of some past of which nothing is left to us but the fading memory
of the "giants in those days." The age of individual big trees can
be computed in terms of human history. There are evidences written in
the rings of these that they endured the drouth which made the famine
in the days of Ahab the king, against which Elijah prayed. These are
growing trees whose seeds are fertile.
One might make a very dramatic collocation of the rise and fall of
empires against the life period of a single sequoia, and that would
be easier than to transcribe by mere phrases the impression of one
of these green towers of silence on the sense. Single and deeply
corrugated as a Corinthian column, with only a lightly-branched crown
for a capital, they spire for five thousand years or so, and then the
leaf-crown becomes rounded to a dome in which the winds breed. Warm
days of Spring, their young nestling zephyrs come fluttering down the
deep wells of shade to shake the saplings of a hundred years. In Summer
the fine-leafed foliage catches the sun like spray, diffusing vaporous
blueness; but the majesty of their gigantic trunks is incommunicable.
After a while the stifling sense of awe breaks before it, and you go
on with your small affairs as children will go on playing even in the
royal presence.
[Illustration: BLUE LAKE, LAKE COUNTY]
The name _Sequoia_ is one of the few cheering notes among our habitual
botanical stupidities--an attempt to express quality as it is humanly
measured in a name. There was once an American Cadmus, Sequoyah, a
Cherokee who invented an Indian alphabet and taught his tribe to read.
Seeing them outnumbered in their own territory, he started west with
the idea of founding a great Indian empire. He was last seen trailing
north across the desert and was heard of no more. Tradition has it that
he reached the forest of the upper Kern River and gave the trees his
name. At least no botanist with his nose in a book has usurped it.
Forests are for cover. They mask not only the naked rock, but the paths
of deer and bear and bighorn. Under the spire-pointed ranks of conifers
that look so black from above, verging to blueness, a world of furtive
folk goes on. A world of birds is in its branches, squirrels nimble
as sparrows, but scarcely anything of this is visible to the watcher
on the heights. Rabbits playing on your lawn would be more noticeable
in proportion than the seldom-seen bighorn leading his light-footed
young from ledge to rocky ledge. The jealous trees cover the trails and
obscure the passes.
As you come up through them you observe the flat, soddy spaces of
old lake basins, green as jewels, and the hanging meadows gay with
cascades of flowers, the stream tangles, the new-made moraines bright
with bindweed and sulphur-flower. But from the heights all this lovely
detail is hidden by the overlapping tents of boughs. Here and there a
stream leaps forth at the falls like a sword from a green scabbard,
or higher up, may be traced as the silver wire on which are strung
unrippled lakes as blue as cobalt. Great chains of such lakes lead down
from the snow-line to the foothill borders, encroached upon by the
silent ranks of trees. As they go down they show soddy borders, they
tend to fill and to grow meadows where presently deep-rooting trees
assume their stations. This is the strategic rule for the taking of a
granite mountain. First the grinding ice and the disintegrating water;
what the streams wash down collects in the glacier-ploughed basins. It
makes lake borders by which the grass comes in--the small grass that
is mightier than mountains, that eats them for its food. Lakes at the
lower levels become meadows, then trees arrive; they overrun the soddy
ground, the snow-manured moraines. The trees themselves take centuries
to fruition. At a later stage men dispossess the forest and build
cities, but this has not yet come to the Sierras. There is something
indomitable in the will of the trees to spread and climb. In the floor
of Yosemite and Hetch Hetchy there are hundred-year-old oaks of full
form and generous growth, and on the slopes above them the same oaks
and of almost the same age are so dwarfed by drouth and altitude that
they are not knee-high to a man, but they keep the due proportions of
their type. A white bark pine will climb where the weight of the winter
drifts is so heavy that it is never able to lift its decumbent trunk
from the ground, clinging like ivy to the wall in which it roots.