drifts that, carried down the melting water, warn the sheep-herder and
the orchardist a hundred miles away of the advancing season. A pine
forest in flower is one of the things worth seeing which is most seldom
seen, for at its best the high passes are still choked by snow, the
lakes ice-locked, the trails dangerous. And then the blossoms, yellow
and crimson tassels and rosy spathes, are carried on the leafy crowns
high over the heads of the most adventurous foresters. What one finds,
as late as the end of June when the trails are open, is a stain of
pollen on the lingering snow, and great clouds of it flying wherever a
bough is brushed by a light wing. In the autumn the whole wood is full
of the click and glint of the winged seeds. Storms of them, like clouds
of locusts, are carried past on the wind, to be dropped in the nearest
clearing or to find a chance lodging in a moss-lined crevice of the
weathered headlands.
[Illustration: LAKE TAHOE, THE HIGH SIERRAS]
But from the heights, all feeling for the process of the forest is
lost in the sense of its irresistible march--it creeps and winds, it
waits darkly for the word. Above the tree-line no sound ascends but a
faint vibration, the body of sound making itself felt in the silence.
On windless days the forest lies black like weed at the bottom of a
lake of air as clear as a vacuum. When the great wind rivers pour about
the peaks, it can be seen lashing like weed in the currents, but still
almost soundlessly--the roar of it passes down the cañons, and is heard
in the cities of the plain. But if the peaks cannot hear what the trees
are plotting about, it is not so with the voices of the water. These
are sharper, more definitive; they rise re-echoing from the rocky walls
and are recognisable each by its distinctive note at incredible heights
of the sheer, glassy, granite frontlets.
In the glacial valleys, such as Yosemite, Tehipite, and Hetch Hetchy,
where young rivers drop from the headlands in long streaming falls,
the noise of them contending with the wind makes mimic thunder. Immense
curtains of falling water are tossed this way and that, they are caught
up and suspended in mid-air, and let fall crashing to the lower levels.
When the wind blows straight up the cañon they will rear against it,
and leap out a shining arc, shattering in mid-air like bursting bombs
of spray. But later in the season, when the streams are heavy with the
melting snows, the wind itself is shattered by the weight of falling
water--it exhausts itself in obscuring clouds of silver dust. When from
Whitney or Williamson or King's Mountain you can see half-a-hundred
such young rivers roaring to the morning, it is as beautiful and as
terrifying as the sight of youth to timorous age. They go leaping with
their shining shields, and their shouting shakes the rocks. Neither
you nor they believe that the most and the best they will come to is an
irrigating canal between sober rows of prunes and barley.
Higher than the forests, or the waters rising out of them, is the
_Py-weack_, the Land of Shining Rocks. They shine with glacier polish;
horses on the high trails sniff suspiciously at their glittering
surfaces. Time can lay slight hold on them by thunder, by frost, and
the little grey moss; it has not yet subdued the front of Oppapago.
Here between snowless ribs and buttresses are the shrunken glaciers
that feed the streams, little toy models of the ancient rivers of ice.
The snowfields of the Sierras are not so inconsiderable as they seem:
they are dwarfed by the precipices among which they hide. Inaccessible
to ordinary mountain travel, they make their best showing from the
surrounding plains, where, lifted in the middle air, they glow with
ethereal whiteness. Close by they display a bewildering waste of broken
ice, boulders, and crevasses, made bleaker by the cobalt shadows.
[Illustration: MOUNT SHASTA--SIERRA GLOW]
North the line of peaks stretches, broken by the passes that give
access to the west. Between them, above the source of streams, in the
ice-gouged hollows, lie unfathomable waters that take all their life
from the sky. Or perhaps they are reservoirs from which the sky is
made, fluid jade and azulite and hyacinth and chrysoprase, as if the
skies of many days had run their colours in those bleak bowls. For at
this altitude the wave contour of the range comes out most sharply; the
sky is strangely deep and darker, as if through its translucence one
glimpsed the void of space. One sees the moon and the planets wandering
there with pale lamps held aloft.
No life of any sort is visible from here. Farther down toward the
coast, over the forested moraines, the condor may be seen leaning
against the wind at sunrise. On the edge of the abysmal cañons eagles
make their nests and go dropping down the shadowy depths to seek their
food from God, but they do not rise to these stark heights. Sometimes
a clanging horde of water-fowl, beating up from the Gulf of California
overland to the Canadian marshes, will grow bewildered in the face of
the great wall-sided cliffs; circling they attempt the forward flight,
only to circle and rise anew, until, wing-weary in that thin air, they
sink exhausted to the margin of a mountain lake, satisfied at last to
thread their way humbly along the creek-beds to open country.
The live forces of the High Sierra are the forces of wind and light.
One feels the push of tremendous currents flowing between the peaks
as among rocky islands. Day by day they may be charted by the cloud
fragments floating on them, by the banners of dry snow dust, streaming
out like long grass from the island shores. Thundering fleets of cumuli
drift up the wind rivers and assault the great domes of Whitney and
Oppapago. The light breaks through all the varying cloud strata, and
colours them with splendour; the glow of the clouds reflected on the
snow is caught by the watchful mountain-lover far down the valleys of
Inyo and San Joaquin. This painted hour of sunset is the apotheosis of
mountains, but for me it has less of majesty than the morning after
deep snows. These come usually early in the season. The air for days
will be full of the formless stir, then the range withdraws itself
behind a veil which closes from tented peak to peak, and includes
sometimes the parallel desert ranges which lie along its eastern coast.
Twenty feet will fall in a single session of the white gods behind the
veil. Then comes a morning blue and sharp as a spear-thrust. Every tree
is like an arrow feathered in green and white. Airy bridges built upon
the bending stems shut in the water-courses; the moraines are smooth
and soft as the backs of huddled sheep. By night the range shows from
the valley as a procession of winged figures holding the snows upon
their bosoms. And that, after all, is the business of mountains. The
western front of the Sierra Nevada, which receives the full force of
the Pacific storms, is rewarded with the stateliest forests. Before
those extended snowy mountain arms lie the great Twin Valleys; behind
them stretches the illimitable sage-brush country, the backyard of the
Sierra.
[Illustration: VALLEY OF THE YOSEMITE]
"Sage-brush country" is one of those local terms that stand for a type
of landscape as distinctive as the moors of England and the campagna
of Italy. It means first of all, open country, great space of sky,
what the inhabitants of it call "eye-reach," treeless except for a few
cotton-woods and willows along the sink of intermittent streams, and
stippled with low shrubs of artemesia. This is the true "sage-brush,"
though it is no sage, the sacred bush of Diana, _Artemisia tridentata_.
It may grow in favoured districts man-high, but ordinarily not more
than two or three feet in the arid regions which it haunts. Other
social shrubs will be found pre-empting miles of the territory to
which the artemesia gives its name, _coleogeny_, _pursia_, _dalia_,
"creosote," but none other gives it the distinctive feature, the web of
pale, silky sage-green against the sun-burned sand.
Other items of the sage-brush landscape are so constant that they
are immediately suggested by it: mountains hanging on the horizon in
opalescent haze, low flowing lines of hills overlaid by old lava-flows,
the "black rock" simulating cloud shadows on the distant ranges, dry
red cones of ancient volcanic ash, and great flat table-topped "buttes"
of the painted desert.
White-crested ranges on the one hand and buttes on the other mark the
limits of the sage; for where snow-caps are, there are trees, and where
the buttes begin the cactus and the palo verde reign.
A sage-brush country is a cattle country primarily; perhaps there may
be mines; where there is water to be stored for irrigation there will
be towns, but the virtue of the sage is that it grows in lands that
man, at least, has found no other use for.
It can thrive on an allowance of water that will support no larger
thing than a chipmunk or a lizard, and, growing, feeds the cattle
on a thousand hills. Therefore it is indispensable to any picture of
the sage-brush country that there should be herds at large in it and
vaqueros riding, or far down the bleached valley the dust of a rodeo
rising. It is impossible to think of such a land and not think of these
things, free life, and air as clear and vibrant with vitality as a
bell. I can never think of it myself without seeing, in addition, the
vultures making a merry-go-round over Panamint, and up from Coso the
creaking line of a twenty-mule team.
The sage-brush country of California begins properly at the foot of
the Sierras where the state-line sheers east by south from Lake Tahoe.
It covers the high valleys that divide the true Sierra from the older,
lesser ranges that keep it company as far south as Olancha. Below
Mono Lake, that part of the gold region made immortal by Mark Twain,
it gives to the chrome- and ochre-tinted soil its distinguishing
characteristic. From the long arm of Death Valley it begins to be
encroached upon by the mesquite, and at Indian Wells it is driven close
under the lee of the last Sierra. The range of which San Bernardino
and San Jacinto are outposts carries the artemisia farther desertward,
almost to the Colorado River in fact, and south again about the Salton
Sea it holds its own with sahuro and palo verde. Its eastern border,
like that of the wild tribes along the Mojave line, is lost in pure
desertness. Formerly much of that country from San Bernardino to
the sea was native to the sage, and all the southern end of the San
Joaquin. But now all this is replaced with orchards, for the artemisia
proves nothing so much of the soil on which it grows as that, given a
due allowance of water, it is as desirable for other things.
[Illustration: THE HALF DOME, YOSEMITE]
All this country which I have described to you has so recently been sea
that the mark of its old beach-line is plainly to be traced along the
east Sierra wall. Still the evaporating water leaves vast deposits of
salt and alkali, blinking white in the sink of Death Valley. There are
lakes there still where the salt crusts over hard and clear like ice,
and deep thick puddles of bitter minerals, the lees of that ancient
inland ocean. From the top of any of the denuded desert ranges it is
possible to trace the winding bays and estuaries, and, with an eye for
location, to choose the points at which one may fairly expect to find
potsherds, amulets, fire-blackened hearthstones, and the middens of a
nameless people who built their primitive towns along its beaches. It
must have had much to recommend it in those days before the sage-brush
took it, for this inland sea, rather than the more mountainous Pacific
shore, was the route taken by the ancient migratory peoples who left
their undecipherable signs scored into the rocks from the Aztec country
to the Arctic. On isolated igneous rocks near their old encampments,
and high on the walls of the box canons, such as might have been
tide-rifts, high above any mechanical contrivance of the present-day
Indians, the records resist equally the shifts of sea and sand and the
efforts of modern science to read them.
Whether the ghosts of the departed peoples ever revisit the ancient
beaches, the ghosts of waters haunt there daily. Morning and
mid-afternoon the rivers of mirage arise; they well out of the past
and are poured trembling on the plain; phantom fogs blow across them,
wraiths of trees grow up and are reflected in false streams. Often
in very early light there are strange suggestions of----dunes and
boulders perhaps? Only no boulders in that country are flat-topped like
the houses built in lands of the sun, and no dunes are wall-sided.
Mirage, we are told, is but a picture of distant things, mirrored on
atmospheric planes, but then maybe a ghost is only a mirage deflected
on our atmosphere from worlds outside our ken, and it is always easy
in the desert to see things that you cannot possibly believe. Whatever
they are, mirages are real to the eye. I mean that they are not to
be winked away nor dissipated by contact. I have watched a vaquero
ride into one of them and drown to all appearances, or seem to be
swimming his horse across its billows, all of him below its surface as
completely hidden as by rivers of water. Moreover, mirages tend always
to occur under given conditions and in the same places. I recall one
of the stations on the old Mojave stage road, which, approached from
the north about an hour after sunrise, would instantly duplicate: two
houses, two lines of poplars, two high corrals.
[Illustration: SHASTA--SNOW CLOUDS]
Occasionally along the edge of the sage-brush country one may see that
surpassing wonder, the moon mirage, poured like quicksilver along the
narrow valleys, as if the thirsty land had dreamed of water.
It is odd how this suggestion of sea and river clings to a country
where there is nothing harder to come by than good water to drink.
For any other purpose it is not to be thought of. After one of those
terrible wind storms, the only really incommoding desert weather, it is
possible to find great spaces all rippled and lined in water-markings
like a sea that has suddenly undergone a magic transformation into
sand. The contours of the desert ranges are billowy; they rise out
of the plain like the grey-backed breakers of open sea. The valleys
between are narrow and trough-like; the shores of them are lined with
crawling dunes that, under the steady pressure of wind currents, are
for ever sliding up their own peaks and down the other side, changing
place without ever once losing the long slope to windward and the
abrupt landward fall of waves.
Another item which adds to the suggestion of the illimitable spread
of sage-brush country, like the sea, is the way the sparse forests
of the mountain-tops appear to be islanded by it. For the sage-brush
extends on across the Great Basin, it stretches into Montana and
south to Arizona and New Mexico, it works about the lower end of the
Rocky Mountains and well into the great central plain. The ranges
lie thick in it as ocean swells, as I have said, and stepping from
crest to crest has come the fox-tail pine, _Pinus flexilis_, all the
way from Humboldt Mountain to San Jacinto. A sinewy, thinly-branched
species, as straight-backed as an Indian, it has little affinity for
its noble congeners of the Sierra forests, but keeps to the dry and
open ridges, nourished by clouds and by infrequent shallow snows. With
it, but at lower levels to which the _flexilis_ will never come, is
found frequently the one-leaved piñon pine, the food-crop of the wild
tribes. But the piñon is a pushing sort, it establishes itself upon the
slightest invitation.
There is a story told in the desert of how this grey, round-headed tree
was once a very great _capitan_, who, in order that his death might be
as beneficent to his people as his life had been, was changed into the
foodful pine. Whether the legend is true or not, certain it is that
if you sit down by a piñon, wherever found, and stay long enough, you
will see Indians. They might come in the Spring looking for _taboose_,
or later for willows and grasses for basketry, for seeds of sunflower
and chia, to shoot doves by the water-holes or to hunt chuckwallas. A
chuckwalla is a lizard, a kind of dragon in miniature, barred black and
white, and as offensive to look at as he is harmless, in fact very good
eating and not too plentiful. Mojaves, Shoshones, Paiutes, Pimas, all
the tribes of the sage-brush country, have this in common, that they
live very close to the earth; roots, seeds, reptiles, thick pads of
the cholla cactus, even the grass of the field, serve them. They look,
indeed, as though they had been made of the earth on the very spot that
produced them, of the black rock, the brown sand, and the dark water
that collects in polished basins of the wind-denuded ranges.
Very little rain gets past the heaven-raking crest of the Sierra Nevada
into the sage-brush country; the most that falls is blown up from the
Gulf of California along the draw created by the close, parallel desert
ranges. It is precipitated usually under atmospheric conditions that
produce violent drops and changes. All that the traveller is likely to
find of it is in these rock reservoirs under the run-off of some bare
granite cliff, or in the rare, persistent "water-holes" hollowed out by
beasts or men, marked in the landscape by one lone tree perhaps, or a
clump of shrubby willows. Often there will be no mark at all except the
frequency along the trail of skeleton cattle or wild sheep, pointing
all in one direction, as they died on their way to the far-between
drinking-places. There are districts in this back-door country where
evaporation from the body is so rapid that death overtakes the chance
prospector even with water in sight or in his canteen across his back.
For years a notorious outlaw protected himself in the Death Valley
region, by filling in all the springs in a circle about the territory
to which he had retreated. Beyond that waterless rim even the law could
not penetrate.
And yet how the land repays the slightest moisture! Years when the
Kuro-Siwa swings closer to our coast and the winds are friendly,
I have seen all that country, from Tehachapi, outside the wall, to
San Gorgiono, one sheet of blue and gold. Seeds of a hundred tender
annuals lie in the loose sands for years between the shrubby sage,
their vitality unimpaired by the delayed resurrection of a chance wet
spring. Often I have sifted the sand in my fingers looking for a sign
of the life-giving principle which bursts so suddenly into beauty,
without finding it. Yet after years in which there is no alteration
in the aspect of the country, except the insensible change of the sage
tints from grey to green and grey again, the miracle takes place, the
blossomy wonder is upon the world.
As a matter of fact, the sage-brush country is by no means the desert
that it looks to the casual eye. Besides the social shrubs which have
each their own blossom and seed time, even the driest years will
afford a few blooms of crimson mallow, and in the shelter of every
considerable shrub some dwarfed and delicate phacelia or nemophilia.
Even out of dunes which bury its hundred old trunks to the new season's
twigs, the mesquite will bear its sweet foodful pods. If you know at
what hours to look for it, wild life is never absent, but it is not
ordinarily to be found by white men blundering about in broad noon.
It is only when you meet, in the midst of great open valleys wherein
there is nothing growing higher than the knees of your horse, and
nothing moving bigger than the little horned toad under the cactus
bush, bands of Indians well fed, cushiony with fat of mesquite meal and
chia, that you understand how little you know of the land in which you
move.
There is a Paiute proverb to the effect that no man should attempt the
country east of the Sierras until he has learned to sleep in the shade
of his arrows. This is a picturesque way of saying that he must be able
to reduce his wants to the limit of necessity. Those who have been able
to do so, and have trusted the land to repay them, have discovered that
the measure is over-full.
A man may not find wealth there, nor too much of food even, but he
often finds himself, which is much more important.
INDEX
_The illustrations are indexed in italics._
Alcatraz, 112
Alviso, 112
Angels, 138
Antioch, 112, 119
Arbolado, 84
"Arroya," definition of, 30
Bakersfield, 129, 132, 133
Berkeley Hills, 108, 114
_Blue Lake, Lake County_, 155
Buena Vista, 122
Cabrillo, 49, 108
Cahuenga, 47, 48, 67
Calaveras, 139
Camulas, 41
_Cañon in the Sierra Madres_, 49
Carmel, 74, 77, 80, 83
Carmel River, 76
Carmel Valley, 78
Carquinez, 112
Carquinez Strait, 107, 119
_Castle Crag, Rattlesnake Cañon_, 136
Castro, 66
Catalina, 49
_Cemetery, The, Santa Barbara Mission_, 56
Cession of California from Mexico, 48
_Clear Lake, Lake County_, 134
"Coasts of Adventure, The," 47-60
Colorado River, 166
Contra Costa, 117
Coronado, 23
Coronel, Don Antonio, 48
Corta Madero, 116
Coso, 165
Coulterville, 139
_Cypress Point, near Carmel_, 75
Death Valley, 166, 172
_Donner Lake_, 142
Donner Lake, 140
Drake, Sir Francis, 9, 43, 108
Eagle Rock, 47
Emigrant Gap, 140
_Eucalyptus Grove, A_, 33
Exeter, 135
Faralones, The, 113
Farmington, 139
Fort Point, 67
Francis of Assisi, 10, 108
Franciscan "Frailes," 9, 12
Frémont, 66
Fresno, 135
Fuca, Juan de, 108
_Glendale, Valley of the San Gabriel_, 40
Golden Gate, 107
_Golden Gate and Black Point_, 107
Gulf of California, 161, 171
_Half Dome, The, Yosemite_, 166
Hamlin, Jack, 137
Harte, Bret, 137, 138
Hetch Hetchy Valley, 159
"High Sierras and the Sage-Brush Country, The" 149-174
Hôtel Del Monte, 76
Humboldt Mountain, 170
Indian Wells, 166
Inyo Valley, 162
Jackass Hill, 139
Jimtown, 139
Jumping Frog, the, 139
Kaweah Mountain, 133
Kaweah River, 129
Kern River, 129, 132, 134, 155
King's Mountain, 159
King's River, 129
King's River Cañon, 137
Klamath River, 143
Kuro-Siwa Current, 49, 172
Laboratory Point, 68
Lake Mono, 165
Lake Tahoe, 165
_Lake Tahoe_, 158
"Land of the Little Duck, The," 107-124
_Laurel Lake, Upper Sacramento_, 145
Lindsay, 135
_Looking down on Monterey and the Bay_, 65
Lopez, Francisco, 47
Los Angeles, 29, 35
Los Angeles River, 30
_McCloud River_, 139
Madera, 135
Maldonado, 108
Mare Island, 116
Mendocino Country, 141
Merced River, 129, 135
_Mill Valley_, 113
_Mirror Lake, Yosemite_, 129
Mission Dolores, 108
Mission Point, 69, 81
Mission River, 17
Mission of San Carlos Borromeo, 76, 78
Mission San Fernando, 47
Missions, ruins of, 19
Mokelumne River, 140
Monterey, 11, 18, 35, 55, 60
"Monterey, the Port of," 63-84
Monterey Cypress, 72
"Mothering Mountains," 27-24
Mount Oppapago, 160, 162
Mount Shasta, 5, 143, 150
_Mount Shasta_, 161
Mount Whitney, 6, 137, 150, 159, 162
Mount Williamson, 159
Napa, 118
Noriega's, 134
Olancha, 165
"Old Spanish Gardens," 87-103
Pacific Grove, 75
Padre Jayme Bravo, 7, 17, 18
Padre Lausan, 66
Padre Serra (Junipero Serra), 11, 76, 78
Paiute Indians, 96
Pajaro, 54, 93
Pajaro river, 64
Pala, 19
"Palatingwas," 20
Palo Corona, 80
Panamint, 165
Pasadena, 34
Paso Robles, 56
_Patio, The, Old Spanish Residence_, 88
_Pescadero, Monterey Bay_, 72
Pieoras Blancos, 83
Point Conception, 67
Point Lobos, 71, 81, 84
Point of Pines, 67
Point Pinos, 70, 81
Point Sur, 70
Portersville, 135
Portola, Don Gaspar de, 11, 55, 93, 108
_Redlands_, 16
_Redwoods_, 131
"Rio," A, 30
Riverside, 33, 39
Sacramento, 112, 123
Sacramento River, 107, 127, 135, 140
"Sage-Brush country," meaning of term, 163
Salinas, 83
Salinas River, 64
Salton Sea, 166
Sausalito, 116
San Antonio, 57
"San Antonio," the, 10
San Bernardino, 7, 33, 39, 149, 166
San Carlos, 79
San Clemente, 48
San Diego, 22, 78
San Diego, Bay of, 9
_San Diego, looking towards Point Loma_, 9
San Emigdio, 128
San Fernando, 41, 128
San Francisco, 67, 107, 108, 110
San Francisco, Bay of, 112
San Gabriel, 36
San Gabriel Valley, 27, 33, 40
San Gorgiono, 41, 172
San Gorgiono, Pass of, 6
San Jacinto, 5, 27, 149, 166, 170
San Joaquin, 128, 132, 139, 166
San Joaquin River, 107, 112, 123, 127, 129, 130, 140, 150
San Joaquin Valley, 162
San Jose, Señor, 10
San Juan, 83
San Juan Bautista, 65, 66
San Juan Capistrano, 18, 48, 50
San Luis Rey, 19
San Pablo, 112
San Pablo Bay, 116
San Quentin, 116
San Raphael, 116, 118
Santa Barbara, 58
Santa Catalina, 48
Santa Clara, 54
Santa Cruz Coast, 74
Santa Cruz Mountains, 55, 64
_Santa Cruz Mountains, the Coast Range_, 78
Santa Inez, 48, 58
Santa Margarita, 56