under the grateful shadow of palm-trees, a bewitching black-and-tan
sister thrumming her guitar while the chocolate for our breakfast
boiled. The slumberous haze of the tropics hung over Lake Nicaragua; but
high above its indistinct, pearly vale rose the smooth cone of the
volcano of Omatepec, robed in a cover of pale emerald green. Warmth,
repose, the verdure of eternal spring, the poetical whisper of palms,
the heavy odor of the tropical blooms, banished the grand, cold fury of
the Sierra, which had left a permanent chill in our bones.
IX
MERCED RAMBLINGS
1866
Delightful oaks cast protecting shadows over our camp on the 1st of
June, 1866. Just beyond a little cook-fire where Hoover was preparing
his mind and pan for an omelet stood Mrs. Fremont’s Mariposa cottage,
with doors and windows wide open, still keeping up its air of hospitable
invitation, though now deserted and fallen into decay. A little farther
on, through an opening, a few clustered roofs and chimneys of the Bear
Valley village showed their distant red-brown tint among heavy masses of
green. Eastward swelled up a great ridge, upon whose grassy slopes were
rough, serpentine outcrops,--groups of pines, and oak-groves with pale
green foliage and clean white bark. Under the roots of this famous Mount
Bullion have been mined those gold veins whose treasure enriched so few,
whose promise allured so many.
As I altogether distrust my ability to speak of this region without
sooner or later alluding to a certain discovery of some scientific value
which I once made here, I deem it wise frankly to tell the story and
discharge my mind of it at once, and if possible forever.
In the winter of 1863 I came to Bear Valley as the sole occupant of a
stage-coach. The Sierras were quite cloud-hidden, and desolation such as
drought has never before or since been able to make reigned in dreary
monotony over all the plains from Stockton to Hornitas.
Ordinarily solitude is with me only a happy synonym for content; but
throughout that ride I was preyed upon by self-reproach, and in an
aggravated manner. The paleontologist of our survey, my senior in rank
and experience, had just said of me, rather in sorrow than in
unkindness, yet with unwonted severity, “I believe that fellow had
rather sit on a peak all day, and stare at those snow-mountains, than
find a fossil in the metamorphic Sierra”; and, in spite of me, all that
weary ride his judgment rang in my ear.
Can it be? I asked myself; has a student of geology so far forgotten his
devotion to science? Am I really fallen to the level of a mere
nature-lover? Later, when evening approached, and our wheels began to
rumble over upturned edges of Sierra slate, every jolt seemed aimed at
me, every thin, sharp outcrop appeared risen up to preach a sermon on my
friend’s text.
I re-dedicated myself to geology, and was framing a resolution to delve
for that greatly important but missing link of evidence, the fossil
which should clear up an old unsolved riddle of upheaval age, when over
to eastward a fervid, crimson light smote the vapor-bank and cleared a
bright pathway through to the peaks, and on to a pale sea-green sky.
Through this gateway of rolling gold and red cloud the summits seemed
infinitely high and far, their stone and snow hung in the sky with
lucent delicacy of hue, brilliant as gems yet soft as air,--a mosaic of
amethyst and opal transfigured with passionate light, as gloriously
above words as beyond art. Obsolete shell-fishes in the metamorphic were
promptly forgotten, and during those lingering moments, while peak after
peak flushed and faded back into recesses of the heavens, I forgot what
paleontological unworthiness was loading me down, becoming finally quite
jolly of heart. But for many days thereafter I did search and hope,
leaving no stone unturned, and usually going so far as to break them
open. Indeed, my third hammer and I were losing temper together, when
one noon I was tired and sat down to rest and lunch in the bottom of
Hell’s Hollow, a cañon whose profound uninterestingness is quite beyond
portrayal. Shut in by great, monotonous slopes and innumerable spurs,
each the exact fac-simile of the other; with no distance, no faintest
suggestion of a snow-peak, only a lofty chaparral ridge sweeping around,
cutting off all eastern lookout; with a few disordered bowlders tumbled
pell-mell into the bed of a feeble brooklet of bitter water,--it seemed
to me the place of places for a fossil. Here was nadir, the snow-capped
zenith of my heart banished even from sight. A swallow of tepid
alkaline water, with which I crowned the frugal and appropriate lunch,
burned my throat, and completed the misery of the occasion.
Jagged outcrops of slate cut through vulgar gold-dirt at my feet.
Picking up my hammer to turn homeward, I noticed in the rock an object
about the size and shape of a small cigar. It was the fossil, the object
for which science had searched and yearned and despaired! There he
reclined comfortably upon his side, half-bedded in luxuriously
fine-grained argillaceous material,--a plump, pampered belemnites (if it
is belemnites), whom the terrible ordeal of metamorphism had spared. I
knelt and observed the radiating structure as well as the characteristic
central cavity, and assured myself it was beyond doubt he. The age of
the gold-belt was discovered! I was at pains to chip my victim out
whole, and when he chose to break in two was easily consoled, reflecting
that he would do as well gummed together.
I knew this mollusk perfectly by sight, could remember how he looked on
half a dozen plates of fossils, but I failed exactly to recollect his
name. It troubled me that I could come so near uttering without ever
precisely hitting upon it. In ten or fifteen minutes I judged it full
time for my joy to begin.
Down the perspective of years I could see before me spectacled wise men
of some scientific society, and one who pronounced my obituary, ending
thus: “In summing up the character and labors of this fallen follower
of science, let it never be forgotten that he discovered the
belemnites;” and perhaps, I mused, they will put over me a slab of
fossil raindrops, those eternally embalmed tears of nature.
But all this came and went without the longed-for elation. There was no
doubt I was not so happy as I thought I should be.
Once in after years I met an aged German paleontologist, fresh from his
fatherland, where through threescore years and ten his soul had fattened
on Solenhofen limestone and effete shells from many and wide-spread
strata.
We were introduced.
“Ach!” he said, with a kindle of enthusiasm, “I have pleasure you to
meet, when it is you which the cephalopoda discovered has.”
Then turning to one who enacted the part of Ganymede, he remarked, “Zwei
lager.”
Now, with freed mind, I should say something of the foot-hills about our
camp as they looked in June. Once before, the reader may remember, I
pictured their autumn garb.
It has become a fixed habit with me to climb Mount Bullion whenever I
get a chance. My winter Sundays were many times spent there in a peace
and repose which Bear Valley village did not afford; for that hamlet
gave itself up, after the Saturday night’s sleep, to a day of hellish
jocularity. The town passed through a period of horse-racing, noisy,
quarrelsome drinking, and disorderly service of Satan; then an hour in
which the Spaniard loved and “treated” the “Americano.” Later the
Americano kicked the “damned Greaser” out of town. Manly forms slept
serenely under steps, and the few “gentlemen of the old school” steadied
themselves against the bar-room door-posts, and in ingenious language
told of the good old pandemonium of 1849.
Thus Mount Bullion came to mean for me a Sabbath retreat over which
heaven arched pure and blue, silent hours (marked by the slow sun)
passing sacredly by in presence of nature and of God.
So now in June I climbed on a Sunday morning to my old retreat, found
the same stone seat, with leaning oak-tree back, and wide, low canopy of
boughs. A little down to the left, welling among tufts of grass and
waving tulips, is the spring which Mrs. Fremont found for her
camp-ground. North and south for miles extends our ridge in gently
rising or falling outline, its top broadly round, and for the most part
an open oak-grove with grass carpet and mountain flowers in wayward
loveliness of growth. West, you overlook a wide panorama. Oak and pine
mottled foot-hills, with rusty groundwork and cloudings of green, wander
down in rolling lines to the ripe plain; beyond are plains, then coast
ranges, rising in peaks, or curved down in passes, through which gray
banks of fog drift in and vanish before the hot air of the plains. East,
the Sierra slope is rent and gashed in a wilderness of cañons, yawning
deep and savage. Miles of chaparral tangle in dense growth over walls
and spurs, covering with kindly olive-green the staring red of riven
mountain-side and gashed earth. Beyond this swells up the more refined
plateau and hill country made of granite and trimmed with pine, bold
domes rising above the green cover; and there the sharp, terrible front
of El Capitan, guarding Yosemite and looking down into its purple gulf.
Beyond, again, are the peaks, and among them one looms sharpest. It is
that Obelisk from which the great storm drove Cotter and me in 1864. We
were now bound to push there as soon as grass should grow among the
upper cañons.
The air around my Sunday mountain in June is dry, bland, and fragrant; a
full sunlight ripens it to a perfect temperature, giving you at once
stimulus and rest. You sleep in it without fear of dew, and no excess of
hot or cold breaks up the even flow of balmy delight. You see the wild
tulips open, and watch wind-ripples course over slopes of thick-standing
grass-blades. Birds, so rare on plains or pine-hills, here sing you
their fullest, and enjoy with you the soft, white light, or come to see
you in your chosen shadow and bathe in your spring.
Mountain oaks, less wonderful than great, straight pines, but altogether
domestic in their generous way of reaching out low, long boughs, roofing
in spots of shade, are the only trees on the Pacific slope which seem to
me at all allied to men; and these quiet foot-hill summits, these
islands of modest, lovely verdure floating in an ocean of sunlight,
lifted enough above San Joaquin plains to reach pure, high air and
thrill your blood and brain with mountain oxygen, are yet far enough
below the rugged wildness of pine and ice and rock to leave you in
peace, and not forever challenge you to combat. They are almost the only
places in the Sierras impressing me as rightly fitted for human company.
I cannot find in wholesale vineyards and ranches dotted along the Sierra
foot anything which savors of the eternal indigenous perfume of home.
They are scenes of speculation and thrift, of immense enterprise and
comfort, with no end of fences and square miles of grain, with here and
there astounding specimens of modern upholstery, to say nothing of
pianos with elaborate legs and always discordant keys; but they never
comfort the soul with that air of sacred household reserve, of simple
human poetry, which elsewhere greets you under plainer roofs, and broods
over your days and nights familiarly.
Here on these still summits the oaks lock their arms and gather in
groves around open slopes of natural park, and you are at home. A
cottage or a castle would seem in keeping, nor would the savage gorges
and snow-capped Sierras overcome the sober kindliness of these
affectionate trees. It is almost as hard now, as I write, to turn my
back on Mount Bullion and descend to camp again, as it was that
afternoon in 1866.
Evening and supper were at hand, Hoover having achieved a repast of
rabbit-pie, with salad from the Italian garden near at hand. It added no
little to my peace that two obese squaws from the neighboring rancheria
had come and squatted in silence on either side of our camp-fire, adding
their statuesque sobriety and fire-flushed bronze to the dusky,
druidical scene.
To be welcomed at White and Hatch’s next evening was reward for our
dusty ride, and over the next day’s familiar trail we hurried to
Clark’s, there again finding friends who took us by the hand. Another
day’s end found us within the Yosemite, and there for a week we walked
and rode, studied and looked, revisiting all our old points, lingering
hours here and half-days there, to complete within our minds the
conception of this place. My chief has written so fully in his charming
Yosemite book of all main facts and details that I would not, if I
could, rehearse them here.
What sentiment, what idea, does this wonder-valley leave upon the
earnest observer? What impression does it leave upon his heart?
From some up-surging crag upon its brink you look out over wide expanse
of granite swells, upon whose solid surface the firs climb and cluster,
and afar on the sky line only darken together in one deep green cover.
Upward heave the eastern ridges; above them looms a white rank of peaks.
Into this plateau is rent a chasm; the fresh-splintered granite falls
down, down, thousands of feet in sheer, blank faces or giant crags
broken in cleft and stair, gorge and bluff, down till they sink under
that winding ribbon of park with its flash of river among sunlit grass,
its darkness, where, within shadows of jutting wall, cloud-like gather
the pine companies, or, in summer opening, stand oak and cottonwood,
casting together their lengthening shadow over meadow and pool. The
falls, like torrents of snow, pour in white lines over purple precipice,
or, as the wind wills, float and drift in vanishing film of airy
lacework.
Two leading ideas are wrought here with a force hardly to be seen
elsewhere. First, the titanic power, the awful stress, which has rent
this solid table-land of granite in twain; secondly, the magical faculty
displayed by vegetation in redeeming the aspect of wreck and masking a
vast geological tragedy behind draperies of fresh and living green. I
can never cease marvelling how all this terrible crush and sundering is
made fair, even lovely, by meadow, by wandering groves, and by those
climbing files of pine which thread every gorge and camp in armies over
every brink; nor can I ever banish from memory another gorge and fall,
that of the Shoshone in Idaho, a sketch of which may help the reader to
see more vividly those peculiarities of color and sentiment that make
Yosemite so unique.
The Snake or Lewis’s Fork of the Columbia River drains an oval basin,
the extent of whose longer axis measures about four hundred miles
westward from the base of the Rocky Mountains across Idaho and into the
middle of Oregon, and whose breadth, in the direction of the meridian,
averages about seventy miles. Irregular chains of mountains bound it in
every direction, piling up in a few places to an elevation of nine
thousand feet. The surface of this basin is unbroken by any considerable
peak. Here and there, knobs, belonging to the earlier geological
formations, rise above its level; and, in a few instances, dome-like
mounds of volcanic rock are lifted from the expanse. It has an
inclination from east to west, and a quite perceptible sag along the
middle line.
In general outline the geology of the region is simple. Its bounding
ranges were chiefly blocked out at the period of Jurassic upheaval, when
the Sierra Nevada and Wahsatch Mountains were folded. Masses of upheaved
granite, with overlying slates and limestones, form the main materials
of the cordon of surrounding hills. During the Cretaceous and Tertiary
periods the entire basin, from the Rocky Mountains to the Blue Mountains
of Oregon, was a fresh-water lake, on whose bottom was deposited a
curious succession of sand and clay beds, including, near the surface, a
layer of white, infusorial silica. At the exposures of these rocks in
the cañon-walls of the present drainage system are found ample evidences
of the kind of life which flourished in the lake itself and lived upon
its borders. Savage fishes, of the garpike type, and vast numbers of
cyprinoids, together with mollusks, are among the prominent
water-fossils. Enough relics of the land vegetation remain to indicate a
flora of a sub-tropical climate; and among the land-fossils are numerous
bones of elephant, camel, horse, elk, and deer.
The _savant_ to whose tender mercies these _disjecta membra_ have been
committed, finds in the molluscan life the most recent types yet
discovered in the American Tertiaries,--forms closely allied to existing
Asiatic species. How and wherefore this lake dried up, and gave place to
the present barren wilderness of sand and sage, is one of those profound
conundrums of nature yet unguessed by geologists. From being a wide and
beautiful expanse of water, edged by winding mountain-shores, with
forest-clad slopes containing a fauna whose remains are now charming
those light-minded fellows, the paleontologists, the scene has entirely
changed, and a monotonous, blank desert spreads itself as far as the eye
can reach. Only here and there, near the snowy mountain-tops, a bit of
cool green contrasts refreshingly with the sterile uniformity of the
plain. During the period of desiccation, perhaps in a measure accounting
for it, a general flood of lava poured down from the mountains and
deluged nearly the whole Snake Basin. The chief sources of this lava lay
at the eastern edge, where subsequent erosion has failed to level
several commanding groups of volcanic peaks. The three buttes and three
tetons mark centres of flow. Remarkable features of the volcanic period
were the sheets of basaltic lava which closed the eruptive era, and in
thin, continuous layers overspread the plain for three hundred miles.
The earlier flows extended farthest to the west. The ragged, broken
terminations of the later sheets recede successively eastward, in a
broad, gradual stairway; so that the present topography of the basin is
a gently inclined field of basaltic lava, sinking to the west, and
finally, by a series of terraced steps, descending to the level of
lacustrine sand-rocks which mark the bottom of the ancient lake, and
cover the plain westward into Oregon.
The head-waters of the Snake River, gathering snow-drainage from a
considerable portion of the Rocky Mountains, find their way through a
series of upland valleys to the eastern margin of the Snake plain, and
there gathering in one main stream flow westward, occupying a gradually
deepening cañon; a narrow, dark gorge, water-worn through the thin
sheets of basalt, cutting down as it proceeds to the westward, until, in
longitude 114° 20´, it has worn seven hundred feet into the lava.
Several tributaries flowing through similar though less profound cañons
join the Snake both north and south. From the days of Lewis, for whom
this Snake or Shoshone River was originally named, up to the present
day, rumors have been current of cataracts in the Snake cañon. It is
curious to observe that all the earlier accounts estimate their height
as six hundred feet, which is exactly the figure given by the first
Jesuit observers of Niagara. That erratic amateur Indian, Catlin,
actually visited these falls; and his account of them, while it entirely
fails to give an adequate idea of their formation and grandeur, is
nevertheless, in the main, truthful. Since the mining development of
Idaho, several parties have visited and examined the Shoshone.
In October, 1868, with a small detachment of the United States
Geological Survey of the 40th Parallel, the writer crossed Goose Creek
Mountains, in northern Utah, and descended by the old Fort Boise road to
the level of the Snake plain. A gray, opaque haze hung close to the
ground, and shut out all distance. The monotony of sage-desert was
overpowering. We would have given anything for a good outlook; but for
three days the mist continued, and we were forced to amuse ourselves by
chasing occasional antelopes.
The evening we camped on Rock Creek was signalized by a fierce wind from
the northeast. It was a dry storm, which continued with tremendous fury
through the night, dying away at daybreak, leaving the heavens
brilliantly clear. We were breakfasting when the sun rose, and shortly
afterward, mounting into the saddle, headed toward the cañon of the
Shoshone. The air was cold and clear. The remotest mountain-peaks upon
the horizon could be distinctly seen, and the forlorn details of their
brown slopes stared at us as through a vacuum. A few miles in front the
smooth surface of the plain was broken by a ragged, zigzag line of
black, which marked the edge of the farther wall of the Snake cañon. A
dull, throbbing sound greeted us. Its pulsations were deep, and seemed
to proceed from the ground beneath our feet.
Leaving the cavalry to bring up the wagon, my two friends and I galloped
on, and were quickly upon the edge of the cañon-wall. We looked down
into a broad, circular excavation, three quarters of a mile in diameter,
and nearly seven hundred feet deep. East and north, over the edges of
the cañon, we looked across miles and miles of the Snake plain, far on
to the blue boundary mountains. The wall of the gorge opposite us, like
the cliff at our feet, sank in perpendicular bluffs nearly to the level
of the river, the broad excavation being covered by rough piles of black
lava and rounded domes of trachyte rock. We saw an horizon as level as
the sea; a circling wall, whose sharp edges were here and there
battlemented in huge, fortress-like masses; a broad river, smooth and
unruffled, flowing quietly into the middle of the scene, and then
plunging into a labyrinth of rocks, tumbling over a precipice two
hundred feet high, and moving westward in a still, deep current, to
disappear behind a black promontory. It was a strange, savage scene: a
monotony of pale blue sky, olive and gray stretches of desert, frowning
walls of jetty lava, deep beryl-green of river-stretches, reflecting,
here and there, the intense solemnity of the cliffs, and in the centre
a dazzling sheet of foam. In the early morning light the shadows of the
cliffs were cast over half the basin, defining themselves in sharp
outline here and there on the river. Upon the foam of the cataract one
point of the rock cast a cobalt-blue shadow. Where the river flowed
round the western promontory, it was wholly in shadow, and of a deep
sea-green. A scanty growth of coniferous trees fringed the brink of the
lower cliffs, overhanging the river. Dead barrenness is the whole
sentiment of the scene. The mere suggestion of trees clinging here and
there along the walls serves rather to heighten than to relieve the
forbidding gloom of the place. Nor does the flashing whiteness, where
the river tears itself among the rocky islands, or rolls in spray down
the cliff, brighten the aspect. In contrast with its brilliancy, the
rocks seem darker and more wild.
The descent of four hundred feet from our standpoint to the level of the
river above the falls has to be made by a narrow, winding path, among
rough ledges of lava. We were obliged to leave our wagon at the summit,
and pack down the camp equipment and photographic apparatus upon
carefully led mules. By midday we were comfortably camped on the margin
of the left bank, just above the brink of the falls. My tent was pitched
upon the edge of a cliff, directly overhanging the rapids. From my door
I looked over the cataract, and, whenever the veil of mist was blown
aside, could see for a mile down the river. The lower half of the cañon
is excavated in a gray, porphyritic trachyte. It is over this material
that the Snake falls. Above the brink the whole breadth of the river is
broken by a dozen small trachyte islands, which the water has carved
into fantastic forms, rounding some into low domes, sharpening others
into mere pillars, and now and then wearing out deep caves. At the very
brink of the fall a few twisted evergreens cling with their roots to the
rock, and lean over the abyss of foam with something of that air of
fatal fascination which is apt to take possession of men.