family sitting-room, and were alone there in presence of a cheery log
fire, which good-naturedly bade us welcome, crackling freely and tossing
its sparks out upon floor of pine and coyote-skin rug. A few old framed
prints hung upon dark walls, their faces looking serenely down upon the
scanty, old-fashioned furniture and windows full of flowering plants. A
low-cushioned chair, not long since vacated, was drawn close by the
centre-table, whereon were a lamp and a large, open Bible, with a pair
of silver-bowed spectacles lying upon its lighted page.
Smith made a gesture of silence toward the door, touched the Bible, and
whispered, “_Here’s_ where old woman Copples lives, and it is a good
thing; I read it aloud to her evenings, and I can just feel the high,
local lights of it. It’ll fetch H. G. yet!”
At this juncture the door opened; a pale, thin, elderly woman entered,
and with tired smile greeted me. While her hard, labor-stiffened,
needle-roughened hand was in mine, I looked into her face and felt
something (it may be, it must be, but little, yet something) of the
sorrow of her life; that of a woman large in sympathy, deep in faith,
eternal in constancy, thrown away on a rough, worthless fellow. All
things she hoped for had failed her; the tenderness which never came,
the hopes years ago in ashes, the whole world of her yearnings long
buried, leaving only the duty of living and the hope of Heaven. As she
sat down, took up her spectacles and knitting, and closed the Bible, she
began pleasantly to talk to us of the warm, bright autumn nights, of
Smith’s work, and then of my own profession, and of her niece, Sarah
Jane. Her genuinely sweet spirit and natively gentle manner were very
beautiful, and far overbalanced all traces of rustic birth and mountain
life.
O, that unquenchable Christian fire, how pure the gold of its result! It
needs no practised elegance, no social greatness, for its success; only
the warm human heart, and out of it shall come a sacred calm and
gentleness, such as no power, no wealth, no culture may ever hope to
win.
No words of mine would outline the beauty of that plain, weary old
woman, the sad, sweet patience of those gray eyes, nor the spirit of
overflowing goodness which cheered and enlivened the half hour we spent
there.
H. G. might perhaps be pardoned for showing an alacrity when the door
again opened and Sarah Jane rolled--I might almost say trundled--in, and
was introduced to me.
Sarah Jane was an essentially Californian product, as much so as one of
those vast potatoes or massive pears; she had a suggestion of State-Fair
in the fulness of her physique, yet withal was pretty and modest.
If I could have rid myself of a fear that her buttons might sooner or
later burst off and go singing by my ear, I think I might have felt as
H. G. did, that she was a “magnificent female,” with her smooth,
brilliant skin and ropes of soft brown hair.
H. G., in presence of the ladies, lost something of his original flavor,
and rose into studied elegance, greatly to the comfort of Sarah, whose
glow of pride as his talk ran on came without show of restraint.
The supper was delicious.
But Sarah was quiet, quiet to H. G. and to me, until after tea, when the
old lady said, “You young folks will have to excuse me this evening,”
and withdrew to her chamber.
More logs were then piled on the sitting-room hearth, and we three
gathered in a semi-circle.
Presently H. G. took the poker and twisted it about among coals and
ashes, prying up the oak sticks, as he announced, in a measured, studied
way, “An artist’s wife, that is,” he explained, “an Academician’s wife
orter, well she’d orter _sabe_ the beautiful, and take her regular
æsthetics; and then again,” he continued in explanatory tone, “she’d
orter to know how to keep a hotel, derned if she hadn’t, for it’s rough
like furst off, ’fore a feller gets his name up. But then when he does,
tho’, she’s got a salubrious old time of it. It’s touch a little bell”
(he pressed the andiron-top to show us how the thing was done), “and
‘Brooks, the morning paper!’ Open your regular Herald:
* * * * *
“‘ART NOTES.--Another of H. G. Smith’s tender works, entitled, “Off the
Grade,” so full of out-of-doors and subtle feeling of nature, is now on
exhibition at Goupil’s.’
“Look down a little further:
“‘ITALIAN OPERA.--Between the acts all eyes turned to the _distingué_
Mrs. H. G. Smith, who looked,’”--then turning to me, and waving his hand
at Sarah Jane, “I leave it to you if she don’t.”
Sarah Jane assumed the pleasing color of the sugar-beet, without seeming
inwardly unhappy.
“It’s only a question of time with H. G.,” continued my friend. “Art is
long, you know--derned long--and it may be a year before I paint my
great picture, but after that Smith works in lead harness.”
He used the poker freely, and more and more his flow of hopes turned a
shade of sentiment to Sarah Jane, who smiled broader and broader,
showing teeth of healthy whiteness.
At last I withdrew and sought my room, which was H. G.’s also, and his
studio. I had gone with a candle round the walls whereon were tacked
studies and sketches, finding here and there a bit of real merit among
the profusion of trash, when the door burst open and my friend entered,
kicked off his boots and trousers, and walked up and down at a sort of
quadrille step, singing:
“‘Yes, it’s the cottage of me love;
You bet, it’s the cottage of me love,’
“and, what’s more, H. G. has just had his genteel good-night kiss; and
when and where is the good old bar-keep?”
I checked his exuberance as best I might, knowing full well that the
quiet and elegant dispenser of neat and mixed beverages hearing this
inquiry would put in an appearance in person and offer a few remarks
designed to provoke ill-feeling. So I at last got Smith in bed and the
lamp out. All was quiet for a few moments, and when I had almost gotten
asleep I heard my room-mate in low tones say to himself,--
“Married, by the Rev. Gospel, our talented California artist, Mr. H. G.
Smith, to Miss Sarah Jane Copples. No cards.”
A pause, and then with more gentle utterance, “and that’s what’s the
matter with H. G.”
Slowly from this atmosphere of art I passed away into the tranquil land
of dreams.
XI
SHASTA
1870
We escaped the harvesting season of 1870. I try to believe all its
poetry is not forever immolated under the strong wheels of that pastoral
Juggernaut of our day, the steam-reaper, and to be grateful that Ruths
have not now to glean the fallen wheat-heads, and loaf around at
questionable hours, setting their caps for susceptible ranchers.
Whatever stirring rhythm may to-day measure time with the quick
fire-breath of reaping-machines shall await a more poetic pen than this.
Some modern Virgil coming along the boundless wheat plain may perhaps
sing you bucolic phrases of the new iron age; but he will soon see his
mistake, as will you. The harvest home, with its Longfellow mellowness
of atmosphere, or even those ideally colored barns of Eastman Johnson’s,
with corn and girls and some of the lingering personal relationship
between crops and human hands; all that is tradition here, not even
memory.
It is quite as well. These people are more germane with enterprise and
hurry, and with the winding-up drink at some vulgar tavern when the
hired hands are paid off, and gather to have “a real nice time with the
boys.”
This was over. The herds of men had poured back to their cities, and
wandered away among distant mines as far as their earnings would carry
them.
A few stranded bummers, who awoke from their “nice time” penniless,
still lingered in pathetic humiliation round the scene of their labor,
rather heightening that air of sleep which now pervaded every ranch in
the Sacramento valley.
We quitted the hotel at Chico with relief, gratefully turning our backs
upon the Chinamen, whose cookery had spoiled our two days’ peace. Mr.
Freeman Clark will have to make out a better case for Confucius, or else
these fellows were apostate. But they were soon behind us, a straight,
dusty avenue leading us past clusters of ranches into a quiet expanse of
level land, and beneath the occasional shadow of roadside oaks. Miles of
harvested plain lay close shaven in monotonous Naples yellow, stretching
on, soft and vague, losing itself in a gray, half-luminous haze. Now and
then, through more transparent intervals, we could see the brown Sierra
feet walling us in to eastward, their oak-clad tops fainter and fainter
as they rose into this sky. Directly overhead hung an arch of pale blue,
but a few degrees down the hue melted into golden gray. Looming through
the mist before us rose sombre forms of trees, growing in processions
along the margins of snow-fed streams, which flow from the Sierra
across the Sacramento plain. Through these silent, sleepy groves the
seclusion is perfect. You come in from blinding, sun-scorched plains to
the great, aged oaks, whose immense breadth of bough seems outstretched
with effort to shade more and more ground.
Alders and cottonwoods line the stream banks; native grapes in tropical
profusion drape the shores, and hang in trailing curtains from tree to
tree. Here and there glimpses open into dark thickets. The stream comes
into view between walls of green. Evening sunlight, broken with shadow,
falls over rippling shallows; still expanses of deep pool reflect blue
from the zenith, and flow on into dark-shaded coves beneath overhanging
verdure. Vineyards and orchards gather themselves pleasantly around
ranch-houses.
Men and women are dull, unrelieved; they are all alike. The eternal
flatness of landscape, the monotony of endlessly pleasant weather, the
scarcely varying year, the utter want of anything unforeseen, and
absence of all surprise in life, are legible upon their quiet,
uninteresting faces. They loaf through eleven months to harvest one.
Individuality is wanting. The same kind of tiresome ranch-gossip you
hear at one table spreads itself over listening acres to the next.
The great American poet, it may confidently be predicted, will not book
his name from the Sacramento Valley. The people, the acres, the industry
seem to be created solely to furnish vulgar fractions in the census. It
was not wholly fancy that detected in the grapes something of the same
flatness and sugary insipidity which characterized the girls I chatted
with on certain piazzas.
What an antipode is the condition of sterile poverty in the farm-life of
the East! Frugality, energy, self-preserving mental activity contrast
sharply with the contented lethargy of this commonplace opulence. Mile
after mile, in recurring succession of wheatland and vineyard, oak-grove
and dusty shabbiness of graceless ranch-buildings, stretches on,
flanking our way on either side, until at last the undulations of the
foot-hills are reached, and the first signs of vigorous life are
observed in the trees. Attitude and consciousness are displayed in the
lordly oaks which cluster upon brown hillsides. The Sacramento, which
through the slumberous plain had flowed in a still, deep current,
reflecting only the hot haze and motionless forms of the trees upon its
banks, here courses along with the ripple of life, displaying through
its clear waters bowlders and pebbles freighted from the higher
mountains.
Our road, ascending through sunny valleys and among rolling, oak-clad
hills, at length reaches the level of the pines, and, climbing to a
considerable crest, descends among a fine coniferous forest into the
deeply wooded valley of the Pitt. Lifted high against the sky, ragged
hills of granite and limestone limit the view. The river, through a
sharp, rocky cañon, has descended from the volcanic plains of
northeastern California, cutting its way across the sea of hills which
represents the Sierra Nevada, and falling toward the west in a series of
white rapids.
Our camp in the cool mountain air banished the fatigues of weary miles;
night, under the mountain stars, gave us refreshing sleep; and from the
morning we crossed Pitt Ferry we dated a new life.
In a deep gorge between lofty, pine-clad walls we came upon the McCloud,
a brilliantly pure stream, wearing its way through lava rocks, and still
bearing the ice-chill of Shasta. Dark, feathery firs stand in files
along the swift river. Oaks, with lustrous leaves, rise above
hill-slopes of red and brown. Numbers of Indian camps are posted here. I
find them picturesque: low, conical huts, opening upon small, smoking
fires attended by squaws. Numberless salmon, split and drying in rows
upon light scaffoldings, make their light-red conspicuous amid the
generally dingy surroundings.
These Indian faces are fairly good-natured, especially when young. I
visited one camp, upon the left river bank, finding Madam at home,
seated by her fireside, engaged in maternal duties. I am almost afraid
to describe the squalor and grotesque hideousness of her person. She was
emaciated and scantily clad in a sort of short petticoat; shaggy,
unkempt hair overhanging a pair of wild wolf’s eyes. The ribs and
collar-bone stood out as upon an anatomical specimen; hard, black flesh
clinging in formless masses upon her body and arms. Altogether she had
the appearance of an animated mummy. Her child, a mere amorphous roll,
clung to her, and emphasized, with cubbish fatness, the wan, shrunken
form of its mother, looking like some ravenous leech which was draining
the woman’s very blood. Shuddering, I hurried away to observe the
husband.
The “buck” was spearing salmon a short distance down stream, his naked
form poised upon a beam which projected over the river, his eyes
riveted, and spear uplifted, waiting for the prey; sunlight, streaming
down in broken masses through trees, fell brilliantly upon his muscular
shoulder and tense, compact thigh, glancing now and then across rigid
arms and the polished point of his spear. The swift, dark water rushed
beneath him, flashing upon its surface a shimmering reflection of his
red figure. Cast in bronze he would have made a companion for Quincy
Ward’s Indian Hunter; and better than a companion, for in his wolfish
sinew and panther muscle there was not, so far as I could observe, that
free Greek suppleness which is so fine a feature in Mr. Ward’s statue;
though Ajax, disguised as an American Indian, might be a better name for
that great and powerful piece of sculpture.
A day’s march brought us from McCloud to the Sacramento, here a small
stream, with banks fringed by a pleasing variety of trees and margins
graceful with water-plants.
Northward for two days we followed closely the line of the Sacramento
River, now descending along slopes to its bed, where the stream played
among picturesque rocks and bowlders, and again climbing by toilsome
ascents into the forest a thousand feet up on the cañon wall, catching
glimpses of towering ridges of pine-clad Sierra above, and curves of the
foaming river deep in the blue shadow beneath us.
More and more the woods became darkened with mountain pine. The air
freshened by northern life gave us the inspiration of altitude.
At last, through a notch to the northward, rose the conical summit of
Shasta, its pale, rosy lavas enamelled with ice. Body and base of the
great peak were hidden by intervening hills, over whose smooth rolls of
forest green the bright, blue sky and the brilliant Shasta summit were
sharp and strong. From that moment the peak became the centre of our
life. From every crest we strained our eyes forward, as now and then
either through forest vistas the incandescent snow greeted us, or from
some high summit the opening cañon walls displayed grander and grander
views of the great volcano. It was sometimes, after all, a pleasure to
descend from these cool heights, with the _impression_ of the mountain
upon our minds, to the cañon bottom, where, among the endlessly varying
bits of beautiful detail, the mental strain wore off.
When our tents were pitched at Sisson’s, while a picturesque haze
floated up from the southward, we enjoyed the grand, uncertain form of
Shasta, with its heaven-piercing crests of white, and wide, placid
sweep of base; full of lines as deeply reposeful as a Greek temple. Its
dark head lifted among the fading stars of dawn, and, strongly set upon
the arch of coming rose, appealed to our emotions; but best we liked to
sit at evening near Munger’s easel, watching the great lava cone glow
with light almost as wild and lurid as if its crater still streamed.
Watkins thought it “photographic luck” that the mountain should so have
draped itself with mist as to defy his camera. Palmer stayed at camp to
make observations in the coloring of meerschaums at fixed altitudes, and
to watch now and then the station barometer.
Shasta from Sisson’s is a broad, triple mountain, the central summit
being flanked on the west by a large and quite perfect crater, whose rim
reaches about twelve thousand feet altitude. On the west a broad,
shoulder-like spur juts from the general slope. The cone rises from its
base eleven thousand feet in one sweep.
A forest of tall, rich pines surrounds Strawberry Valley and the little
group of ranches near Sisson’s. Under this high sky, and a pure quality
of light, the whole varied foreground of green and gold stretches out
toward the rocky mountain base in charming contrast. Brooks from the
snow thread their way through open meadow, waving overhead a tent-work
of willows, silvery and cool.
Shasta, as a whole, is the single cone of an immense, extinct volcano.
It occupies almost precisely the axial line of the Sierra Nevada, but
the range, instead of carrying its great, wave-like ridge through this
region, breaks down in the neighborhood of Lassen’s Butte, and for
eighty miles northward is only represented by low, confused masses of
mountain cut through and through by the cañon of the McCloud, Pitt, and
Sacramento.
A broad, volcanic plain, interrupted here and there by inconsiderable
chains, occupies the country east of Scott’s Mountain. From this general
plain, whose altitude is from twenty-five hundred to thirty-five hundred
feet, rises Mount Shasta. About its base cluster hillocks of a hundred
little volcanoes, but they are utterly inconspicuous under the shadow of
the great peak. The volcanic plain-land is partly overgrown by forest,
and in part covers itself with fields of grass or sage. Riding over it
in almost any part the one great point in the landscape is the cone of
Shasta; its crest of solid white, its vast altitude, the pale-gray or
rosy tints of its lavas, and the dark girdle of forest which swells up
over cañon-carved foothills give it a grandeur equalled by hardly any
American mountain.
September eleventh found the climbers of our party--S. F. Emmons,
Frederick A. Clark, Albert B. Clark, Mr. Sisson, the pioneer guide of
the region, and myself--mounted upon our mules, heading for the crater
cone over rough rocks and among the stunted firs and pines which mark
the upper limit of forest growth. The morning was cool and clear, with
a fresh north wind sweeping round the volcano, and bringing in its
descent invigorating cold of the snow region. When we had gone as far as
our mules could carry us, threading their difficult way among piles of
lava, we dismounted and made up our packs of beds, instruments, food and
fuel for a three days’ trip, turned the animals over to George and John,
our two muleteers, bade them good-day, and with Sisson, who was to
accompany us up the first ascent, struck out on foot. Already above
vegetation, we looked out over all the valley south and west, observing
its arabesque of forest, meadow, and chaparral, the files of pines which
struggled up almost to our feet, and just below us the volcano slope
strewn with red and brown wreck and patches of shrunken snowdrift.
Our climb up the steep western crater slope was slow and tiresome, quite
without risk or excitement. The footing, altogether of lodged _débris_,
at times gave way provokingly, and threw us out of balance. Once upon
the spiry pinnacles which crown the rim, a scene of wild power broke
upon us. The round bowl, about a mile in diameter and nearly a thousand
feet deep, lay beneath us, its steep, shelving sides of shattered lava
mantled in places to the very bottom by fields of snow.
We clambered along the edge toward Shasta, and came to a place where for
a thousand feet it was a mere blade of ice, sharpened by the snow into a
thin, frail edge, upon which we walked in cautious balance, a misstep
likely to hurl us down into the chaos of lava blocks within the crater.
Passing this, we reached the north edge of the rim, and from a rugged
mound of shattered rock looked down into a gorge between us and the main
Shasta. There, winding its huge body along, lay a glacier, riven with
sharp, deep crevasses yawning fifty or sixty feet wide, the blue hollows
of their shadowed depth contrasting with the brilliant surfaces of ice.
We studied its whole length from the far, high Shasta crest down in
winding course, deepening its cañon more and more as it extends,
crowding past our crater cone, and at last terminating in bold
ice-billows and a wide belt of hilly moraine. The surface over half of
its length was quite clean, but directly opposite us occurs a fine ice
cascade; its entire surface is cut with transverse crevasses, which have
a general tendency to curve downward; and all this dislocation is
accompanied by a freight of lava blocks which shoot down the cañon walls
on either side, bounding out all over the glacier.
In a later trip, while Watkins was making his photographic views, I
climbed about, going to the edges of some crevasses and looking over
into their blue vaults, where icicles overhang, and a whispered sound of
waterflow comes up faintly from beneath.
From a point about midway across where I had climbed and rested upon the
brink of an ice-cliff, the glacier below me breaking off into its wild
pile of cascade blocks and _sérac_, I looked down over all the lower
flow, broken with billowy upheavals, and bright with bristling spires of
sunlit ice. Upon the right rose the great cone of Shasta, formed of
chocolate-colored lavas, its sky line a single curved sweep of snow cut
sharply against a deep blue sky. To the left the precipices of the
lesser cone rose to the altitude of twelve thousand feet, their surfaces
half jagged ledges of lava and half irregular sheets of ice. From my
feet the glacier sank rapidly between volcanic walls, and the shadow of
the lesser cone fell in a dark band across the brilliantly lighted
surface. Looking down its course, my eye ranged over sunny and shadowed
zones of ice and over the gray bowlder region of the terminal moraine;
still lower, along the former track of ancient and grander glaciers, and
down upon undulating, pine-clad foothills, descending in green steps,
reaching out like promontories into the sea of plain which lay outspread
nine thousand feet below, basking in the half-tropical sunshine, its
checkered green fields and orchards ripening their wheat and figs.
Our little party separated, each going about his labor. The Clarks, with
theodolite and barometer, were engaged on a pinnacle over on the western
crater-edge. Mr. Sisson, who had helped us thus far with a huge
pack-load of wood, now said good-by, and was soon out of sight on his
homeward tramp. Emmons and I geologized about the rim and interior
slope, getting at last out of sight of one another.
In mid-crater sprang up a sharp cone several hundred feet high, composed
of much shattered lava, and indicating doubtless the very latest
volcanic activity. At its base lay a small lakelet, frozen over with
rough, black ice. Far below us cold gray banks and floating flocks of
vapor began to drift and circle about the lava slopes, rising higher at
sunset, till they quite enveloped us, and at times shut out the view.