moccasin had smoothed, and go on with his story of bear fight or wolf
trap, illustrating by singularly apt gesture every trait and motion of
the animal he described, while firelight warmed the brown skin and ruddy
cheek of my little charge and flickered on her soft, black hair.
The last bear story of an evening being ended, Protem took from me
Clarissa, whose single yawn and pretty bewilderment subsided in a
second, leaving her sound asleep on the buckskin shoulder of her father.
About half way between Sheep Rock and the snow-line extensive eruptions
of basalt have occurred, deluging the lower slopes, and flowing in
gently inclined fields and streams down through Shasta Valley for many
miles. The surface of this basalt country is singularly diversified.
Rising above its general level are numerous domes, some of them smoothly
arched over with rock, others perforated at the top, and more broken in
circular parapets. The origin of these singular blisters is probably
simple. Overflowing former trachyte fields, the basalt swept down,
covering a series of pools and brooks. The water converted into steam
blew up the viscous rock in such forms as we find. Here and there the
basalt surface opens in circular orifices, into which you may look a
hundred feet or more.
In 1863, in company with Professor Brewer, I visited this very region,
and we were then shown an interesting tubular cavern lying directly
under the surface of a lava plain.
Mr. Palmer and I revisited the spot, and, having tied our mules,
descended through a circular hole to the cavern’s mouth. An archway of
black lava sixty feet wide by eighty high, with a floor of lava sand and
rough bowlders, led under the basalt in a northerly direction,
preserving an incline not more than the gentle slope of the country. Our
roof overhead could hardly have been more than twenty or thirty feet
thick. We followed the cavern, which was a comparatively regular tube,
for half or three-quarters of a mile. Now and then the roof would open
up in larger chambers, and the floor be cumbered with huge piles of
lava, over which we scrambled, sometimes nearly reaching the ceiling.
Fresh lava-froth and smooth blister-holes lined the sides. Innumerable
bats and owls on silent wing floated by our candles, fanning an air
singularly still and dense.
After a cautious scramble over a long pile of immense basalt blocks, we
came to the end of the cave, and sat down upon piles of _débris_. We
then repeated an experiment, formerly made by Brewer and myself, of
blowing out our candle to observe the intense darkness, then firing a
pistol that we might hear its dull, muffled explosion.
The formation of this cave, as explained in Professor Whitney’s
Geological Report, is this: “A basalt stream, flowing down from Shasta,
cooled and hardened upon the surface, while within the mass remained
molten and fluid. From simple pressure the lava burst out at the lower
end, and, flowing forth, left an empty tube. Wonderfully fresh and
recent the whole confused rock-walls appeared, and we felt, as we walked
and climbed back to the opening and to daylight, as if we had been
allowed to travel back into the volcano age.”
One more view of Shasta, obtained a few days later from Well’s ranch on
the Yreka road, seems worthy of mention. From here the cone and side
crater are in line, making a single symmetrical form with broad, broken
summit singularly like Cotopaxi.
You look over green meadows and cultivated fields; beyond is a chain of
little volcanoes girdling Shasta’s foot, for the most part bare and
yellow, but clouded in places with dark forest, which a little farther
up mantles the broad, grand cone, and sweeps up over ridge and cañon to
alpine heights of rock and ice.
Strange and splendid is the evening effect from here, when shadow over
base and light upon summit divide the vast pile into two zones of
blue-purple and red-gold. We watched the colors fade and the peak recede
farther and dimmer among darkness and stars.
XIII
MOUNT WHITNEY
1871
There lay between Carson and Mount Whitney a ride of two hundred and
eighty miles along the east base of the Sierra. Stage-driving, like
other exact professions, gathers among its followers certain types of
men and manners, either by some mode of natural selection, or else after
a Darwinian way developing one set of traits to the exclusion of others.
However interesting it might be to investigate the moulding power of
whip and reins, or to discover what measure of coachman there is latent
in every one of us, it cannot be questioned that the characters of
drivers do resemble one another in surprising degree. That ostentatious
silence and self-contained way of ignoring one’s presence on the box for
the first half hour, the tragi-comic, just-audible undertone in which
they remonstrate with the swing team, and such single refrain of
obsolete song as they drone and drone a hundred times, may be observed
on every coach from San Diego to Montana.
So I found it natural enough that the driver, my sole companion from
Carson to Aurora, should sit for the first hour in a silence etiquette
forbade me to violate. His team, by strict attention to their duties,
must have left his mind quite free, and I saw symptoms of suppressed
sociability within forty minutes of our departure.
The nine-mile house, if my memory serves, was his landmark for
taciturnity, for soon after passing it he began to skirmish along a sort
of picket line of conversation. To the wheel mares he remarked, “Hot,
gals; ain’t it, tho’?” and to his off leader, who strained wild eyes in
every direction for something to become excited about, “Look at him,
Dixie; wouldn’t you like a rabbit to shy at?”
With a true driver’s pride in reading men, he scanned me from boots to
barometer, and at last, to my immense delight, said, with the air of
throwing his hat into a ring, “What mountain was you going down to
measure?” Had he inquired after my grandfather by his first name, I
could not have been more surprised. At once I told him the plain truth,
and waited for further developments; but, like an indifferent shot who
drives centre on a first trial, he proposed not to endanger his
reputation for infallibility by other ventures, and withdrew again to
that conspicuous stupidity which coachmen and Buddhists alike delight
in.
Left to myself, I spent hours in looking out over the desert and up
along that bold front of Sierra which rose on our right from the sage
plains of Carson Valley up through ramparts of pine land to summits of
rock and ravines with sunken snow-banks.
So far as Aurora, I remember little worth describing. Sierras, or
outlying volcanic foot-hills, bound the west. About our road are desert
plains and rolling sage-clad hills, fresh, light olive at this June
season, and softly sloping in long _glacis_ down to wide, impressive
levels.
Green valleys and cultivated farms margin the Carson and Walker rivers.
Sierras are not lofty enough to be grand, desert too gentle and
overspread with sage to be terrible; yet the pale, high key of all its
colors, and singular aërial brilliancy lend an otherwise dreary enough
picture the charm,--as I once before said,--of water-color drawings.
There is no perspective under this fierce white light; in midday
intensely sharp reflections glare from hill and valley, except where the
shadow of passing cloud spreads cool and blue over olive slopes.
Alas for Aurora, once so active and bustling with silver mines and its
almost daily murder! Twenty-six whiskey hells and two Vigilance
Committees graced those days of prosperity and mirthful gallows, of
stock-board and the gay delirium of speculation. Now her sad streets are
lined with closed doors; a painful silence broods over quartz mills, and
through the whole deserted town one perceives that melancholy security
of human life which is hereabouts one of the pathetic symptoms of
bankruptcy. The “boys” have gone off to merrily shoot one another
somewhere else, leaving poor Aurora in the hands of a sort of coroner’s
jury who gather nightly at the one saloon and hold dreary inquests over
departed enterprise.
My landlord’s tread echoed through a large, empty hotel, and when I
responded to his call for lunch the silentest of girls became medium
between me and a Chinaman, who gazed sad-eyed through his kitchen door
as in pity for one who must choose between starving and his own cookery.
But I have always felt it unpardonable egotism for a traveller to force
the reader into sharing with him the inevitable miseries of roadside
food. Whatever merit there may be in locking this prandial grief fast
from public view, I feel myself entitled to in a high degree, for I hold
it in my power to describe the most revolting cuisine on the planet, yet
refrain.
From Aurora my road, still parallel with the mountains, though now
hidden from them by banks of volcanic hills, climbed a long, wearisome
slope from whose summit a glorious panorama of snowy Sierras lay before
us. From our feet, steep declivities fell two thousand feet to the level
of a wide desert basin, bounded upon the west by long ranks of high,
white peaks, and otherwise walled in by chains of volcanic hills, smooth
with dull sage flanks, and yet varied here and there by outcropping
formations of eruptive rocks and dusky cedar forests.
Just at the Sierra foot, surrounded by bare, gray volcanoes and reaches
of ashen plain, lies Mono lake, a broad oval darkened along its farther
shore by reflecting the shadowed mountains, and pale tranquil blue
where among light desert levels it mirrors the silken softness of sky
and cloud. Flocks of pelicans, high against the sky, floated in slow,
wheeling flight, reflecting the sun from white wings, and, turning, were
lost in the blue to gleam out again like flakes of snow.
The eye ranges over strange, forbidding hill-forms and leagues of
desert, from which no familiarity can ever banish suggestions of death.
Traced along boundary hills, straight terraces of an ancient beach
indicate former water-levels, and afar in the Sierra, great, empty
gorges, glacier-burnished and moraine-flanked, lead up to amphitheatres
of rock once white with _névé_.
I recognized the old familiar summits: Mount Ritter, Lyell, Dana, and
that firm peak with Titan strength and brow so square and solid it seems
altogether natural we should have named it for California’s statesman,
John Conness.
We rumbled down hill and out upon the desert, plodding until evening
through sand, and over rocky, cedar-wooded spurs, at last crossing adobe
meadows, where were settlements and a herd of Spanish cattle which had
escaped the drought of California, and now marched, northward bound, for
Montana.
Frowning volcanic hills flanked our road as evening wore on, lifting
dark forms against a sky singularly pale and luminous. Afar, we caught
glimpses of the dark, swelling Sierra wave thrusting up
“star-neighboring peaks,” and then, descending into hollows among lava
mounds, found ourselves shut completely in. A night at the Hot Springs
of Partzwick was notably free from anything which may be recounted.
Morning found me waiting alone on the hotel veranda, and I suppose the
luxuries of the establishment must have left a stamp of melancholy upon
my face, for the little, solemn driver who drew up his vehicle at the
door said in a tone of condolence, “The hearse is ready.”
Stages, drivers and teams had been successively worse as I journeyed
southward. This little old specimen, by whose side I sat from Partzwick
to Independence, ought to be excepted, and I should neglect a duty were
I not to portray one, at least, of his traits. He was a musical old
fellow, and given to chanting in low tones songs, sometimes pathetic,
often sentimental, but in every case preserved by him in most
fragmentary recollection. Such singing suffered, too, from the necessary
and frequent interruption of driving; the same breath quavering in
cracked melody, and tossing some neatly rounded oath or horse-phrase at
off or near wheeler, catching up an end of the refrain again in time to
satisfy his musical requirements.
All the morning he had warned me most impressively to count myself
favored if a certain bridge over Bishop’s Creek should not sink under us
and cast me upon wild waters. Rightly estimating my friend, I was not
surprised when we reached the spot to find a good, solid structure
bridging a narrow creek not more than four feet deep.
As we rolled on down Owen’s Valley, he sang, chatted and drove in a
manner which showed him capable of three distinct, yet simultaneous,
mental processes. I follow his words as nearly as memory serves.
“That creek, sir, was six feet deep.
‘Oh Lillie, sweet Lillie, dear Lillie Dale.’
What the devil are you shying at? You cursed mustang, come up out of
that;
... ‘little green grave.’
Yes, seven feet, and if we’d have fell in, swimming wouldn’t saved us.
“You, Balley, what are you a doin’ on?
‘’Neath the hill in the flowing vale.’
And what’s more, we couldn’t have crawled up that bank, nohow.
‘My own dear Lillie Dale.’
You’d like to kick over them traces, would you? Keep your doggoned neck
up snug against that collar, and take that.
“We’d drowned, sir; drowned sure as thunder.
‘In the place where the violets grow.’”
Desert hills, and low, mountain gateways, opening views of vast, sterile
plains, no longer formed our eastern outlook. The White Mountains, a
lofty, barren chain vying with the Sierras in altitude, rose in splendid
rank and stretched southeast, parallel with the great range. Down the
broad, intermediate trough flowed Owen’s River, alternately through
expanses of natural meadow and desolate reaches of sage.
The Sierra, as we travelled southward, became bolder and bolder, strong
granite spurs plunging steeply down into the desert; above, the mountain
sculpture grew grander and grander, until forms wild and rugged as the
Alps stretched on in dense ranks as far as the eye could reach. More and
more the granite came out in all its strength. Less and less soil
covered the slopes: groves of pine became rarer, and sharp, rugged
buttresses advanced boldly to the plain. Here and there a cañon-gate
between rough granite pyramids, and flanked by huge moraines, opened its
savage gallery back among peaks. Even around the summits there was but
little snow, and the streams which at short intervals flowed from the
mountain foot, traversing the plains, were sunken far below their
ordinary volume.
The mountain forms and mode of sculpture of the opposite ranges are
altogether different. The White and Inyo chains, formed chiefly of
uplifted sedimentary beds, are largely covered with soil, and wherever
the solid rock is exposed its easily traced strata plains and soft,
wooded surface combined in producing a general aspect of breadth and
smoothness; while the Sierra, here more than anywhere else, holds up a
front of solid stone, carved into most intricate and highly ornamental
forms: vast aiguilles, trimmed from summit to base with line of slender
minarets; huge, broad domes, deeply fluted and surmounted with tall
obelisks, and everywhere the greatest profusion of bristling points.
From the base of each range a long, sloping talus descends gently to the
river, and here and there, bursting up through Sierra foot-hills, rise
the red and black forms of recent volcanoes as regular and barren as if
cooled but yesterday.
I had reason for not regretting my departure from the Inyo House at
Independence next morning before sunrise; and when a young woman in an
elaborate brown calico, copied evidently from some imperial evening
toilet, pertly demanded my place by the driver, adding that she was not
one of the “inside kind,” I willingly yielded, and made myself contented
on the back seat alone. Presently, however, a companion came to me in
the person of a middle-aged Spanish doña, clad altogether in black, with
a shawl worn over her head after the manner of a mantilla. When it began
to rain violently and beat upon that brown calico, I made bold to offer
the young woman my sheltered place, but she gayly declined, averring
herself not made of sugar. So the doña and I shared my great coat across
our laps and established relations of civility, though she spoke no
English, and I only that little Spanish so much more embarrassing than
none.
In her smile, in the large, soft eyes, and that tinge of Castilian blood
which shone red-warm through olive cheek, I saw the signs of a race
blessed with sturdier health than ours. With snowy hair growing low on a
massive forehead, and just a glimpse now and then of large, gold beads,
through a white handkerchief about her throat, she seemed to me a
charming picture: though, perhaps, her fine looks gained something by
contrasting with the sickly girl in front, whose pallor and cough could
not have meant less than the pretubercular state.
Clouds covered the mountains on either hand, leaving me only ranches and
people to observe. May I be forgiven if I am wrong in accounting for the
late improvement of political tone in Tuolumne by the presence here of
so large a share of her most degraded citizens; people whose faces and
dress and life and manners are sadder than any possibilities held up to
us by Darwin.
My long ride ended in a few hours at Lone Pine, where, from the hotel
window, I watched a dark-blue mass of storm which covered and veiled the
region where I knew my goal, the Whitney summit, must stand.
For two days storm-curtains hung low about the Sierra base, their vapor
banks, dark with fringes of shower, at times drifting out over Lone Pine
and quenching a thirsty earth. On the third afternoon blue sky shone
through rifts overhead, and now and then a single peak, dashed with
broken sunshine, rose for a moment over rolling clouds which swelled
above it again like huge billows.
About an hour before sunset the storm began rapidly to sink into level
fold, over which, in clear, yellow light, emerged “cloud-compelling”
peaks. The liberated sun poured down shafts of light, piercing the mist
which now in locks of gold and gray blew about the mountain heads in
wonderful splendor.
How deep and solemn a blue filled the cañon depths! What passion of
light glowed around the summits! With delight I watched them one after
another fading till only the sharp, terrible crest of Whitney, still red
with reflected light from the long-sunken sun, showed bright and
glorious above the whole Sierra.
Upon observing the topography, I saw that one bold spur advanced from
Mount Whitney to the plain; on either side of it profound cañons opened
back to the summit. I remembered the impossibility of making a climb up
those northern precipices, and at once chose the more southern gorge.
Next morning we set out on horseback for the mountain base, twelve miles
across plains and through an outlying range of hills. My companion for
the trip was Paul Pinson, as tough and plucky a mountaineer as France
ever sent us, who consented readily to follow me. José, the
mild-mannered and grinning Mexican boy who rode with us, was to remain
in care of our animals at the foot-hills while we made the climb.
I left a Green barometer to be observed at Lone Pine, and carried my
short high-mountain instrument, by the same excellent maker.
Gauzy mists again enveloped the Sierra, leaving us free minds to enjoy a
ride, of which the very first mile supplied me food for days of thought.
The American residents of Lone Pine outskirts live in a homeless
fashion; sullen, almost arrogant, neglect stares out from the open
doors. There is no attempt at grace, no memory of comfort, no suggested
hope for improvement.
Not so the Spanish homes, their low, adobe, wide-roofed cabins neatly
enclosed with even, basket-work fence, and lining hedge of blooming
hollyhock.
We stopped to bow good-morning to my friend and stage companion, the
doña. She sat in the threshold of her open door, sewing; beyond her
stretched a bare floor, clean and white: the few chairs, the table
spread with snowy linen, everything, shone with an air of religious
spotlessness. Symmetry reigned in the precise, well-kept garden,
arranged in rows of pepper-plants and crisp heads of vernal lettuce.
I longed for a painter to catch her brilliant smile, and surround her on
canvas as she was here, with order and dignity. The same plain, black
dress clad her ample figure, and about the neck heavy, barbaric gold
beads served again as collar.
Under low eaves above her, and quite around the house, hung, in triple
row, festoons of flaming red peppers, in delicious contrast with the
rich adobe gray.
It was a study of order and true womanly repose, fitted to cheer us, and
a grouping of such splendid color as might tempt a painter to cross the
world.
A little farther on we passed an Indian ranchero where several willow
wickyups were built upon the bank of a cold brook. Half-naked children
played about here and there; a few old squaws bustled at household work;
but nearly all lay outstretched, dozing. A sort of tattered brilliancy
characterized the place. Gay, high-colored squalor reigned. There seemed
hardly more lack of thrift or sense of decorum than in the American
ranches, yet somehow the latter send a stab of horror through one, while
this quaint indolence and picturesque neglect seem aptly contrived to
set off the Indian genius for loafing, and leave you with a sort of
æsthetic satisfaction, rather than the sorrow their half development
should properly evoke.
Leaving all this behind us, our road led westward across a long sage
slope entering a narrow, tortuous pass through a low range of outlying
granite hills. Strangely weathered forms towered on either side, their
bare, brown surface contrasting pleasantly with the vivid ribbon of
willows which wove a green and silver cover over swift water.
The granite was riven with innumerable cracks, showing here and there a
strong tendency to concentric forms, and I judged the immense
spheroidal bowlders which lay on all sides, piled one upon another, to
be the kernels or nuclei of larger masses.
Quickly crossing this ridge, we came out upon the true Sierra
foot-slope, a broad, inclined plain stretching north and south as far as
we could see. Directly in front of us rose the rugged form of Mount
Whitney spur, a single mass of granite, rough-hewn, and darkened with
coniferous groves. The summits were lost in a cloud of almost indigo
hue.
Putting our horses at a trot, we quickly ascended the _glacis_, and at
the very foot of the rocks dismounted, and made up our packs. José, with
the horses, left us and went back half a mile to a mountain ranch, where
he was to await our return; and presently Pinson and I, with heavy
burdens upon our backs, began slowly to work our way up the granite spur
and toward the great cañon.
An hour’s climb brought us around upon the south wall of our spur, and
about a thousand feet above a stream which dashed and leaped along the
cañon bottom, through wild ravines and over granite bluffs. Our slope
was a rugged rock-face, giving foothold here and there to pine and
juniper trees, but for the greater part bare and bold.
Far above, at an elevation of ten thousand feet, a dark grove of alpine
pines gathered in the cañon bed. Thither we bent our steps, edging from
cleft to cleft, making constant, though insignificant, progress. At
length our wall became so wild and deeply cut with side cañons that we
found it impossible to follow it longer, and descended carefully to the
bottom.
Almost immediately, with heavy wind gusts and sound as of torrents, a
storm broke upon us, darkening the air and drenching us to the skin. The
three hours we toiled up over rocks, through dripping willow-brooks and
among trains of _débris_ were not noticeable for their cheerfulness.
The storm had ceased, but it was evening when, wet and exhausted, we at
length reached the alpine grove, and threw ourselves down for rest under
a huge, overhanging rock which offered its shelter for our bivouac.