1871, I took copy, to identify the peak, was vitiated in a way neither
of us could have foreseen, and a serious error might have crept into
current geography but for the timely visit of Mr. Goodyear.
Mr. Hoffmann stands clear of blame in this matter. Upon my shoulders and
those of my _particeps criminis_, the storm and the local magnetic
attraction, it all rests.
We sat for some time in that silence which even the rudest natures pay
as an unconscious tribute to the august presence of a great mountain,
and then began again the march toward Mount Whitney. Seaman, who had
started ill, here felt so painfully the effect of altitude that we urged
him to struggle no further against dizziness and nausea, but to return,
which he did with reluctance. We parted at the very crown of the ridge,
on the verge of a gulf which plunges down from Mount Whitney to Owen’s
Valley. Knowles, who is a sort of chamois, kept his head splendidly, and
together we clambered round and up to the crest of a bold needle about
fourteen thousand four hundred feet high, from which the discouraging
truth dawned upon us that it was impossible to surmount the three sharp
pinnacles which lay between us and the delicately sculptured crest
beyond.
To the right and below, three thousand feet down from our tower, I could
trace the line of my attempted climb of 1864, to where it disappeared
around a projecting buttress at the foot of the great precipice, which
forms the eastern face of Mount Whitney and the subordinate pinnacles to
the south.
To the left, through crags and splintered monoliths, we could catch a
glimpse of a deep glacier basin lying west of Mount Whitney, enclosing
great sweeps of _débris_ and numerous vivid blue tarns.
Between the minarets we could also see portions of the southwest slope
of Mount Whitney, which was evidently a smooth, accessible face, and the
one of all others to attempt. But the day was already too far advanced
to leave us the remotest hope of even reaching the glacier basin west of
Mount Whitney, and we decided to return to camp.
Before beginning our wearisome march I sketched the outline of the Mount
Whitney group, which, so far as I know, differs from any other cluster
of peaks. The Sierra here is a bold wall with an almost perpendicular
front of about three thousand feet, which is crowned by sharp turrets,
having a tendency to lean out over the eastern gulf; these are properly
the crests of great, rib-like buttresses, which jut from the general
surface of the granite front.
Mount Whitney itself springs up and out like the prow of a sharp ocean
steamer. Southward along the summit my sketch is of a confused region of
rough-hewn granite obelisks and towers, all remarkable for the deep
shattering to which the rock has been subjected. It is a region which
may even yet suffer considerable perceptible change, since a single
winter’s frost and snow must dislodge numberless blocks from the crests
and flanks of the whole group. Indeed, at the time of my visit, notably
the period of least snow and frost, we often heard the sharp rattle of
falling _débris_.
We varied our course homeward by climbing along a lateral ridge, whence
we could look into the Mount Whitney basin, and here we were favored by
a fine view, chiefly pleasing to us because the whole accessible slope
of the peak came out, unobscured by intervening ridges.
It was evident that we must find a mule pass through the granite waves,
from our present camp round into the great glacier basin, or else plan
our next attempt with provisions and blankets on our backs and an
uncertain number of days’ clambering over the intervening cañons to the
foot of our peak.
The shades of twilight were darkening the amphitheatre as we plodded
homeward; ghostly cliffs and dim towers were hardly recognizable as
defined against the evening sky, in which already a few pale stars shone
tremulously.
I spare the reader the days of snow and sleet we spent under a temporary
shelter constructed of blankets. I pass over the elaborate system of
rivulets, which forever burrowed new channels and originated future
geography under our tent. These were quickly forgotten the morning of
the clear-up, as we quitted our camp under the shadow of the 1871 peak,
and marched southwestward down the bowlder-strewn valley of our brook.
A fine series of lateral moraines flank this cañon on the left, moraines
rising one above another in defined terraces, for the most part composed
of granite blocks, but here and there of solid rock _in situ_, where the
ridge throws out prominent spurs.
We ascended the north wall, zigzagging to and fro among pines, till,
having climbed a thousand feet, we found ourselves upon a plateau of
granite sand, among groves of _pinus flexilis_, which seemed (as to me
the sequoias always have) the relics of a past climatic condition, the
well-preserved octogenarians of the forest. Through open groves of these
giant trees, whose red, gnarled trunks and dark green foliage stood out
with artistic definition upon bare granite sand, we saw the deep cañon
of the Kern a few miles to our left, and beyond it, swelling in splendid
rank against the west, my old friends, the Kaweah peaks, their dark,
pyramidal summits here and there touched with flashing ice-banks.
The bottom of Kern Cañon was hidden from us; its craggy edges broken and
rounded by glacial action, and in part built upon by the fragments of
great moraines, were especially powerful; and as a master’s sketch
emphasizes the leading lines, so here each sharply carved ravine or
rock-rift is given force by lines of almost black pines. Startled bands
of deer looked timidly at us for a moment, and then bounded wildly away
through the woods. All else was silent and motionless.
At evening we entered the long-hoped-for cañon, and threaded our way up
among moraines and forest close to the foot of Mount Whitney, the peak
itself rising grandly across the amphitheatre’s head, every spire and
rocky crevice brought sharply out in the warm evening sunlight. With my
field-glass I could see that it was a simple, brief walk of a few hours
to the summit, and, all anxiety at rest, I lay down on my blankets to
watch the effects of light.
As often as one camps at twelve thousand feet in the Sierra, the charm
of crystally pure air, these cold, sparkling, gem-like tints of rock and
alpine lake, the fiery bronze of foliage, and luminous though deep-toned
sky, combine to produce an intellectual and even a spiritual elevation.
Deep and stirring feelings come naturally, the present falls back into
its true relation, one’s own wearying identity shrinks from the broad,
open foreground of the vision, and a calmness born of reverent
reflections encompasses the soul.
At eleven o’clock next morning Knowles and I stood together on the
topmost rock of Mount Whitney. We found there a monument of stones, and
records of the two parties who had preceded us,--the first, Messrs.
Hunter and Crapo, and afterward, that of Rabe of the Geological Survey.
The former were, save Indian hunters, the first, so far as we know, who
achieved this dominating summit. Mr. Rabe has the honor of the first
measurement by barometer. Our three visits were all within a month.
The day was cloudless, and the sky, milder than is common over these
extreme heights, warmed to a mellow glow and rested in softening beauty
over minaret and dome. Air and light seemed melted together; even the
wild rocks springing up all about us wore an aspect of aërial delicacy.
Around the wide panorama, half low desert, half rugged granite
mountains, each detail was observable, but a uniform, luminous medium
toned, without obscuring, the field of vision. That fearful sense of
wreck and desolation, of a world crushed into fragments, of the ice
chisel which, unseen, has wrought this strange mountain sculpture, all
the sensations of power and tragedy I had invariably felt before on high
peaks, were totally forgotten. It was the absolute reverse of the effect
on Mount Tyndall, where an unrelenting clearness discovered every object
in all its power and reality. Then we saw only unburied wreck of
geologic struggles, black with sudden shadow or white under searching
focus, as if the sun were a great burning-glass, gathering light from
all space, and hurling its fierce shafts upon spire and wall.
Now it was like an opal world, submerged in a sea of dreamy light, down
through whose motionless, transparent depths I became conscious of
sunken ranges, great hollows of undiscernible depth, reefs of pearly
granite as clear and delicate as the coral banks in a tropical ocean. It
was not like a haze in the lower world, which veils away distance in
softly vanishing perspective; there was no mist, no vagueness, no loss
of form nor fading of outline--only a strange harmonizing of earth and
air. Shadows were faint, yet defined, lights visible, but most
exquisitely modulated. The hollow blue which over Tyndall led the eye up
into vacant solitudes was here replaced by a sense of sheltering
nearness, a certain dove-colored obscurity in the atmosphere which
seemed to filter the sunlight of all its harsher properties. I do not
permit myself to describe details, for they have left no enduring
impression, nor am I insensible of how vain any attempt must be to
reproduce the harmony of such subtle aspects of nature--aspects most
rare and indescribable because producing their charm by negative means.
I suppose such an atmospheric effect is to be accounted for by a lower
stratum of pure, transparent air overlaid by an upper one so charged
with moisture (or perhaps one of those thus-far-unexplained dry mists
occasionally seen in the high Sierra) as to intercept the blue rays of
sunlight, and admit only softened yellow ones.
This is the true Mount Whitney, the one we named in 1864, and upon which
the name of our chief is forever to rest. It stands, not like white
Shasta, in a grandeur of solitude, but about it gather companies of crag
and spire, piercing the blue or wrapped in monkish raiment of snowstorm
and mist. Far below, laid out in ashen death, slumbers the desert.
Silence reigns on these icy heights, save when scream of Sierra eagle or
loud crescendo of avalanche interrupts the frozen stillness, or when in
symphonic fulness a storm rolls through vacant cañons with its stern
minor. It is hard not to invest these great, dominating peaks with
consciousness, difficult to realize that, sitting thus for ages in
presence of all nature can work of light-magic and color-beauty, no
inner spirit has kindled, nor throb of granite heart once responded, no
Buddhistic nirvana-life, even, has brooded in eternal calm within these
sphinx-like breasts of stone.
A week after my climb I lay on the desert sand at the foot of the Inyo
Range and looked up at Mount Whitney, realizing all its grand
individuality, and saw the drifting clouds interrupt a sun-brightened
serenity by frown after frown of moving shadow; and I entered for a
moment deeply and intimately into that strange realm where admiration
blends with superstition, that condition in which the savage feels
within him the greatness of a natural object, and forever after endows
it with consciousness and power. For a moment I was back in the Aryan
myth days, when they saw afar a snowy peak, and called it Dhavalagiri
(white elephant), and invested it with mystic power.
These peculiar moments, rare enough in the life of a scientific man,
when one trembles on the edge of myth-making, are of interest, as
unfolding the origin and manner of savage beliefs, and as awakening the
unperishing germ of primitive manhood which is buried within us all
under so much culture and science.
How generally the myth-maker has been extinguished in modern students of
mountains may be realized by examining the tone of Alpine literature,
which, once lifted above the fatiguing repetition of gymnastics, is
almost invariably scientific.
Ruskin alone among prose writers on the Alps re-echoes the dim past, in
ever-recurring myth-making, over cloud and peak and glacier; his is the
Rigveda’s idea of nature. The varying hues which mood and emotion
forever pass before his own mental vision mask with their illusive
mystery the simple realities of nature, until mountains and their bold,
natural facts are lost behind the cloudy poetry of the writer.
Ruskin helps us to know himself, not the Alps; his mountain chapters,
although essentially four thousand years old, are, however, no more an
anachronism than the dim primeval spark which smoulders in all of us;
their brilliancy _is_ that spark fanned into flame.
To follow a chapter of Ruskin by one of Tyndall is to bridge forty
centuries and realize the full contrast of archaic and modern thought.
This was the drift of my revery as I lay basking on the hot sands of
Inyo, realizing fully the geological history and hard, materialistic
reality of Mount Whitney, its mineral nature, its chemistry; yet archaic
impulse even then held me, and the gaunt, gray old Indian who came
slowly toward me must have subtly felt my condition, for he crouched
beside me and silently fixed his hawk eye upon the peak.
At last he drew an arrow, sighted along its straight shaft, bringing the
obsidian head to bear on Mount Whitney, and in strange fragments of
language told me that the peak was an old, old man, who watched this
valley and cared for the Indians, but who shook the country with
earthquakes to punish the whites for injustice toward his tribe.
I looked at his whitened hair and keen, black eye. I watched the spare,
bronze face, upon which was written the burden of a hundred dark and
gloomy superstitions; and as he trudged away across the sands I could
but feel the liberating power of modern culture, which unfetters us from
the more than iron bands of self-made myths. My mood vanished with the
savage, and I saw the great peak only as it really is--a splendid mass
of granite 14,887 feet high, ice-chiselled and storm-tinted; a great
monolith left standing amid the ruins of a bygone geological empire.
XIV
THE PEOPLE
If mankind were offspring of isothermal lines and topography, we might
arrive at a just criticism of Sierra Nevada people by that cheap and
rapid method so much in vogue nowadays among physical geographers. Their
practice of dragooning the free-agent with wet and dry bulb thermometers
would help us to predict the future of Sierra society but little more
securely than Madam Saint John, who also deals in coming events. I fear
we have no better than the old way of developing what lies ahead
logically from yesterday and to-day, adding large measure of sympathy
with human aspiration and faith in divine help.
Why all sorts and conditions of men from every race upon the planet
wanted gold, and twenty years ago came here to win it, I shall not
concern myself to ask. Nor can I formulate very accurately the
proportions of good, bad, and indifferent _dramatis personæ_ upon whom
the golden curtain of ’49 rolled up.
No venerated landmark or sacred restraint held those men in check. There
were no precedents for the acting, no play-book, no prompter, no
audience. “Anglo-Saxondom’s idee” reigned supreme, developing a plot of
riotous situation, and inconceivably sudden change. Wit and intellect
wrought a condition the most ambitious savages might regard with baffled
envy. History would not, if she could, parallel the state of society
here from ’49 to ’55, nor can we imagine to what height of horror it
might have reached had the Sierra drainage held unlimited gold. Those
were lively days. The penniless ’49er still looks back to them with
bleared eyes as the one period of his life. “Dust” was plenty and to be
had, if not for digging, at the modest price of a bullet.
To prove the soil’s fertility he tells you proudly how, in those years,
wild oats on every hill grew tall enough to be tied across your
saddle-bow. This irony of nature has passed away, but the cursed plant
ripens its hundredfold in life and manner.
No one familiar with society as it then was feels the least surprise
that Mr. Bret Harte should deal so largely in morbid anatomy, or appear
to search painfully for a single noble trait to redeem the common bad.
Yet not universal bad, for there were not wanting a few strong Christian
men who, amid all, kept their eyes on the one model, leading lives
blameless, if obscure.
Broadly, through all kinds and conditions, shone the virtue of generous,
if not self-denying, hospitality. A sort of open-handed fraternity
banded together the honest miners; they were shoulder to shoulder in
common quest of gold, in united effort to make the “camp” lively. The
“fraternity” too often emulated that of Cain, or wore a ghastly
likeness to the Commune. That those desperadoes, who, through the long
chain of mining towns, outnumbered respectable men, had so generally the
fixed habit of killing one another should rather be written down to
their credit; that they never married to hand down lawless traits seems
their crowning virtue.
For a few years the solemn pines looked down on a mad carnival of
godless license, a pandemonium in whose picturesque delirium human
character crumbled and vanished like dead leaves.
It was stirring and gay, but Melpomene’s pathetic face was always under
that laughing mask of comedy.
This is the unpromising origin of our Sierra civilization. It may be
instructive to note some early steps of improvement: a protest, first
silent, then loud, which went up against disorder and crime; and later,
the inauguration of justice, in form, if not in reality.
There occurs to me an incident illustrating these first essays in civil
law; it is vouched for by my friend, an unwilling actor in the affair.
Exactly why horse-stealing should have been so early recognized as a
heinous sin it is not easy to discover; however that might be, murderers
continued to notch the number of their victims on neatly kept hilts of
pistols or knives, in comparative security, long after the horse thief
began to meet his hempen fate.
Early in the fifties, on a still, hot summer’s afternoon, a certain man,
in a camp of the northern mines which shall be nameless, having tracked
his two donkeys and one horse a half-mile, and discovering that a man’s
track with spur-marks followed them, came back to town and told “the
boys,” who loitered about a popular saloon, that in his opinion “some
Mexican had stole the animals.”
Such news as this naturally demanded drinks all around. “Do you know,
gentlemen,” said one who assumed leadership, “that just naturally to
shoot these Greasers ain’t the best way. Give ’em a fair jury trial, and
rope ’em up with all the majesty of law. That’s the cure.”
Such words of moderation were well received, and they drank again to
“Here’s hoping we ketch that Greaser.”
As they loafed back to the veranda a Mexican walked over the hill brow,
jingling his spurs pleasantly in accord with a whistled waltz.
The advocate for law said in undertone, “That’s the cuss.”
A rush, a struggle, and the Mexican, bound hand and foot, lay on his
back in the bar-room. The camp turned out to a man.
Happily, such cries as “String him up!” “Burn the doggoned
‘lubricator’!” and other equally pleasant phrases fell unheeded upon his
Spanish ear.
A jury, upon which they forced my friend, was quickly gathered in the
street, and, despite refusals to serve, the crowd hurried them in behind
the bar.
A brief statement of the case was made by the _ci-devant_ advocate, and
they shoved the jury into a commodious poker-room, where were seats
grouped about neat, green tables. The noise outside in the bar-room by
and by died away into complete silence, but from afar down the cañon
came confused sounds as of disorderly cheering.
They came nearer, and again the light-hearted noise of human laughter
mingled with clinking glasses around the bar.
A low knock at the jury door; the lock burst in, and a dozen smiling
fellows asked the verdict.
A foreman promptly answered, “_Not guilty_.”
With volleyed oaths, and ominous laying of hands on pistol hilts, the
boys slammed the door with, “You’ll have to do better than that!”
In half an hour the advocate gently opened the door again.
“Your _opinion_, gentlemen?”
“Guilty!”
“Correct! You can come out. We hung him an hour ago.”
The jury took theirs “neat”; and when, after a few minutes, the pleasant
village returned to its former tranquillity, it was “allowed” at more
than one saloon that “Mexicans’ll know enough to let white men’s stock
alone after this.” One and another exchanged the belief that this sort
of thing was more sensible than “‘nipping’ em on sight.”
When, before sunset, the bar-keeper concluded to sweep some dust out of
his poker-room back-door, he felt a momentary surprise at finding the
missing horse dozing under the shadow of an oak, and the two lost
donkeys serenely masticating playing-cards, of which many bushels lay in
a dusty pile. He was reminded then that the animals had been there all
day.
During three or four years the battle between good and bad became more
and more determined, until all positive characters arrayed themselves
either for or against public order.
At length, on a sudden, the party for right organized those august mobs,
the Vigilance Committees, and quickly began to festoon their more
depraved fellow-men from tree to tree. Rogues of sufficient shrewdness
got themselves enrolled in the vigilance ranks, and were soon unable to
tell themselves from the most virtuous. Those quiet oaks, whose hundreds
of sunny years had been spent in lengthening out glorious branches, now
found themselves playing the part of public gibbet.
Let it be distinctly understood that I am not passing criticism on the
San Francisco organization, which I have never investigated, but on
“Committees” in the mountain towns, with whose performance I am
familiar.
The Vigilants quickly put out of existence a majority of the worst
desperadoes, and by their swift, merciless action struck such terror to
the rest that ever after the right has mainly controlled affairs.
This was, _perhaps_, well. With characteristic promptness they laid
down their power, and gave California over to the constituted
authorities. This was magnificent. They deserve the commendation due to
success. They have, however, such a frank, honest way of singing their
praise, such eternal, undisguised and virtuous self-laudation over the
whole matter, that no one else need interrupt them with fainter notes.
Although this generation has written its indorsement in full upon the
transaction, it may be doubted if history (how long is it before
dispassionate candor speaks?) will trace an altogether favorable verdict
upon her pages. Possibly, to fulfil the golden round of duty it is
needful to do right in the right way, and success may not be proven the
eternal test of merit.
That the Vigilance Committees grasped the moral power is undeniable;
that they used it for the public salvation is equally true; but the best
advocates are far from showing that with skill and moderation they might
not have thrown their weight into the scale _with_ law, and conquered,
by means of legislature, judge, and jury, a peace wholly free from the
stain of lawless blood.
An impartial future may possibly grant the plenary inspiration of
Vigilance Committees. Perhaps that better choice was in truth denied
them; it may be the hour demanded a sudden blow of self-defence. Whether
better or best, the act has not left unmixed blessing, although it now
seems as if the lawlessness, which even till these later years has from
time to time manifested itself, is gradually and surely dying out. Yet
to-day, as I write, State troops are encamped at Amador, to suppress a
spirit which has taken law in its own hand.
With the gradual decline of gold product, something like social
equilibrium asserted itself. By 1860 California had made the vast,
inspiring stride from barbarism to vulgarity.