have got to be ready for a population of a million or more. Our house
has got to be in order."
It is not every day that one can see an American metropolitan city in
the making.
* * * * *
Back of the high-crested hills that have been suffered to remain as a
part of the topography of this remarkable town--for its residents still
like to perch their smart new houses where they may command a view of
Puget Sound or the snow-capped Rainier--is as lovely a chain of lakes as
was ever given to an American city. Boston would have made the edges of
these the finest suburbs in the land; she is trying some sort of an
experiment of that kind with her dirty old Charles river. Seattle saw in
the great bowl of Lake Washington something more.
"We can crowd into Portland a little more," said the shrewdest of her
citizens, "by making this lake into a fresh-water harbor."
Just what the advantages of a fresh-water harbor may be to Seattle which
already possesses one of the finest deep-water harbors on the North
Pacific, may be obscure to you for the moment. Then the Seattle man
informs you that Portland has a fresh-water harbor, that the masters of
ships, still thirty days' sailing from port, make for its haven, knowing
that in fresh water the barnacles that make so great a drag upon a
vessel's progress will fall away from the hull. A fresh-water bath for a
salt-water hull is better than a drain-off in a dry dock--and a great
sight cheaper.
Here, then, is a masterful new town seeking new points of advantage over
its rivals, piercing canals through to its backyard lakes so that it may
eventually be as completely surrounded by docks and shipping as are New
York and Boston. It is impossible to think of Seattle ever hesitating.
Seattle proceeds to accomplish. Before she has a real opportunity to
count the cost, the improvements which she has undertaken are rolling in
revenue to her coffers.
* * * * *
Tacoma is smaller than either Seattle or Portland--and not one whit less
vigorous than either of them. She has not undergone the wholesale
transformations of her sister to the north and still retains all the
aspects of a busy port of the Far North--long reaching wharves, busy,
dirty railroad yards reaching and serving them, fir-clad hills rising
from the water, the smell and industry of lumber--and back of all these
her mountain. It is her mountain--"The Mountain that was God" as the
Indians used to say--and if for long weeks it may stay modestly hidden
behind fog-banks, there do come days when its great snow-capped peak
gazes serenely down upon the little city.
Do not dare to come into this town and call her mountain Rainier, after
the fashion of government "map sharps" and railroad advertisements. It
is Mount Tacoma, if you please, and woe be to any man who calls it
anything else. Former President Taft once shouldered the question upon
reaching the northwestern corner of the land like a true diplomat. At
the dinners in both Seattle and Tacoma he referred to the great guardian
peak of Washington as "the mountain" thereby offending no one and
leaving a pleasant "lady or the tiger" mystery as to which of the two
names he would use in private conversation.
But whether the mountain be Rainier or Tacoma, it is going to be one of
the great playgrounds of the nation--and that within very few years.
Think of starting out from a brisk American city of a hundred thousand
population and within two hours standing at the foot of a giant glacier
grinding down from the heavens, a cold, dead, icy thing but still imbued
with the stubborn sort of life that stunted vegetable growths possess, a
life that makes the frozen river travel toward the sea every day of the
year. A man living in Tacoma, or Seattle, or Portland, for that matter,
can have both the dangers and the joys of Swiss mountain climbing but a
few hours distant. It takes knowledge and courage to make the ascent of
Rainier--a tedious trip which starts through the three summer months in
which it is possible at five o'clock in the morning so as to reach the
summit before the snows begin to melt to the danger point. And yet, in
the hands of skilled guides, so many women cross the crevices and climb
the steep upward trails, that the record of their ascents is no longer
kept.
This great Swiss mountain--higher than Blanc, and vastly more impressive
from the fact that its fourteen thousand foot summit rises almost
directly from the sea--is the central feature of the newest of all the
government parks. It is in the stages of early development and already
the tourists are coming to it in increasing numbers. Given a few years
and Rainier will vie in popularity with the Yellowstone, the Yosemite
and the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. In scenic beauty of its own
inimitable sort it already ranks with these.
The man who makes the ascent of Rainier--if poetry and imagination rest
within his soul--may truly feel that he has come near to God. He can
feel the ardor and the inspiration of the red men who gave the mountain
its mystic symbolism. He can look up into the clouds and feel that he is
at the dome of the world. He can look down, down past the timber line
off across miles of timber land and catch the silver of Puget Sound and
the distant horizon flash of the Pacific. He can see smoke to the
south--Portland--smoke to the north and west--Seattle--and nearer than
these--the brisk Tacoma that hugs this mountain to herself.
If imagination rest within him he can now know that these cities, at the
northwest corner of America, are barely adult, just beginning to come
into their own. A great measure of growth and strength is yet to be
given to them.
19
SAN FRANCISCO--THE NEWEST PHOENIX
We came upon it in the still of an early Sunday evening--the wonderful
city of Saint Francis. Throughout that cloudless Sabbath we had
journeyed southward through California. At dawn the porter of the
sleeping car had informed us that we were in the Golden State, not to be
distinguished in its northern reaches from Oregon. Men were talking of
the wonders of the Klamath country into which the civilizing rails of
steel are being steadily pushed, the breath of tomorrow was upon the
lips of every one who boarded the train, but the land itself was wild,
half-timbered, rugged to the last degree. Through the morning grays the
volcanic cone of Shasta was showing ever and ever so faintly, and if an
acquaintance of two hours with the peak that Joaquin Miller has made so
famous did not enthuse the man behind the car-window, it must have been
that he was still a bit dazed, not surfeited, with the wonders of
Rainier.
At the foot of Shasta our train stood for a bare ten minutes while
travelers descended and partook of the vilest tasting waters that nature
might boast in all California. Shasta spring water is supposed to be
mightily beneficial and that is probably true, for our experience with
spring waters has been that their benefits have existed in an inverse
ratio to their pleasantness of taste. But if Nature had given her
benefactions to Shasta a sort of Spartan touch, she has more than
compensated for the severity of her gifts by the beauty of their
setting. You literally descend directly upon the springs. The railroad
performs earthly miracles to land a passenger in front of them. It
descends a vast number of feet in an incredibly short length of
track--the conductor will reduce these to cold statistics--and your idea
is a quick drop on a gigantic hair-pin. At the base of the lowest leg of
this hair-pin is the spring, set in a deep glen, the mossy banks of
which are constantly adrip and seemingly one great slow-moving
waterfall, even throughout the fearfully dry seasons of California. The
whole thing is distinctly European, distinctly different--a bit of Swiss
scenery root-dug and brought to the West Coast of the United States.
After Shasta and the springs, another of the desolate, fascinating
canyons to be threaded for many miles besides the twistings of a
melancholy river, then--of a sudden--open country, farmers growing green
things, ranch-houses, dusty county-roads, with automobiles plowing them
dustier still, little towns, more ranches--everything in California from
two to two million acres is a ranch--then a grinding of air-brakes and
your neighbor across the aisle is fumbling with his red-covered
time-table to locate the station upon it. As for you, you don't care
about what station it really may be. It is a station. You are sure of
that. There is the familiar light yellow depot, but in the well-kept
lawn that abuts it grows a giant tree. That tree is a palm, and the
palm-tree typifies California to every tingling sense of your mentality.
This is the real California. The mountains have already become
accustomed things to you, the broad ranches were coming into their own
before you ever reached Denver, but the palm is exotic in your homeland,
a glass-protected thing. That it grows freely beside this little
unidentified railroad station proclaims to you that you are at last in a
land that bids defiance to that trinity of scourging giants--December,
January and February--and calls itself summer the whole year round.
This palm has brought you to a sense of your location--to California.
The romance that has been spelled into you of a distant land, and of the
men who toiled that it become a great state peopled with great cities,
of Nature's lavish gifts and terrific blows laid alike upon it, came
into your heart and soul and body at the first glimpse of that tree.
Before the train is under way again your camera has been called into
action--mental processes are supplemented by a permanent record
chemically etched upon a film of celluloid.
After that pioneer among palm-trees, more of these little yellow depots
and more of these rarely beautiful palms standing beside them. The
ranches multiply, this valley of Sacramento is a rarely fertile thing.
Growth stretches for miles, without ever a hint of undulation.
California is the flattest thing you have ever seen. And again and again
you will be declaring it the most mountainous of all our states. The
flat-lands carry you beyond daylight into dusk. The towns multiply, a
glow of arc reflection against the shadows of evening is Sacramento a
dozen miles distant. Then there is a rattle of switches, a halt at a
junction station, and mail is being gathered from the impromptu
literature makers on our train to go east. The main line is reached. And
a little later the Straits of Costa are crossed. Here is a broad arm of
the sea and if it were still lingering daylight you might declare that
Holland, not Switzerland, had been transplanted into California. The sea
laughs at bridges, and so from Benecia to Port Costa we go on a great
ferryboat, eleven Pullmans, a great ten-drivered passenger
locomotive--all of us together. For twenty minutes we slip across the
water, breathing fresh air once again and standing in the ferry's bow
looking toward the shadowy outline of a high, black hill carelessly
punctuated here and there by yellow points of light. A new land is
always mysterious and fascinating; by night doubly mysterious, doubly
fascinating.
The ferry boat fast to its bridge, the locomotive is no longer an
impotent thing. We are making the last stage of a long trip across the
continent by rail. The little towns are multiplying. The subtle
prescience of a great city is upon us. We turn west, then south and the
suburban villages are shouldering one another all the more closely the
entire way. We skirt and barely miss Berkeley, hesitate at Oakland and
then come to a grinding final stop at the end of a pier that juts itself
far out beyond the shallow reaches of San Francisco bay. Again there is
a ferry boat--a capacious craft not unlike those craft upon which we
have ridden time and time again between Staten island and the tip of
Manhattan--and when its screws have ceased to turn we will finally be in
the real San Francisco, reached as a really great metropolis may be
reached, after an infinitude of time and trouble. It is still
October--the warmest month of the year in the city by the Golden
Gate--and the girls and their young men fill the long benches on the
open decks of the ferry. The wind blows soft from the Pacific, and
straight ahead is San Francisco--a mystery of yellow illumination rising
from the water's edge.
As the ferry makes her course, the goal is less and less of a mystery.
Street lights begin to give some sort of half-coherent form to the high
hills that make the amphitheater site of San Francisco, they dip in even
lines to show the course of straight avenues. A great beer sign changes
and rechanges in spelling its lively message, there is a moon-faced
clock held aloft, you pinch your memory sharply, and then know that it
must be the tower of the great ferry-house, the conspicuous waterfront
land-mark of San Francisco.
In another five minutes you are passing under that tower--a veritable
gate-keeper of the city--and facing up Market street; from the beginning
its undisputed chief thoroughfare. A taxicab is standing there. You
throw your hand-baggage into it, come tumbling after, yourself. There is
a confusion of street-lights, a momentary intimacy of a trolley car
running alongside--a little later the glare and confusion of a hotel
lobby, the fascinating fuss of getting yourself settled in a strange
town. There is a double witchery in approaching a great new city at
night.
In the morning to tumble out of your hotel into that same strange town
in the clarity of early sunshine, to have this great street or that or
that--Market or Geary or Powell--stretching forth as if longing to
invite your explorations--here again is the fascination of travel. The
big trolley cars come rolling up Market street in quick succession, and
for an instant their appeal is strong. But over there is a car of
another sort, running on narrow-gauge tracks and with the roar of an
endless cable ever at work beneath the pavement. The little cars upon
those narrow tracks interest you. They are as gaily colored and as
bravely striped as any circus wagon of boyhood days, and when you pay
your fare you can take your choice--between the interior of a stuffy
little cabin amidships or open seats at either end arranged after the
time-honored fashion of Irish jaunting cars. San Franciscans do not
hesitate. They range themselves along the open seats of the dinky cars
and look proud as toads as the cars go clanking up the awful hills.
The San Francisco cable car is in a transportation class by itself. It
clings tenaciously to early traditions. For in San Francisco the cable
railroad was born--and in San Francisco the cable railroad still
remains. One Andrew S. Halladie was its inventor--somewhere early in the
"seventies." Up Clay street hill, and to know and appreciate the slope
of Clay street hill one must have seen it once at least, Halladie's
first car struggled, while its passengers held their breaths just as
first-comers to San Francisco still hold their breaths as they ride up
and down the fearful hills. The telegraph told to the whole land how a
street railroad was running on a rope out in that little-known land of
marvels--California. But the telegraph could not tell what the railroad
on a rope meant to San Francisco--San Francisco encompassed and held in
by her high sand hills. The Clay street cable road had conquered one of
the meanest of these hills and they began to plan other roads of a
similar sort. Like a blossoming and growing vine the city spread, almost
overnight. Sand-dunes became building-lots of high value and a new
bonanza era was come to San Francisco. And, with the traditional
generosity of the coast, she gave her transportation idea to other
cities. In a little while St. Louis, Chicago, Washington and New York
were banishing the horse cars from their busiest streets. A new era in
city transit was begun.
A few years later the broomstick trolley--cheaper and in many respects
far more efficient--displaced the cable-cars in many of these cities.
But San Francisco up to the present time has stuck loyally to her
old-time hill conquerors. And the nervous lever-clutch of the gripman as
he "gets the rope" is as distinctive of her as are the fantasies of her
marvelous wooden architecture.
Some of the cable cars have disappeared--they began to go in those
wonderful years of reconstruction right after the fire, and they are
already obsolete in the city's chief thoroughfare, Market street. The
others remain. Over on Pacific avenue is a little line that the San
Franciscans dearly love, for it is particularly reminiscent of the trams
that used to clatter through Market street before the fire--a diminutive
summer-house in front and pulling an immaculate little horseless horse
car behind. Eventually all will go. One road's franchise has already
expired and upon it San Francisco is today maintaining the first
municipally operated street car line in any metropolitan city of
America. If the experiment in Geary street succeeds, and it is being
carefully operated with such a hope clearly in view, it will probably be
extended to the cable lines when their franchises expire and they revert
automatically to the city.
* * * * *
[Illustration: Where the Pacific rolls up to San Francisco]
The distinctive mannerisms of San Francisco are changing--slowly but
very surely indeed. Some of them still remain, however, in greater or
less force. At the restaurants, in the shops and in the hotels you
receive your change in "hard money"--gold and silver coin. Your real San
Franciscan will have nothing else. There is something about the
substantial feeling of a coin, something about the tinkling of a handful
of it that runs straight to the bottom of his heart. Since the
fire--which worked ever more fearful havoc with San Francisco comforts
than with the physical structure of the city--the use of paper money has
increased. But your true Californian will have none of it. When he goes
east and they give him paper money he fusses and fumes about
it--inwardly at least. He thinks that it may slip out of that pesky
inner pocket or vest or coat. He wants gold--a handful of it in his
trousers-pocket to jingle and to stay put. And as for pennies. You who
count yourself of the East will have to come east once again before you
pocket such copper trash--they will have none of them upon the West
Coast. Small change may be anything else but it is not Western.
"Western," did we say?
Hold on. San Francisco is not western. California is not western. To
call either western is to commit an abomination approaching the use of
the word "Frisco."
"California is to all purposes, practical and social--a great island,"
your San Franciscan will explain to you. "To the east of us lies
another dividing sea--the broad miles of desert and of mountains, and so
broad is it that Hong Kong or Manila or Yokohama seem nearer to us than
Chicago or St. Louis. We recognize nothing west of New York and
Washington. Between is that vast space--the real West--which fast trains
and good, bridge in a little more than four days. In there is your
West--Illinois, Mississippi, Iowa, Nebraska, Colorado--all the rest of
that fine family of American states.
"In Los Angeles, now, it is different. The lady that you take out upon
your arm there is probably from Davenport or Kokomo or Indianapolis,
whether she will admit it or not. Los Angeles is western. We are not. We
are 'the Coast' and be exceeding careful, young man, how you say it."
He has spoken the truth. Your typical San Franciscan is quite as well
versed in the streets and shops and hotels of London, Paris and Vienna,
as your typical New Yorker or Bostonian. The four days bridging across
the North American continent is no more to him than the Hudson river
ferries to the commuter from New Jersey. His city is cosmopolitan--and
he is proud of it. Her streets are cosmopolitan and so are her shops and
her great hotels. To the stately Palace reared from the site of the old,
and with a new glass-covered court rivaling the glories of its
predecessor, still come princes and diplomats, globe-trotters of every
sort and bearing in their train wondrous luggage of every sort,
prosperous miners from the North, bankers from the East, Californians
from every corner of their great state, and look with curious interest
at the elect of San Francisco sipping their high tea there in the court
yard.
And the cosmopolitanism of the streets is still more marked. Portuguese,
Italian, sour-doughs from Alaska, hundreds of the little brown Japs who
are giving California such a tremendous worry these days, Indians,
French Kanakas, Mexicans, Chinese--the list might be run almost
interminably. Of these none are more interesting than the Chinese. You
see them in all the downtown quarters of San Francisco--the men with
that inscrutable gravity and sagacity that long centuries of
civilization seem to have given them, the women and the little girls, of
high caste or low, invariably hatless and wearing loose coat and
trousers--in many cases of brilliant colors and rare Oriental silks. And
when you come to their own city within a city--San Francisco's famous
Chinatown--they are the dominant folk upon the street. Of course the new
Chinatown is not the old--with its subterranean labyrinths of
unspeakable vileness and dirt, with danger and crime lurking in each of
its dark corners. That passed completely in the fire. But it had begun
to pass even before that great calamity. It was being exploited. Paid
guides, with a keen sense of the theatrical, were beginning to work the
damage. The "rubberneck wagons" were multiplying.
Today Chinatown is frankly commercial. It is clean and new and clever.
Architects have brought more of the Chinese spirit into its buildings
than the old ever had. It does not lack color--by day, the treasures of
its shops, the queer folk who walk its streets, even the bright red
placards upon the door-lintels; by night the close slow-moving throngs
through Grant avenue--its chief thoroughfare--the swinging lanterns
above their heads, the radiance that comes out from brilliantly lighted
and mysterious rooms along the way--the new Chinatown of San Francisco.
But it is now frankly commercial. The paid guides and the "rubberneck
wagons" have completed the ruin. If you are taken into an opium den, you
may be fairly sure that the entire performance has been staged for the
delectation of you and yours. For the real secrets even of the new
Chinatown are not shown to the unappreciative eyes of white folk.
At the edge of Chinatown slopes Portsmouth square and here the
cosmopolitanism of San Francisco reaches its high apex. Around it
chatters the babel of all tongues, beyond it stretches the "Barbary
Coast,"[G] that collection of vile, if picturesque resorts that
possesses a tremendous fascination for some San Franciscans and some
tourists but which has no place within the covers of this book. To
Portsmouth square come the representatives of all these little colonies
of babbling foreigners, the men who sail the seven seas--the flotsam and
the jetsam not alone of the Orient but of the whole wide world as well.
There is a little man who sits on one side of the square and who for a
very small sum will execute cubist art upon your cuticle. Among
tattooers he acknowledges but two superiors--a one-legged veteran who
plies his trade near the wharves of the Mersey, and a Hindu artist at
Calcutta. The little shops that line Portsmouth square are the little
shops of many peoples. Over their counters you can buy many things
practical, and many, many more of the most impractical things in all the
world. And the new Hall of Justice rises above the square in the precise
site of the old.
[G] As this goes to press a "vice crusade" has swept San
Francisco and the "Barbary Coast" has been forced to close
its doors. It is not unlikely that they may be opened once
again. E. H.