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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of Steep Trails, by John Muir
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
+will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
+using this eBook.
+
+Title: Steep Trails
+
+Author: John Muir
+
+Release Date: September, 1995 [eBook #326]
+[Most recently updated: July 15, 2022]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+Produced by: Judy Gibson and David Widger
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STEEP TRAILS ***
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Steep Trails
+
+by John Muir
+
+California • Utah • Nevada • Washington
+Oregon • The Grand Cañon
+
+Contents
+
+ EDITOR’S NOTE
+ Steep Trails
+ I. Wild Wool
+ II. A Geologist’s Winter Walk
+ III. Summer Days at Mount Shasta
+ IV. A Perilous Night on Shasta’s Summit
+ V. Shasta Rambles and Modoc Memories
+ VI. The City of the Saints
+ VII. A Great Storm in Utah
+ VIII. Bathing in Salt Lake
+ IX. Mormon Lilies
+ X. The San Gabriel Valley
+ XI. The San Gabriel Mountains
+ XII. Nevada Farms
+ XIII. Nevada Forests
+ XIV. Nevada’s Timber Belt
+ XV. Glacial Phenomena in Nevada
+ XVI. Nevada’s Dead Towns
+ XVII. Puget Sound
+ XVIII. The Forests of Washington
+ XIX. People and Towns of Puget Sound
+ XX. An Ascent of Mount Rainier
+ XXI. The Physical and Climatic Characteristics of Oregon
+ XXII. The Forests of Oregon and their Inhabitants
+ XXIII. The Rivers of Oregon
+ XXIV. The Grand Cañon of the Colorado
+ Footnotes:
+
+[Illustration:
+Mountain Sheep
+(_Ovis nelsoni_)
+From a drawing by Allan Brooks]
+
+Illustrations
+
+ Mountain Sheep (_Ovis nelsoni_)
+ TISSIACK FROM GLACIER POINT: TENAYA CAÑON ON THE LEFT
+ MOUNT SHASTA AFTER A SNOWSTORM
+ AT SHASTA SODA SPRINGS
+ IN THE WAHSATCH MOUNTAINS
+ SEGO LILIES (_Calochortus Nuttallii_)
+ SAN GABRIEL VALLEY
+ THE SAGE LEVELS OF THE NEVADA DESERT
+ MOUNT RAINIER FROM THE SODA SPRINGS
+ THE OREGON SEA-BLUFFS
+ CAPE HORN, COLUMBIA RIVER
+ THE GRAND CAÑON AT O’NEILL’S POINT
+
+
+
+
+EDITOR’S NOTE
+
+
+The papers brought together in this volume have, in a general way, been
+arranged in chronological sequence. They span a period of twenty-nine
+years of Muir’s life, during which they appeared as letters and
+articles, for the most part in publications of limited and local
+circulation. The Utah and Nevada sketches, and the two San Gabriel
+papers, were contributed, in the form of letters, to the _San Francisco
+Evening Bulletin_ toward the end of the seventies. Written in the
+field, they preserve the freshness of the author’s first impressions of
+those regions. Much of the material in the chapters on Mount Shasta
+first took similar shape in 1874. Subsequently it was rewritten and
+much expanded for inclusion in _Picturesque California, and the Region
+West of the Rocky Mountains_, which Muir began to edit in 1888. In the
+same work appeared the description of Washington and Oregon. The
+charming little essay “Wild Wool” was written for the _Overland
+Monthly_ in 1875. “A Geologist’s Winter Walk” is an extract from a
+letter to a friend, who, appreciating its fine literary quality, took
+the responsibility of sending it to the _Overland Monthly_ without the
+author’s knowledge. The concluding chapter on “The Grand Cañon of the
+Colorado” was published in the _Century Magazine_ in 1902, and exhibits
+Muir’s powers of description at their maturity.
+
+Some of these papers were revised by the author during the later years
+of his life, and these revisions are a part of the form in which they
+now appear. The chapters on Mount Shasta, Oregon, and Washington will
+be found to contain occasional sentences and a few paragraphs that were
+included, more or less verbatim, in _The Mountains of California_ and
+_Our National Parks_. Being an important part of their present context,
+these paragraphs could not be omitted without impairing the unity of
+the author’s descriptions.
+
+The editor feels confident that this volume will meet, in every way,
+the high expectations of Muir’s readers. The recital of his experiences
+during a stormy night on the summit of Mount Shasta will take rank
+among the most thrilling of his records of adventure. His observations
+on the dead towns of Nevada, and on the Indians gathering their harvest
+of pine nuts, recall a phase of Western life that has left few traces
+in American literature. Many, too, will read with pensive interest the
+author’s glowing description of what was one time called the New
+Northwest. Almost inconceivably great have been the changes wrought in
+that region during the past generation. Henceforth the landscapes that
+Muir saw there will live in good part only in his writings, for fire,
+axe, plough, and gunpowder have made away with the supposedly boundless
+forest wildernesses and their teeming life.
+
+WILLIAM FREDERIC BADÈ
+
+
+Berkeley, California
+_May_, 1918
+
+
+
+
+STEEP TRAILS
+
+
+
+
+I. Wild Wool
+
+
+Moral improvers have calls to preach. I have a friend who has a call to
+plough, and woe to the daisy sod or azalea thicket that falls under the
+savage redemption of his keen steel shares. Not content with the
+so-called subjugation of every terrestrial bog, rock, and moorland, he
+would fain discover some method of reclamation applicable to the ocean
+and the sky, that in due calendar time they might be brought to bud and
+blossom as the rose. Our efforts are of no avail when we seek to turn
+his attention to wild roses, or to the fact that both ocean and sky are
+already about as rosy as possible—the one with stars, the other with
+dulse, and foam, and wild light. The practical developments of his
+culture are orchards and clover-fields wearing a smiling, benevolent
+aspect, truly excellent in their way, though a near view discloses
+something barbarous in them all. Wildness charms not my friend, charm
+it never so wisely: and whatsoever may be the character of his heaven,
+his earth seems only a chaos of agricultural possibilities calling for
+grubbing-hoes and manures.
+
+Sometimes I venture to approach him with a plea for wildness, when he
+good-naturedly shakes a big mellow apple in my face, reiterating his
+favorite aphorism, “Culture is an orchard apple; Nature is a crab.” Not
+all culture, however, is equally destructive and inappreciative. Azure
+skies and crystal waters find loving recognition, and few there be who
+would welcome the axe among mountain pines, or would care to apply any
+correction to the tones and costumes of mountain waterfalls.
+Nevertheless, the barbarous notion is almost universally entertained by
+civilized man, that there is in all the manufactures of Nature
+something essentially coarse which can and must be eradicated by human
+culture. I was, therefore, delighted in finding that the wild wool
+growing upon mountain sheep in the neighborhood of Mount Shasta was
+much finer than the average grades of cultivated wool. This FINE
+discovery was made some three months ago[1], while hunting among the
+Shasta sheep between Shasta and Lower Klamath Lake. Three fleeces were
+obtained—one that belonged to a large ram about four years old, another
+to a ewe about the same age, and another to a yearling lamb. After
+parting their beautiful wool on the side and many places along the
+back, shoulders, and hips, and examining it closely with my lens, I
+shouted: “Well done for wildness! Wild wool is finer than tame!”
+
+My companions stooped down and examined the fleeces for themselves,
+pulling out tufts and ringlets, spinning them between their fingers,
+and measuring the length of the staple, each in turn paying tribute to
+wildness. It WAS finer, and no mistake; finer than Spanish Merino. Wild
+wool IS finer than tame.
+
+“Here,” said I, “is an argument for fine wildness that needs no
+explanation. Not that such arguments are by any means rare, for all
+wildness is finer than tameness, but because fine wool is appreciable
+by everybody alike—from the most speculative president of national
+wool-growers’ associations all the way down to the gude-wife spinning
+by her ingleside.”
+
+Nature is a good mother, and sees well to the clothing of her many
+bairns—birds with smoothly imbricated feathers, beetles with shining
+jackets, and bears with shaggy furs. In the tropical south, where the
+sun warms like a fire, they are allowed to go thinly clad; but in the
+snowy northland she takes care to clothe warmly. The squirrel has socks
+and mittens, and a tail broad enough for a blanket; the grouse is
+densely feathered down to the ends of his toes; and the wild sheep,
+besides his undergarment of fine wool, has a thick overcoat of hair
+that sheds off both the snow and the rain. Other provisions and
+adaptations in the dresses of animals, relating less to climate than to
+the more mechanical circumstances of life, are made with the same
+consummate skill that characterizes all the love work of Nature. Land,
+water, and air, jagged rocks, muddy ground, sand beds, forests,
+underbrush, grassy plains, etc., are considered in all their possible
+combinations while the clothing of her beautiful wildlings is
+preparing. No matter what the circumstances of their lives may be, she
+never allows them to go dirty or ragged. The mole, living always in the
+dark and in the dirt, is yet as clean as the otter or the wave-washed
+seal; and our wild sheep, wading in snow, roaming through bushes, and
+leaping among jagged storm-beaten cliffs, wears a dress so exquisitely
+adapted to its mountain life that it is always found as unruffled and
+stainless as a bird.
+
+On leaving the Shasta hunting grounds I selected a few specimen tufts,
+and brought them away with a view to making more leisurely
+examinations; but, owing to the imperfectness of the instruments at my
+command, the results thus far obtained must be regarded only as rough
+approximations.
+
+As already stated, the clothing of our wild sheep is composed of fine
+wool and coarse hair. The hairs are from about two to four inches long,
+mostly of a dull bluish-gray color, though varying somewhat with the
+seasons. In general characteristics they are closely related to the
+hairs of the deer and antelope, being light, spongy, and elastic, with
+a highly polished surface, and though somewhat ridged and spiraled,
+like wool, they do not manifest the slightest tendency to felt or
+become taggy. A hair two and a half inches long, which is perhaps near
+the average length, will stretch about one fourth of an inch before
+breaking. The diameter decreases rapidly both at the top and bottom,
+but is maintained throughout the greater portion of the length with a
+fair degree of regularity. The slender tapering point in which the
+hairs terminate is nearly black: but, owing to its fineness as compared
+with the main trunk, the quantity of blackness is not sufficient to
+affect greatly the general color. The number of hairs growing upon a
+square inch is about ten thousand; the number of wool fibers is about
+twenty-five thousand, or two and a half times that of the hairs. The
+wool fibers are white and glossy, and beautifully spired into ringlets.
+The average length of the staple is about an inch and a half. A fiber
+of this length, when growing undisturbed down among the hairs, measures
+about an inch; hence the degree of curliness may easily be inferred. I
+regret exceedingly that my instruments do not enable me to measure the
+diameter of the fibers, in order that their degrees of fineness might
+be definitely compared with each other and with the finest of the
+domestic breeds; but that the three wild fleeces under consideration
+are considerably finer than the average grades of Merino shipped from
+San Francisco is, I think, unquestionable.
+
+When the fleece is parted and looked into with a good lens, the skin
+appears of a beautiful pale-yellow color, and the delicate wool fibers
+are seen growing up among the strong hairs, like grass among stalks of
+corn, every individual fiber being protected about as specially and
+effectively as if inclosed in a separate husk. Wild wool is too fine to
+stand by itself, the fibers being about as frail and invisible as the
+floating threads of spiders, while the hairs against which they lean
+stand erect like hazel wands; but, notwithstanding their great
+dissimilarity in size and appearance, the wool and hair are forms of
+the same thing, modified in just that way and to just that degree that
+renders them most perfectly subservient to the well-being of the sheep.
+Furthermore, it will be observed that these wild modifications are
+entirely distinct from those which are brought chancingly into
+existence through the accidents and caprices of culture; the former
+being inventions of God for the attainment of definite ends. Like the
+modifications of limbs—the fin for swimming, the wing for flying, the
+foot for walking—so the fine wool for warmth, the hair for additional
+warmth and to protect the wool, and both together for a fabric to wear
+well in mountain roughness and wash well in mountain storms.
+
+The effects of human culture upon wild wool are analogous to those
+produced upon wild roses. In the one case there is an abnormal
+development of petals at the expense of the stamens, in the other an
+abnormal development of wool at the expense of the hair. Garden roses
+frequently exhibit stamens in which the transmutation to petals may be
+observed in various stages of accomplishment, and analogously the
+fleeces of tame sheep occasionally contain a few wild hairs that are
+undergoing transmutation to wool. Even wild wool presents here and
+there a fiber that appears to be in a state of change. In the course of
+my examinations of the wild fleeces mentioned above, three fibers were
+found that were wool at one end and hair at the other. This, however,
+does not necessarily imply imperfection, or any process of change
+similar to that caused by human culture. Water lilies contain parts
+variously developed into stamens at one end, petals at the other, as
+the constant and normal condition. These half wool, half hair fibers
+may therefore subserve some fixed requirement essential to the
+perfection of the whole, or they may simply be the fine boundary-lines
+where and exact balance between the wool and the hair is attained.
+
+I have been offering samples of mountain wool to my friends, demanding
+in return that the fineness of wildness be fairly recognized and
+confessed, but the returns are deplorably tame. The first question
+asked, is, “Now truly, wild sheep, wild sheep, have you any wool?”
+while they peer curiously down among the hairs through lenses and
+spectacles. “Yes, wild sheep, you HAVE wool; but Mary’s lamb had more.
+In the name of use, how many wild sheep, think you, would be required
+to furnish wool sufficient for a pair of socks?” I endeavor to point
+out the irrelevancy of the latter question, arguing that wild wool was
+not made for man but for sheep, and that, however deficient as clothing
+for other animals, it is just the thing for the brave mountain-dweller
+that wears it. Plain, however, as all this appears, the quantity
+question rises again and again in all its commonplace tameness. For in
+my experience it seems well-nigh impossible to obtain a hearing on
+behalf of Nature from any other standpoint than that of human use.
+Domestic flocks yield more flannel per sheep than the wild, therefore
+it is claimed that culture has improved upon wildness; and so it has as
+far as flannel is concerned, but all to the contrary as far as a
+sheep’s dress is concerned. If every wild sheep inhabiting the Sierra
+were to put on tame wool, probably only a few would survive the dangers
+of a single season. With their fine limbs muffled and buried beneath a
+tangle of hairless wool, they would become short-winded, and fall an
+easy prey to the strong mountain wolves. In descending precipices they
+would be thrown out of balance and killed, by their taggy wool catching
+upon sharp points of rocks. Disease would also be brought on by the
+dirt which always finds a lodgment in tame wool, and by the draggled
+and water-soaked condition into which it falls during stormy weather.
+
+No dogma taught by the present civilization seems to form so
+insuperable an obstacle in the way of a right understanding of the
+relations which culture sustains to wildness as that which regards the
+world as made especially for the uses of man. Every animal, plant, and
+crystal controverts it in the plainest terms. Yet it is taught from
+century to century as something ever new and precious, and in the
+resulting darkness the enormous conceit is allowed to go unchallenged.
+
+I have never yet happened upon a trace of evidence that seemed to show
+that any one animal was ever made for another as much as it was made
+for itself. Not that Nature manifests any such thing as selfish
+isolation. In the making of every animal the presence of every other
+animal has been recognized. Indeed, every atom in creation may be said
+to be acquainted with and married to every other, but with universal
+union there is a division sufficient in degree for the purposes of the
+most intense individuality; no matter, therefore, what may be the note
+which any creature forms in the song of existence, it is made first for
+itself, then more and more remotely for all the world and worlds.
+
+Were it not for the exercise of individualizing cares on the part of
+Nature, the universe would be felted together like a fleece of tame
+wool. But we are governed more than we know, and most when we are
+wildest. Plants, animals, and stars are all kept in place, bridled
+along appointed ways, _with_ one another, and _through the midst_ of
+one another—killing and being killed, eating and being eaten, in
+harmonious proportions and quantities. And it is right that we should
+thus reciprocally make use of one another, rob, cook, and consume, to
+the utmost of our healthy abilities and desires. Stars attract one
+another as they are able, and harmony results. Wild lambs eat as many
+wild flowers as they can find or desire, and men and wolves eat the
+lambs to just the same extent.
+
+This consumption of one another in its various modifications is a kind
+of culture varying with the degree of directness with which it is
+carried out, but we should be careful not to ascribe to such culture
+any improving qualities upon those on whom it is brought to bear. The
+water-ousel plucks moss from the riverbank to build its nest, but is
+does not improve the moss by plucking it. We pluck feathers from birds,
+and less directly wool from wild sheep, for the manufacture of clothing
+and cradle-nests, without improving the wool for the sheep, or the
+feathers for the bird that wore them. When a hawk pounces upon a linnet
+and proceeds to pull out its feathers, preparatory to making a meal,
+the hawk may be said to be cultivating the linnet, and he certainly
+does effect an improvement as far as hawk-food is concerned; but what
+of the songster? He ceases to be a linnet as soon as he is snatched
+from the woodland choir; and when, hawklike, we snatch the wild sheep
+from its native rock, and, instead of eating and wearing it at once,
+carry it home, and breed the hair out of its wool and the bones out of
+its body, it ceases to be a sheep.
+
+These breeding and plucking processes are similarly improving as
+regards the secondary uses aimed at; and, although the one requires but
+a few minutes for its accomplishment, the other many years or
+centuries, they are essentially alike. We eat wild oysters alive with
+great directness, waiting for no cultivation, and leaving scarce a
+second of distance between the shell and the lip; but we take wild
+sheep home and subject them to the many extended processes of
+husbandry, and finish by boiling them in a pot—a process which
+completes all sheep improvements as far as man is concerned. It will be
+seen, therefore, that wild wool and tame wool—wild sheep and tame
+sheep—are terms not properly comparable, nor are they in any correct
+sense to be considered as bearing any antagonism toward each other;
+they are different things. Planned and accomplished for wholly
+different purposes.
+
+Illustrative examples bearing upon this interesting subject may be
+multiplied indefinitely, for they abound everywhere in the plant and
+animal kingdoms wherever culture has reached. Recurring for a moment to
+apples. The beauty and completeness of a wild apple tree living its own
+life in the woods is heartily acknowledged by all those who have been
+so happy as to form its acquaintance. The fine wild piquancy of its
+fruit is unrivaled, but in the great question of quantity as human food
+wild apples are found wanting. Man, therefore, takes the tree from the
+woods, manures and prunes and grafts, plans and guesses, adds a little
+of this and that, selects and rejects, until apples of every
+conceivable size and softness are produced, like nut galls in response
+to the irritating punctures of insects. Orchard apples are to me the
+most eloquent words that culture has ever spoken, but they reflect no
+imperfection upon Nature’s spicy crab. Every cultivated apple is a
+crab, not improved, _but cooked_, variously softened and swelled out in
+the process, mellowed, sweetened, spiced, and rendered pulpy and
+foodful, but as utterly unfit for the uses of nature as a meadowlark
+killed and plucked and roasted. Give to Nature every cultured
+apple—codling, pippin, russet—and every sheep so laboriously
+compounded—muffled Southdowns, hairy Cotswolds, wrinkled Merinos—and
+she would throw the one to her caterpillars, the other to her wolves.
+
+It is now some thirty-six hundred years since Jacob kissed his mother
+and set out across the plains of Padan-aram to begin his experiments
+upon the flocks of his uncle, Laban; and, notwithstanding the high
+degree of excellence he attained as a wool-grower, and the innumerable
+painstaking efforts subsequently made by individuals and associations
+in all kinds of pastures and climates, we still seem to be as far from
+definite and satisfactory results as we ever were. In one breed the
+wool is apt to wither and crinkle like hay on a sun-beaten hillside. In
+another, it is lodged and matted together like the lush tangled grass
+of a manured meadow. In one the staple is deficient in length, in
+another in fineness; while in all there is a constant tendency toward
+disease, rendering various washings and dippings indispensable to
+prevent its falling out. The problem of the quality and quantity of the
+carcass seems to be as doubtful and as far removed from a satisfactory
+solution as that of the wool. Desirable breeds blundered upon by long
+series of groping experiments are often found to be unstable and
+subject to disease—bots, foot rot, blind staggers, etc.—causing
+infinite trouble, both among breeders and manufacturers. Would it not
+be well, therefore, for some one to go back as far as possible and take
+a fresh start?
+
+The source or sources whence the various breeds were derived is not
+positively known, but there can be hardly any doubt of their being
+descendants of the four or five wild species so generally distributed
+throughout the mountainous portions of the globe, the marked
+differences between the wild and domestic species being readily
+accounted for by the known variability of the animal, and by the long
+series of painstaking selection to which all its characteristics have
+been subjected. No other animal seems to yield so submissively to the
+manipulations of culture. Jacob controlled the color of his flocks
+merely by causing them to stare at objects of the desired hue; and
+possibly Merinos may have caught their wrinkles from the perplexed
+brows of their breeders. The California species (_Ovis montana_)[2] is
+a noble animal, weighing when full-grown some three hundred and fifty
+pounds, and is well worthy the attention of wool-growers as a point
+from which to make a new departure, for pure wildness is the one great
+want, both of men and of sheep.
+
+
+
+
+II. A Geologist’s Winter Walk[3]
+
+
+After reaching Turlock, I sped afoot over the stubble fields and
+through miles of brown hemizonia and purple erigeron, to Hopeton,
+conscious of little more than that the town was behind and beneath me,
+and the mountains above and before me; on through the oaks and
+chaparral of the foothills to Coulterville; and then ascended the first
+great mountain step upon which grows the sugar pine. Here I slackened
+pace, for I drank the spicy, resiny wind, and beneath the arms of this
+noble tree I felt that I was safely home. Never did pine trees seem so
+dear. How sweet was their breath and their song, and how grandly they
+winnowed the sky! I tingled my fingers among their tassels, and rustled
+my feet among their brown needles and burrs, and was exhilarated and
+joyful beyond all I can write.
+
+When I reached Yosemite, all the rocks seemed talkative, and more
+telling and lovable than ever. They are dear friends, and seemed to
+have warm blood gushing through their granite flesh; and I love them
+with a love intensified by long and close companionship. After I had
+bathed in the bright river, sauntered over the meadows, conversed with
+the domes, and played with the pines, I still felt blurred and weary,
+as if tainted in some way with the sky of your streets. I determined,
+therefore, to run out for a while to say my prayers in the higher
+mountain temples. “The days are sunful,” I said, “and, though now
+winter, no great danger need be encountered, and no sudden storm will
+block my return, if I am watchful.”
+
+The morning after this decision, I started up the cañon of Tenaya,
+caring little about the quantity of bread I carried; for, I thought, a
+fast and a storm and a difficult cañon were just the medicine I needed.
+When I passed Mirror Lake, I scarcely noticed it, for I was absorbed in
+the great Tissiack—her crown a mile away in the hushed azure; her
+purple granite drapery flowing in soft and graceful folds down to my
+feet, embroidered gloriously around with deep, shadowy forest. I have
+gazed on Tissiack a thousand times—in days of solemn storms, and when
+her form shone divine with the jewelry of winter, or was veiled in
+living clouds; and I have heard her voice of winds, and snowy, tuneful
+waters when floods were falling; yet never did her soul reveal itself
+more impressively than now. I hung about her skirts, lingering timidly,
+until the higher mountains and glaciers compelled me to push up the
+cañon.
+
+[Illustration: TISSIACK FROM GLACIER POINT: TENAYA CAÑON ON THE LEFT]
+
+This cañon is accessible only to mountaineers, and I was anxious to
+carry my barometer and clinometer through it, to obtain sections and
+altitudes, so I chose it as the most attractive highway. After I had
+passed the tall groves that stretch a mile above Mirror Lake, and
+scrambled around the Tenaya Fall, which is just at the head of the lake
+groves, I crept through the dense and spiny chaparral that plushes the
+roots of the mountains here for miles in warm green, and was ascending
+a precipitous rock front, smoothed by glacial action, when I suddenly
+fell—for the first time since I touched foot to Sierra rocks. After
+several somersaults, I became insensible from the shock, and when
+consciousness returned I found myself wedged among short, stiff bushes,
+trembling as if cold, not injured in the slightest.
+
+Judging by the sun, I could not have been insensible very long;
+probably not a minute, possibly an hour; and I could not remember what
+made me fall, or where I had fallen from; but I saw that if I had
+rolled a little further, my mountain climbing would have been finished,
+for just beyond the bushes the cañon wall steepened and I might have
+fallen to the bottom. “There,” said I, addressing my feet, to whose
+separate skill I had learned to trust night and day on any mountain,
+“that is what you get by intercourse with stupid town stairs, and dead
+pavements.” I felt degraded and worthless. I had not yet reached the
+most difficult portion of the cañon, but I determined to guide my
+humbled body over the most nerve-trying places I could find; for I was
+now awake, and felt confident that the last of the town fog had been
+shaken from both head and feet.
+
+I camped at the mouth of a narrow gorge which is cut into the bottom of
+the main cañon, determined to take earnest exercise next day. No plushy
+boughs did my ill-behaved bones enjoy that night, nor did my bumped
+head get a spicy cedar plume pillow mixed with flowers. I slept on a
+naked boulder, and when I awoke all my nervous trembling was gone.
+
+The gorged portion of the cañon, in which I spent all the next day, is
+about a mile and a half in length; and I passed the time in tracing the
+action of the forces that determined this peculiar bottom gorge, which
+is an abrupt, ragged-walled, narrow-throated cañon, formed in the
+bottom of the wide-mouthed, smooth, and beveled main cañon. I will not
+stop now to tell you more; some day you may see it, like a shadowy
+line, from Cloud’s Rest. In high water, the stream occupies all the
+bottom of the gorge, surging and chafing in glorious power from wall to
+wall. But the sound of the grinding was low as I entered the gorge,
+scarcely hoping to be able to pass through its entire length. By cool
+efforts, along glassy, ice-worn slopes, I reached the upper end in a
+little over a day, but was compelled to pass the second night in the
+gorge, and in the moonlight I wrote you this short pencil-letter in my
+notebook:—
+
+The moon is looking down into the cañon, and how marvelously the great
+rocks kindle to her light! Every dome, and brow, and swelling boss
+touched by her white rays, glows as if lighted with snow. I am now only
+a mile from last night’s camp; and have been climbing and sketching all
+day in this difficult but instructive gorge. It is formed in the bottom
+of the main cañon, among the roots of Cloud’s Rest. It begins at the
+filled-up lake basin where I camped last night, and ends a few hundred
+yards above, in another basin of the same kind. The walls everywhere
+are craggy and vertical, and in some places they overlean. It is only
+from twenty to sixty feet wide, and not, though black and broken
+enough, the thin, crooked mouth of some mysterious abyss; but it was
+eroded, for in many places I saw its solid, seamless floor.
+
+    I am sitting on a big stone, against which the stream divides, and
+    goes brawling by in rapids on both sides; half of my rock is white
+    in the light, half in shadow. As I look from the opening jaws of
+    this shadowy gorge, South Dome is immediately in front—high in the
+    stars, her face turned from the moon, with the rest of her body
+    gloriously muffled in waved folds of granite. On the left,
+    sculptured from the main Cloud’s Rest ridge, are three magnificent
+    rocks, sisters of the great South Dome. On the right is the
+    massive, moonlit front of Mount Watkins, and between, low down in
+    the furthest distance, is Sentinel Dome, girdled and darkened with
+    forest. In the near foreground Tenaya Creek is singing against
+    boulders that are white with snow and moonbeams. Now look back
+    twenty yards, and you will see a waterfall fair as a spirit; the
+    moonlight just touches it, bringing it into relief against a dark
+    background of shadow. A little to the left, and a dozen steps this
+    side of the fall, a flickering light marks my camp—and a precious
+    camp it is. A huge, glacier-polished slab, falling from the smooth,
+    glossy flank of Cloud’s Rest, happened to settle on edge against
+    the wall of the gorge. I did not know that this slab was
+    glacier-polished until I lighted my fire. Judge of my delight. I
+    think it was sent here by an earthquake. It is about twelve feet
+    square. I wish I could take it home[4] for a hearthstone. Beneath
+    this slab is the only place in this torrent-swept gorge where I
+    could find sand sufficient for a bed.
+    I expected to sleep on the boulders, for I spent most of the
+    afternoon on the slippery wall of the cañon, endeavoring to get
+    around this difficult part of the gorge, and was compelled to
+    hasten down here for water before dark. I shall sleep soundly on
+    this sand; half of it is mica. Here, wonderful to behold, are a few
+    green stems of prickly rubus, and a tiny grass. They are here to
+    meet us. Ay, even here in this darksome gorge, “frightened and
+    tormented” with raging torrents and choking avalanches of snow. Can
+    it be? As if rubus and the grass leaf were not enough of God’s
+    tender prattle words of love, which we so much need in these mighty
+    temples of power, yonder in the “benmost bore” are two blessed
+    adiantums. Listen to them! How wholly infused with God is this one
+    big word of love that we call the world! Good-night. Do you see the
+    fire-glow on my ice-smoothed slab, and on my two ferns and the
+    rubus and grass panicles? And do you hear how sweet a sleep- song
+    the fall and cascades are singing?
+
+The water-ground chips and knots that I found fastened between the
+rocks kept my fire alive all through the night. Next morning I rose
+nerved and ready for another day of sketching and noting, and any form
+of climbing. I escaped from the gorge about noon, after accomplishing
+some of the most delicate feats of mountaineering I ever attempted; and
+here the cañon is all broadly open again—the floor luxuriantly forested
+with pine, and spruce, and silver fir, and brown-trunked libocedrus.
+The walls rise in Yosemite forms, and Tenaya Creek comes down seven
+hundred feet in a white brush of foam. This is a little Yosemite
+valley. It is about two thousand feet above the level of the main
+Yosemite, and about twenty-four hundred below Lake Tenaya.
+
+I found the lake frozen, and the ice was so clear and unruffled that
+the surrounding mountains and the groves that look down upon it were
+reflected almost as perfectly as I ever beheld them in the calm evening
+mirrors of summer. At a little distance, it was difficult to believe
+the lake frozen at all; and when I walked out on it, cautiously
+stamping at short intervals to test the strength of the ice, I seemed
+to walk mysteriously, without adequate faith, on the surface of the
+water. The ice was so transparent that I could see through it the
+beautifully wave-rippled, sandy bottom, and the scales of mica glinting
+back the down-pouring light. When I knelt down with my face close to
+the ice, through which the sunbeams were pouring, I was delighted to
+discover myriads of Tyndall’s six-rayed water flowers, magnificently
+colored.
+
+A grand old mountain mansion is this Tenaya region! In the glacier
+period it was a _mer de glace_, far grander than the _mer de glace_ of
+Switzerland, which is only about half a mile broad. The Tenaya _mer de
+glace_ was not less than two miles broad, late in the glacier epoch,
+when all the principal dividing crests were bare; and its depth was not
+less than fifteen hundred feet. Ice streams from Mounts Lyell and Dana,
+and all the mountains between, and from the nearer Cathedral Peak,
+flowed hither, welded into one, and worked together. After eroding this
+Tanaya Lake basin, and all the splendidly sculptured rocks and
+mountains that surround and adorn it, and the great Tenaya Cañon, with
+its wealth of all that makes mountains sublime, they were welded with
+the vast South, Lyell, and Illilouette glaciers on one side, and with
+those of Hoffman on the other—thus forming a portion of a yet grander
+_mer de glace_ in Yosemite Valley.
+
+I reached the Tenaya Cañon, on my way home, by coming in from the
+northeast, rambling down over the shoulders of Mount Watkins, touching
+bottom a mile above Mirror Lake. From thence home was but a saunter in
+the moonlight.
+
+After resting one day, and the weather continuing calm, I ran up over
+the left shoulder of South Dome and down in front of its grand split
+face to make some measurements, completed my work, climbed to the right
+shoulder, struck off along the ridge for Cloud’s Rest, and reached the
+topmost heave of her sunny wave in ample time to see the sunset.
+
+Cloud’s Rest is a thousand feet higher than Tissiack. It is a wavelike
+crest upon a ridge, which begins at Yosemite with Tissiack, and runs
+continuously eastward to the thicket of peaks and crests around Lake
+Tenaya. This lofty granite wall is bent this way and that by the
+restless and weariless action of glaciers just as if it had been made
+of dough. But the grand circumference of mountains and forests are
+coming from far and near, densing into one close assemblage; for the
+sun, their god and father, with love ineffable, is glowing a sunset
+farewell. Not one of all the assembled rocks or trees seemed remote.
+How impressively their faces shone with responsive love!
+
+I ran home in the moonlight with firm strides; for the sun-love made me
+strong. Down through the junipers; down through the firs; now in jet
+shadows, now in white light; over sandy moraines and bare, clanking
+rocks; past the huge ghost of South Dome rising weird through the firs;
+past the glorious fall of Nevada, the groves of Illilouette; through
+the pines of the valley; beneath the bright crystal sky blazing with
+stars. All of this mountain wealth in one day!—one of the rich ripe
+days that enlarge one’s life; so much of the sun upon one side of it,
+so much of the moon and stars on the other.
+
+
+
+
+III. Summer Days at Mount Shasta
+
+
+Mount Shasta rises in solitary grandeur from the edge of a
+comparatively low and lightly sculptured lava plain near the northern
+extremity of the Sierra, and maintains a far more impressive and
+commanding individuality than any other mountain within the limits of
+California. Go where you may, within a radius of from fifty to a
+hundred miles or more, there stands before you the colossal cone of
+Shasta, clad in ice and snow, the one grand unmistakable landmark—the
+pole star of the landscape. Far to the southward Mount Whitney lifts
+its granite summit four or five hundred feet higher than Shasta, but it
+is nearly snowless during the late summer, and is so feebly
+individualized that the traveler may search for it in vain among the
+many rival peaks crowded along the axis of the range to north and south
+of it, which all alike are crumbling residual masses brought into
+relief in the degradation of the general mass of the range. The highest
+point on Mount Shasta, as determined by the State Geological Survey, is
+14,440 feet above mean tide. That of Whitney, computed from fewer
+observations, is about 14,900 feet. But inasmuch as the average
+elevation of the plain out of which Shasta rises is only about four
+thousand feet above the sea, while the actual base of the peak of Mount
+Whitney lies at an elevation of eleven thousand feet, the individual
+height of the former is about two and a half times as great as that of
+the latter.
+
+Approaching Shasta from the south, one obtains glimpses of its snowy
+cone here and there through the trees from the tops of hills and
+ridges; but it is not until Strawberry Valley is reached, where there
+is a grand out-opening of the forests, that Shasta is seen in all its
+glory. From base to crown clearly revealed with its wealth of woods and
+waters and fountain snow, rejoicing in the bright mountain sky, and
+radiating beauty on all the subject landscape like a sun. Standing in a
+fringing thicket of purple spiraea in the immediate foreground is a
+smooth expanse of green meadow with its meandering stream, one of the
+smaller affluents of the Sacramento; then a zone of dark, close forest,
+its countless spires of pine and fir rising above one another on the
+swelling base of the mountain in glorious array; and, over all, the
+great white cone sweeping far into the thin, keen sky—meadow, forest,
+and grand icy summit harmoniously blending and making one sublime
+picture evenly balanced.
+
+[Illustration: MOUNT SHASTA AFTER A SNOWSTORM]
+
+The main lines of the landscape are immensely bold and simple, and so
+regular that it needs all its shaggy wealth of woods and chaparral and
+its finely tinted ice and snow and brown jutting crags to keep it from
+looking conventional. In general views of the mountain three distinct
+zones may be readily defined. The first, which may be called the
+Chaparral Zone, extends around the base in a magnificent sweep nearly a
+hundred miles in length on its lower edge, and with a breadth of about
+seven miles. It is a dense growth of chaparral from three to six or
+eight feet high, composed chiefly of manzanita, cherry, chincapin, and
+several species of ceanothus, called deerbrush by the hunters, forming,
+when in full bloom, one of the most glorious flowerbeds conceivable.
+The continuity of this flowery zone is interrupted here and there,
+especially on the south side of the mountain, by wide swaths of
+coniferous trees, chiefly the sugar and yellow pines, Douglas spruce,
+silver fir, and incense cedar, many specimens of which are two hundred
+feet high and five to seven feet in diameter. Goldenrods, asters,
+gilias, lilies, and lupines, with many other less conspicuous plants,
+occur in warm sheltered openings in these lower woods, making charming
+gardens of wildness where bees and butterflies are at home and many a
+shy bird and squirrel.
+
+The next higher is the Fir Zone, made up almost exclusively of two
+species of silver fir. It is from two to three miles wide, has an
+average elevation above the sea of some six thousand feet on its lower
+edge and eight thousand on its upper, and is the most regular and best
+defined of the three.
+
+The Alpine Zone has a rugged, straggling growth of storm-beaten dwarf
+pines (_Pinus albicaulis_), which forms the upper edge of the
+timberline. This species reaches an elevation of about nine thousand
+feet, but at this height the tops of the trees rise only a few feet
+into the thin frosty air, and are closely pressed and shorn by wind and
+snow; yet they hold on bravely and put forth an abundance of beautiful
+purple flowers and produce cones and seeds. Down towards the edge of
+the fir belt they stand erect, forming small, well-formed trunks, and
+are associated with the taller two-leafed and mountain pines and the
+beautiful Williamson spruce. Bryanthus, a beautiful flowering
+heathwort, flourishes a few hundred feet above the timberline,
+accompanied with kalmia and spiraea. Lichens enliven the faces of the
+cliffs with their bright colors, and in some of the warmer nooks of the
+rocks, up to a height of eleven thousand feet, there are a few tufts of
+dwarf daisies, wallflowers, and penstemons; but, notwithstanding these
+bloom freely, they make no appreciable show at a distance, and the
+stretches of rough brown lava beyond the storm-beaten trees seem as
+bare of vegetation as the great snow fields and glaciers of the summit.
+
+Shasta is a fire-mountain, an old volcano gradually accumulated and
+built up into the blue deep of the sky by successive eruptions of ashes
+and molten lava which, shot high in the air and falling in darkening
+showers, and flowing from chasms and craters, grew outward and upward
+like the trunk of a knotty, bulging tree. Not in one grand convulsion
+was Shasta given birth, nor in any one special period of volcanic storm
+and stress, though mountains more than a thousand feet in height have
+been cast up like molehills in a night—quick contributions to the
+wealth of the landscapes, and most emphatic statements, on the part of
+Nature, of the gigantic character of the power that dwells beneath the
+dull, dead-looking surface of the earth. But sections cut by the
+glaciers, displaying some of the internal framework of Shasta, show
+that comparatively long periods of quiescence intervened between many
+distinct eruptions, during which the cooling lavas ceased to flow, and
+took their places as permanent additions to the bulk of the growing
+mountain. Thus with alternate haste and deliberation eruption succeeded
+eruption, until Mount Shasta surpassed even its present sublime height.
+
+Then followed a strange contrast. The glacial winter came on. The sky
+that so often had been darkened with storms of cinders and ashes and
+lighted by the glare of volcanic fires was filled with crystal
+snow-flowers, which, loading the cooling mountain, gave birth to
+glaciers that, uniting edge to edge, at length formed one grand conical
+glacier—a down-crawling mantle of ice upon a fountain of smouldering
+fire, crushing and grinding its brown, flinty lavas, and thus degrading
+and remodeling the entire mountain from summit to base. How much
+denudation and degradation has been effected we have no means of
+determining, the porous, crumbling rocks being ill adapted for the
+reception and preservation of glacial inscriptions.
+
+The summit is now a mass of ruins, and all the finer striations have
+been effaced from the flanks by post-glacial weathering, while the
+irregularity of its lavas as regards susceptibility to erosion, and the
+disturbance caused by inter- and post-glacial eruptions, have obscured
+or obliterated those heavier characters of the glacial record found so
+clearly inscribed upon the granite pages of the high Sierra between
+latitude 36 degrees 30 minutes and 39 degrees. This much, however, is
+plain: that the summit of the mountain was considerably lowered, and
+the sides were deeply grooved and fluted while it was a center of
+dispersal for the glaciers of the circumjacent region. And when at
+length the glacial period began to draw near its close, the ice mantle
+was gradually melted off around the base of the mountain, and in
+receding and breaking up into its present fragmentary condition the
+irregular heaps and rings of moraine matter were stored upon its flanks
+on which the forests are growing. The glacial erosion of most of the
+Shasta lavas gives rise to detritus composed of rough subangular
+boulders of moderate size and porous gravel and sand, which yields
+freely to the transporting power of running water. Several centuries
+ago immense quantities of this lighter material were washed down from
+the higher slopes by a flood of extraordinary magnitude, caused
+probably by the sudden melting of the ice and snow during an eruption,
+giving rise to the deposition of conspicuous delta-like beds around the
+base. And it is upon these flood-beds of moraine soil, thus suddenly
+and simultaneously laid down and joined edge to edge, that the flowery
+chaparral is growing.
+
+Thus, by forces seemingly antagonistic and destructive, Nature
+accomplishes her beneficent designs—now a flood of fire, now a flood of
+ice, now a flood of water; and again in the fullness of time an
+outburst of organic life—forest and garden, with all their wealth of
+fruit and flowers, the air stirred into one universal hum with
+rejoicing insects, a milky way of wings and petals, girdling the
+newborn mountain like a cloud, as if the vivifying sunbeams beating
+against its sides had broken into a foam of plant-bloom and bees.
+
+But with such grand displays as Nature is making here, how grand are
+her reservations, bestowed only upon those who devotedly seek them!
+Beneath the smooth and snowy surface the fountain fires are still
+aglow, to blaze forth afresh at their appointed times. The glaciers,
+looking so still and small at a distance, represented by the artist
+with a patch of white paint laid on by a single stroke of his brush,
+are still flowing onward, unhalting, with deep crystal currents,
+sculpturing the mountain with stern, resistless energy. How many caves
+and fountains that no eye has yet seen lie with all their fine
+furniture deep down in the darkness, and how many shy wild creatures
+are at home beneath the grateful lights and shadows of the woods,
+rejoicing in their fullness of perfect life!
+
+Standing on the edge of the Strawberry Meadows in the sun-days of
+summer, not a foot or feather or leaf seems to stir; and the grand,
+towering mountain with all its inhabitants appears in rest, calm as a
+star. Yet how profound is the energy ever in action, and how great is
+the multitude of claws and teeth, wings and eyes, wide awake and at
+work and shining! Going into the blessed wilderness, the blood of the
+plants throbbing beneath the life-giving sunshine seems to be heard and
+felt; plant growth goes on before our eyes, and every tree and bush and
+flower is seen as a hive of restless industry. The deeps of the sky are
+mottled with singing wings of every color and tone—clouds of brilliant
+chrysididae dancing and swirling in joyous rhythm, golden-barred
+vespidae, butterflies, grating cicadas and jolly rattling
+grasshoppers—fairly enameling the light, and shaking all the air into
+music. Happy fellows they are, every one of them, blowing tiny pipe and
+trumpet, plodding and prancing, at work or at play.
+
+Though winter holds the summit, Shasta in summer is mostly a massy,
+bossy mound of flowers colored like the alpenglow that flushes the
+snow. There are miles of wild roses, pink bells of huckleberry and
+sweet manzanita, every bell a honey-cup, plants that tell of the north
+and of the south; tall nodding lilies, the crimson sarcodes,
+rhododendron, cassiope, and blessed linnaea; phlox, calycanthus, plum,
+cherry, crataegus, spiraea, mints, and clovers in endless variety;
+ivesia, larkspur, and columbine; golden aplopappus, linosyris[5],
+bahia, wyethia, arnica, brodiaea, etc.,—making sheets and beds of light
+edgings of bloom in lavish abundance for the myriads of the air
+dependent on their bounty.
+
+The common honeybees, gone wild in this sweet wilderness, gather tons
+of honey into the hollows of the trees and rocks, clambering eagerly
+through bramble and hucklebloom, shaking the clustered bells of the
+generous manzanita, now humming aloft among polleny willows and firs,
+now down on the ashy ground among small gilias and buttercups, and anon
+plunging into banks of snowy cherry and buckthorn. They consider the
+lilies and roll into them, pushing their blunt polleny faces against
+them like babies on their mother’s bosom; and fondly, too, with eternal
+love does Mother Nature clasp her small bee-babies and suckle them,
+multitudes at once, on her warm Shasta breast. Besides the common
+honeybee there are many others here, fine, burly, mossy fellows, such
+as were nourished on the mountains many a flowery century before the
+advent of the domestic species—bumblebees, mason-bees, carpenter-bees,
+and leaf-cutters. Butterflies, too, and moths of every size and
+pattern; some wide-winged like bats, flapping slowly and sailing in
+easy curves; others like small flying violets shaking about loosely in
+short zigzag flights close to the flowers, feasting in plenty night and
+day.
+
+Deer in great abundance come to Shasta from the warmer foothills every
+spring to feed in the rich, cool pastures, and bring forth their young
+in the ceanothus tangles of the chaparral zone, retiring again before
+the snowstorms of winter, mostly to the southward and westward of the
+mountain. In like manner the wild sheep of the adjacent region seek the
+lofty inaccessible crags of the summit as the snow melts, and are
+driven down to the lower spurs and ridges where there is but little
+snow, to the north and east of Shasta.
+
+Bears, too, roam this foodful wilderness, feeding on grass, clover,
+berries, nuts, ant eggs, fish, flesh, or fowl,—whatever comes in their
+way,—with but little troublesome discrimination. Sugar and honey they
+seem to like best of all, and they seek far to find the sweets; but
+when hard pushed by hunger they make out to gnaw a living from the bark
+of trees and rotten logs, and might almost live on clean lava alone.
+
+Notwithstanding the California bears have had as yet but little
+experience with honeybees, they sometimes succeed in reaching the
+bountiful stores of these industrious gatherers and enjoy the feast
+with majestic relish. But most honeybees in search of a home are wise
+enough to make choice of a hollow in a living tree far from the ground,
+whenever such can be found. There they are pretty secure, for though
+the smaller brown and black bears climb well, they are unable to gnaw
+their way into strong hives, while compelled to exert themselves to
+keep from falling and at the same time endure the stings of the bees
+about the nose and eyes, without having their paws free to brush them
+off. But woe to the unfortunates who dwell in some prostrate trunk, and
+to the black bumblebees discovered in their mossy, mouselike nests in
+the ground. With powerful teeth and claws these are speedily laid bare,
+and almost before time is given for a general buzz the bees, old and
+young, larvae, honey, stings, nest, and all, are devoured in one
+ravishing revel.
+
+The antelope may still be found in considerable numbers to the
+northeastward of Shasta, but the elk, once abundant, have almost
+entirely gone from the region. The smaller animals, such as the wolf,
+the various foxes, wildcats, coon, squirrels, and the curious wood rat
+that builds large brush huts, abound in all the wilder places; and the
+beaver, otter, mink, etc., may still be found along the sources of the
+rivers. The blue grouse and mountain quail are plentiful in the woods
+and the sage-hen on the plains about the northern base of the mountain,
+while innumerable smaller birds enliven and sweeten every thicket and
+grove.
+
+There are at least five classes of human inhabitants about the Shasta
+region: the Indians, now scattered, few in numbers and miserably
+demoralized, though still offering some rare specimens of savage
+manhood; miners and prospectors, found mostly to the north and west of
+the mountain, since the region about its base is overflowed with lava;
+cattle-raisers, mostly on the open plains to the northeastward and
+around the Klamath Lakes; hunters and trappers, where the woods and
+waters are wildest; and farmers, in Shasta Valley on the north side of
+the mountain, wheat, apples, melons, berries, all the best production
+of farm and garden growing and ripening there at the foot of the great
+white cone, which seems at times during changing storms ready to fall
+upon them—the most sublime farm scenery imaginable.
+
+The Indians of the McCloud River that have come under my observation
+differ considerably in habits and features from the Diggers and other
+tribes of the foothills and plains, and also from the Pah Utes and
+Modocs. They live chiefly on salmon. They seem to be closely related to
+the Tlingits of Alaska, Washington, and Oregon, and may readily have
+found their way here by passing from stream to stream in which salmon
+abound. They have much better features than the Indians of the plains,
+and are rather wide awake, speculative and ambitious in their way, and
+garrulous, like the natives of the northern coast.
+
+Before the Modoc War they lived in dread of the Modocs, a tribe living
+about the Klamath Lake and the Lava Beds, who were in the habit of
+crossing the low Sierra divide past the base of Shasta on freebooting
+excursions, stealing wives, fish, and weapons from the Pitts and
+McClouds. Mothers would hush their children by telling them that the
+Modocs would catch them.
+
+During my stay at the Government fish-hatching station on the McCloud I
+was accompanied in my walks along the riverbank by a McCloud boy about
+ten years of age, a bright, inquisitive fellow, who gave me the Indian
+names of the birds and plants that we met. The water-ousel he knew well
+and he seemed to like the sweet singer, which he called “Sussinny.” He
+showed me how strips of the stems of the beautiful maidenhair fern were
+used to adorn baskets with handsome brown bands, and pointed out
+several plants good to eat, particularly the large saxifrage growing
+abundantly along the river margin. Once I rushed suddenly upon him to
+see if he would be frightened; but he unflinchingly held his ground,
+struck a grand heroic attitude, and shouted, “Me no fraid; me Modoc!”
+
+Mount Shasta, so far as I have seen, has never been the home of
+Indians, not even their hunting ground to any great extent, above the
+lower slopes of the base. They are said to be afraid of fire-mountains
+and geyser basins as being the dwelling places of dangerously powerful
+and unmanageable gods. However, it is food and their relations to other
+tribes that mainly control the movements of Indians; and here their
+food was mostly on the lower slopes, with nothing except the wild sheep
+to tempt them higher. Even these were brought within reach without
+excessive climbing during the storms of winter.
+
+On the north side of Shasta, near Sheep Rock, there is a long cavern,
+sloping to the northward, nearly a mile in length, thirty or forty feet
+wide, and fifty feet or more in height, regular in form and direction
+like a railroad tunnel, and probably formed by the flowing away of a
+current of lava after the hardening of the surface. At the mouth of
+this cave, where the light and shelter is good, I found many of the
+heads and horns of the wild sheep, and the remains of campfires, no
+doubt those of Indian hunters who in stormy weather had camped there
+and feasted after the fatigues of the chase. A wild picture that must
+have formed on a dark night—the glow of the fire, the circle of
+crouching savages around it seen through the smoke, the dead game, and
+the weird darkness and half-darkness of the walls of the cavern, a
+picture of cave-dwellers at home in the stone age!
+
+Interest in hunting is almost universal, so deeply is it rooted as an
+inherited instinct ever ready to rise and make itself known. Fine
+scenery may not stir a fiber of mind or body, but how quick and how
+true is the excitement of the pursuit of game! Then up flames the
+slumbering volcano of ancient wildness, all that has been done by
+church and school through centuries of cultivation is for the moment
+destroyed, and the decent gentleman or devout saint becomes a howling,
+bloodthirsty, demented savage. It is not long since we all were cavemen
+and followed game for food as truly as wildcat or wolf, and the long
+repression of civilization seems to make the rebound to savage love of
+blood all the more violent. This frenzy, fortunately, does not last
+long in its most exaggerated form, and after a season of wildness
+refined gentlemen from cities are not more cruel than hunters and
+trappers who kill for a living.
+
+Dwelling apart in the depths of the woods are the various kinds of
+mountaineers,—hunters, prospectors, and the like,—rare men, “queer
+characters,” and well worth knowing. Their cabins are located with
+reference to game and the ledges to be examined, and are constructed
+almost as simply as those of the wood rats made of sticks laid across
+each other without compass or square. But they afford good shelter from
+storms, and so are “square” with the need of their builders. These men
+as a class are singularly fine in manners, though their faces may be
+scarred and rough like the bark of trees. On entering their cabins you
+will promptly be placed on your good behavior, and, your wants being
+perceived with quick insight, complete hospitality will be offered for
+body and mind to the extent of the larder.
+
+These men know the mountains far and near, and their thousand voices,
+like the leaves of a book. They can tell where the deer may be found at
+any time of year or day, and what they are doing; and so of all the
+other furred and feathered people they meet in their walks; and they
+can send a thought to its mark as well as a bullet. The aims of such
+people are not always the highest, yet how brave and manly and clean
+are their lives compared with too many in crowded towns mildewed and
+dwarfed in disease and crime! How fine a chance is here to begin life
+anew in the free fountains and skylands of Shasta, where it is so easy
+to live and to die! The future of the hunter is likely to be a good
+one; no abrupt change about it, only a passing from wilderness to
+wilderness, from one high place to another.
+
+Now that the railroad has been built up the Sacramento, everybody with
+money may go to Mount Shasta, the weak as well as the strong,
+fine-grained, succulent people, whose legs have never ripened, as well
+as sinewy mountaineers seasoned long in the weather. This, surely, is
+not the best way of going to the mountains, yet it is better than
+staying below. Many still small voices will not be heard in the noisy
+rush and din, suggestive of going to the sky in a chariot of fire or a
+whirlwind, as one is shot to the Shasta mark in a booming palace-car
+cartridge; up the rocky cañon, skimming the foaming river, above the
+level reaches, above the dashing spray—fine exhilarating translation,
+yet a pity to go so fast in a blur, where so much might be seen and
+enjoyed.
+
+The mountains are fountains not only of rivers and fertile soil, but of
+men. Therefore we are all, in some sense, mountaineers, and going to
+the mountains is going home. Yet how many are doomed to toil in town
+shadows while the white mountains beckon all along the horizon! Up the
+cañon to Shasta would be a cure for all care. But many on arrival seem
+at a loss to know what to do with themselves, and seek shelter in the
+hotel, as if that were the Shasta they had come for. Others never leave
+the rail, content with the window views, and cling to the comforts of
+the sleeping car like blind mice to their mothers. Many are sick and
+have been dragged to the healing wilderness unwillingly for body-good
+alone. Were the parts of the human machine detachable like Yankee
+inventions, how strange would be the gatherings on the mountains of
+pieces of people out of repair!
+
+How sadly unlike the whole-hearted ongoing of the seeker after gold is
+this partial, compulsory mountaineering!—as if the mountain treasuries
+contained nothing better than gold! Up the mountains they go,
+high-heeled and high-hatted, laden like Christian with mortifications
+and mortgages of divers sorts and degrees, some suffering from the
+sting of bad bargains, others exulting in good ones; hunters and
+fishermen with gun and rod and leggins; blythe and jolly troubadours to
+whom all Shasta is romance; poets singing their prayers; the weak and
+the strong, unable or unwilling to bear mental taxation. But, whatever
+the motive, all will be in some measure benefited. None may wholly
+escape the good of Nature, however imperfectly exposed to her
+blessings. The minister will not preach a perfectly flat and
+sedimentary sermon after climbing a snowy peak; and the fair play and
+tremendous impartiality of Nature, so tellingly displayed, will surely
+affect the after pleadings of the lawyer. Fresh air at least will get
+into everybody, and the cares of mere business will be quenched like
+the fires of a sinking ship.
+
+Possibly a branch railroad may some time be built to the summit of
+Mount Shasta like the road on Mount Washington. In the mean time
+tourists are dropped at Sisson’s, about twelve miles from the summit,
+whence as headquarters they radiate in every direction to the so-called
+“points of interest”; sauntering about the flowery fringes of the
+Strawberry Meadows, bathing in the balm of the woods, scrambling,
+fishing, hunting; riding about Castle Lake, the McCloud River, Soda
+Springs, Big Spring, deer pastures, and elsewhere. Some demand bears,
+and make excited inquiries concerning their haunts, how many there
+might be altogether on the mountain, and whether they are grizzly,
+brown, or black. Others shout, “Excelsior,” and make off at once for
+the upper snow fields. Most, however, are content with comparatively
+level ground and moderate distances, gathering at the hotel every
+evening laden with trophies—great sheaves of flowers, cones of various
+trees, cedar and fir branches covered with yellow lichens, and possibly
+a fish or two, or quail, or grouse.
+
+[Illustration: AT SHASTA SODA SPRINGS]
+
+But the heads of deer, antelope, wild sheep, and bears are
+conspicuously rare or altogether wanting in tourist collections in the
+“paradise of hunters.” There is a grand comparing of notes and
+adventures. Most are exhilarated and happy, though complaints may
+occasionally be heard—“The mountain does not look so very high after
+all, nor so very white; the snow is in patches like rags spread out to
+dry,” reminding one of Sydney Smith’s joke against Jeffrey, “D—n the
+Solar System; bad light, planets too indistinct.” But far the greater
+number are in good spirits, showing the influence of holiday enjoyment
+and mountain air. Fresh roses come to cheeks that long have been pale,
+and sentiment often begins to blossom under the new inspiration.
+
+The Shasta region may be reserved as a national park, with special
+reference to the preservation of its fine forests and game. This should
+by all means be done; but, as far as game is concerned, it is in little
+danger from tourists, notwithstanding many of them carry guns, and are
+in some sense hunters. Going in noisy groups, and with guns so shining,
+they are oftentimes confronted by inquisitive Douglas squirrels, and
+are thus given opportunities for shooting; but the larger animals
+retire at their approach and seldom are seen. Other gun people, too
+wise or too lifeless to make much noise, move slowly along the trails
+and about the open spots of the woods, like benumbed beetles in a
+snowdrift. Such hunters are themselves hunted by the animals, which in
+perfect safety follow them out of curiosity.
+
+During the bright days of midsummer the ascent of Shasta is only a
+long, safe saunter, without fright or nerve strain, or even serious
+fatigue, to those in sound health. Setting out from Sisson’s on
+horseback, accompanied by a guide leading a pack animal with provision,
+blankets, and other necessaries, you follow a trail that leads up to
+the edge of the timberline, where you camp for the night, eight or ten
+miles from the hotel, at an elevation of about ten thousand feet. The
+next day, rising early, you may push on to the summit and return to
+Sisson’s. But it is better to spend more time in the enjoyment of the
+grand scenery on the summit and about the head of the Whitney Glacier,
+pass the second night in camp, and return to Sisson’s on the third day.
+Passing around the margin of the meadows and on through the zones of
+the forest, you will have good opportunities to get ever-changing views
+of the mountain and its wealth of creatures that bloom and breathe.
+
+The woods differ but little from those that clothe the mountains to the
+southward, the trees being slightly closer together and generally not
+quite so large, marking the incipient change from the open sunny
+forests of the Sierra to the dense damp forests of the northern coast,
+where a squirrel may travel in the branches of the thick-set trees
+hundreds of miles without touching the ground. Around the upper belt of
+the forest you may see gaps where the ground has been cleared by
+avalanches of snow, thousands of tons in weight, which, descending with
+grand rush and roar, brush the trees from their paths like so many
+fragile shrubs or grasses.
+
+At first the ascent is very gradual. The mountain begins to leave the
+plain in slopes scarcely perceptible, measuring from two to three
+degrees. These are continued by easy gradations mile after mile all the
+way to the truncated, crumbling summit, where they attain a steepness
+of twenty to twenty-five degrees. The grand simplicity of these lines
+is partially interrupted on the north subordinate cone that rises from
+the side of the main cone about three thousand feet from the summit.
+This side cone, past which your way to the summit lies, was active
+after the breaking-up of the main ice-cap of the glacial period, as
+shown by the comparatively unwasted crater in which it terminates and
+by streams of fresh-looking, unglaciated lava that radiate from it as a
+center.
+
+The main summit is about a mile and a half in diameter from southwest
+to northeast, and is nearly covered with snow and _névé_, bounded by
+crumbling peaks and ridges, among which we look in vain for any sure
+plan of an ancient crater. The extreme summit is situated on the
+southern end of a narrow ridge that bounds the general summit on the
+east. Viewed from the north, it appears as an irregular blunt point
+about ten feet high, and is fast disappearing before the stormy
+atmospheric action to which it is subjected.
+
+At the base of the eastern ridge, just below the extreme summit, hot
+sulphurous gases and vapor escape with a hissing, bubbling noise from a
+fissure in the lava. Some of the many small vents cast up a spray of
+clear hot water, which falls back repeatedly until wasted in vapor. The
+steam and spray seem to be produced simply by melting snow coming in
+the way of the escaping gases, while the gases are evidently derived
+from the heated interior of the mountain, and may be regarded as the
+last feeble expression of the mighty power that lifted the entire mass
+of the mountain from the volcanic depths far below the surface of the
+plain.
+
+The view from the summit in clear weather extends to an immense
+distance in every direction. Southeastward, the low volcanic portion of
+the Sierra is seen like a map, both flanks as well as the crater-dotted
+axis, as far as Lassen’s Butte[6], a prominent landmark and an old
+volcano like Shasta, between ten and eleven thousand feet high, and
+distant about sixty miles. Some of the higher summit peaks near
+Independence Lake, one hundred and eighty miles away, are at times
+distinctly visible. Far to the north, in Oregon, the snowy volcanic
+cones of Mounts Pitt, Jefferson, and the Three Sisters rise in clear
+relief, like majestic monuments, above the dim dark sea of the northern
+woods. To the northeast lie the Rhett and Klamath Lakes, the Lava Beds,
+and a grand display of hill and mountain and gray rocky plains. The
+Scott, Siskiyou, and Trinity Mountains rise in long, compact waves to
+the west and southwest, and the valley of the Sacramento and the coast
+mountains, with their marvelous wealth of woods and waters, are seen;
+while close around the base of the mountain lie the beautiful Shasta
+Valley, Strawberry Valley, Huckleberry Valley, and many others, with
+the headwaters of the Shasta, Sacramento, and McCloud Rivers. Some
+observers claim to have seen the ocean from the summit of Shasta, but I
+have not yet been so fortunate.
+
+The Cinder Cone near Lassen’s Butte is remarkable as being the scene of
+the most recent volcanic eruption in the range. It is a symmetrical
+truncated cone covered with gray cinders and ashes, with a regular
+crater in which a few pines an inch or two in diameter are growing. It
+stands between two small lakes which previous to the last eruption,
+when the cone was built, formed one lake. From near the base of the
+cone a flood of extremely rough black vesicular lava extends across
+what was once a portion of the bottom of the lake into the forest of
+yellow pine.
+
+This lava flow seems to have been poured out during the same eruption
+that gave birth to the cone, cutting the lake in two, flowing a little
+way into the woods and overwhelming the trees in its way, the ends of
+some of the charred trunks still being visible, projecting from beneath
+the advanced snout of the flow where it came to rest; while the floor
+of the forest for miles around is so thickly strewn with loose cinders
+that walking is very fatiguing. The Pitt River Indians tell of a
+fearful time of darkness, probably due to this eruption, when the sky
+was filled with falling cinders which, as they thought, threatened
+every living creature with destruction, and say that when at length the
+sun appeared through the gloom it was red like blood.
+
+Less recent craters in great numbers dot the adjacent region, some with
+lakes in their throats, some overgrown with trees, others nearly
+bare—telling monuments of Nature’s mountain fires so often lighted
+throughout the northern Sierra. And, standing on the top of icy Shasta,
+the mightiest fire-monument of them all, we can hardly fail to look
+forward to the blare and glare of its next eruption and wonder whether
+it is nigh. Elsewhere men have planted gardens and vineyards in the
+craters of volcanoes quiescent for ages, and almost without warning
+have been hurled into the sky. More than a thousand years of profound
+calm have been known to intervene between two violent eruptions.
+Seventeen centuries intervened between two consecutive eruptions on the
+island of Ischia. Few volcanoes continue permanently in eruption. Like
+gigantic geysers, spouting hot stone instead of hot water, they work
+and sleep, and we have no sure means of knowing whether they are only
+sleeping or dead.
+
+
+
+
+IV. A Perilous Night on Shasta’s Summit
+
+
+Toward the end of summer, after a light, open winter, one may reach the
+summit of Mount Shasta without passing over much snow, by keeping on
+the crest of a long narrow ridge, mostly bare, that extends from near
+the camp-ground at the timberline. But on my first excursion to the
+summit the whole mountain, down to its low swelling base, was smoothly
+laden with loose fresh snow, presenting a most glorious mass of winter
+mountain scenery, in the midst of which I scrambled and reveled or lay
+snugly snowbound, enjoying the fertile clouds and the snow-bloom in all
+their growing, drifting grandeur.
+
+I had walked from Redding, sauntering leisurely from station to station
+along the old Oregon stage road, the better to see the rocks and
+plants, birds and people, by the way, tracing the rushing Sacramento to
+its fountains around icy Shasta. The first rains had fallen on the
+lowlands, and the first snows on the mountains, and everything was
+fresh and bracing, while an abundance of balmy sunshine filled all the
+noonday hours. It was the calm afterglow that usually succeeds the
+first storm of the winter. I met many of the birds that had reared
+their young and spent their summer in the Shasta woods and chaparral.
+They were then on their way south to their winter homes, leading their
+young full-fledged and about as large and strong as the parents.
+Squirrels, dry and elastic after the storms, were busy about their
+stores of pine nuts, and the latest goldenrods were still in bloom,
+though it was now past the middle of October. The grand color glow—the
+autumnal jubilee of ripe leaves—was past prime, but, freshened by the
+rain, was still making a fine show along the banks of the river and in
+the ravines and the dells of the smaller streams.
+
+At the salmon-hatching establishment on the McCloud River I halted a
+week to examine the limestone belt, grandly developed there, to learn
+what I could of the inhabitants of the river and its banks, and to give
+time for the fresh snow that I knew had fallen on the mountain to
+settle somewhat, with a view to making the ascent. A pedestrian on
+these mountain roads, especially so late in the year, is sure to excite
+curiosity, and many were the interrogations concerning my ramble. When
+I said that I was simply taking a walk, and that icy Shasta was my
+mark, I was invariably admonished that I had come on a dangerous quest.
+The time was far too late, the snow was too loose and deep to climb,
+and I should be lost in drifts and slides. When I hinted that new snow
+was beautiful and storms not so bad as they were called, my advisers
+shook their heads in token of superior knowledge and declared the
+ascent of “Shasta Butte” through loose snow impossible. Nevertheless,
+before noon of the second of November I was in the frosty azure of the
+utmost summit.
+
+When I arrived at Sisson’s everything was quiet. The last of the summer
+visitors had flitted long before, and the deer and bears also were
+beginning to seek their winter homes. My barometer and the sighing
+winds and filmy half-transparent clouds that dimmed the sunshine gave
+notice of the approach of another storm, and I was in haste to be off
+and get myself established somewhere in the midst of it, whether the
+summit was to be attained or not. Sisson, who is a mountaineer,
+speedily fitted me out for storm or calm as only a mountaineer could,
+with warm blankets and a week’s provisions so generous in quantity and
+kind that they easily might have been made to last a month in case of
+my being closely snowbound. Well I knew the weariness of snow-climbing,
+and the frosts, and the dangers of mountaineering so late in the year;
+therefore I could not ask a guide to go with me, even had one been
+willing. All I wanted was to have blankets and provisions deposited as
+far up in the timber as the snow would permit a pack animal to go.
+There I could build a storm nest and lie warm, and make raids up and
+around the mountain in accordance with the weather.
+
+Setting out on the afternoon of November first, with Jerome Fay,
+mountaineer and guide, in charge of the animals, I was soon plodding
+wearily upward through the muffled winter woods, the snow of course
+growing steadily deeper and looser, so that we had to break a trail.
+The animals began to get discouraged, and after night and darkness came
+on they became entangled in a bed of rough lava, where, breaking
+through four or five feet of mealy snow, their feet were caught between
+angular boulders. Here they were in danger of being lost, but after we
+had removed packs and saddles and assisted their efforts with ropes,
+they all escaped to the side of a ridge about a thousand feet below the
+timberline.
+
+To go farther was out of the question, so we were compelled to camp as
+best we could. A pitch pine fire speedily changed the temperature and
+shed a blaze of light on the wild lava-slope and the straggling
+storm-bent pines around us. Melted snow answered for coffee, and we had
+plenty of venison to roast. Toward midnight I rolled myself in my
+blankets, slept an hour and a half, arose and ate more venison, tied
+two days’ provisions to my belt, and set out for the summit, hoping to
+reach it ere the coming storm should fall. Jerome accompanied me a
+little distance above camp and indicated the way as well as he could in
+the darkness. He seemed loath to leave me, but, being reassured that I
+was at home and required no care, he bade me good-bye and returned to
+camp, ready to lead his animals down the mountain at daybreak.
+
+After I was above the dwarf pines, it was fine practice pushing up the
+broad unbroken slopes of snow, alone in the solemn silence of the
+night. Half the sky was clouded; in the other half the stars sparkled
+icily in the keen, frosty air; while everywhere the glorious wealth of
+snow fell away from the summit of the cone in flowing folds, more
+extensive and continuous than any I had ever seen before. When day
+dawned the clouds were crawling slowly and becoming more massive, but
+gave no intimation of immediate danger, and I pushed on faithfully,
+though holding myself well in hand, ready to return to the timber; for
+it was easy to see that the storm was not far off. The mountain rises
+ten thousand feet above the general level of the country, in blank
+exposure to the deep upper currents of the sky, and no labyrinth of
+peaks and cañons I had ever been in seemed to me so dangerous as these
+immense slopes, bare against the sky.
+
+The frost was intense, and drifting snow dust made breathing at times
+rather difficult. The snow was as dry as meal, and the finer particles
+drifted freely, rising high in the air, while the larger portions of
+the crystals rolled like sand. I frequently sank to my armpits between
+buried blocks of loose lava, but generally only to my knees. When tired
+with walking I still wallowed slowly upward on all fours. The steepness
+of the slope—thirty-five degrees in some places—made any kind of
+progress fatiguing, while small avalanches were being constantly set in
+motion in the steepest places. But the bracing air and the sublime
+beauty of the snowy expanse thrilled every nerve and made absolute
+exhaustion impossible. I seemed to be walking and wallowing in a cloud;
+but, holding steadily onward, by half-past ten o’clock I had gained the
+highest summit.
+
+I held my commanding foothold in the sky for two hours, gazing on the
+glorious landscapes spread maplike around the immense horizon, and
+tracing the outlines of the ancient lava-streams extending far into the
+surrounding plains, and the pathways of vanished glaciers of which
+Shasta had been the center. But, as I had left my coat in camp for the
+sake of having my limbs free in climbing, I soon was cold. The wind
+increased in violence, raising the snow in magnificent drifts that were
+drawn out in the form of wavering banners blowing in the sun. Toward
+the end of my stay a succession of small clouds struck against the
+summit rocks like drifting icebergs, darkening the air as they passed,
+and producing a chill as definite and sudden as if ice-water had been
+dashed in my face. This is the kind of cloud in which snow-flowers
+grow, and I turned and fled.
+
+Finding that I was not closely pursued, I ventured to take time on the
+way down for a visit to the head of the Whitney Glacier and the “Crater
+Butte.” After I had reached the end of the main summit ridge the
+descent was but little more than one continuous soft, mealy, muffled
+slide, most luxurious and rapid, though the hissing, swishing speed
+attained was obscured in great part by flying snow dust—a marked
+contrast to the boring seal-wallowing upward struggle. I reached camp
+about an hour before dusk, hollowed a strip of loose ground in the lee
+of a large block of red lava, where firewood was abundant, rolled
+myself in my blankets, and went to sleep.
+
+Next morning, having slept little the night before the ascent and being
+weary with climbing after the excitement was over, I slept late. Then,
+awaking suddenly, my eyes opened on one of the most beautiful and
+sublime scenes I ever enjoyed. A boundless wilderness of storm clouds
+of different degrees of ripeness were congregated over all the lower
+landscape for thousands of square miles, colored gray, and purple, and
+pearl, and deep-glowing white, amid which I seemed to be floating;
+while the great white cone of the mountain above was all aglow in the
+free, blazing sunshine. It seemed not so much an ocean as a land of
+clouds—undulating hill and dale, smooth purple plains, and silvery
+mountains of cumuli, range over range, diversified with peak and dome
+and hollow fully brought out in light and shade.
+
+I gazed enchanted, but cold gray masses, drifting like dust on a
+wind-swept plain, began to shut out the light, forerunners of the
+coming storm I had been so anxiously watching. I made haste to gather
+as much wood as possible, snugging it as a shelter around my bed. The
+storm side of my blankets was fastened down with stakes to reduce as
+much as possible the sifting-in of drift and the danger of being blown
+away. The precious bread sack was placed safely as a pillow, and when
+at length the first flakes fell I was exultingly ready to welcome them.
+Most of my firewood was more than half rosin and would blaze in the
+face of the fiercest drifting; the winds could not demolish my bed, and
+my bread could be made to last indefinitely; while in case of need I
+had the means of making snowshoes and could retreat or hold my ground
+as I pleased.
+
+Presently the storm broke forth into full snowy bloom, and the
+thronging crystals darkened the air. The wind swept past in hissing
+floods, grinding the snow into meal and sweeping down into the hollows
+in enormous drifts all the heavier particles, while the finer dust was
+sifted through the sky, increasing the icy gloom. But my fire glowed
+bravely as if in glad defiance of the drift to quench it, and,
+notwithstanding but little trace of my nest could be seen after the
+snow had leveled and buried it, I was snug and warm, and the passionate
+uproar produced a glad excitement.
+
+Day after day the storm continued, piling snow on snow in weariless
+abundance. There were short periods of quiet, when the sun would seem
+to look eagerly down through rents in the clouds, as if to know how the
+work was advancing. During these calm intervals I replenished my
+fire—sometimes without leaving the nest, for fire and woodpile were so
+near this could easily be done—or busied myself with my notebook,
+watching the gestures of the trees in taking the snow, examining
+separate crystals under a lens, and learning the methods of their
+deposition as an enduring fountain for the streams. Several times, when
+the storm ceased for a few minutes, a Douglas squirrel came frisking
+from the foot of a clump of dwarf pines, moving in sudden interrupted
+spurts over the bossy snow; then, without any apparent guidance, he
+would dig rapidly into the drift where were buried some grains of
+barley that the horses had left. The Douglas squirrel does not strictly
+belong to these upper woods, and I was surprised to see him out in such
+weather. The mountain sheep also, quite a large flock of them, came to
+my camp and took shelter beside a clump of matted dwarf pines a little
+above my nest.
+
+The storm lasted about a week, but before it was ended Sisson became
+alarmed and sent up the guide with animals to see what had become of me
+and recover the camp outfit. The news spread that “there was a man on
+the mountain,” and he must surely have perished, and Sisson was blamed
+for allowing any one to attempt climbing in such weather; while I was
+as safe as anybody in the lowlands, lying like a squirrel in a warm,
+fluffy nest, busied about my own affairs and wishing only to be let
+alone. Later, however, a trail could not have been broken for a horse,
+and some of the camp furniture would have had to be abandoned. On the
+fifth day I returned to Sisson’s, and from that comfortable base made
+excursions, as the weather permitted, to the Black Butte, to the foot
+of the Whitney Glacier, around the base of the mountain, to Rhett and
+Klamath Lakes, to the Modoc region and elsewhere, developing many
+interesting scenes and experiences.
+
+But the next spring, on the other side of this eventful winter, I saw
+and felt still more of the Shasta snow. For then it was my fortune to
+get into the very heart of a storm, and to be held in it for a long
+time.
+
+On the 28th of April 1875 I led a party up the mountain for the purpose
+of making a survey of the summit with reference to the location of the
+Geodetic monument. On the 30th, accompanied by Jerome Fay, I made
+another ascent to make some barometrical observations, the day
+intervening between the two ascents being devoted to establishing a
+camp on the extreme edge of the timberline. Here, on our red trachyte
+bed, we obtained two hours of shallow sleep broken for occasional
+glimpses of the keen, starry night. At two o’clock we rose, breakfasted
+on a warmed tin-cupful of coffee and a piece of frozen venison broiled
+on the coals, and started for the summit. Up to this time there was
+nothing in sight that betokened the approach of a storm; but on gaining
+the summit, we saw toward Lassen’s Butte hundreds of square miles of
+white cumuli boiling dreamily in the sunshine far beneath us, and
+causing no alarm.
+
+The slight weariness of the ascent was soon rested away, and our
+glorious morning in the sky promised nothing but enjoyment. At 9 a.m.
+the dry thermometer stood at 34 degrees in the shade and rose steadily
+until at 1 p.m. it stood at 50 degrees, probably influenced somewhat by
+radiation from the sun-warmed cliffs. A common bumblebee, not at all
+benumbed, zigzagged vigorously about our heads for a few moments, as if
+unconscious of the fact that the nearest honey flower was a mile
+beneath him.
+
+In the mean time clouds were growing down in Shasta Valley—massive
+swelling cumuli, displaying delicious tones of purple and gray in the
+hollows of their sun-beaten bosses. Extending gradually southward
+around on both sides of Shasta, these at length united with the older
+field towards Lassen’s Butte, thus encircling Mount Shasta in one
+continuous cloud zone. Rhett and Klamath Lakes were eclipsed beneath
+clouds scarcely less brilliant than their own silvery disks. The Modoc
+Lava Beds, many a snow-laden peak far north in Oregon, the Scott and
+Trinity and Siskiyou Mountains, the peaks of the Sierra, the blue Coast
+Range, Shasta Valley, the dark forests filling the valley of the
+Sacramento, all in turn were obscured or buried, leaving the lofty cone
+on which we stood solitary in the sunshine between two skies—a sky of
+spotless blue above, a sky of glittering cloud beneath. The creative
+sun shone glorious on the vast expanse of cloudland; hill and dale,
+mountain and valley springing into existence responsive to his rays and
+steadily developing in beauty and individuality. One huge mountain-cone
+of cloud, corresponding to Mount Shasta in these newborn cloud ranges,
+rose close alongside with a visible motion, its firm, polished bosses
+seeming so near and substantial that we almost fancied that we might
+leap down upon them from where we stood and make our way to the
+lowlands. No hint was given, by anything in their appearance, of the
+fleeting character of these most sublime and beautiful cloud mountains.
+On the contrary they impressed one as being lasting additions to the
+landscape.
+
+The weather of the springtime and summer, throughout the Sierra in
+general, is usually varied by slight local rains and dustings of snow,
+most of which are obviously far too joyous and life-giving to be
+regarded as storms—single clouds growing in the sunny sky, ripening in
+an hour, showering the heated landscape, and passing away like a
+thought, leaving no visible bodily remains to stain the sky. Snowstorms
+of the same gentle kind abound among the high peaks, but in spring they
+not unfrequently attain larger proportions, assuming a violence and
+energy of expression scarcely surpassed by those bred in the depths of
+winter. Such was the storm now gathering about us.
+
+It began to declare itself shortly after noon, suggesting to us the
+idea of at once seeking our safe camp in the timber and abandoning the
+purpose of making an observation of the barometer at 3 p.m.,—two having
+already been made, at 9 a.m., and 12 m., while simultaneous
+observations were made at Strawberry Valley. Jerome peered at short
+intervals over the ridge, contemplating the rising clouds with anxious
+gestures in the rough wind, and at length declared that if we did not
+make a speedy escape we should be compelled to pass the rest of the day
+and night on the summit. But anxiety to complete my observations
+stifled my own instinctive promptings to retreat, and held me to my
+work. No inexperienced person was depending on me, and I told Jerome
+that we two mountaineers should be able to make our way down through
+any storm likely to fall.
+
+Presently thin, fibrous films of cloud began to blow directly over the
+summit from north to south, drawn out in long fairy webs like carded
+wool, forming and dissolving as if by magic. The wind twisted them into
+ringlets and whirled them in a succession of graceful convolutions like
+the outside sprays of Yosemite Falls in flood time; then, sailing out
+into the thin azure over the precipitous brink of the ridge they were
+drifted together like wreaths of foam on a river. These higher and
+finer cloud fabrics were evidently produced by the chilling of the air
+from its own expansion caused by the upward deflection of the wind
+against the slopes of the mountain. They steadily increased on the
+north rim of the cone, forming at length a thick, opaque, ill-defined
+embankment from the icy meshes of which snow-flowers began to fall,
+alternating with hail. The sky speedily darkened, and just as I had
+completed my last observation and boxed my instruments ready for the
+descent, the storm began in serious earnest. At first the cliffs were
+beaten with hail, every stone of which, as far as I could see, was
+regular in form, six-sided pyramids with rounded base, rich and
+sumptuous-looking, and fashioned with loving care, yet seemingly thrown
+away on those desolate crags down which they went rolling, falling,
+sliding in a network of curious streams.
+
+After we had forced our way down the ridge and past the group of
+hissing fumaroles, the storm became inconceivably violent. The
+thermometer fell 22 degrees in a few minutes, and soon dropped below
+zero. The hail gave place to snow, and darkness came on like night. The
+wind, rising to the highest pitch of violence, boomed and surged amid
+the desolate crags; lightning flashes in quick succession cut the
+gloomy darkness; and the thunders, the most tremendously loud and
+appalling I ever heard, made an almost continuous roar, stroke
+following stroke in quick, passionate succession, as though the
+mountain were being rent to its foundations and the fires of the old
+volcano were breaking forth again.
+
+Could we at once have begun to descend the snow slopes leading to the
+timber, we might have made good our escape, however dark and wild the
+storm. As it was, we had first to make our way along a dangerous ridge
+nearly a mile and a half long, flanked in many places by steep
+ice-slopes at the head of the Whitney Glacier on one side and by
+shattered precipices on the other. Apprehensive of this coming
+darkness, I had taken the precaution, when the storm began, to make the
+most dangerous points clear to my mind, and to mark their relations
+with reference to the direction of the wind. When, therefore, the
+darkness came on, and the bewildering drift, I felt confident that we
+could force our way through it with no other guidance. After passing
+the “Hot Springs” I halted in the lee of a lava-block to let Jerome,
+who had fallen a little behind, come up. Here he opened a council in
+which, under circumstances sufficiently exciting but without evincing
+any bewilderment, he maintained, in opposition to my views, that it was
+impossible to proceed. He firmly refused to make the venture to find
+the camp, while I, aware of the dangers that would necessarily attend
+our efforts, and conscious of being the cause of his present peril,
+decided not to leave him.
+
+Our discussions ended, Jerome made a dash from the shelter of the
+lava-block and began forcing his way back against the wind to the “Hot
+Springs,” wavering and struggling to resist being carried away, as if
+he were fording a rapid stream. After waiting and watching in vain for
+some flaw in the storm that might be urged as a new argument in favor
+of attempting the descent, I was compelled to follow. “Here,” said
+Jerome, as we shivered in the midst of the hissing, sputtering
+fumaroles, “we shall be safe from frost.” “Yes,” said I, “we can lie in
+this mud and steam and sludge, warm at least on one side; but how can
+we protect our lungs from the acid gases, and how, after our clothing
+is saturated, shall we be able to reach camp without freezing, even
+after the storm is over? We shall have to wait for sunshine, and when
+will it come?”
+
+The tempered area to which we had committed ourselves extended over
+about one fourth of an acre; but it was only about an eighth of an inch
+in thickness, for the scalding gas jets were shorn off close to the
+ground by the oversweeping flood of frosty wind. And how lavishly the
+snow fell only mountaineers may know. The crisp crystal flowers seemed
+to touch one another and fairly to thicken the tremendous blast that
+carried them. This was the bloom-time, the summer of the cloud, and
+never before have I seen even a mountain cloud flowering so profusely.
+
+When the bloom of the Shasta chaparral is falling, the ground is
+sometimes covered for hundreds of square miles to a depth of half an
+inch. But the bloom of this fertile snow cloud grew and matured and
+fell to a depth of two feet in a few hours. Some crystals landed with
+their rays almost perfect, but most of them were worn and broken by
+striking against one another, or by rolling on the ground. The touch of
+these snow-flowers in calm weather is infinitely gentle—glinting,
+swaying, settling silently in the dry mountain air, or massed in flakes
+soft and downy. To lie out alone in the mountains of a still night and
+be touched by the first of these small silent messengers from the sky
+is a memorable experience, and the fineness of that touch none will
+forget. But the storm-blast laden with crisp, sharp snow seems to crush
+and bruise and stupefy with its multitude of stings, and compels the
+bravest to turn and flee.
+
+The snow fell without abatement until an hour or two after what seemed
+to be the natural darkness of the night. Up to the time the storm first
+broke on the summit its development was remarkably gentle. There was a
+deliberate growth of clouds, a weaving of translucent tissue above,
+then the roar of the wind and the thunder, and the darkening flight of
+snow. Its subsidence was not less sudden. The clouds broke and
+vanished, not a crystal was left in the sky, and the stars shone out
+with pure and tranquil radiance.
+
+During the storm we lay on our backs so as to present as little surface
+as possible to the wind, and to let the drift pass over us. The mealy
+snow sifted into the folds of our clothing and in many places reached
+the skin. We were glad at first to see the snow packing about us,
+hoping it would deaden the force of the wind, but it soon froze into a
+stiff, crusty heap as the temperature fell, rather augmenting our novel
+misery.
+
+When the heat became unendurable, on some spot where steam was escaping
+through the sludge, we tried to stop it with snow and mud, or shifted a
+little at a time by shoving with our heels; for to stand in blank
+exposure to the fearful wind in our frozen-and-broiled condition seemed
+certain death. The acrid incrustations sublimed from the escaping gases
+frequently gave way, opening new vents to scald us; and, fearing that
+if at any time the wind should fall, carbonic acid, which often formed
+a considerable portion of the gaseous exhalations of volcanoes, might
+collect in sufficient quantities to cause sleep and death, I warned
+Jerome against forgetting himself for a single moment, even should his
+sufferings admit of such a thing.
+
+Accordingly, when during the long, dreary watches of the night we
+roused from a state of half-consciousness, we called each other by name
+in a frightened, startled way, each fearing the other might be benumbed
+or dead. The ordinary sensations of cold give but a faint conception of
+that which comes on after hard climbing with want of food and sleep in
+such exposure as this. Life is then seen to be a fire, that now
+smoulders, now brightens, and may be easily quenched. The weary hours
+wore away like dim half-forgotten years, so long and eventful they
+seemed, though we did nothing but suffer. Still the pain was not always
+of that bitter, intense kind that precludes thought and takes away all
+capacity for enjoyment. A sort of dreamy stupor came on at times in
+which we fancied we saw dry, resinous logs suitable for campfires, just
+as after going days without food men fancy they see bread.
+
+Frozen, blistered, famished, benumbed, our bodies seemed lost to us at
+times—all dead but the eyes. For the duller and fainter we became the
+clearer was our vision, though only in momentary glimpses. Then, after
+the sky cleared, we gazed at the stars, blessed immortals of light,
+shining with marvelous brightness with long lance rays, near-looking
+and new-looking, as if never seen before. Again they would look
+familiar and remind us of stargazing at home. Oftentimes imagination
+coming into play would present charming pictures of the warm zone
+below, mingled with others near and far. Then the bitter wind and the
+drift would break the blissful vision and dreary pains cover us like
+clouds. “Are you suffering much?” Jerome would inquire with pitiful
+faintness. “Yes,” I would say, striving to keep my voice brave, “frozen
+and burned; but never mind, Jerome, the night will wear away at last,
+and tomorrow we go a-Maying, and what campfires we will make, and what
+sunbaths we will take!”
+
+The frost grew more and more intense, and we became icy and covered
+over with a crust of frozen snow, as if we had lain cast away in the
+drift all winter. In about thirteen hours—every hour like a year—day
+began to dawn, but it was long ere the summit’s rocks were touched by
+the sun. No clouds were visible from where we lay, yet the morning was
+dull and blue, and bitterly frosty; and hour after hour passed by while
+we eagerly watched the pale light stealing down the ridge to the hollow
+where we lay. But there was not a trace of that warm, flushing sunrise
+splendor we so long had hoped for.
+
+As the time drew near to make an effort to reach camp, we became
+concerned to know what strength was left us, and whether or no we could
+walk; for we had lain flat all this time without once rising to our
+feet. Mountaineers, however, always find in themselves a reserve of
+power after great exhaustion. It is a kind of second life, available
+only in emergencies like this; and, having proved its existence, I had
+no great fear that either of us would fail, though one of my arms was
+already benumbed and hung powerless.
+
+At length, after the temperature was somewhat mitigated on this
+memorable first of May, we arose and began to struggle homeward. Our
+frozen trousers could scarcely be made to bend at the knee, and we
+waded the snow with difficulty. The summit ridge was fortunately
+wind-swept and nearly bare, so we were not compelled to lift our feet
+high, and on reaching the long home slopes laden with loose snow we
+made rapid progress, sliding and shuffling and pitching headlong, our
+feebleness accelerating rather than diminishing our speed. When we had
+descended some three thousand feet the sunshine warmed our backs and we
+began to revive. At 10 a.m. we reached the timber and were safe.
+
+Half an hour later we heard Sisson shouting down among the firs, coming
+with horses to take us to the hotel. After breaking a trail through the
+snow as far as possible he had tied his animals and walked up. We had
+been so long without food that we cared but little about eating, but we
+eagerly drank the coffee he prepared for us. Our feet were frozen, and
+thawing them was painful, and had to be done very slowly by keeping
+them buried in soft snow for several hours, which avoided permanent
+damage. Five thousand feet below the summit we found only three inches
+of new snow, and at the base of the mountain only a slight shower of
+rain had fallen, showing how local our storm had been, notwithstanding
+its terrific fury. Our feet were wrapped in sacking, and we were soon
+mounted and on our way down into the thick sunshine—“God’s Country,” as
+Sisson calls the Chaparral Zone. In two hours’ ride the last snowbank
+was left behind. Violets appeared along the edges of the trail, and the
+chaparral was coming into bloom, with young lilies and larkspurs about
+the open places in rich profusion. How beautiful seemed the golden
+sunbeams streaming through the woods between the warm brown boles of
+the cedars and pines! All my friends among the birds and plants seemed
+like _old_ friends, and we felt like speaking to every one of them as
+we passed, as if we had been a long time away in some far, strange
+country.
+
+In the afternoon we reached Strawberry Valley and fell asleep. Next
+morning we seemed to have risen from the dead. My bedroom was flooded
+with sunshine, and from the window I saw the great white Shasta cone
+clad in forests and clouds and bearing them loftily in the sky.
+Everything seemed full and radiant with the freshness and beauty and
+enthusiasm of youth. Sisson’s children came in with flowers and covered
+my bed, and the storm on the mountaintop banished like a dream.
+
+
+
+
+V. Shasta Rambles and Modoc Memories
+
+
+Arctic beauty and desolation, with their blessings and dangers, all may
+be found here, to test the endurance and skill of adventurous climbers;
+but far better than climbing the mountain is going around its warm,
+fertile base, enjoying its bounties like a bee circling around a bank
+of flowers. The distance is about a hundred miles, and will take some
+of the time we hear so much about—a week or two—but the benefits will
+compensate for any number of weeks. Perhaps the profession of doing
+good may be full, but every body should be kind at least to himself.
+Take a course of good water and air, and in the eternal youth of Nature
+you may renew your own. Go quietly, alone; no harm will befall you.
+Some have strange, morbid fears as soon as they find themselves with
+Nature, even in the kindest and wildest of her solitudes, like very
+sick children afraid of their mother—as if God were dead and the devil
+were king.
+
+One may make the trip on horseback, or in a carriage, even; for a good
+level road may be found all the way round, by Shasta Valley, Sheep
+Rock, Elk Flat, Huckleberry Valley, Squaw Valley, following for a
+considerable portion of the way the old Emigrant Road, which lies along
+the east disk of the mountain, and is deeply worn by the wagons of the
+early gold-seekers, many of whom chose this northern route as perhaps
+being safer and easier, the pass here being only about six thousand
+feet above sea level. But it is far better to go afoot. Then you are
+free to make wide waverings and zigzags away from the roads to visit
+the great fountain streams of the rivers, the glaciers also, and the
+wildest retreats in the primeval forests, where the best plants and
+animals dwell, and where many a flower-bell will ring against your
+knees, and friendly trees will reach out their fronded branches and
+touch you as you pass. One blanket will be enough to carry, or you may
+forego the pleasure and burden altogether, as wood for fires is
+everywhere abundant. Only a little food will be required. Berries and
+plums abound in season, and quail and grouse and deer—the magnificent
+shaggy mule deer as well as the common species.
+
+As you sweep around so grand a center, the mountain itself seems to
+turn, displaying its riches like the revolving pyramids in jewelers’
+windows. One glacier after another comes into view, and the outlines of
+the mountain are ever changing, though all the way around, from
+whatever point of view, the form is maintained of a grand, simple cone
+with a gently sloping base and rugged, crumbling ridges separating the
+glaciers and the snowfields more or less completely. The play of
+colors, from the first touches of the morning sun on the summit, down
+the snowfields and the ice and lava until the forests are aglow, is a
+never-ending delight, the rosy lava and the fine flushings of the snow
+being ineffably lovely. Thus one saunters on and on in the glorious
+radiance in utter peace and forgetfulness of time.
+
+Yet, strange to say, there are days even here somewhat dull-looking,
+when the mountain seems uncommunicative, sending out no appreciable
+invitation, as if not at home. At such time its height seems much less,
+as if, crouching and weary, it were taking rest. But Shasta is always
+at home to those who love her, and is ever in a thrill of enthusiastic
+activity—burning fires within, grinding glaciers without, and fountains
+ever flowing. Every crystal dances responsive to the touches of the
+sun, and currents of sap in the growing cells of all the vegetation are
+ever in a vital whirl and rush, and though many feet and wings are
+folded, how many are astir! And the wandering winds, how busy they are,
+and what a breadth of sound and motion they make, glinting and bubbling
+about the crags of the summit, sifting through the woods, feeling their
+way from grove to grove, ruffling the loose hair on the shoulders of
+the bears, fanning and rocking young birds in their cradles, making a
+trumpet of every corolla, and carrying their fragrance around the
+world.
+
+In unsettled weather, when storms are growing, the mountain looms
+immensely higher, and its miles of height become apparent to all,
+especially in the gloom of the gathering clouds, or when the storm is
+done and they are rolling away, torn on the edges and melting while in
+the sunshine. Slight rainstorms are likely to be encountered in a trip
+round the mountain, but one may easily find shelter beneath
+well-thatched trees that shed the rain like a roof. Then the shining of
+the wet leaves is delightful, and the steamy fragrance, and the burst
+of bird song from a multitude of thrushes and finches and warblers that
+have nests in the chaparral.
+
+The nights, too, are delightful, watching with Shasta beneath the great
+starry dome. A thousand thousand voices are heard, but so finely
+blended they seem a part of the night itself, and make a deeper
+silence. And how grandly do the great logs and branches of your
+campfire give forth the heat and light that during their long
+century-lives they have so slowly gathered from the sun, storing it
+away in beautiful dotted cells and beads of amber gum! The neighboring
+trees look into the charmed circle as if the noon of another day had
+come, familiar flowers and grasses that chance to be near seem far more
+beautiful and impressive than by day, and as the dead trees give forth
+their light all the other riches of their lives seem to be set free and
+with the rejoicing flames rise again to the sky. In setting out from
+Strawberry Valley, by bearing off to the northwestward a few miles you
+may see
+
+    “...beneath dim aisles, in odorous beds,
+    The slight Linnaea hang its twin-born heads,
+    And [bless] the monument of the man of flowers,
+    Which breathes his sweet fame through the northern bowers.”
+
+This is one of the few places in California where the charming linnaea
+is found, though it is common to the northward through Oregon and
+Washington. Here, too, you may find the curious but unlovable
+darlingtonia, a carnivorous plant that devours bumblebees,
+grasshoppers, ants, moths, and other insects, with insatiable appetite.
+In approaching it, its suspicious-looking yellow-spotted hood and
+watchful attitude will be likely to make you go cautiously through the
+bog where it stands, as if you were approaching a dangerous snake. It
+also occurs in a bog near Sothern’s Station on the stage road, where I
+first saw it, and in other similar bogs throughout the mountains
+hereabouts.
+
+The “Big Spring” of the Sacramento is about a mile and a half above
+Sisson’s, issuing from the base of a drift-covered hill. It is lined
+with emerald algae and mosses, and shaded with alder, willow, and thorn
+bushes, which give it a fine setting. Its waters, apparently unaffected
+by flood or drouth, heat or cold, fall at once into white rapids with a
+rush and dash, as if glad to escape from the darkness to begin their
+wild course down the cañon to the plain.
+
+Muir’s Peak, a few miles to the north of the spring, rises about three
+thousand feet above the plain on which it stands, and is easily
+climbed. The view is very fine and well repays the slight walk to its
+summit, from which much of your way about the mountain may be studied
+and chosen. The view obtained of the Whitney Glacier should tempt you
+to visit it, since it is the largest of the Shasta glaciers and its
+lower portion abounds in beautiful and interesting cascades and
+crevasses. It is three or four miles long and terminates at an
+elevation of about nine thousand five hundred feet above sea level, in
+moraine-sprinkled ice cliffs sixty feet high. The long gray slopes
+leading up to the glacier seem remarkably smooth and unbroken. They are
+much interrupted, nevertheless, with abrupt, jagged precipitous gorges,
+which though offering instructive sections of the lavas for
+examination, would better be shunned by most people. This may be done
+by keeping well down on the base until fronting the glacier before
+beginning the ascent.
+
+The gorge through which the glacier is drained is raw-looking, deep and
+narrow, and indescribably jagged. The walls in many places overhang; in
+others they are beveled, loose, and shifting where the channel has been
+eroded by cinders, ashes, strata of firm lavas, and glacial drift,
+telling of many a change from frost to fire and their attendant floods
+of mud and water. Most of the drainage of the glacier vanishes at once
+in the porous rocks to reappear in springs in the distant valley, and
+it is only in time of flood that the channel carries much water; then
+there are several fine falls in the gorge, six hundred feet or more in
+height. Snow lies in it the year round at an elevation of eight
+thousand five hundred feet, and in sheltered spots a thousand feet
+lower. Tracing this wild changing channel-gorge, gully, or cañon, the
+sections will show Mount Shasta as a huge palimpsest, containing the
+records, layer upon layer, of strangely contrasted events in its
+fiery-icy history. But look well to your footing, for the way will test
+the skill of the most cautious mountaineers.
+
+Regaining the low ground at the base of the mountain and holding on in
+your grand orbit, you pass through a belt of juniper woods, called “The
+Cedars,” to Sheep Rock at the foot of the Shasta Pass. Here you strike
+the old emigrant road, which leads over the low divide to the eastern
+slopes of the mountain. In a north-northwesterly direction from the
+foot of the pass you may chance to find Pluto’s Cave, already
+mentioned; but it is not easily found, since its several mouths are on
+a level with the general surface of the ground, and have been made
+simply by the falling-in of portions of the roof. Far the most
+beautiful and richly furnished of the mountain caves of California
+occur in a thick belt of metamorphic limestone that is pretty generally
+developed along the western flank of the Sierra from the McCloud River
+to the Kaweah, a distance of nearly four hundred miles. These volcanic
+caves are not wanting in interest, and it is well to light a pitch pine
+torch and take a walk in these dark ways of the underworld whenever
+opportunity offers, if for no other reason to see with new appreciation
+on returning to the sunshine the beauties that lie so thick about us.
+
+Sheep Rock is about twenty miles from Sisson’s, and is one of the
+principal winter pasture grounds of the wild sheep, from which it takes
+its name. It is a mass of lava presenting to the gray sage plain of
+Shasta Valley a bold craggy front two thousand feet high. Its summit
+lies at an elevation of five thousand five hundred feet above the sea,
+and has several square miles of comparatively level surface, where
+bunchgrass grows and the snow does not lie deep, thus allowing the
+hardy sheep to pick up a living through the winter months when deep
+snows have driven them down from the lofty ridges of Shasta.
+
+From here it might be well to leave the immediate base of the mountain
+for a few days and visit the Lava Beds made famous by the Modoc War.
+They lie about forty miles to the northeastward, on the south shore of
+Rhett or Tule[7] Lake, at an elevation above sea level of about
+forty-five hundred feet. They are a portion of a flow of dense black
+vesicular lava, dipping northeastward at a low angle, but little
+changed as yet by the weather, and about as destitute of soil as a
+glacial pavement. The surface, though smooth in a general way as seen
+from a distance, is dotted with hillocks and rough crater-like pits,
+and traversed by a network of yawning fissures, forming a combination
+of topographical conditions of very striking character. The way lies by
+Mount Bremer, over stretches of gray sage plains, interrupted by rough
+lava slopes timbered with juniper and yellow pine, and with here and
+there a green meadow and a stream.
+
+This is a famous game region, and you will be likely to meet small
+bands of antelope, mule deer, and wild sheep. Mount Bremer is the most
+noted stronghold of the sheep in the whole Shasta region. Large flocks
+dwell here from year to year, winter and summer, descending
+occasionally into the adjacent sage plains and lava beds to feed, but
+ever ready to take refuge in the jagged crags of their mountain at
+every alarm. While traveling with a company of hunters I saw about
+fifty in one flock.
+
+The Van Bremer brothers, after whom the mountain is named, told me that
+they once climbed the mountain with their rifles and hounds on a grand
+hunt; but, after keeping up the pursuit for a week, their boots and
+clothing gave way, and the hounds were lamed and worn out without
+having run down a single sheep, notwithstanding they ran night and day.
+On smooth spots, level or ascending, the hounds gained on the sheep,
+but on descending ground, and over rough masses of angular rocks they
+fell hopelessly behind. Only half a dozen sheep were shot as they
+passed the hunters stationed near their paths circling round the rugged
+summit. The full-grown bucks weigh nearly three hundred and fifty
+pounds.
+
+The mule deer are nearly as heavy. Their long, massive ears give them a
+very striking appearance. One large buck that I measured stood three
+feet and seven inches high at the shoulders, and when the ears were
+extended horizontally the distance across from tip to tip was two feet
+and one inch.
+
+From the Van Bremer ranch the way to the Lava Beds leads down the
+Bremer Meadows past many a smooth grassy knoll and jutting cliff, along
+the shore of Lower Klamath Lake, and thence across a few miles of sage
+plain to the brow of the wall-like bluff of lava four hundred and fifty
+feet above Tule Lake. Here you are looking southeastward, and the Modoc
+landscape, which at once takes possession of you, lies revealed in
+front. It is composed of three principal parts; on your left lies the
+bright expanse of Tule Lake, on your right an evergreen forest, and
+between the two are the black Lava Beds.
+
+When I first stood there, one bright day before sundown, the lake was
+fairly blooming in purple light, and was so responsive to the sky in
+both calmness and color it seemed itself a sky. No mountain shore hides
+its loveliness. It lies wide open for many a mile, veiled in no mystery
+but the mystery of light. The forest also was flooded with sun-purple,
+not a spire moving, and Mount Shasta was seen towering above it
+rejoicing in the ineffable beauty of the alpenglow. But neither the
+glorified woods on the one hand, nor the lake on the other, could at
+first hold the eye. That dark mysterious lava plain between them
+compelled attention. Here you trace yawning fissures, there clusters of
+somber pits; now you mark where the lava is bent and corrugated in
+swelling ridges and domes, again where it breaks into a rough mass of
+loose blocks. Tufts of grass grow far apart here and there and small
+bushes of hardy sage, but they have a singed appearance and can do
+little to hide the blackness. Deserts are charming to those who know
+how to see them—all kinds of bogs, barrens, and heathy moors; but the
+Modoc Lava Beds have for me an uncanny look. As I gazed the purple
+deepened over all the landscape. Then fell the gloaming, making
+everything still more forbidding and mysterious. Then, darkness like
+death.
+
+Next morning the crisp, sunshiny air made even the Modoc landscape less
+hopeless, and we ventured down the bluff to the edge of the Lava Beds.
+Just at the foot of the bluff we came to a square enclosed by a stone
+wall. This is a graveyard where lie buried thirty soldiers, most of
+whom met their fate out in the Lava Beds, as we learn by the boards
+marking the graves—a gloomy place to die in, and deadly-looking even
+without Modocs. The poor fellows that lie here deserve far more pity
+than they have ever received. Picking our way over the strange ridges
+and hollows of the beds, we soon came to a circular flat about twenty
+yards in diameter, on the shore of the lake, where the comparative
+smoothness of the lava and a few handfuls of soil have caused the grass
+tufts to grow taller. This is where General Canby was slain while
+seeking to make peace with the treacherous Modocs.
+
+Two or three miles farther on is the main stronghold of the Modocs,
+held by them so long and defiantly against all the soldiers that could
+be brought to the attack. Indians usually choose to hide in tall grass
+and bush and behind trees, where they can crouch and glide like
+panthers, without casting up defenses that would betray their
+positions; but the Modoc castle is in the rock. When the Yosemite
+Indians made raids on the settlers of the lower Merced, they withdrew
+with their spoils into Yosemite Valley; and the Modocs boasted that in
+case of war they had a stone house into which no white man could come
+as long as they cared to defend it. Yosemite was not held for a single
+day against the pursuing troops; but the Modocs held their fort for
+months, until, weary of being hemmed in, they chose to withdraw.
+
+It consists of numerous redoubts formed by the unequal subsidence of
+portions of the lava flow, and a complicated network of redans
+abundantly supplied with salient and re-entering angles, being united
+each to the other and to the redoubts by a labyrinth of open and
+covered corridors, some of which expand at intervals into spacious
+caverns, forming as a whole the most complete natural Gibraltar I ever
+saw. Other castles scarcely less strong are connected with this by
+subterranean passages known only to the Indians, while the unnatural
+blackness of the rock out of which Nature has constructed these
+defenses, and the weird, inhuman physiognomy of the whole region are
+well calculated to inspire terror.
+
+Deadly was the task of storming such a place. The breech-loading rifles
+of the Indians thrust through chinks between the rocks were ready to
+pick off every soldier who showed himself for a moment, while the
+Indians lay utterly invisible. They were familiar with byways both over
+and under ground, and could at any time sink suddenly out of sight like
+squirrels among the loose boulders. Our bewildered soldiers heard them
+shooting, now before, now behind them, as they glided from place to
+place through fissures and subterranean passes, all the while as
+invisible as Gyges wearing his magic ring. To judge from the few I have
+seen, Modocs are not very amiable-looking people at best. When,
+therefore, they were crawling stealthily in the gloomy caverns, unkempt
+and begrimed and with the glare of war in their eyes, they must have
+seemed very demons of the volcanic pit.
+
+Captain Jack’s cave is one of the many somber cells of the castle. It
+measures twenty-five or thirty feet in diameter at the entrance, and
+extends but a short distance in a horizontal direction. The floor is
+littered with the bones of the animals slaughtered for food during the
+war. Some eager archaeologist may hereafter discover this cabin and
+startle his world by announcing another of the Stone Age caves. The sun
+shines freely into its mouth, and graceful bunches of grass and
+eriogonums and sage grow about it, doing what they can toward its
+redemption from degrading associations and making it beautiful.
+
+Where the lava meets the lake there are some fine curving bays,
+beautifully embroidered with rushes and polygonums, a favorite resort
+of waterfowl. On our return, keeping close along shore, we caused a
+noisy plashing and beating of wings among cranes and geese. The ducks,
+less wary, kept their places, merely swimming in and out through
+openings in the rushes, rippling the glassy water, and raising spangles
+in their wake. The countenance of the lava beds became less and less
+forbidding. Tufts of pale grasses, relieved on the jet rocks, looked
+like ornaments on a mantel, thick-furred mats of emerald mosses
+appeared in damp spots next the shore, and I noticed one tuft of small
+ferns. From year to year in the kindly weather the beds are thus
+gathering beauty—beauty for ashes.
+
+Returning to Sheep Rock and following the old emigrant road, one is
+soon back again beneath the snows and shadows of Shasta, and the Ash
+Creek and McCloud Glaciers come into view on the east side of the
+mountain. They are broad, rugged, crevassed cloudlike masses of
+down-grinding ice, pouring forth streams of muddy water as measures of
+the work they are doing in sculpturing the rocks beneath them; very
+unlike the long, majestic glaciers of Alaska that riverlike go winding
+down the valleys through the forests to the sea. These, with a few
+others as yet nameless, are lingering remnants of once great glaciers
+that occupied the cañons now taken by the rivers, and in a few
+centuries will, under present conditions, vanish altogether.
+
+The rivers of the granite south half of the Sierra are outspread on the
+peaks in a shining network of small branches, that divide again and
+again into small dribbling, purling, oozing threads drawing their
+sources from the snow and ice of the surface. They seldom sink out of
+sight, save here and there in the moraines or glaciers, or, early in
+the season, beneath the banks and bridges of snow, soon to issue again.
+But in the north half, laden with rent and porous lava, small tributary
+streams are rare, and the rivers, flowing for a time beneath the sky of
+rock, at length burst forth into the light in generous volume from
+seams and caverns, filtered, cool, and sparkling, as if their bondage
+in darkness, safe from the vicissitudes of the weather in their youth,
+were only a blessing.
+
+Only a very small portion of the water derived from the melting ice and
+snow of Shasta flows down its flanks on the surface. Probably
+ninety-nine per cent of it is at once absorbed and drained away beneath
+the porous lava-folds of the mountain to gush forth, filtered and pure,
+in the form of immense springs, so large, some of them, that they give
+birth to rivers that start on their journey beneath the sun, full-grown
+and perfect without any childhood. Thus the Shasta River issues from a
+large lake-like spring in Shasta Valley, and about two thirds of the
+volume of the McCloud gushes forth in a grand spring on the east side
+of the mountain, a few miles back from its immediate base.
+
+To find the big spring of the McCloud, or “Mud Glacier,” which you will
+know by its size (it being the largest on the east side), you make your
+way through sunny, parklike woods of yellow pine, and a shaggy growth
+of chaparral, and come in a few hours to the river flowing in a gorge
+of moderate depth, cut abruptly down into the lava plain. Should the
+volume of the stream where you strike it seem small, then you will know
+that you are above the spring; if large, nearly equal to its volume at
+its confluence with the Pitt River, then you are below it; and in
+either case have only to follow the river up or down until you come to
+it.
+
+Under certain conditions you may hear the roar of the water rushing
+from the rock at a distance of half a mile, or even more; or you may
+not hear it until within a few rods. It comes in a grand, eager gush
+from a horizontal seam in the face of the wall of the river gorge in
+the form of a partially interrupted sheet nearly seventy-five yards in
+width, and at a height above the riverbed of about forty feet, as
+nearly as I could make out without the means of exact measurement. For
+about fifty yards this flat current is in one unbroken sheet, and flows
+in a lacework of plashing, upleaping spray over boulders that are clad
+in green silky algae and water mosses to meet the smaller part of the
+river, which takes its rise farther up. Joining the river at right
+angles to its course, it at once swells its volume to three times its
+size above the spring.
+
+The vivid green of the boulders beneath the water is very striking, and
+colors the entire stream with the exception of the portions broken into
+foam. The color is chiefly due to a species of algae which seems common
+in springs of this sort. That any kind of plant can hold on and grow
+beneath the wear of so boisterous a current seems truly wonderful, even
+after taking into consideration the freedom of the water from cutting
+drift, and the constance of its volume and temperature throughout the
+year. The temperature is about 45 degrees, and the height of the river
+above the sea is here about three thousand feet. Asplenium, epilobium,
+heuchera, hazel, dogwood, and alder make a luxurious fringe and
+setting; and the forests of Douglas spruce along the banks are the
+finest I have ever seen in the Sierra.
+
+From the spring you may go with the river—a fine traveling
+companion—down to the sportsman’s fishing station, where, if you are
+getting hungry, you may replenish your stores; or, bearing off around
+the mountain by Huckleberry Valley, complete your circuit without
+interruption, emerging at length from beneath the outspread arms of the
+sugar pine at Strawberry Valley, with all the new wealth and health
+gathered in your walk; not tired in the least, and only eager to repeat
+the round.
+
+Tracing rivers to their fountains makes the most charming of travels.
+As the life-blood of the landscapes, the best of the wilderness comes
+to their banks, and not one dull passage is found in all their eventful
+histories. Tracing the McCloud to its highest springs, and over the
+divide to the fountains of Fall River, near Fort Crook, thence down
+that river to its confluence with the Pitt, on from there to the
+volcanic region about Lassen’s Butte, through the Big Meadows among the
+sources of the Feather River, and down through forests of sugar pine to
+the fertile plains of Chico—this is a glorious saunter and imposes no
+hardship. Food may be had at moderate intervals, and the whole circuit
+forms one ever-deepening, broadening stream of enjoyment.
+
+Fall River is a very remarkable stream. It is only about ten miles
+long, and is composed of springs, rapids, and falls—springs beautifully
+shaded at one end of it, a showy fall one hundred and eighty feet high
+at the other, and a rush of crystal rapids between. The banks are
+fringed with rubus, rose, plum cherry, spiraea, azalea, honeysuckle,
+hawthorn, ash, alder, elder, aster, goldenrod, beautiful grasses,
+sedges, rushes, mosses, and ferns with fronds as large as the leaves of
+palms—all in the midst of a richly forested landscape. Nowhere within
+the limits of California are the forests of yellow pine so extensive
+and exclusive as on the headwaters of the Pitt. They cover the
+mountains and all the lower slopes that border the wide, open valleys
+which abound there, pressing forward in imposing ranks, seemingly the
+hardiest and most firmly established of all the northern coniferae.
+
+The volcanic region about Lassen’s Butte I have already in part
+described. Miles of its flanks are dotted with hot springs, many of
+them so sulphurous and boisterous and noisy in their boiling that they
+seem inclined to become geysers like those of the Yellowstone.
+
+The ascent of Lassen’s Butte is an easy walk, and the views from the
+summit are extremely telling. Innumerable lakes and craters surround
+the base; forests of the charming Williamson spruce fringe lake and
+crater alike; the sunbeaten plains to east and west make a striking
+show, and the wilderness of peaks and ridges stretch indefinitely away
+on either hand. The lofty, icy Shasta, towering high above all, seems
+but an hour’s walk from you, though the distance in an air-line is
+about sixty miles.
+
+The “Big Meadows” lie near the foot of Lassen’s Butte, a beautiful
+spacious basin set in the heart of the richly forested mountains,
+scarcely surpassed in the grandeur of its surroundings by Tahoe. During
+the Glacial Period it was a mer de glace, then a lake, and now a level
+meadow shining with bountiful springs and streams. In the number and
+size of its big spring fountains it excels even Shasta. One of the
+largest that I measured forms a lakelet nearly a hundred yards in
+diameter, and, in the generous flood it sends forth offers one of the
+most telling symbols of Nature’s affluence to be found in the
+mountains.
+
+The great wilds of our country, once held to be boundless and
+inexhaustible, are being rapidly invaded and overrun in every
+direction, and everything destructible in them is being destroyed. How
+far destruction may go it is not easy to guess. Every landscape, low
+and high, seems doomed to be trampled and harried. Even the sky is not
+safe from scath—blurred and blackened whole summers together with the
+smoke of fires that devour the woods.
+
+The Shasta region is still a fresh unspoiled wilderness, accessible and
+available for travelers of every kind and degree. Would it not then be
+a fine thing to set it apart like the Yellowstone and Yosemite as a
+National Park for the welfare and benefit of all mankind, preserving
+its fountains and forests and all its glad life in primeval beauty?
+Very little of the region can ever be more valuable for any other
+use—certainly not for gold nor for grain. No private right or interest
+need suffer, and thousands yet unborn would come from far and near and
+bless the country for its wise and benevolent forethought.
+
+
+
+
+VI. The City of the Saints[8]
+
+
+The mountains rise grandly round about this curious city, the Zion of
+the new Saints, so grandly that the city itself is hardly visible. The
+Wahsatch Range, snow-laden and adorned with glacier-sculpted peaks,
+stretches continuously along the eastern horizon, forming the boundary
+of the Great Salt Lake Basin; while across the valley of the Jordan
+southwestward from here, you behold the Oquirrh Range, about as snowy
+and lofty as the Wahsatch. To the northwest your eye skims the blue
+levels of the great lake, out of the midst of which rise island
+mountains, and beyond, at a distance of fifty miles, is seen the
+picturesque wall of the lakeside mountains blending with the lake and
+the sky.
+
+The glacial developments of these superb ranges are sharply sculptured
+peaks and crests, with ample wombs between them where the ancient snows
+of the glacial period were collected and transformed into ice, and
+ranks of profound shadowy cañons, while moraines commensurate with the
+lofty fountains extend into the valleys, forming far the grandest
+series of glacial monuments I have yet seen this side of the Sierra.
+
+In beginning this letter I meant to describe the city, but in the
+company of these noble old mountains, it is not easy to bend one’s
+attention upon anything else. Salt Lake cannot be called a very
+beautiful town, neither is there anything ugly or repulsive about it.
+From the slopes of the Wahsatch foothills, or old lake benches, toward
+Fort Douglas it is seen to occupy the sloping gravelly delta of City
+Creek, a fine, hearty stream that comes pouring from the snows of the
+mountains through a majestic glacial cañon; and it is just where this
+stream comes forth into the light on the edge of the valley of the
+Jordan that the Mormons have built their new Jerusalem.
+
+At first sight there is nothing very marked in the external appearance
+of the town excepting its leafiness. Most of the houses are veiled with
+trees, as if set down in the midst of one grand orchard; and seen at a
+little distance they appear like a field of glacier boulders overgrown
+with aspens, such as one often meets in the upper valleys of the
+California Sierra, for only the angular roofs are clearly visible.
+
+[Illustration: IN THE WAHSATCH MOUNTAINS]
+
+Perhaps nineteen twentieths of the houses are built of bluish-gray
+adobe bricks, and are only one or two stories high, forming fine
+cottage homes which promise simple comfort within. They are set well
+back from the street, leaving room for a flower garden, while almost
+every one has a thrifty orchard at the sides and around the back. The
+gardens are laid out with great simplicity, indicating love for flowers
+by people comparatively poor, rather than deliberate efforts of the
+rich for showy artistic effects. They are like the pet gardens of
+children, about as artless and humble, and harmonize with the low
+dwellings to which they belong. In almost every one you find daisies,
+and mint, and lilac bushes, and rows of plain English tulips. Lilacs
+and tulips are the most characteristic flowers, and nowhere have I seen
+them in greater perfection. As Oakland is pre-eminently a city of
+roses, so is this Mormon Saints’ Rest a city of lilacs and tulips. The
+flowers, at least, are saintly, and they are surely loved. Scarce a
+home, however obscure, is without them, and the simple, unostentatious
+manner in which they are planted and gathered in pots and boxes about
+the windows shows how truly they are prized.
+
+The surrounding commons, the marshy levels of the Jordan, and dry,
+gravelly lake benches on the slopes of the Wahsatch foothills are now
+gay with wild flowers, chief among which are a species of phlox, with
+an abundance of rich pink corollas, growing among sagebrush in showy
+tufts, and a beautiful papilionaceous plant, with silky leaves and
+large clusters of purple flowers, banner, wings, and keel exquisitely
+shaded, a mertensia, hydrophyllum, white boragewort, orthocarpus,
+several species of violets, and a tall scarlet gilia. It is delightful
+to see how eagerly all these are sought after by the children, both
+boys and girls. Every day that I have gone botanizing I have met groups
+of little Latter-Days with their precious bouquets, and at such times
+it was hard to believe the dark, bloody passages of Mormon history.
+
+But to return to the city. As soon as City Creek approaches its upper
+limit its waters are drawn off right and left, and distributed in brisk
+rills, one on each side of every street, the regular slopes of the
+delta upon which the city is built being admirably adapted to this
+system of street irrigation. These streams are all pure and sparkling
+in the upper streets, but, as they are used to some extent as sewers,
+they soon manifest the consequence of contact with civilization, though
+the speed of their flow prevents their becoming offensive, and little
+Saints not over particular may be seen drinking from them everywhere.
+
+The streets are remarkably wide and the buildings low, making them
+appear yet wider than they really are. Trees are planted along the
+sidewalks—elms, poplars, maples, and a few catalpas and hawthorns; yet
+they are mostly small and irregular, and nowhere form avenues half so
+leafy and imposing as one would be led to expect. Even in the business
+streets there is but little regularity in the buildings—now a row of
+plain adobe structures, half store, half dwelling, then a high
+mercantile block of red brick or sandstone, and again a row of adobe
+cottages nestled back among apple trees. There is one immense store
+with its sign upon the roof, in letters big enough to be read miles
+away, “Z.C.M.I.” (Zion’s Co-operative Mercantile Institution), while
+many a small, codfishy corner grocery bears the legend “Holiness to the
+Lord, Z.C.M.I.” But little evidence will you find in this Zion, with
+its fifteen thousand souls, of great wealth, though many a Saint is
+seeking it as keenly as any Yankee Gentile. But on the other hand,
+searching throughout all the city, you will not find any trace of
+squalor or extreme poverty.
+
+Most of the women I have chanced to meet, especially those from the
+country, have a weary, repressed look, as if for the sake of their
+religion they were patiently carrying burdens heavier than they were
+well able to bear. But, strange as it must seem to Gentiles, the many
+wives of one man, instead of being repelled from one another by
+jealousy, appear to be drawn all the closer together, as if the real
+marriage existed between the wives only. Groups of half a dozen or so
+may frequently be seen on the streets in close conversation, looking as
+innocent and unspeculative as a lot of heifers, while the masculine
+Saints pass them by as if they belonged to a distinct species. In the
+Tabernacle last Sunday, one of the elders of the church, in discoursing
+upon the good things of life, the possessions of Latter-Day Saints,
+enumerated fruitful fields, horses, cows, wives, and implements, the
+wives being placed as above, between the cows and implements, without
+receiving any superior emphasis.
+
+Polygamy, as far as I have observed, exerts a more degrading influence
+upon husbands that upon wives. The love of the latter finds expression
+in flowers and children, while the former seem to be rendered incapable
+of pure love of anything. The spirit of Mormonism is intensely
+exclusive and un-American. A more withdrawn, compact, sealed-up body of
+people could hardly be found on the face of the earth than is gathered
+here, notwithstanding railroads, telegraphs, and the penetrating lights
+that go sifting through society everywhere in this revolutionary,
+question-asking century. Most of the Mormons I have met seem to be in a
+state of perpetual apology, which can hardly be fully accounted for by
+Gentile attacks. At any rate it is unspeakably offensive to any free
+man.
+
+“We Saints,” they are continually saying, “are not as bad as we are
+called. We don’t murder those who differ with us, but rather treat them
+with all charity. You may go through our town night or day and no harm
+shall befall you. Go into our houses and you will be well used. We are
+as glad as you are that Lee was punished,” etc. While taking a saunter
+the other evening we were overtaken by a characteristic Mormon, “an
+umble man,” who made us a very deferential salute and then walked on
+with us about half a mile. We discussed whatsoever of Mormon doctrines
+came to mind with American freedom, which he defended as best he could,
+speaking in an excited but deprecating tone. When hard pressed he would
+say: “I don’t understand these deep things, but the elders do. I’m only
+an umble tradesman.” In taking leave he thanked us for the pleasure of
+our querulous conversation, removed his hat, and bowed lowly in a sort
+of Uriah Heep manner, and then went to his humble home. How many humble
+wives it contained, we did not learn.
+
+Fine specimens of manhood are by no means wanting, but the number of
+people one meets here who have some physical defect or who attract
+one’s attention by some mental peculiarity that manifests itself
+through the eyes, is astonishingly great in so small a city. It would
+evidently be unfair to attribute these defects to Mormonism, though
+Mormonism has undoubtedly been the magnet that elected and drew these
+strange people together from all parts of the world.
+
+But however “the peculiar doctrines” and “peculiar practices” of
+Mormonism have affected the bodies and the minds of the old Saints, the
+little Latter-Day boys and girls are as happy and natural as possible,
+running wild, with plenty of good hearty parental indulgence, playing,
+fighting, gathering flowers in delightful innocence; and when we
+consider that most of the parents have been drawn from the thickly
+settled portion of the Old World, where they have long suffered the
+repression of hunger and hard toil, the Mormon children, “Utah’s best
+crop,” seem remarkably bright and promising.
+
+From children one passes naturally into the blooming wilderness, to the
+pure religion of sunshine and snow, where all the good and the evil of
+this strange people lifts and vanishes from the mind like mist from the
+mountains.
+
+
+
+
+VII. A Great Storm in Utah[9]
+
+
+Utah has just been blessed with one of the grandest storms I have ever
+beheld this side of the Sierra. The mountains are laden with fresh
+snow; wild streams are swelling and booming adown the cañons, and out
+in the valley of the Jordan a thousand rain-pools are gleaming in the
+sun.
+
+With reference to the development of fertile storms bearing snow and
+rain, the greater portion of the calendar springtime of Utah has been
+winter. In all the upper cañons of the mountains the snow is now from
+five to ten feet deep or more, and most of it has fallen since March.
+Almost every other day during the last three weeks small local storms
+have been falling on the Wahsatch and Oquirrh Mountains, while the
+Jordan Valley remained dry and sun-filled. But on the afternoon of
+Thursday, the 17th ultimo, wind, rain, and snow filled the whole basin,
+driving wildly over valley and plain from range to range, bestowing
+their benefactions in most cordial and harmonious storm-measures. The
+oldest Saints say they have never witnessed a more violent storm of
+this kind since the first settlement of Zion, and while the gale from
+the northwest, with which the storm began, was rocking their adobe
+walls, uprooting trees and darkening the streets with billows of dust
+and sand, some of them seemed inclined to guess that the terrible
+phenomenon was one of the signs of the times of which their preachers
+are so constantly reminding them, the beginning of the outpouring of
+the treasured wrath of the Lord upon the Gentiles for the killing of
+Joseph Smith. To me it seemed a cordial outpouring of Nature’s love;
+but it is easy to differ with salt Latter-Days in everything—storms,
+wives, politics, and religion.
+
+About an hour before the storm reached the city I was so fortunate as
+to be out with a friend on the banks of the Jordan enjoying the
+scenery. Clouds, with peculiarly restless and self-conscious gestures,
+were marshaling themselves along the mountain-tops, and sending out
+long, overlapping wings across the valley; and even where no cloud was
+visible, an obscuring film absorbed the sunlight, giving rise to a
+cold, bluish darkness. Nevertheless, distant objects along the
+boundaries of the landscape were revealed with wonderful distinctness
+in this weird, subdued, cloud-sifted light. The mountains, in
+particular, with the forests on their flanks, their mazy lacelike
+cañons, the wombs of the ancient glaciers, and their marvelous
+profusion of ornate sculpture, were most impressively manifest. One
+would fancy that a man might be clearly seen walking on the snow at a
+distance of twenty or thirty miles.
+
+While we were reveling in this rare, ungarish grandeur, turning from
+range to range, studying the darkening sky and listening to the still
+small voices of the flowers at our feet, some of the denser clouds came
+down, crowning and wreathing the highest peaks and dropping long gray
+fringes whose smooth linear structure showed that snow was beginning to
+fall. Of these partial storms there were soon ten or twelve, arranged
+in two rows, while the main Jordan Valley between them lay as yet in
+profound calm. At 4:30 p.m. a dark brownish cloud appeared close down
+on the plain towards the lake, extending from the northern extremity of
+the Oquirrh Range in a northeasterly direction as far as the eye could
+reach. Its peculiar color and structure excited our attention without
+enabling us to decide certainly as to its character, but we were not
+left long in doubt, for in a few minutes it came sweeping over the
+valley in a wild uproar, a torrent of wind thick with sand and dust,
+advancing with a most majestic front, rolling and overcombing like a
+gigantic sea-wave. Scarcely was it in plain sight ere it was upon us,
+racing across the Jordan, over the city, and up the slopes of the
+Wahsatch, eclipsing all the landscapes in its course—the bending trees,
+the dust streamers, and the wild onrush of everything movable giving it
+an appreciable visibility that rendered it grand and inspiring.
+
+This gale portion of the storm lasted over an hour, then down came the
+blessed rain and the snow all through the night and the next day, the
+snow and rain alternating and blending in the valley. It is long since
+I have seen snow coming into a city. The crystal flakes falling in the
+foul streets was a pitiful sight.
+
+Notwithstanding the vaunted refining influences of towns, purity of all
+kinds—pure hearts, pure streams, pure snow—must here be exposed to
+terrible trials. City Creek, coming from its high glacial fountains,
+enters the streets of this Mormon Zion pure as an angel, but how does
+it leave it? Even roses and lilies in gardens most loved are tainted
+with a thousand impurities as soon as they unfold. I heard Brigham
+Young in the Tabernacle the other day warning his people that if they
+did not mend their manners angels would not come into their houses,
+though perchance they might be sauntering by with little else to do
+than chat with them. Possibly there may be Salt Lake families
+sufficiently pure for angel society, but I was not pleased with the
+reception they gave the small snow angels that God sent among them the
+other night. Only the children hailed them with delight. The old
+Latter-Days seemed to shun them. I should like to see how Mr. Young,
+the Lake Prophet, would meet such messengers.
+
+But to return to the storm. Toward the evening of the 18th it began to
+wither. The snowy skirts of the Wahsatch Mountains appeared beneath the
+lifting fringes of the clouds, and the sun shone out through colored
+windows, producing one of the most glorious after-storm effects I ever
+witnessed. Looking across the Jordan, the gray sagey slopes from the
+base of the Oquirrh Mountains were covered with a thick, plushy cloth
+of gold, soft and ethereal as a cloud, not merely tinted and gilded
+like a rock with autumn sunshine, but deeply muffled beyond
+recognition. Surely nothing in heaven, nor any mansion of the Lord in
+all his worlds, could be more gloriously carpeted. Other portions of
+the plain were flushed with red and purple, and all the mountains and
+the clouds above them were painted in corresponding loveliness. Earth
+and sky, round and round the entire landscape, was one ravishing
+revelation of color, infinitely varied and interblended.
+
+I have seen many a glorious sunset beneath lifting storm clouds on the
+mountains, but nothing comparable with this. I felt as if new-arrived
+in some other far-off world. The mountains, the plains, the sky, all
+seemed new. Other experiences seemed but to have prepared me for this,
+as souls are prepared for heaven. To describe the colors on a single
+mountain would, if it were possible at all, require many a
+volume—purples, and yellows, and delicious pearly grays divinely toned
+and interblended, and so richly put on one seemed to be looking down
+through the ground as through a sky. The disbanding clouds lingered
+lovingly about the mountains, filling the cañons like tinted wool,
+rising and drooping around the topmost peaks, fondling their rugged
+bases, or, sailing alongside, trailed their lustrous fringes through
+the pines as if taking a last view of their accomplished work. Then
+came darkness, and the glorious day was done.
+
+This afternoon the Utah mountains and valleys seem to belong to our own
+very world again. They are covered with common sunshine. Down here on
+the banks of the Jordan, larks and redwings are swinging on the rushes;
+the balmy air is instinct with immortal life; the wild flowers, the
+grass, and the farmers’ grain are fresh as if, like the snow, they had
+come out of heaven, and the last of the angel clouds are fleeing from
+the mountains.
+
+
+
+
+VIII. Bathing in Salt Lake[10]
+
+
+When the north wind blows, bathing in Salt Lake is a glorious baptism,
+for then it is all wildly awake with waves, blooming like a prairie in
+snowy crystal foam. Plunging confidently into the midst of the grand
+uproar you are hugged and welcomed, and swim without effort, rocking
+and heaving up and down, in delightful rhythm, while the winds sing in
+chorus and the cool, fragrant brine searches every fiber of your body;
+and at length you are tossed ashore with a glad Godspeed, braced and
+salted and clean as a saint.
+
+The nearest point on the shoreline is distant about ten miles from Salt
+Lake City, and is almost inaccessible on account of the boggy character
+of the ground, but, by taking the Western Utah Railroad, at a distance
+of twenty miles you reach what is called Lake Point, where the shore is
+gravelly and wholesome and abounds in fine retreating bays that seem to
+have been made on purpose for bathing. Here the northern peaks of the
+Oquirrh Range plant their feet in the clear blue brine, with fine
+curbing insteps, leaving no space for muddy levels. The crystal
+brightness of the water, the wild flowers, and the lovely mountain
+scenery make this a favorite summer resort for pleasure and health
+seekers. Numerous excursion trains are run from the city, and parties,
+some of them numbering upwards of a thousand, come to bathe, and dance,
+and roam the flowery hillsides together.
+
+But at the time of my first visit in May, I fortunately found myself
+alone. The hotel and bathhouse, which form the chief improvements of
+the place, were sleeping in winter silence, notwithstanding the year
+was in full bloom. It was one of those genial sun-days when flowers and
+flies come thronging to the light, and birds sing their best. The
+mountain ranges, stretching majestically north and south, were piled
+with pearly cumuli, the sky overhead was pure azure, and the wind-swept
+lake was all aroll and aroar with whitecaps.
+
+I sauntered along the shore until I came to a sequestered cove, where
+buttercups and wild peas were blooming close down to the limit reached
+by the waves. Here, I thought, is just the place for a bath; but the
+breakers seemed terribly boisterous and forbidding as they came rolling
+up the beach, or dashed white against the rocks that bounded the cove
+on the east. The outer ranks, ever broken, ever builded, formed a
+magnificent rampart, sculptured and corniced like the hanging wall of a
+bergschrund, and appeared hopelessly insurmountable, however easily one
+might ride the swelling waves beyond. I feasted awhile on their beauty,
+watching their coming in from afar like faithful messengers, to tell
+their stories one by one; then I turned reluctantly away, to botanize
+and wait a calm. But the calm did not come that day, nor did I wait
+long. In an hour or two I was back again to the same little cove. The
+waves still sang the old storm song, and rose in high crystal walls,
+seemingly hard enough to be cut in sections, like ice.
+
+Without any definite determination I found myself undressed, as if some
+one else had taken me in hand; and while one of the largest waves was
+ringing out its message and spending itself on the beach, I ran out
+with open arms to the next, ducked beneath its breaking top, and got
+myself into right lusty relationship with the brave old lake. Away I
+sped in free, glad motion, as if, like a fish, I had been afloat all my
+life, now low out of sight in the smooth, glassy valleys, now bounding
+aloft on firm combing crests, while the crystal foam beat against my
+breast with keen, crisp clashing, as if composed of pure salt. I bowed
+to every wave, and each lifted me right royally to its shoulders,
+almost setting me erect on my feet, while they all went speeding by
+like living creatures, blooming and rejoicing in the brightness of the
+day, and chanting the history of their grand mountain home.
+
+A good deal of nonsense has been written concerning the difficulty of
+swimming in this heavy water. “One’s head would go down, and heels come
+up, and the acrid brine would burn like fire.” I was conscious only of
+a joyous exhilaration, my limbs seemingly heeding their own business,
+without any discomfort or confusion; so much so, that without previous
+knowledge my experience on this occasion would not have led me to
+detect anything peculiar. In calm weather, however, the sustaining
+power of the water might probably be more marked. This was by far the
+most exciting and effective wave excursion I ever made this side of the
+Rocky Mountains; and when at its close I was heaved ashore among the
+sunny grasses and flowers, I found myself a new creature indeed, and
+went bounding along the beach with blood all aglow, reinforced by the
+best salts of the mountains, and ready for any race.
+
+Since the completion of the transcontinental and Utah railways, this
+magnificent lake in the heart of the continent has become as accessible
+as any watering-place on either coast; and I am sure that thousands of
+travelers, sick and well, would throng its shores every summer were its
+merits but half known. Lake Point is only an hour or two from the city,
+and has hotel accommodations and a steamboat for excursions; and then,
+besides the bracing waters, the climate is delightful. The mountains
+rise into the cool sky furrowed with cañons almost yosemitic in
+grandeur, and filled with a glorious profusion of flowers and trees.
+Lovers of science, lovers of wildness, lovers of pure rest will find
+here more than they may hope for.
+
+As for the Mormons one meets, however their doctrines be regarded, they
+will be found as rich in human kindness as any people in all our broad
+land, while the dark memories that cloud their earlier history will
+vanish from the mind as completely as when we bathe in the fountain
+azure of the Sierra.
+
+
+
+
+IX. Mormon Lilies[11]
+
+
+Lilies are rare in Utah; so also are their companions the ferns and
+orchids, chiefly on account of the fiery saltness of the soil and
+climate. You may walk the deserts of the Great Basin in the bloom time
+of the year, all the way across from the snowy Sierra to the snowy
+Wahsatch, and your eyes will be filled with many a gay malva, and
+poppy, and abronia, and cactus, but you may not see a single true lily,
+and only a very few liliaceous plants of any kind. Not even in the
+cool, fresh glens of the mountains will you find these favorite
+flowers, though some of these desert ranges almost rival the Sierra in
+height. Nevertheless, in the building and planting of this grand
+Territory the lilies were not forgotten. Far back in the dim geologic
+ages, when the sediments of the old seas were being gathered and
+outspread in smooth sheets like leaves of a book, and when these
+sediments became dry land, and were baked and crumbled into the sky as
+mountain ranges; when the lava-floods of the Fire Period were being
+lavishly poured forth from innumerable rifts and craters; when the ice
+of the Glacial Period was laid like a mantle over every mountain and
+valley—throughout all these immensely protracted periods, in the throng
+of these majestic operations, Nature kept her flower children in mind.
+She considered the lilies, and, while planting the plains with sage and
+the hills with cedar, she has covered at least one mountain with golden
+erythroniums and fritillarias as its crowning glory, as if willing to
+show what she could do in the lily line even here.
+
+Looking southward from the south end of Salt Lake, the two northmost
+peaks of the Oquirrh Range are seen swelling calmly into the cool sky
+without any marked character, excepting only their snow crowns, and a
+few weedy-looking patches of spruce and fir, the simplicity of their
+slopes preventing their real loftiness from being appreciated. Gray,
+sagey plains circle around their bases, and up to a height of a
+thousand feet or more their sides are tinged with purple, which I
+afterwards found is produced by a close growth of dwarf oak just coming
+into leaf. Higher you may detect faint tintings of green on a gray
+ground, from young grasses and sedges; then come the dark pine woods
+filling glacial hollows, and over all the smooth crown of snow.
+
+While standing at their feet, the other day, shortly after my memorable
+excursion among the salt waves of the lake, I said: “Now I shall have
+another baptism. I will bathe in the high sky, among cool wind-waves
+from the snow.” From the more southerly of the two peaks a long ridge
+comes down, bent like a bow, one end in the hot plains, the other in
+the snow of the summit. After carefully scanning the jagged towers and
+battlements with which it is roughened, I determined to make it my way,
+though it presented but a feeble advertisement of its floral wealth.
+This apparent barrenness, however, made no great objection just then,
+for I was scarce hoping for flowers, old or new, or even for fine
+scenery. I wanted in particular to learn what the Oquirrh rocks were
+made of, what trees composed the curious patches of forest; and,
+perhaps more than all, I was animated by a mountaineer’s eagerness to
+get my feet into the snow once more, and my head into the clear sky,
+after lying dormant all winter at the level of the sea.
+
+But in every walk with Nature one receives far more than he seeks. I
+had not gone more than a mile from Lake Point ere I found the way
+profusely decked with flowers, mostly compositae and purple
+leguminosae, a hundred corollas or more to the square yard, with a
+corresponding abundance of winged blossoms above them, moths and
+butterflies, the leguminosae of the insect kingdom. This floweriness is
+maintained with delightful variety all the way up through rocks and
+bushes to the snow—violets, lilies, gilias, oenotheras, wallflowers,
+ivesias, saxifrages, smilax, and miles of blooming bushes, chiefly
+azalea, honeysuckle, brier rose, buckthorn, and eriogonum, all meeting
+and blending in divine accord.
+
+Two liliaceous plants in particular, _Erythronium grandiflorum_ and
+_Fritillaria pudica_, are marvelously beautiful and abundant. Never
+before, in all my walks, have I met so glorious a throng of these fine
+showy liliaceous plants. The whole mountainside was aglow with them,
+from a height of fifty-five hundred feet to the very edge of the snow.
+Although remarkably fragile, both in form and in substance, they are
+endowed with plenty of deep-seated vitality, enabling them to grow in
+all kinds of places—down in leafy glens, in the lee of wind-beaten
+ledges, and beneath the brushy tangles of azalea, and oak, and prickly
+roses—everywhere forming the crowning glory of the flowers. If the
+neighboring mountains are as rich in lilies, then this may well be
+called the Lily Range.
+
+After climbing about a thousand feet above the plain I came to a
+picturesque mass of rock, cropping up through the underbrush on one of
+the steepest slopes of the mountain. After examining some tufts of
+grass and saxifrage that were growing in its fissured surface, I was
+going to pass it by on the upper side, where the bushes were more open,
+but a company composed of the two lilies I have mentioned were blooming
+on the lower side, and though they were as yet out of sight, I suddenly
+changed my mind and went down to meet them, as if attracted by the
+ringing of their bells. They were growing in a small, nestlike opening
+between the rock and the bushes, and both the erythronium and the
+fritillaria were in full flower. These were the first of the species I
+had seen, and I need not try to tell the joy they made. They are both
+lowly plants,—lowly as violets,—the tallest seldom exceeding six inches
+in height, so that the most searching winds that sweep the mountains
+scarce reach low enough to shake their bells.
+
+The fritillaria has five or six linear, obtuse leaves, put on
+irregularly near the bottom of the stem, which is usually terminated by
+one large bell-shaped flower; but its more beautiful companion, the
+erythronium, has two radical leaves only, which are large and oval, and
+shine like glass. They extend horizontally in opposite directions, and
+form a beautiful glossy ground, over which the one large down-looking
+flower is swung from a simple stem, the petals being strongly recurved,
+like those of _Lilium superbum_. Occasionally a specimen is met which
+has from two to five flowers hung in a loose panicle. People oftentimes
+travel far to see curious plants like the carnivorous darlingtonia, the
+fly-catcher, the walking fern, etc. I hardly know how the little bells
+I have been describing would be regarded by seekers of this class, but
+every true flower-lover who comes to consider these Utah lilies will
+surely be well rewarded, however long the way.
+
+Pushing on up the rugged slopes, I found many delightful
+seclusions—moist nooks at the foot of cliffs, and lilies in every one
+of them, not growing close together like daisies, but well apart, with
+plenty of room for their bells to swing free and ring. I found hundreds
+of them in full bloom within two feet of the snow. In winter only the
+bulbs are alive, sleeping deep beneath the ground, like field mice in
+their nests; then the snow-flowers fall above them, lilies over lilies,
+until the spring winds blow, and these winter lilies wither in turn;
+then the hiding erythroniums and fritillarias rise again, responsive to
+the first touches of the sun.
+
+I noticed the tracks of deer in many places among the lily gardens, and
+at the height of about seven thousand feet I came upon the fresh trail
+of a flock of wild sheep, showing that these fine mountaineers still
+flourish here above the range of Mormon rifles. In the planting of her
+wild gardens, Nature takes the feet and teeth of her flocks into
+account, and makes use of them to trim and cultivate, and keep them in
+order, as the bark and buds of the tree are tended by woodpeckers and
+linnets.
+
+The evergreen woods consist, as far as I observed, of two species, a
+spruce and a fir, standing close together, erect and arrowy in a
+thrifty, compact growth; but they are quite small, say from six to
+twelve or fourteen inches in diameter, and bout forty feet in height.
+Among their giant relatives of the Sierra the very largest would seem
+mere saplings. A considerable portion of the south side of the mountain
+is planted with a species of aspen, called “quaking asp” by the
+wood-choppers. It seems to be quite abundant on many of the eastern
+mountains of the basin, and forms a marked feature of their upper
+forests.
+
+Wading up the curves of the summit was rather toilsome, for the snow,
+which was softened by the blazing sun, was from ten to twenty feet
+deep, but the view was one of the most impressively sublime I ever
+beheld. Snowy, ice-sculptured ranges bounded the horizon all around,
+while the great lake, eighty miles long and fifty miles wide, lay fully
+revealed beneath a lily sky. The shorelines, marked by a ribbon of
+white sand, were seen sweeping around many a bay and promontory in
+elegant curves, and picturesque islands rising to mountain heights, and
+some of them capped with pearly cumuli. And the wide prairie of water
+glowing in the gold and purple of evening presented all the colors that
+tint the lips of shells and the petals of lilies—the most beautiful
+lake this side of the Rocky Mountains. Utah Lake, lying thirty-five
+miles to the south, was in full sight also, and the river Jordan, which
+links the two together, may be traced in silvery gleams throughout its
+whole course.
+
+Descending the mountain, I followed the windings of the main central
+glen on the north, gathering specimens of the cones and sprays of the
+evergreens, and most of the other new plants I had met; but the lilies
+formed the crowning glory of my bouquet—the grandest I had carried in
+many a day. I reached the hotel on the lake about dusk with all my
+fresh riches, and my first mountain ramble in Utah was accomplished. On
+my way back to the city, the next day, I met a grave old Mormon with
+whom I had previously held some Latter-Day discussions. I shook my big
+handful of lilies in his face and shouted, “Here are the true saints,
+ancient and Latter-Day, enduring forever!” After he had recovered from
+his astonishment he said, “They are nice.”
+
+The other liliaceous plants I have met in Utah are two species of
+zigadenas, _Fritillaria atropurpurea, Calochortus Nuttallii_, and three
+or four handsome alliums. One of these lilies, the calochortus, several
+species of which are well known in California as the “Mariposa tulips,”
+has received great consideration at the hands of the Mormons, for to it
+hundreds of them owe their lives. During the famine years between 1853
+and 1858, great destitution prevailed, especially in the southern
+settlements, on account of drouth and grasshoppers, and throughout one
+hungry winter in particular, thousands of the people subsisted chiefly
+on the bulbs of the tulips, called “sego” by the Indians, who taught
+them its use.
+
+[Illustration: SEGO LILIES
+(_Calochortus Nuttallii_)]
+
+Liliaceous women and girls are rare among the Mormons. They have seen
+too much hard, repressive toil to admit of the development of lily
+beauty either in form or color. In general they are thickset, with
+large feet and hands, and with sun-browned faces, often curiously
+freckled like the petals of _Fritillaria atropurpurea_. They are fruit
+rather than flower—good brown bread. But down in the San Pitch Valley
+at Gunnison, I discovered a genuine lily, happily named Lily Young. She
+is a granddaughter of Brigham Young, slender and graceful, with
+lily-white cheeks tinted with clear rose, She was brought up in the old
+Salt Lake Zion House, but by some strange chance has been transplanted
+to this wilderness, where she blooms alone, the “Lily of San Pitch.”
+Pitch is an old Indian, who, I suppose, pitched into the settlers and
+thus acquired fame enough to give name to the valley. Here I feel
+uneasy about the name of this lily, for the compositors have a perverse
+trick of making me say all kinds of absurd things wholly unwarranted by
+plain copy, and I fear that the “Lily of San Pitch” will appear in
+print as the widow of Sam Patch. But, however this may be, among my
+memories of this strange land, that Oquirrh mountain, with its golden
+lilies, will ever rise in clear relief, and associated with them will
+always be the Mormon lily of San Pitch.
+
+
+
+
+X. The San Gabriel Valley[12]
+
+
+The sun valley of San Gabriel is one of the brightest spots to be found
+in all our bright land, and most of its brightness is wildness—wild
+south sunshine in a basin rimmed about with mountains and hills.
+Cultivation is not wholly wanting, for here are the choices of all the
+Los Angeles orange groves, but its glorious abundance of ripe sun and
+soil is only beginning to be coined into fruit. The drowsy bits of
+cultivation accomplished by the old missionaries and the more recent
+efforts of restless Americans are scarce as yet visible, and when
+comprehended in general views form nothing more than mere freckles on
+the smooth brown bosom of the Valley.
+
+I entered the sunny south half a month ago, coming down along the cool
+sea, and landing at Santa Monica. An hour’s ride over stretches of
+bare, brown plain, and through cornfields and orange groves, brought me
+to the handsome, conceited little town of Los Angeles, where one finds
+Spanish adobes and Yankee shingles meeting and overlapping in very
+curious antagonism. I believe there are some fifteen thousand people
+here, and some of their buildings are rather fine, but the gardens and
+the sky interested me more. A palm is seen here and there poising its
+royal crown in the rich light, and the banana, with its magnificent
+ribbon leaves, producing a marked tropical effect—not semi-tropical, as
+they are so fond of saying here, while speaking of their fruits.
+Nothing I have noticed strikes me as semi, save the brusque little bits
+of civilization with which the wilderness is checkered. These are
+semi-barbarous or less; everything else in the region has a most
+exuberant pronounced wholeness. The city held me but a short time, for
+the San Gabriel Mountains were in sight, advertising themselves grandly
+along the northern sky, and I was eager to make my way into their
+midst.
+
+At Pasadena I had the rare good fortune to meet my old friend Doctor
+Congar, with whom I had studied chemistry and mathematics fifteen years
+ago. He exalted San Gabriel above all other inhabitable valleys, old
+and new, on the face of the globe. “I have rambled,” said he, “ever
+since we left college, tasting innumerable climates, and trying the
+advantages offered by nearly every new State and Territory. Here I have
+made my home, and here I shall stay while I live. The geographical
+position is exactly right, soil and climate perfect, and everything
+that heart can wish comes to our efforts—flowers, fruits, milk and
+honey, and plenty of money. And there,” he continued, pointing just
+beyond his own precious possessions, “is a block of land that is for
+sale; buy it and be my neighbor; plant five acres with orange trees,
+and by the time your last mountain is climbed their fruit will be your
+fortune.” He then led my down the valley, through the few famous old
+groves in full bearing, and on the estate of Mr. Wilson showed me a
+ten-acre grove eighteen years old, the last year’s crop from which was
+sold for twenty thousand dollars. “There,” said he, with triumphant
+enthusiasm, “what do you think of that? Two thousand dollars per acre
+per annum for land worth only one hundred dollars.”
+
+[Illustration: SAN GABRIEL VALLEY]
+
+The number of orange trees planted to the acre is usually from
+forty-nine to sixty-nine; they then stand from twenty-five to thirty
+feet apart each way, and, thus planted, thrive and continue fruitful to
+a comparatively great age. J. DeBarth Shorb, an enthusiastic believer
+in Los Angeles and oranges, says, “We have trees on our property fully
+forty years old, and eighteen inches in diameter, that are still
+vigorous and yielding immense crops of fruit, although they are only
+twenty feet apart.” Seedlings are said to begin to bear remunerative
+crops in their tenth year, but by superior cultivation this long
+unproductive period my be somewhat lessened, while trees from three to
+five years old may be purchased from the nurserymen, so that the
+newcomer who sets out an orchard may begin to gather fruit by the fifth
+or sixth year. When first set out, and for some years afterward, the
+trees are irrigated by making rings of earth around them, which are
+connected with small ditches, through which the water is distributed to
+each tree. Or, where the ground is nearly level, the whole surface is
+flooded from time to time as required. From 309 trees, twelve years old
+from the seed, DeBarth Shorb says that in the season of 1874 he
+obtained an average of $20.50 per tree, or $1435 per acre, over and
+above the cost of transportation to San Francisco, commission on sales,
+etc. He considers $1000 per acre a fair average at present prices,
+after the trees have reached the age of twelve years. The average price
+throughout the county for the last five years has been about $20 or $25
+per thousand; and, inasmuch as the area adapted to orange culture is
+limited, it is hoped that this price may not greatly fall for many
+years.
+
+The lemon and lime are also cultivated here to some extent, and
+considerable attention is now being given to the Florida banana, and
+the olive, almond, and English walnut. But the orange interest heavily
+overshadows every other, while vines have of late years been so
+unremunerative they are seldom mentioned.
+
+This is pre-eminently a fruit land, but the fame of its productions has
+in some way far outrun the results that have as yet been attained.
+Experiments have been tried, and good beginnings made, but the number
+of really valuable, well-established groves is scarce as one to fifty,
+compared with the newly planted. Many causes, however, have combined of
+late to give the business a wonderful impetus, and new orchards are
+being made every day, while the few old groves, aglow with golden
+fruit, are the burning and shining lights that direct and energize the
+sanguine newcomers.
+
+After witnessing the bad effect of homelessness, developed to so
+destructive an extent in California, it would reassure every lover of
+his race to see the hearty home-building going on here and the blessed
+contentment that naturally follows it. Travel-worn pioneers, who have
+been tossed about like boulders in flood time, are thronging hither as
+to a kind of a terrestrial heaven, resolved to rest. They build, and
+plant, and settle, and so come under natural influences. When a man
+plants a tree he plants himself. Every root is an anchor, over which he
+rests with grateful interest, and becomes sufficiently calm to feel the
+joy of living. He necessarily makes the acquaintance of the sun and the
+sky. Favorite trees fill his mind, and, while tending them like
+children, and accepting the benefits they bring, he becomes himself a
+benefactor. He sees down through the brown common ground teeming with
+colored fruits, as if it were transparent, and learns to bring them to
+the surface. What he wills he can raise by true enchantment. With slips
+and rootlets, his magic wands, they appear at his bidding. These, and
+the seeds he plants, are his prayers, and by them brought into right
+relations with God, he works grander miracles every day than ever were
+written.
+
+The Pasadena Colony, located on the southwest corner of the well-known
+San Pasqual Rancho, is scarce three years old, but it is growing
+rapidly, like a pet tree, and already forms one of the best
+contributions to culture yet accomplished in the county. It now numbers
+about sixty families, mostly drawn from the better class of vagabond
+pioneers, who, during their rolling-stone days have managed to gather
+sufficient gold moss to purchase from ten to forty acres of land. They
+are perfectly hilarious in their newly found life, work like ants in a
+sunny noonday, and, looking far into the future, hopefully count their
+orange chicks ten years or more before they are hatched; supporting
+themselves in the meantime on the produce of a few acres of alfalfa,
+together with garden vegetables and the quick-growing fruits, such as
+figs, grapes, apples, etc., the whole reinforced by the remaining
+dollars of their land purchase money. There is nothing more remarkable
+in the character of the colony than the literary and scientific taste
+displayed. The conversation of most I have met here is seasoned with a
+smack of mental ozone, Attic salt, which struck me as being rare among
+the tillers of California soil. People of taste and money in search of
+a home would do well to prospect the resources of this aristocratic
+little colony.
+
+If we look now at these southern valleys in general, it will appear at
+once that with all their advantages they lie beyond the reach of poor
+settlers, not only on account of the high price of irrigable land—one
+hundred dollars per acre and upwards—but because of the scarcity of
+labor. A settler with three or four thousand dollars would be penniless
+after paying for twenty acres of orange land and building ever so plain
+a house, while many years would go by ere his trees yielded an income
+adequate to the maintenance of his family.
+
+Nor is there anything sufficiently reviving in the fine climate to form
+a reliable inducement for very sick people. Most of this class, from
+all I can learn, come here only to die, and surely it is better to die
+comfortably at home, avoiding the thousand discomforts of travel, at a
+time when they are so heard to bear. It is indeed pitiful to see so
+many invalids, already on the verge of the grave, making a painful way
+to quack climates, hoping to change age to youth, and the darkening
+twilight of their day to morning. No such health-fountain has been
+found, and this climate, fine as it is, seems, like most others, to be
+adapted for well people only. From all I could find out regarding its
+influence upon patients suffering from pulmonary difficulties, it is
+seldom beneficial to any great extent in advanced cases. The cold sea
+winds are less fatal to this class of sufferers than the corresponding
+winds further north, but, notwithstanding they are tempered on their
+passage inland over warm, dry ground, they are still more or less
+injurious.
+
+The summer climate of the fir and pine woods of the Sierra Nevada
+would, I think, be found infinitely more reviving; but because these
+woods have not been advertised like patent medicines, few seem to think
+of the spicy, vivifying influences that pervade their fountain
+freshness and beauty.
+
+
+
+
+XI. The San Gabriel Mountains[13]
+
+
+After saying so much for human culture in my last, perhaps I may now be
+allowed a word for wildness—the wildness of this southland, pure and
+untamable as the sea.
+
+In the mountains of San Gabriel, overlooking the lowland vines and
+fruit groves, Mother Nature is most ruggedly, thornily savage. Not even
+in the Sierra have I ever made the acquaintance of mountains more
+rigidly inaccessible. The slopes are exceptionally steep and insecure
+to the foot of the explorer, however great his strength or skill may
+be, but thorny chaparral constitutes their chief defense. With the
+exception of little park and garden spots not visible in comprehensive
+views, the entire surface is covered with it, from the highest peaks to
+the plain. It swoops into every hollow and swells over every ridge,
+gracefully complying with the varied topography, in shaggy,
+ungovernable exuberance, fairly dwarfing the utmost efforts of human
+culture out of sight and mind.
+
+But in the very heart of this thorny wilderness, down in the dells, you
+may find gardens filled with the fairest flowers, that any child would
+love, and unapproachable linns lined with lilies and ferns, where the
+ousel builds its mossy hut and sings in chorus with the white falling
+water. Bears, also, and panthers, wolves, wildcats; wood rats,
+squirrels, foxes, snakes, and innumerable birds, all find grateful
+homes here, adding wildness to wildness in glorious profusion and
+variety.
+
+Where the coast ranges and the Sierra Nevada come together we find a
+very complicated system of short ranges, the geology and topography of
+which is yet hidden, and many years of laborious study must be given
+for anything like a complete interpretation of them. The San Gabriel is
+one or more of these ranges, forty or fifty miles long, and half as
+broad, extending from the Cajon Pass on the east, to the Santa Monica
+and Santa Susanna ranges on the west. San Antonio, the dominating peak,
+rises towards the eastern extremity of the range to a height of about
+six thousand feet, forming a sure landmark throughout the valley and
+all the way down to the coast, without, however, possessing much
+striking individuality. The whole range, seen from the plain, with the
+hot sun beating upon its southern slopes, wears a terribly forbidding
+aspect. There is nothing of the grandeur of snow, or glaciers, or deep
+forests, to excite curiosity or adventure; no trace of gardens or
+waterfalls. From base to summit all seems gray, barren, silent—dead,
+bleached bones of mountains, overgrown with scrubby bushes, like gray
+moss. But all mountains are full of hidden beauty, and the next day
+after my arrival at Pasadena I supplied myself with bread and eagerly
+set out to give myself to their keeping.
+
+On the first day of my excursion I went only as far as the mouth of
+Eaton Cañon, because the heat was oppressive, and a pair of new shoes
+were chafing my feet to such an extent that walking began to be
+painful. While looking for a camping ground among the boulder beds of
+the cañon, I came upon a strange, dark man of doubtful parentage. He
+kindly invited me to camp with him, and led me to his little hut. All
+my conjectures as to his nationality failed, and no wonder, since his
+father was Irish and mother Spanish, a mixture not often met even in
+California. He happened to be out of candles, so we sat in the dark
+while he gave me a sketch of his life, which was exceedingly
+picturesque. Then he showed me his plans for the future. He was going
+to settle among these cañon boulders, and make money, and marry a
+Spanish woman. People mine for irrigating water along the foothills as
+for gold. He is now driving a prospecting tunnel into a spur of the
+mountains back of his cabin. “My prospect is good,” he said, “and if I
+strike a strong flow, I shall soon be worth five or ten thousand
+dollars. That flat out there,” he continued, referring to a small,
+irregular patch of gravelly detritus that had been sorted out and
+deposited by Eaton Creek during some flood season, “is large enough for
+a nice orange grove, and, after watering my own trees, I can sell water
+down the valley; and then the hillside back of the cabin will do for
+vines, and I can keep bees, for the white sage and black sage up the
+mountains is full of honey. You see, I’ve got a good thing.” All this
+prospective affluence in the sunken, boulder-choked flood-bed of Eaton
+Creek! Most home-seekers would as soon think of settling on the summit
+of San Antonio.
+
+Half an hour’s easy rambling up the cañon brought me to the foot of
+“The Fall,” famous throughout the valley settlements as the finest yet
+discovered in the range. It is a charming little thing, with a voice
+sweet as a songbird’s, leaping some thirty-five or forty feet into a
+round, mirror pool. The cliff back of it and on both sides is
+completely covered with thick, furry mosses, and the white fall shines
+against the green like a silver instrument in a velvet case. Here come
+the Gabriel lads and lassies from the commonplace orange groves, to
+make love and gather ferns and dabble away their hot holidays in the
+cool pool. They are fortunate in finding so fresh a retreat so near
+their homes. It is the Yosemite of San Gabriel. The walls, though not
+of the true Yosemite type either in form or sculpture, rise to a height
+of nearly two thousand feet. Ferns are abundant on all the rocks within
+reach of the spray, and picturesque maples and sycamores spread a
+grateful shade over a rich profusion of wild flowers that grow among
+the boulders, from the edge of the pool a mile or more down the
+dell-like bottom of the valley, the whole forming a charming little
+poem of wildness—the vestibule of these shaggy mountain temples.
+
+The foot of the fall is about a thousand feet above the level of the
+sea, and here climbing begins. I made my way out of the valley on the
+west side, followed the ridge that forms the western rim of the Eaton
+Basin to the summit of one of the principal peaks, thence crossed the
+middle of the basin, forcing a way over its many subordinate ridges,
+and out over the eastern rim, and from first to last during three days
+spent in this excursion, I had to contend with the richest, most
+self-possessed and uncompromising chaparral I have ever enjoyed since
+first my mountaineering began.
+
+For a hundred feet or so the ascent was practicable only by means of
+bosses of the club moss that clings to the rock. Above this the ridge
+is weathered away to a slender knife-edge for a distance of two or
+three hundred yards, and thence to the summit it is a bristly mane of
+chaparral. Here and there small openings occur, commanding grand views
+of the valley and beyond to the ocean. These are favorite outlooks and
+resting places for bears, wolves, and wildcats. In the densest places I
+came upon woodrat villages whose huts were from four to eight feet
+high, built in the same style of architecture as those of the muskrats.
+
+The day was nearly done. I reached the summit and I had time to make
+only a hasty survey of the topography of the wild basin now outspread
+maplike beneath, and to drink in the rare loveliness of the sunlight
+before hastening down in search of water. Pushing through another mile
+of chaparral, I emerged into one of the most beautiful parklike groves
+of live oak I ever saw. The ground beneath was planted only with
+aspidiums and brier roses. At the foot of the grove I came to the dry
+channel of one of the tributary streams, but, following it down a short
+distance, I descried a few specimens of the scarlet mimulus; and I was
+assured that water was near. I found about a bucketful in a granite
+bowl, but it was full of leaves and beetles, making a sort of brown
+coffee that could be rendered available only by filtering it through
+sand and charcoal. This I resolved to do in case the night came on
+before I found better. Following the channel a mile farther down to its
+confluence with another, larger tributary, I found a lot of boulder
+pools, clear as crystal, and brimming full, linked together by little
+glistening currents just strong enough to sing. Flowers in full bloom
+adorned the banks, lilies ten feet high, and luxuriant ferns arching
+over one another in lavish abundance, while a noble old live oak spread
+its rugged boughs over all, forming one of the most perfect and most
+secluded of Nature’s gardens. Here I camped, making my bed on smooth
+cobblestones.
+
+Next morning, pushing up the channel of a tributary that takes its rise
+on Mount San Antonio, I passed many lovely gardens watered by oozing
+currentlets, every one of which had lilies in them in the full pomp of
+bloom, and a rich growth of ferns, chiefly woodwardias and aspidiums
+and maidenhairs; but toward the base of the mountain the channel was
+dry, and the chaparral closed over from bank to bank, so that I was
+compelled to creep more than a mile on hands and knees.
+
+In one spot I found an opening in the thorny sky where I could stand
+erect, and on the further side of the opening discovered a small pool.
+“Now, _here_,” I said, “I must be careful in creeping, for the birds of
+the neighborhood come here to drink, and the rattlesnakes come here to
+catch them.” I then began to cast my eye along the channel, perhaps
+instinctively feeling a snaky atmosphere, and finally discovered one
+rattler between my feet. But there was a bashful look in his eye, and a
+withdrawing, deprecating kink in his neck that showed plainly as words
+could tell that he would not strike, and only wished to be let alone. I
+therefore passed on, lifting my foot a little higher than usual, and
+left him to enjoy his life in this his own home.
+
+My next camp was near the heart of the basin, at the head of a grand
+system of cascades from ten to two hundred feet high, one following the
+other in close succession and making a total descent of nearly
+seventeen hundred feet. The rocks above me leaned over in a threatening
+way and were full of seams, making the camp a very unsafe one during an
+earthquake.
+
+Next day the chaparral, in ascending the eastern rim of the basin, was,
+if possible, denser and more stubbornly bayoneted than ever. I followed
+bear trails, where in some places I found tufts of their hair that had
+been pulled out in squeezing a way through; but there was much of a
+very interesting character that far overpaid all my pains. Most of the
+plants are identical with those of the Sierra, but there are quite a
+number of Mexican species. One coniferous tree was all I found. This is
+a spruce of a species new to me, _Douglasii macrocarpa_.[14]
+
+My last camp was down at the narrow, notched bottom of a dry channel,
+the only open way for the life in the neighborhood. I therefore lay
+between two fires, built to fence out snakes and wolves.
+
+From the summit of the eastern rim I had a glorious view of the valley
+out to the ocean, which would require a whole book for its description.
+My bread gave out a day before reaching the settlements, but I felt all
+the fresher and clearer for the fast.
+
+
+
+
+XII. Nevada Farms[15]
+
+
+To the farmer who comes to this thirsty land from beneath rainy skies,
+Nevada seems one vast desert, all sage and sand, hopelessly
+irredeemable now and forever. And this, under present conditions, is
+severely true. For notwithstanding it has gardens, grainfields, and
+hayfields generously productive, these compared with the arid stretches
+of valley and plain, as beheld in general views from the mountain tops,
+are mere specks lying inconspicuously here and there, in out-of-the-way
+places, often thirty or forty miles apart.
+
+In leafy regions, blessed with copious rains, we learn to measure the
+productive capacity of the soil by its natural vegetation. But this
+rule is almost wholly inapplicable here, for, notwithstanding its
+savage nakedness, scarce at all veiled by a sparse growth of sage and
+linosyris[16], the desert soil of the Great Basin is as rich in the
+elements that in rainy regions rise and ripen into food as that of any
+other State in the Union. The rocks of its numerous mountain ranges
+have been thoroughly crushed and ground by glaciers, thrashed and
+vitalized by the sun, and sifted and outspread in lake basins by
+powerful torrents that attended the breaking-up of the glacial period,
+as if in every way Nature had been making haste to prepare the land for
+the husbandman. Soil, climate, topographical conditions, all that the
+most exacting could demand, are present, but one thing, water, is
+wanting. The present rainfall would be wholly inadequate for
+agriculture, even if it were advantageously distributed over the
+lowlands, while in fact the greater portion is poured out on the
+heights in sudden and violent thundershowers called “cloud-bursts,” the
+waters of which are fruitlessly swallowed up in sandy gulches and
+deltas a few minutes after their first boisterous appearance. The
+principal mountain chains, trending nearly north and south, parallel
+with the Sierra and the Wahsatch, receive a good deal of snow during
+winter, but no great masses are stored up as fountains for large
+perennial streams capable of irrigating considerable areas. Most of it
+is melted before the end of May and absorbed by moraines and gravelly
+taluses, which send forth small rills that slip quietly down the upper
+cañons through narrow strips of flowery verdure, most of them sinking
+and vanishing before they reach the base of their fountain ranges.
+Perhaps not one in ten of the whole number flow out into the open
+plains, not a single drop reaches the sea, and only a few are large
+enough to irrigate more than one farm of moderate size.
+
+It is upon these small outflowing rills that most of the Nevada ranches
+are located, lying countersunk beneath the general level, just where
+the mountains meet the plains, at an average elevation of five thousand
+feet above sea level. All the cereals and garden vegetables thrive
+here, and yield bountiful crops. Fruit, however, has been, as yet,
+grown successfully in only a few specially favored spots.
+
+Another distinct class of ranches are found sparsely distributed along
+the lowest portions of the plains, where the ground is kept moist by
+springs, or by narrow threads of moving water called rivers, fed by
+some one or more of the most vigorous of the mountain rills that have
+succeeded in making their escape from the mountains. These are mostly
+devoted to the growth of wild hay, though in some the natural meadow
+grasses and sedges have been supplemented by timothy and alfalfa; and
+where the soil is not too strongly impregnated with salts, some grain
+is raised. Reese River Valley, Big Smoky Valley, and White River Valley
+offer fair illustrations of this class. As compared with the foothill
+ranches, they are larger and less inconspicuous, as they lie in the
+wide, unshadowed levels of the plains—wavy-edged flecks of green in a
+wilderness of gray.
+
+Still another class equally well defined, both as to distribution and
+as to products, is restricted to that portion of western Nevada and the
+eastern border of California which lies within the redeeming influences
+of California waters. Three of the Sierra rivers descend from their icy
+fountains into the desert like angels of mercy to bless Nevada. These
+are the Walker, Carson, and Truckee; and in the valleys through which
+they flow are found by far the most extensive hay and grain fields
+within the bounds of the State. Irrigating streams are led off right
+and left through innumerable channels, and the sleeping ground,
+starting at once into action, pours forth its wealth without stint.
+
+But notwithstanding the many porous fields thus fertilized,
+considerable portions of the waters of all these rivers continue to
+reach their old deathbeds in the desert, indicating that in these salt
+valleys there still is room for coming farmers. In middle and eastern
+Nevada, however, every rill that I have seen in a ride of three
+thousand miles, at all available for irrigation, has been claimed and
+put to use.
+
+It appears, therefore, that under present conditions the limit of
+agricultural development in the dry basin between the Sierra and the
+Wahsatch has been already approached, a result caused not alone by
+natural restrictions as to the area capable of development, but by the
+extraordinary stimulus furnished by the mines to agricultural effort.
+The gathering of gold and silver, hay and barley, have gone on
+together. Most of the mid-valley bogs and meadows, and foothill rills
+capable of irrigating from ten to fifty acres, were claimed more than
+twenty years ago.
+
+A majority of these pioneer settlers are plodding Dutchmen, living
+content in the back lanes and valleys of Nature; but the high price of
+all kinds of farm products tempted many of even the keen Yankee
+prospectors, made wise in California, to bind themselves down to this
+sure kind of mining. The wildest of wild hay, made chiefly of carices
+and rushes, was sold at from two to three hundred dollars per ton on
+ranches. The same kind of hay is still worth from fifteen to forty
+dollars per ton, according to the distance from mines and comparative
+security from competition. Barley and oats are from forty to one
+hundred dollars a ton, while all sorts of garden products find ready
+sale at high prices.
+
+With rich mine markets and salubrious climate, the Nevada farmer can
+make more money by loose, ragged methods than the same class of farmers
+in any other State I have yet seen, while the almost savage isolation
+in which they live seems grateful to them. Even in those cases where
+the advent of neighbors brings no disputes concerning water rights and
+ranges, they seem to prefer solitude, most of them having been elected
+from adventurers from California—the pioneers of pioneers. The passing
+stranger, however, is always welcomed and supplied with the best the
+home affords, and around the fireside, while he smokes his pipe, very
+little encouragement is required to bring forth the story of the
+farmer’s life—hunting, mining, fighting, in the early Indian times,
+etc. Only the few who are married hope to return to California to
+educate their children, and the ease with which money is made renders
+the fulfillment of these hopes comparatively sure.
+
+After dwelling thus long on the farms of this dry wonderland, my
+readers may be led to fancy them of more importance as compared with
+the unbroken fields of Nature than they really are. Making your way
+along any of the wide gray valleys that stretch from north to south,
+seldom will your eye be interrupted by a single mark of cultivation.
+The smooth lake-like ground sweeps on indefinitely, growing more and
+more dim in the glowing sunshine, while a mountain range from eight to
+ten thousand feet high bounds the view on either hand. No singing
+water, no green sod, no moist nook to rest in—mountain and valley alike
+naked and shadowless in the sun-glare; and though, perhaps, traveling a
+well-worn road to a gold or silver mine, and supplied with repeated
+instructions, you can scarce hope to find any human habitation from day
+to day, so vast and impressive is the hot, dusty, alkaline wildness.
+
+But after riding some thirty or forty miles, and while the sun may be
+sinking behind the mountains, you come suddenly upon signs of
+cultivation. Clumps of willows indicate water, and water indicates a
+farm. Approaching more nearly, you discover what may be a patch of
+barley spread out unevenly along the bottom of a flood bed, broken
+perhaps, and rendered less distinct by boulder piles and the fringing
+willows of a stream. Speedily you can confidently say that the grain
+patch is surely such; its ragged bounds become clear; a sand-roofed
+cabin comes to view littered with sun-cracked implements and with an
+outer girdle of potato, cabbage, and alfalfa patches.
+
+The immense expanse of mountain-girt valleys, on the edges of which
+these hidden ranches lie, make even the largest fields seem comic in
+size. The smallest, however, are by no means insignificant in a
+pecuniary view. On the east side of the Toyabe Range I discovered a
+jolly Irishman who informed me that his income from fifty acres,
+reinforced by a sheep range on the adjacent hills, was from seven to
+nine thousand dollars per annum. His irrigating brook is about four
+feet wide and eight inches deep, flowing about two miles per hour.
+
+On Duckwater Creek, Nye County, Mr. Irwin has reclaimed a tule swamp
+several hundred acres in extent, which is now chiefly devoted to
+alfalfa. On twenty-five acres he claims to have raised this year
+thirty-seven tons of barley. Indeed, I have not yet noticed a meager
+crop of any kind in the State. Fruit alone is conspicuously absent.
+
+On the California side of the Sierra grain will not ripen at much
+greater elevation than four thousand feet above sea level. The valleys
+of Nevada lie at a height of from four to six thousand feet, and both
+wheat and barley ripen, wherever water may be had, up to seven thousand
+feet. The harvest, of course, is later as the elevation increases. In
+the valleys of the Carson and Walker Rivers, four thousand feet above
+the sea, the grain harvest is about a month later than in California.
+In Reese River Valley, six thousand feet, it begins near the end of
+August. Winter grain ripens somewhat earlier, while occasionally one
+meets a patch of barley in some cool, high-lying cañon that will not
+mature before the middle of September.
+
+Unlike California, Nevada will probably be always richer in gold and
+silver than in grain. Utah farmers hope to change the climate of the
+east side of the basin by prayer, and point to the recent rise in the
+waters of the Great Salt Lake as a beginning of moister times. But
+Nevada’s only hope, in the way of any considerable increase in
+agriculture, is from artesian wells. The experiment has been tried on a
+small scale with encouraging success. But what is now wanted seems to
+be the boring of a few specimen wells of a large size out in the main
+valleys. The encouragement that successful experiments of this kind
+would give to emigration seeking farms forms an object well worthy the
+attention of the Government. But all that California farmers in the
+grand central valley require is the preservation of the forests and the
+wise distribution of the glorious abundance of water from the snow
+stored on the west flank of the Sierra.
+
+Whether any considerable area of these sage plains will ever thus be
+made to blossom in grass and wheat, experience will show. But in the
+mean time Nevada is beautiful in her wildness, and if tillers of the
+soil can thus be brought to see that possibly Nature may have other
+uses even for _rich_ soils besides the feeding of human beings, then
+will these foodless “deserts” have taught a fine lesson.
+
+
+
+
+XIII. Nevada Forests[17]
+
+
+When the traveler from California has crossed the Sierra and gone a
+little way down the eastern flank, the woods come to an end about as
+suddenly and completely as if, going westward, he had reached the
+ocean. From the very noblest forests in the world he emerges into free
+sunshine and dead alkaline lake-levels. Mountains are seen beyond,
+rising in bewildering abundance, range beyond range. But however
+closely we have been accustomed to associate forests and mountains,
+these always present a singularly barren aspect, appearing gray and
+forbidding and shadeless, like heaps of ashes dumped from the blazing
+sky.
+
+But wheresoever we may venture to go in all this good world, nature is
+ever found richer and more beautiful than she seems, and nowhere may
+you meet with more varied and delightful surprises than in the byways
+and recesses of this sublime wilderness—lovely asters and abronias on
+the dusty plains, rose-gardens around the mountain wells, and resiny
+woods, where all seemed so desolate, adorning the hot foothills as well
+as the cool summits, fed by cordial and benevolent storms of rain and
+hail and snow; all of these scant and rare as compared with the
+immeasurable exuberance of California, but still amply sufficient
+throughout the barest deserts for a clear manifestation of God’s love.
+
+Though Nevada is situated in what is called the “Great Basin,” no less
+than sixty-five groups and chains of mountains rise within the bounds
+of the State to a height of about from eight thousand to thirteen
+thousand feet above the level of the sea, and as far as I have
+observed, every one of these is planted, to some extent, with
+coniferous trees, though it is only upon the highest that we find
+anything that may fairly be called a forest. The lower ranges and the
+foothills and slopes of the higher are roughened with small scrubby
+junipers and nut pines, while the dominating peaks, together with the
+ridges that swing in grand curves between them, are covered with a
+closer and more erect growth of pine, spruce, and fir, resembling the
+forests of the Eastern States both as to size and general botanical
+characteristics. Here is found what is called the heavy timber, but the
+tallest and most fully developed sections of the forests, growing down
+in sheltered hollows on moist moraines, would be regarded in California
+only as groves of saplings, and so, relatively, they are, for by
+careful calculation we find that more than a thousand of these trees
+would be required to furnish as much timber as may be obtained from a
+single specimen of our Sierra giants.
+
+The height of the timberline in eastern Nevada, near the middle of the
+Great Basin, is about eleven thousand feet above sea level;
+consequently the forests, in a dwarfed, storm-beaten condition, pass
+over the summits of nearly every range in the State, broken here and
+there only by mechanical conditions of the surface rocks. Only three
+mountains in the State have as yet come under my observation whose
+summits rise distinctly above the treeline. These are Wheeler’s Peak,
+twelve thousand three hundred feet high, Mount Moriah, about twelve
+thousand feet, and Granite Mountain, about the same height, all of
+which are situated near the boundary line between Nevada and Utah
+Territory.
+
+In a rambling mountaineering journey of eighteen hundred miles across
+the state, I have met nine species of coniferous trees,—four pines, two
+spruces, two junipers, and one fir,—about one third the number found in
+California. By far the most abundant and interesting of these is the
+_Pinus Fremontiana_,[18] or nut pine. In the number of individual trees
+and extent of range this curious little conifer surpasses all the
+others combined. Nearly every mountain in the State is planted with it
+from near the base to a height of from eight thousand to nine thousand
+feet above the sea. Some are covered from base to summit by this one
+species, with only a sparse growth of juniper on the lower slopes to
+break the continuity of these curious woods, which, though dark-looking
+at a little distance, are yet almost shadeless, and without any hint of
+the dark glens and hollows so characteristic of other pine woods. Tens
+of thousands of acres occur in one continuous belt. Indeed, viewed
+comprehensively, the entire State seems to be pretty evenly divided
+into mountain ranges covered with nut pines and plains covered with
+sage—now a swath of pines stretching from north to south, now a swath
+of sage; the one black, the other gray; one severely level, the other
+sweeping on complacently over ridge and valley and lofty crowning dome.
+
+The real character of a forest of this sort would never be guessed by
+the inexperienced observer. Traveling across the sage levels in the
+dazzling sunlight, you gaze with shaded eyes at the mountains rising
+along their edges, perhaps twenty miles away, but no invitation that is
+at all likely to be understood is discernible. Every mountain, however
+high it swells into the sky, seems utterly barren. Approaching nearer,
+a low brushy growth is seen, strangely black in aspect, as though it
+had been burned. This is a nut pine forest, the bountiful orchard of
+the red man. When you ascend into its midst you find the ground beneath
+the trees, and in the openings also, nearly naked, and mostly rough on
+the surface—a succession of crumbling ledges of lava, limestones,
+slate, and quartzite, coarsely strewn with soil weathered from them.
+Here and there occurs a bunch of sage or linosyris, or a purple aster,
+or a tuft of dry bunch-grass.
+
+[Illustration: THE SAGE LEVELS OF THE NEVADA DESERT]
+
+The harshest mountainsides, hot and waterless, seem best adapted to the
+nut pine’s development. No slope is too steep, none too dry; every
+situation seems to be gratefully chosen, if only it be sufficiently
+rocky and firm to afford secure anchorage for the tough, grasping
+roots. It is a sturdy, thickset little tree, usually about fifteen feet
+high when full grown, and about as broad as high, holding its knotty
+branches well out in every direction in stiff zigzags, but turning them
+gracefully upward at the ends in rounded bosses. Though making so dark
+a mass in the distance, the foliage is a pale grayish green, in stiff,
+awl-shaped fascicles. When examined closely these round needles seem
+inclined to be two-leaved, but they are mostly held firmly together, as
+if to guard against evaporation. The bark on the older sections is
+nearly black, so that the boles and branches are clearly traced against
+the prevailing gray of the mountains on which they delight to dwell.
+
+The value of this species to Nevada is not easily overestimated. It
+furnishes fuel, charcoal, and timber for the mines, and, together with
+the enduring juniper, so generally associated with it, supplies the
+ranches with abundance of firewood and rough fencing. Many a square
+mile has already been denuded in supplying these demands, but, so great
+is the area covered by it, no appreciable loss has as yet been
+sustained. It is pretty generally known that this tree yields edible
+nuts, but their importance and excellence as human food is infinitely
+greater than is supposed. In fruitful seasons like this one, the pine
+nut crop of Nevada is, perhaps, greater than the entire wheat crop of
+California, concerning which so much is said and felt throughout the
+food markets of the world.
+
+The Indians alone appreciate this portion of Nature’s bounty and
+celebrate the harvest home with dancing and feasting. The cones, which
+are a bright grass-green in color and about two inches long by one and
+a half in diameter, are beaten off with poles just before the scales
+open, gathered in heaps of several bushels, and lightly scorched by
+burning a thin covering of brushwood over them. The resin, with which
+the cones are bedraggled, is thus burned off, the nuts slightly
+roasted, and the scales made to open. Then they are allowed to dry in
+the sun, after which the nuts are easily thrashed out and are ready to
+be stored away. They are about half an inch long by a quarter of an
+inch in diameter, pointed at the upper end, rounded at the base, light
+brown in general color, and handsomely dotted with purple, like birds’
+eggs. The shells are thin, and may be crushed between the thumb and
+finger. The kernels are white and waxy-looking, becoming brown by
+roasting, sweet and delicious to every palate, and are eaten by birds,
+squirrels, dogs, horses, and man. When the crop is abundant the Indians
+bring in large quantities for sale; they are eaten around every
+fireside in the State, and oftentimes fed to horses instead of barley.
+
+Looking over the whole continent, none of Nature’s bounties seems to me
+so great as this in the way of food, none so little appreciated.
+Fortunately for the Indians and wild animals that gather around
+Nature’s board, this crop is not easily harvested in a monopolizing
+way. If it could be gathered like wheat the whole would be carried away
+and dissipated in towns, leaving the brave inhabitants of these wilds
+to starve.
+
+Long before the harvest time, which is in September and October, the
+Indians examine the trees with keen discernment, and inasmuch as the
+cones require two years to mature from the first appearance of the
+little red rosettes of the fertile flowers, the scarcity or abundance
+of the crop may be predicted more than a year in advance. Squirrels,
+and worms, and Clarke crows, make haste to begin the harvest. When the
+crop is ripe the Indians make ready their long beating-poles; baskets,
+bags, rags, mats, are gotten together. The squaws out among the
+settlers at service, washing and drudging, assemble at the family huts;
+the men leave their ranch work; all, old and young, are mounted on
+ponies, and set off in great glee to the nut lands, forming cavalcades
+curiously picturesque. Flaming scarfs and calico skirts stream loosely
+over the knotty ponies, usually two squaws astride of each, with the
+small baby midgets bandaged in baskets slung on their backs, or
+balanced upon the saddle-bow, while the nut baskets and water jars
+project from either side, and the long beating-poles, like
+old-fashioned lances, angle out in every direction.
+
+Arrived at some central point already fixed upon, where water and grass
+is found, the squaws with baskets, the men with poles, ascend the
+ridges to the laden trees, followed by the children; beating begins
+with loud noise and chatter; the burs fly right and left, lodging
+against stones and sagebrush; the squaws and children gather them with
+fine natural gladness; smoke columns speedily mark the joyful scene of
+their labors as the roasting fires are kindled; and, at night,
+assembled in circles, garrulous as jays, the first grand nut feast
+begins. Sufficient quantities are thus obtained in a few weeks to last
+all winter.
+
+The Indians also gather several species of berries and dry them to vary
+their stores, and a few deer and grouse are killed on the mountains,
+besides immense numbers of rabbits and hares; but the pine-nuts are
+their main dependence—their staff of life, their bread.
+
+Insects also, scarce noticed by man, come in for their share of this
+fine bounty. Eggs are deposited, and the baby grubs, happy fellows,
+find themselves in a sweet world of plenty, feeding their way through
+the heart of the cone from one nut chamber to another, secure from rain
+and wind and heat, until their wings are grown and they are ready to
+launch out into the free ocean of air and light.
+
+
+
+
+XIV. Nevada’s Timber Belt[19]
+
+
+The pine woods on the tops of the Nevada mountains are already shining
+and blooming in winter snow, making a most blessedly refreshing
+appearance to the weary traveler down on the gray plains. During the
+fiery days of summer the whole of this vast region seems so perfectly
+possessed by the sun that the very memories of pine trees and snow are
+in danger of being burned away, leaving one but little more than dust
+and metal. But since these first winter blessings have come, the wealth
+and beauty of the landscapes have come fairly into view, and one is
+rendered capable of looking and seeing.
+
+The grand nut harvest is over, as far as the Indians are concerned,
+though perhaps less than one bushel in a thousand of the whole crop has
+been gathered. But the squirrels and birds are still busily engaged,
+and by the time that Nature’s ends are accomplished, every nut will
+doubtless have been put to use.
+
+All of the nine Nevada conifers mentioned in my last letter are also
+found in California, excepting only the Rocky Mountain spruce, which I
+have not observed westward of the Snake Range. So greatly, however,
+have they been made to vary by differences of soil and climate, that
+most of them appear as distinct species. Without seeming in any way
+dwarfed or repressed in habit, they nowhere develop to anything like
+California dimensions. A height of fifty feet and diameter of twelve or
+fourteen inches would probably be found to be above the average size of
+those cut for lumber. On the margin of the Carson and Humboldt Sink the
+larger sage bushes are called “heavy timber”; and to the settlers here
+any tree seems large enough for saw-logs.
+
+Mills have been built in the most accessible cañons of the higher
+ranges, and sufficient lumber of an inferior kind is made to supply
+most of the local demand. The principal lumber trees of Nevada are the
+white pine (_Pinus flexilis_), foxtail pine, and Douglas spruce, or
+“red pine,” as it is called here. Of these the first named is most
+generally distributed, being found on all the higher ranges throughout
+the State. In botanical characters it is nearly allied to the Weymouth,
+or white, pine of the Eastern States, and to the sugar and mountain
+pines of the Sierra. In open situations it branches near the ground and
+tosses out long down-curving limbs all around, often gaining in this
+way a very strikingly picturesque habit. It is seldom found lower than
+nine thousand feet above the level of the sea, but from this height it
+pushes upward over the roughest ledges to the extreme limit of tree
+growth—about eleven thousand feet.
+
+On the Hot Creek, White Pine, and Golden Gate ranges we find a still
+hardier and more picturesque species, called the foxtail pine, from its
+long dense leaf-tassels. About a foot or eighteen inches of the ends of
+the branches are densely packed with stiff outstanding needles, which
+radiate all around like an electric fox- or squirrel-tail. The needles
+are about an inch and a half long, slightly curved, elastic, and
+glossily polished, so that the sunshine sifting through them makes them
+burn with a fine silvery luster, while their number and elastic temper
+tell delightfully in the singing winds.
+
+This tree is pre-eminently picturesque, far surpassing not only its
+companion species of the mountains in this respect, but also the most
+noted of the lowland oaks and elms. Some stand firmly erect, feathered
+with radiant tail tassels down to the ground, forming slender, tapering
+towers of shining verdure; others with two or three specialized
+branches pushed out at right angles to the trunk and densely clad with
+the tasseled sprays, take the form of beautiful ornamental crosses.
+Again, in the same woods you find trees that are made up of several
+boles united near the ground, and spreading in easy curves at the sides
+in a plane parallel to the axis of the mountain, with the elegant
+tassels hung in charming order between them the whole making a perfect
+harp, ranged across the main wind-lines just where they may be most
+effective in the grand storm harmonies. And then there is an infinite
+variety of arching forms, standing free or in groups, leaning away from
+or toward each other in curious architectural structures,—innumerable
+tassels drooping under the arches and radiating above them, the outside
+glowing in the light, masses of deep shade beneath, giving rise to
+effects marvelously beautiful,—while on the roughest ledges of
+crumbling limestone are lowly old giants, five or six feet in diameter,
+that have braved the storms of more than a thousand years. But, whether
+old or young, sheltered or exposed to the wildest gales, this tree is
+ever found to be irrepressibly and extravagantly picturesque, offering
+a richer and more varied series of forms to the artist than any other
+species I have yet seen.
+
+One of the most interesting mountain excursions I have made in the
+State was up through a thick spicy forest of these trees to the top of
+the highest summit of the Troy Range, about ninety miles to the south
+of Hamilton. The day was full of perfect Indian-summer sunshine, calm
+and bracing. Jays and Clarke crows made a pleasant stir in the foothill
+pines and junipers; grasshoppers danced in the hazy light, and rattled
+on the wing in pure glee, reviving suddenly from the torpor of a frosty
+October night to exuberant summer joy. The squirrels were working
+industriously among the falling nuts; ripe willows and aspens made
+gorgeous masses of color on the russet hillsides and along the edges of
+the small streams that threaded the higher ravines; and on the smooth
+sloping uplands, beneath the foxtail pines and firs, the ground was
+covered with brown grasses, enriched with sunflowers, columbines, and
+larkspurs and patches of linosyris, mostly frost-nipped and gone to
+seed, yet making fine bits of yellow and purple in the general brown.
+
+At a height of about ninety-five hundred feet we passed through a
+magnificent grove of aspens, about a hundred acres in extent, through
+which the mellow sunshine sifted in ravishing splendor, showing every
+leaf to be as beautiful in color as the wing of a butterfly, and making
+them tell gloriously against the evergreens. These extensive groves of
+aspen are a marked feature of the Nevada woods. Some of the lower
+mountains are covered with them, giving rise to remarkably beautiful
+masses of pale, translucent green in spring and summer, yellow and
+orange in autumn, while in winter, after every leaf has fallen, the
+white bark of the boles and branches seen in mass seems like a cloud of
+mist that has settled close down on the mountain, conforming to all its
+hollows and ridges like a mantle, yet roughened on the surface with
+innumerable ascending spires.
+
+Just above the aspens we entered a fine, close growth of foxtail pine,
+the tallest and most evenly planted I had yet seen. It extended along a
+waving ridge tending north and south and down both sides with but
+little interruption for a distance of about five miles. The trees were
+mostly straight in the bole, and their shade covered the ground in the
+densest places, leaving only small openings to the sun. A few of the
+tallest specimens measured over eighty feet, with a diameter of
+eighteen inches; but many of the younger trees, growing in tufts, were
+nearly fifty feet high, with a diameter of only five or six inches,
+while their slender shafts were hidden from top to bottom by a close,
+fringy growth of tasseled branchlets. A few white pines and balsam firs
+occur here and there, mostly around the edges of sunny openings, where
+they enrich the air with their rosiny fragrance, and bring out the
+peculiar beauties of the predominating foxtails by contrast.
+
+Birds find grateful homes here—grouse, chickadees, and linnets, of
+which we saw large flocks that had a delightfully enlivening effect.
+But the woodpeckers are remarkably rare. Thus far I have noticed only
+one species, the golden-winged; and but few of the streams are large
+enough or long enough to attract the blessed ousel, so common in the
+Sierra.
+
+On Wheeler’s Peak, the dominating summit of the Snake Mountains, I
+found all the conifers I had seen on the other ranges of the State,
+excepting the foxtail pine, which I have not observed further east than
+the White Pine range, but in its stead the beautiful Rocky Mountain
+spruce. First, as in the other ranges, we find the juniper and nut
+pine; then, higher, the white pine and balsam fir; then the Douglas
+spruce and this new Rocky Mountain spruce, which is common eastward
+from here, though this range is, as far as I have observed, its western
+limit. It is one of the largest and most important of Nevada conifers,
+attaining a height of from sixty to eighty feet and a diameter of
+nearly two feet, while now and then an exceptional specimen may be
+found in shady dells a hundred feet high or more.
+
+The foliage is bright yellowish and bluish green, according to exposure
+and age, growing all around the branchlets, though inclined to turn
+upward from the undersides, like that of the plushy firs of California,
+making remarkably handsome fernlike plumes. While yet only mere
+saplings five or six inches thick at the ground, they measure fifty or
+sixty feet in height and are beautifully clothed with broad, level,
+fronded plumes down to the base, preserving a strict arrowy outline,
+though a few of the larger branches shoot out in free exuberance,
+relieving the spire from any unpicturesque stiffness of aspect, while
+the conical summit is crowded with thousands of rich brown cones to
+complete its beauty.
+
+We made the ascent of the peak just after the first storm had whitened
+its summit and brightened the atmosphere. The foot-slopes are like
+those of the Troy range, only more evenly clad with grasses. After
+tracing a long, rugged ridge of exceedingly hard quartzite, said to be
+veined here and there with gold, we came to the North Dome, a noble
+summit rising about a thousand feet above the timberline, its slopes
+heavily tree-clad all around, but most perfectly on the north. Here the
+Rocky Mountain spruce forms the bulk of the forest. The cones were
+ripe; most of them had shed their winged seeds, and the shell-like
+scales were conspicuously spread, making rich masses of brown from the
+tops of the fertile trees down halfway to the ground, cone touching
+cone in lavish clusters. A single branch that might be carried in the
+hand would be found to bear a hundred or more.
+
+Some portions of the wood were almost impenetrable, but in general we
+found no difficulty in mazing comfortably on over fallen logs and under
+the spreading boughs, while here and there we came to an opening
+sufficiently spacious for standpoints, where the trees around their
+margins might be seen from top to bottom. The winter sunshine streamed
+through the clustered spires, glinting and breaking into a fine dust of
+spangles on the spiky leaves and beads of amber gum, and bringing out
+the reds and grays and yellows of the lichened boles which had been
+freshened by the late storm; while the tip of every spire looking up
+through the shadows was dipped in deepest blue.
+
+The ground was strewn with burs and needles and fallen trees; and, down
+in the dells, on the north side of the dome, where strips of aspen are
+imbedded in the spruces, every breeze sent the ripe leaves flying, some
+lodging in the spruce boughs, making them bloom again, while the fresh
+snow beneath looked like a fine painting.
+
+Around the dome and well up toward the summit of the main peak, the
+snow-shed was well marked with tracks of the mule deer and the pretty
+stitching and embroidery of field mice, squirrels, and grouse; and on
+the way back to camp I came across a strange track, somewhat like that
+of a small bear, but more spreading at the toes. It proved to be that
+of a wolverine. In my conversations with hunters, both Indians and
+white men assure me that there are no bears in Nevada, notwithstanding
+the abundance of pine-nuts, of which they are so fond, and the
+accessibility of these basin ranges from their favorite haunts in the
+Sierra Nevada and Wahsatch Mountains. The mule deer, antelope, wild
+sheep, wolverine, and two species of wolves are all of the larger
+animals that I have seen or heard of in the State.
+
+
+
+
+XV. Glacial Phenomena in Nevada[20]
+
+
+The monuments of the Ice Age in the Great Basin have been greatly
+obscured and broken, many of the more ancient of them having perished
+altogether, leaving scarce a mark, however faint, of their existence—a
+condition of things due not alone to the long-continued action of
+post-glacial agents, but also in great part to the perishable character
+of the rocks of which they were made. The bottoms of the main valleys,
+once grooved and planished like the glacier pavements of the Sierra,
+lie buried beneath sediments and detritus derived from the adjacent
+mountains, and now form the arid sage plains; characteristic U-shaped
+cañons have become V-shaped by the deepening of their bottoms and
+straightening of their sides, and decaying glacier headlands have been
+undermined and thrown down in loose taluses, while most of the moraines
+and striae and scratches have been blurred or weathered away.
+Nevertheless, enough remains of the more recent and the more enduring
+phenomena to cast a good light well back upon the conditions of the
+ancient ice sheet that covered this interesting region, and upon the
+system of distinct glaciers that loaded the tops of the mountains and
+filled the cañons long after the ice sheet had been broken up.
+
+The first glacial traces that I noticed in the basin are on the
+Wassuck, Augusta, and Toyabe ranges, consisting of ridges and cañons,
+whose trends, contours, and general sculpture are in great part
+specifically glacial, though deeply blurred by subsequent denudation.
+These discoveries were made during the summer of 1876-77. And again, on
+the 17th of last August, while making the ascent of Mount Jefferson,
+the dominating mountain of the Toquima range, I discovered an
+exceedingly interesting group of moraines, cañons with V-shaped cross
+sections, wide neve amphitheatres, moutoneed rocks, glacier meadows,
+and one glacier lake, all as fresh and telling as if the glaciers to
+which they belonged had scarcely vanished.
+
+The best preserved and most regular of the moraines are two laterals
+about two hundred feet in height and two miles long, extending from the
+foot of a magnificent cañon valley on the north side of the mountain
+and trending first in a northerly direction, then curving around to the
+west, while a well-characterized terminal moraine, formed by the
+glacier towards the close of its existence, unites them near their
+lower extremities at a height of eighty-five hundred feet. Another pair
+of older lateral moraines, belonging to a glacier of which the one just
+mentioned was a tributary, extend in a general northwesterly direction
+nearly to the level of Big Smoky Valley, about fifty-five hundred feet
+above sea level.
+
+Four other cañons, extending down the eastern slopes of this grand old
+mountain into Monito Valley, are hardly less rich in glacial records,
+while the effects of the mountain shadows in controlling and directing
+the movements of the residual glaciers to which all these phenomena
+belonged are everywhere delightfully apparent in the trends of the
+cañons and ridges, and in the massive sculpture of the neve wombs at
+their heads. This is a very marked and imposing mountain, attracting
+the eye from a great distance. It presents a smooth and gently curved
+outline against the sky, as observed from the plains, and is whitened
+with patches of enduring snow. The summit is made up of irregular
+volcanic tables, the most extensive of which is about two and a half
+miles long, and like the smaller ones is broken abruptly down on the
+edges by the action of the ice. Its height is approximately eleven
+thousand three hundred feet above the sea.
+
+A few days after making these interesting discoveries, I found other
+well-preserved glacial traces on Arc Dome, the culminating summit of
+the Toyabe Range. On its northeastern slopes there are two small
+glacier lakes, and the basins of two others which have recently been
+filled with down-washed detritus. One small residual glacier lingered
+until quite recently beneath the coolest shadows of the dome, the
+moraines and névé-fountains of which are still as fresh and unwasted as
+many of those lying at the same elevation on the Sierra—ten thousand
+feet—while older and more wasted specimens may be traced on all the
+adjacent mountains. The sculpture, too, of all the ridges and summits
+of this section of the range is recognized at once as glacial, some of
+the larger characters being still easily readable from the plains at a
+distance of fifteen or twenty miles.
+
+The Hot Creek Mountains, lying to the east of the Toquima and Monito
+ranges, reach the culminating point on a deeply serrate ridge at a
+height of ten thousand feet above the sea. This ridge is found to be
+made up of a series of imposing towers and pinnacles which have been
+eroded from the solid mass of the mountain by a group of small residual
+glaciers that lingered in their shadows long after the larger ice
+rivers had vanished. On its western declivities are found a group of
+well-characterized moraines, cañons, and _roches moutonnées_, all of
+which are unmistakably fresh and telling. The moraines in particular
+could hardly fail to attract the eye of any observer. Some of the short
+laterals of the glaciers that drew their fountain snows from the jagged
+recesses of the summit are from one to two hundred feet in height, and
+scarce at all wasted as yet, notwithstanding the countless storms that
+have fallen upon them, while cool rills flow between them, watering
+charming gardens of arctic plants—saxifrages, larkspurs, dwarf birch,
+ribes, and parnassia, etc.—beautiful memories of the Ice Age,
+representing a once greatly extended flora.
+
+In the course of explorations made to the eastward of here, between the
+38th and 40th parallels, I observed glacial phenomena equally fresh and
+demonstrative on all the higher mountains of the White Pine, Golden
+Gate, and Snake ranges, varying from those already described only as
+determined by differences of elevation, relations to the snow-bearing
+winds, and the physical characteristics of the rock formations.
+
+On the Jeff Davis group of the Snake Range, the dominating summit of
+which is nearly thirteen thousand feet in elevation, and the highest
+ground in the basin, every marked feature is a glacier monument—peaks,
+valleys, ridges, meadows, and lakes. And because here the
+snow-fountains lay at a greater height, while the rock, an exceedingly
+hard quartzite, offered superior resistance to post-glacial agents, the
+ice-characters are on a larger scale, and are more sharply defined than
+any we have noticed elsewhere, and it is probably here that the last
+lingering glacier of the basin was located. The summits and connecting
+ridges are mere blades and points, ground sharp by the glaciers that
+descended on both sides to the main valleys. From one standpoint I
+counted nine of these glacial channels with their moraines sweeping
+grandly out to the plains to deep sheer-walled névé-fountains at their
+heads, making a most vivid picture of the last days of the Ice Period.
+
+I have thus far directed attention only to the most recent and
+appreciable of the phenomena; but it must be borne in mind that less
+recent and less obvious traces of glacial action abound on _all_ the
+ranges throughout the entire basin, where the fine striae and grooves
+have been obliterated, and most of the moraines have been washed away,
+or so modified as to be no longer recognizable, and even the lakes and
+meadows, so characteristic of glacial regions, have almost entirely
+vanished. For there are other monuments, far more enduring than these,
+remaining tens of thousands of years after the more perishable records
+are lost. Such are the cañons, ridges, and peaks themselves, the
+glacial peculiarities of whose trends and contours cannot be hid from
+the eye of the skilled observer until changes have been wrought upon
+them far more destructive than those to which these basin ranges have
+yet been subjected.
+
+It appears, therefore, that the last of the basin glaciers have but
+recently vanished, and that the almost innumerable ranges trending
+north and south between the Sierra and the Wahsatch Mountains were
+loaded with glaciers that descended to the adjacent valleys during the
+last glacial period, and that it is to this mighty host of ice streams
+that all the more characteristic of the present features of these
+mountain ranges are due.
+
+But grand as is this vision delineated in these old records, this is
+not all; for there is not wanting evidence of a still grander
+glaciation extending over all the valleys now forming the sage plains
+as well as the mountains. The basins of the main valleys alternating
+with the mountain ranges, and which contained lakes during at least the
+closing portion of the Ice Period, were eroded wholly, or in part, from
+a general elevated tableland, by immense glaciers that flowed north and
+south to the ocean. The mountains as well as the valleys present
+abundant evidence of this grand origin.
+
+The flanks of all the interior ranges are seen to have been heavily
+abraded and ground away by the ice acting in a direction parallel with
+their axes. This action is most strikingly shown upon projecting
+portions where the pressure has been greatest. These are shorn off in
+smooth planes and bossy outswelling curves, like the outstanding
+portions of cañon walls. Moreover, the extremities of the ranges taper
+out like those of dividing ridges which have been ground away by
+dividing and confluent glaciers. Furthermore, the horizontal sections
+of separate mountains, standing isolated in the great valleys, are
+lens-shaped like those of mere rocks that rise in the channels of
+ordinary cañon glaciers, and which have been overflowed or pastflowed,
+while in many of the smaller valleys _roches moutonnées_ occur in great
+abundance.
+
+Again, the mineralogical and physical characters of the two ranges
+bounding the sides of many of the valleys indicate that the valleys
+were formed simply by the removal of the material between the ranges.
+And again, the rim of the general basin, where it is elevated, as for
+example on the southwestern portion, instead of being a ridge
+sculptured on the sides like a mountain range, is found to be composed
+of many short ranges, parallel to one another, and to the interior
+ranges, and so modeled as to resemble a row of convex lenses set on
+edge and half buried beneath a general surface, without manifesting any
+dependence upon synclinal or anticlinal axes—a series of forms and
+relations that could have resulted only from the outflow of vast basin
+glaciers on their courses to the ocean.
+
+I cannot, however, present all the evidence here bearing upon these
+interesting questions, much less discuss it in all its relations. I
+will, therefore, close this letter with a few of the more important
+generalizations that have grown up out of the facts that I have
+observed. First, at the beginning of the glacial period the region now
+known as the Great Basin was an elevated tableland, not furrowed as at
+present with mountains and valleys, but comparatively bald and
+featureless.
+
+Second, this tableland, bounded on the east and west by lofty mountain
+ranges, but comparatively open on the north and south, was loaded with
+ice, which was discharged to the ocean northward and southward, and in
+its flow brought most, if not all, the present interior ranges and
+valleys into relief by erosion.
+
+Third, as the glacial winter drew near its close the ice vanished from
+the lower portions of the basin, which then became lakes, into which
+separate glaciers descended from the mountains. Then these mountain
+glaciers vanished in turn, after sculpturing the ranges into their
+present condition.
+
+Fourth, the few immense lakes extending over the lowlands, in the midst
+of which many of the interior ranges stood as islands, became shallow
+as the ice vanished from the mountains, and separated into many
+distinct lakes, whose waters no longer reached the ocean. Most of these
+have disappeared by the filling of their basins with detritus from the
+mountains, and now form sage plains and “alkali flats.”
+
+The transition from one to the other of these various conditions was
+gradual and orderly: first, a nearly simple tableland; then a grand
+_mer de glace_ shedding its crawling silver currents to the sea, and
+becoming gradually more wrinkled as unequal erosion roughened its bed,
+and brought the highest peaks and ridges above the surface; then a land
+of lakes, an almost continuous sheet of water stretching from the
+Sierra to the Wahsatch, adorned with innumerable island mountains; then
+a slow desiccation and decay to present conditions of sage and sand.
+
+
+
+
+XVI. Nevada’s Dead Towns[21]
+
+
+Nevada is one of the very youngest and wildest of the States;
+nevertheless it is already strewn with ruins that seem as gray and
+silent and time-worn as if the civilization to which they belonged had
+perished centuries ago. Yet, strange to say, all these ruins are
+results of mining efforts made within the last few years. Wander where
+you may throughout the length and breadth of this mountain-barred
+wilderness, you everywhere come upon these dead mining towns, with
+their tall chimney stacks, standing forlorn amid broken walls and
+furnaces, and machinery half buried in sand, the very names of many of
+them already forgotten amid the excitements of later discoveries, and
+now known only through tradition—tradition ten years old.
+
+While exploring the mountain ranges of the State during a considerable
+portion of three summers, I think that I have seen at least five of
+these deserted towns and villages for every one in ordinary life. Some
+of them were probably only camps built by bands of prospectors, and
+inhabited for a few months or years, while some specially interesting
+cañon was being explored, and then carelessly abandoned for more
+promising fields. But many were real towns, regularly laid out and
+incorporated, containing well-built hotels, churches, schoolhouses,
+post offices, and jails, as well as the mills on which they all
+depended; and whose well-graded streets were filled with lawyers,
+doctors, brokers, hangmen, real estate agents, etc., the whole
+population numbering several thousand.
+
+A few years ago the population of Hamilton is said to have been nearly
+eight thousand; that of Treasure Hill, six thousand; of Shermantown,
+seven thousand; of Swansea, three thousand. All of these were
+incorporated towns with mayors, councils, fire departments, and daily
+newspapers. Hamilton has now about one hundred inhabitants, most of
+whom are merely waiting in dreary inaction for something to turn up.
+Treasure Hill has about half as many, Shermantown one family, and
+Swansea none, while on the other hand the graveyards are far too full.
+
+In one cañon of the Toyabe range, near Austin, I found no less than
+five dead towns without a single inhabitant. The streets and blocks of
+“real estate” graded on the hillsides are rapidly falling back into the
+wilderness. Sagebrushes are growing up around the forges of the
+blacksmith shops, and lizards bask on the crumbling walls.
+
+While traveling southward from Austin down Big Smoky Valley, I noticed
+a remarkably tall and imposing column, rising like a lone pine out of
+the sagebrush on the edge of a dry gulch. This proved to be a
+smokestack of solid masonry. It seemed strangely out of place in the
+desert, as if it had been transported entire from the heart of some
+noisy manufacturing town and left here by mistake. I learned afterwards
+that it belonged to a set of furnaces that were built by a New York
+company to smelt ore that never was found. The tools of the workmen are
+still lying in place beside the furnaces, as if dropped in some sudden
+Indian or earthquake panic and never afterwards handled. These imposing
+ruins, together with the desolate town, lying a quarter of a mile to
+the northward, present a most vivid picture of wasted effort. Coyotes
+now wander unmolested through the brushy streets, and of all the busy
+throng that so lavishly spent their time and money here only one man
+remains—a lone bachelor with one suspender.
+
+Mining discoveries and progress, retrogression and decay, seem to have
+been crowded more closely against each other here than on any other
+portion of the globe. Some one of the band of adventurous prospectors
+who came from the exhausted placers of California would discover some
+rich ore—how much or little mattered not at first. These specimens fell
+among excited seekers after wealth like sparks in gunpowder, and in a
+few days the wilderness was disturbed with the noisy clang of miners
+and builders. A little town would then spring up, and before anything
+like a careful survey of any particular lode would be made, a company
+would be formed, and expensive mills built. Then, after all the
+machinery was ready for the ore, perhaps little, or none at all, was to
+be found. Meanwhile another discovery was reported, and the young town
+was abandoned as completely as a camp made for a single night; and so
+on, until some really valuable lode was found, such as those of Eureka,
+Austin, Virginia, etc., which formed the substantial groundwork for a
+thousand other excitements.
+
+Passing through the dead town of Schellbourne last month, I asked one
+of the few lingering inhabitants why the town was built. “For the
+mines,” he replied. “And where are the mines?” “On the mountains back
+here.” “And why were they abandoned?” I asked. “Are they exhausted?”
+“Oh, no,” he replied, “they are not exhausted; on the contrary, they
+have never been worked at all, for unfortunately, just as we were about
+ready to open them, the Cherry Creek mines were discovered across the
+valley in the Egan range, and everybody rushed off there, taking what
+they could with them—houses machinery, and all. But we are hoping that
+somebody with money and speculation will come and revive us yet.”
+
+The dead mining excitements of Nevada were far more intense and
+destructive in their action than those of California, because the
+prizes at stake were greater, while more skill was required to gain
+them. The long trains of gold-seekers making their way to California
+had ample time and means to recover from their first attacks of mining
+fever while crawling laboriously across the plains, and on their
+arrival on any portion of the Sierra gold belt, they at once began to
+make money. No matter in what gulch or cañon they worked, some measure
+of success was sure, however unskillful they might be. And though while
+making ten dollars a day they might be agitated by hopes of making
+twenty, or of striking their picks against hundred- or thousand-dollar
+nuggets, men of ordinary nerve could still work on with comparative
+steadiness, and remain rational.
+
+But in the case of the Nevada miner, he too often spent himself in
+years of weary search without gaining a dollar, traveling hundreds of
+miles from mountain to mountain, burdened with wasting hopes of
+discovering some hidden vein worth millions, enduring hardships of the
+most destructive kind, driving innumerable tunnels into the hillsides,
+while his assayed specimens again and again proved worthless. Perhaps
+one in a hundred of these brave prospectors would “strike it rich,”
+while ninety-nine died alone in the mountains or sank out of sight in
+the corners of saloons, in a haze of whiskey and tobacco smoke.
+
+The healthful ministry of wealth is blessed; and surely it is a fine
+thing that so many are eager to find the gold and silver that lie hid
+in the veins of the mountains. But in the search the seekers too often
+become insane, and strike about blindly in the dark like raving madmen.
+Seven hundred and fifty tons of ore from the original Eberhardt mine on
+Treasure Hill yielded a million and a half dollars, the whole of this
+immense sum having been obtained within two hundred and fifty feet of
+the surface, the greater portion within one hundred and forty feet.
+Other ore masses were scarcely less marvelously rich, giving rise to
+one of the most violent excitements that ever occurred in the history
+of mining. All kinds of people—shoemakers, tailors, farmers, etc., as
+well as miners—left their own right work and fell in a perfect storm of
+energy upon the White Pine Hills, covering the ground like
+grasshoppers, and seeming determined by the very violence of their
+efforts to turn every stone to silver. But with few exceptions, these
+mining storms pass away about as suddenly as they rise, leaving only
+ruins to tell of the tremendous energy expended, as heaps of giant
+boulders in the valley tell of the spent power of the mountain floods.
+
+In marked contrast with this destructive unrest is the orderly
+deliberation into which miners settle in developing a truly valuable
+mine. At Eureka we were kindly led through the treasure chambers of the
+Richmond and Eureka Consolidated, our guides leisurely leading the way
+from level to level, calling attention to the precious ore masses which
+the workmen were slowly breaking to pieces with their picks, like
+navvies wearing away the day in a railroad cutting; while down at the
+smelting works the bars of bullion were handled with less eager haste
+than the farmer shows in gathering his sheaves.
+
+The wealth Nevada has already given to the world is indeed wonderful,
+but the only grand marvel is the energy expended in its development.
+The amount of prospecting done in the face of so many dangers and
+sacrifices, the innumerable tunnels and shafts bored into the
+mountains, the mills that have been built—these would seem to require a
+race of giants. But, in full view of the substantial results achieved,
+the pure waste manifest in the ruins one meets never fails to produce a
+saddening effect.
+
+The dim old ruins of Europe, so eagerly sought after by travelers, have
+something pleasing about them, whatever their historical associations;
+for they at least lend some beauty to the landscape. Their picturesque
+towers and arches seem to be kindly adopted by nature, and planted with
+wild flowers and wreathed with ivy; while their rugged angles are
+soothed and freshened and embossed with green mosses, fresh life and
+decay mingling in pleasing measures, and the whole vanishing softly
+like a ripe, tranquil day fading into night. So, also, among the older
+ruins of the East there is a fitness felt. They have served their time,
+and like the weather-beaten mountains are wasting harmoniously. The
+same is in some degree true of the dead mining towns of California.
+
+But those lying to the eastward of the Sierra throughout the ranges of
+the Great Basin waste in the dry wilderness like the bones of cattle
+that have died of thirst. Many of them do not represent any good
+accomplishment, and have no right to be. They are monuments of fraud
+and ignorance—sins against science. The drifts and tunnels in the rocks
+may perhaps be regarded as the prayers of the prospector, offered for
+the wealth he so earnestly craves; but, like prayers of any kind not in
+harmony with nature, they are unanswered. But, after all, effort,
+however misapplied, is better than stagnation. Better toil blindly,
+beating every stone in turn for grains of gold, whether they contain
+any or not, than lie down in apathetic decay.
+
+The fever period is fortunately passing away. The prospector is no
+longer the raving, wandering ghoul of ten years ago, rushing in random
+lawlessness among the hills, hungry and footsore; but cool and
+skillful, well supplied with every necessary, and clad in his right
+mind. Capitalists, too, and the public in general, have become wiser,
+and do not take fire so readily from mining sparks; while at the same
+time a vast amount of real work is being done, and the ratio between
+growth and decay is constantly becoming better.
+
+
+
+
+XVII. Puget Sound
+
+
+Washington Territory, recently admitted[22] into the Union as a State,
+lies between latitude 46 degrees and 49 degrees and longitude 117
+degrees and 125 degrees, forming the northwest shoulder of the United
+States. The majestic range of the Cascade Mountains naturally divides
+the State into two distinct parts, called Eastern and Western
+Washington, differing greatly from each other in almost every way, the
+western section being less than half as large as the eastern, and, with
+its copious rains and deep fertile soil, being clothed with forests of
+evergreens, while the eastern section is dry and mostly treeless,
+though fertile in many parts, and producing immense quantities of wheat
+and hay. Few States are more fertile and productive in one way or
+another than Washington, or more strikingly varied in natural features
+or resources.
+
+Within her borders every kind of soil and climate may be found—the
+densest woods and dryest plains, the smoothest levels and roughest
+mountains. She is rich in square miles (some seventy thousand of them),
+in coal, timber, and iron, and in sheltered inland waters that render
+these resources advantageously accessible. She also is already rich in
+busy workers, who work hard, though not always wisely, hacking,
+burning, blasting their way deeper into the wilderness, beneath the
+sky, and beneath the ground. The wedges of development are being driven
+hard, and none of the obstacles or defenses of nature can long
+withstand the onset of this immeasurable industry.
+
+Puget Sound, so justly famous the world over for the surpassing size
+and excellence and abundance of its timber, is a long, many-fingered
+arm of the sea reaching southward from the head of the Strait of Juan
+de Fuca into the heart of the grand forests of the western portion of
+Washington, between the Cascade Range and the mountains of the coast.
+It is less than a hundred miles in length, but so numerous are the
+branches into which it divides, and so many its bays, harbors, and
+islands, that its entire shoreline is said to measure more than
+eighteen hundred miles. Throughout its whole vast extent ships move in
+safety, and find shelter from every wind that blows, the entire
+mountain-girt sea forming one grand unrivaled harbor and center for
+commerce.
+
+The forest trees press forward to the water around all the windings of
+the shores in most imposing array, as if they were courting their fate,
+coming down from the mountains far and near to offer themselves to the
+axe, thus making the place a perfect paradise for the lumberman. To the
+lover of nature the scene is enchanting. Water and sky, mountain and
+forest, clad in sunshine and clouds, are composed in landscapes sublime
+in magnitude, yet exquisitely fine and fresh, and full of glad,
+rejoicing life. The shining waters stretch away into the leafy
+wilderness, now like the reaches of some majestic river and again
+expanding into broad roomy spaces like mountain lakes, their farther
+edges fading gradually and blending with the pale blue of the sky. The
+wooded shores with an outer fringe of flowering bushes sweep onward in
+beautiful curves around bays, and capes, and jutting promontories
+innumerable; while the islands, with soft, waving outlines, lavishly
+adorned with spruces and cedars, thicken and enrich the beauty of the
+waters; and the white spirit mountains looking down from the sky keep
+watch and ward over all, faithful and changeless as the stars.
+
+All the way from the Strait of Juan de Fuca up to Olympia, a hopeful
+town situated at the head of one of the farthest-reaching of the
+fingers of the Sound, we are so completely inland and surrounded by
+mountains that it is hard to realize that we are sailing on a branch of
+the salt sea. We are constantly reminded of Lake Tahoe. There is the
+same clearness of the water in calm weather without any trace of the
+ocean swell, the same picturesque winding and sculpture of the
+shoreline and flowery, leafy luxuriance; only here the trees are taller
+and stand much closer together, and the backgrounds are higher and far
+more extensive. Here, too, we find greater variety amid the marvelous
+wealth of islands and inlets, and also in the changing views dependent
+on the weather. As we double cape after cape and round the uncounted
+islands, new combinations come to view in endless variety, sufficient
+to fill and satisfy the lover of wild beauty through a whole life.
+
+Oftentimes in the stillest weather, when all the winds sleep and no
+sign of storms is felt or seen, silky clouds form and settle over all
+the land, leaving in sight only a circle of water with indefinite
+bounds like views in mid-ocean; then, the clouds lifting, some islet
+will be presented standing alone, with the tops of its trees dipping
+out of sight in pearly gray fringes; or, lifting higher, and perhaps
+letting in a ray of sunshine through some rift overhead, the whole
+island will be set free and brought forward in vivid relief amid the
+gloom, a girdle of silver light of dazzling brightness on the water
+about its shores, then darkening again and vanishing back into the
+general gloom. Thus island after island may be seen, singly or in
+groups, coming and going from darkness to light like a scene of
+enchantment, until at length the entire cloud ceiling is rolled away,
+and the colossal cone of Mount Rainier is seen in spotless white
+looking down over the forests from a distance of sixty miles, but so
+lofty and so massive and clearly outlined as to impress itself upon us
+as being just back of a strip of woods only a mile or two in breadth.
+
+For the tourist sailing to Puget Sound from San Francisco there is but
+little that is at all striking in the scenery within reach by the way
+until the mouth of the Strait of Juan de Fuca is reached. The voyage is
+about four days in length and the steamers keep within sight of the
+coast, but the hills fronting the sea up to Oregon are mostly bare and
+uninviting, the magnificent redwood forests stretching along this
+portion of the California coast seeming to keep well back, away from
+the heavy winds, so that very little is seen of them; while there are
+no deep inlets or lofty mountains visible to break the regular
+monotony. Along the coast of Oregon the woods of spruce and fir come
+down to the shore, kept fresh and vigorous by copious rains, and become
+denser and taller to the northward until, rounding Cape Flattery, we
+enter the Strait of Fuca, where, sheltered from the ocean gales, the
+forests begin to hint the grandeur they attain in Puget Sound. Here the
+scenery in general becomes exceedingly interesting; for now we have
+arrived at the grand mountain-walled channel that forms the entrance to
+that marvelous network of inland waters that extends along the margin
+of the continent to the northward for a thousand miles.
+
+This magnificent inlet was named for Juan de Fuca, who discovered it in
+1592 while seeking a mythical strait, supposed to exist somewhere in
+the north, connecting the Atlantic and Pacific. It is about seventy
+miles long, ten or twelve miles wide, and extends to the eastward in a
+nearly straight line between the south end of Vancouver Island and the
+Olympic Range of mountains on the mainland.
+
+Cape Flattery, the western termination of the Olympic Range, is
+terribly rugged and jagged, and in stormy weather is utterly
+inaccessible from the sea. Then the ponderous rollers of the deep
+Pacific thunder amid its caverns and cliffs with the foam and uproar of
+a thousand Yosemite waterfalls. The bones of many a noble ship lie
+there, and many a sailor. It would seem unlikely that any living thing
+should seek rest in such a place, or find it. Nevertheless, frail and
+delicate flowers bloom there, flowers of both the land and the sea;
+heavy, ungainly seals disport in the swelling waves, and find grateful
+retreats back in the inmost bores of its storm-lashed caverns; while in
+many a chink and hollow of the highest crags, not visible from beneath,
+a great variety of waterfowl make homes and rear their young.
+
+But not always are the inhabitants safe, even in such wave-defended
+castles as these, for the Indians of the neighboring shores venture
+forth in the calmest summer weather in their frail canoes to spear the
+seals in the narrow gorges amid the grinding, gurgling din of the
+restless waters. At such times also the hunters make out to scale many
+of the apparently inaccessible cliffs for the eggs and young of the
+gulls and other water birds, occasionally losing their lives in these
+perilous adventures, which give rise to many an exciting story told
+around the campfires at night when the storms roar loudest.
+
+Passing through the strait, we have the Olympic Mountains close at hand
+on the right, Vancouver Island on the left, and the snowy peak of Mount
+Baker straight ahead in the distance. During calm weather, or when the
+clouds are lifting and rolling off the mountains after a storm, all
+these views are truly magnificent. Mount Baker is one of that wonderful
+series of old volcanoes that once flamed along the summits of the
+Sierras and Cascades from Lassen to Mount St. Elias. Its fires are
+sleeping now, and it is loaded with glaciers, streams of ice having
+taken the place of streams of glowing lava. Vancouver Island presents a
+charming variety of hill and dale, open sunny spaces and sweeps of dark
+forest rising in swell beyond swell to the high land in the distance.
+
+But the Olympic Mountains most of all command attention, seen tellingly
+near and clear in all their glory, rising from the water’s edge into
+the sky to a height of six or eight thousand feet. They bound the
+strait on the south side throughout its whole extent, forming a massive
+sustained wall, flowery and bushy at the base, a zigzag of snowy peaks
+along the top, which have ragged-edged fields of ice and snow beneath
+them, enclosed in wide amphitheaters opening to the waters of the
+strait through spacious forest-filled valleys enlivened with fine,
+dashing streams. These valleys mark the courses of the Olympic glaciers
+at the period of their greatest extension, when they poured their
+tribute into that portion of the great northern ice sheet that
+overswept the south end of Vancouver Island and filled the strait with
+flowing ice as it is now filled with ocean water.
+
+The steamers of the Sound usually stop at Esquimalt on their way up,
+thus affording tourists an opportunity to visit the interesting town of
+Victoria, the capital of British Columbia. The Victoria harbor is too
+narrow and difficult of access for the larger class of ships; therefore
+a landing has to be made at Esquimalt. The distance, however, is only
+about three miles, and the way is delightful, winding on through a
+charming forest of Douglas spruce, with here and there groves of oak
+and madrone, and a rich undergrowth of hazel, dogwood, willow, alder,
+spiraea, rubus, huckleberry, and wild rose. Pretty cottages occur at
+intervals along the road, covered with honeysuckle, and many an
+upswelling rock, freshly glaciated and furred with yellow mosses and
+lichen, telling interesting stories of the icy past.
+
+Victoria is a quiet, handsome, breezy town, beautifully located on
+finely modulated ground at the mouth of the Canal de Haro, with
+charming views in front, of islands and mountains and far-reaching
+waters, ever changing in the shifting lights and shades of the clouds
+and sunshine. In the background there are a mile or two of field and
+forest and sunny oak openings; then comes the forest primeval, dense
+and shaggy and well-nigh impenetrable.
+
+Notwithstanding the importance claimed for Victoria as a commercial
+center and the capital of British Columbia, it has a rather young,
+loose-jointed appearance. The government buildings and some of the
+business blocks on the main streets are well built and imposing in bulk
+and architecture. These are far less interesting and characteristic,
+however, than the mansions set in the midst of spacious pleasure
+grounds and the lovely home cottages embowered in honeysuckle and
+climbing roses. One soon discovers that this is no Yankee town. The
+English faces and the way that English is spoken alone would tell that;
+while in business quarters there is a staid dignity and moderation that
+is very noticeable, and a want of American push and hurrah. Love of
+land and of privacy in homes is made manifest in the residences, many
+of which are built in the middle of fields and orchards or large city
+blocks, and in the loving care with which these home grounds are
+planted. They are very beautiful. The fineness of the climate, with its
+copious measure of warm moisture distilling in dew and fog, and gentle,
+bathing, laving rain, give them a freshness and floweriness that is
+worth going far to see.
+
+Victoria is noted for its fine drives, and every one who can should
+either walk or drive around the outskirts of the town, not only for the
+fine views out over the water but to see the cascades of bloom pouring
+over the gables of the cottages, and the fresh wild woods with their
+flowery, fragrant underbrush. Wild roses abound almost everywhere. One
+species, blooming freely along the woodland paths, is from two to three
+inches in diameter, and more fragrant than any other wild rose I ever
+saw excepting the sweetbriar. This rose and three species of spiraea
+fairly fill the air with fragrance after a shower. And how brightly
+then do the red berries of the dogwood shine out from the warm
+yellow-green of leaves and mosses!
+
+But still more interesting and significant are the glacial phenomena
+displayed hereabouts. All this exuberant tree, bush, and herbaceous
+vegetation, cultivated or wild, is growing upon moraine beds outspread
+by waters that issued from the ancient glaciers at the time of their
+recession, and scarcely at all moved or in any way modified by
+post-glacial agencies. The town streets and the roads are graded in
+moraine material, among scratched and grooved rock bosses that are as
+unweathered and telling as any to be found in the glacier channels of
+Alaska. The harbor also is clearly of glacial origin. The rock islets
+that rise here and there, forming so marked a feature of the harbor,
+are unchanged _roches moutonnées_, and the shores are grooved,
+scratched, and rounded, and in every way as glacial in all their
+characteristics as those of a newborn glacial lake.
+
+Most visitors to Victoria go to the stores of the Hudson’s Bay Company,
+presumably on account of the romantic associations, or to purchase a
+bit of fur or some other wild-Indianish trinket as a memento. At
+certain seasons of the year, when the hairy harvests are gathered in,
+immense bales of skins may be seen in these unsavory warehouses, the
+spoils of many thousand hunts over mountain and plain, by lonely river
+and shore. The skins of bears, wolves, beavers, otters, fishers,
+martens, lynxes, panthers, wolverine, reindeer, moose, elk, wild goats,
+sheep, foxes, squirrels, and many others of our “poor earth-born
+companions and fellow mortals” may here be found.
+
+Vancouver is the southmost and the largest of the countless islands
+forming the great archipelago that stretches a thousand miles to the
+northward. Its shores have been known a long time, but little is known
+of the lofty mountainous interior on account of the difficulties in the
+way of explorations—lake, bogs, and shaggy tangled forests. It is
+mostly a pure, savage wilderness, without roads or clearings, and
+silent so far as man is concerned. Even the Indians keep close to the
+shore, getting a living by fishing, dwelling together in villages, and
+traveling almost wholly by canoes. White settlements are few and far
+between. Good agricultural lands occur here and there on the edge of
+the wilderness, but they are hard to clear, and have received but
+little attention thus far. Gold, the grand attraction that lights the
+way into all kinds of wildernesses and makes rough places smooth, has
+been found, but only in small quantities, too small to make much
+motion. Almost all the industry of the island is employed upon lumber
+and coal, in which, so far as known, its chief wealth lies.
+
+Leaving Victoria for Port Townsend, after we are fairly out on the free
+open water, Mount Baker is seen rising solitary over a dark breadth of
+forest, making a glorious show in its pure white raiment. It is said to
+be about eleven thousand feet high, is loaded with glaciers, some of
+which come well down into the woods, and never, so far as I have heard,
+has been climbed, though in all probability it is not inaccessible. The
+task of reaching its base through the dense woods will be likely to
+prove of greater difficulty than the climb to the summit.
+
+In a direction a little to the left of Mount Baker and much nearer, may
+be seen the island of San Juan, famous in the young history of the
+country for the quarrels concerning its rightful ownership between the
+Hudson’s Bay Company and Washington Territory, quarrels which nearly
+brought on war with Great Britain. Neither party showed any lack of
+either pluck or gunpowder. General Scott was sent out by President
+Buchanan to negotiate, which resulted in a joint occupancy of the
+island. Small quarrels, however, continued to arise until the year
+1874, when the peppery question was submitted to the Emperor of Germany
+for arbitration. Then the whole island was given to the United States.
+
+San Juan is one of a thickset cluster of islands that fills the waters
+between Vancouver and the mainland, a little to the north of Victoria.
+In some of the intricate channels between these islands the tides run
+at times like impetuous rushing rivers, rendering navigation rather
+uncertain and dangerous for the small sailing vessels that ply between
+Victoria and the settlements on the coast of British Columbia and the
+larger islands. The water is generally deep enough everywhere, too deep
+in most places for anchorage, and, the winds shifting hither and
+thither or dying away altogether, the ships, getting no direction from
+their helms, are carried back and forth or are caught in some eddy
+where two currents meet and whirled round and round to the dismay of
+the sailors, like a chip in a river whirlpool.
+
+All the way over to Port Townsend the Olympic Mountains well maintain
+their massive, imposing grandeur, and present their elaborately carved
+summits in clear relief, many of which are out of sight in coming up
+the strait on account of our being too near the base of the range. Turn
+to them as often as we may, our admiration only grows the warmer the
+longer we dwell upon them. The highest peaks are Mount Constance and
+Mount Olympus, said to be about eight thousand feet high.
+
+In two or three hours after leaving Victoria, we arrive at the handsome
+little town of Port Townsend, situated at the mouth of Puget Sound, on
+the west side. The residential portion of the town is set on the level
+top of the bluff that bounds Port Townsend Bay, while another nearly
+level space of moderate extent, reaching from the base of the bluff to
+the shoreline, is occupied by the business portion, thus making a town
+of two separate and distinct stories, which are connected by long,
+ladder-like flights of stairs. In the streets of the lower story, while
+there is no lack of animation, there is but little business noise as
+compared with the amount of business transacted. This in great part is
+due to the scarcity of horses and wagons. Farms and roads back in the
+woods are few and far between. Nearly all the tributary settlements are
+on the coast, and communication is almost wholly by boats, canoes, and
+schooners. Hence country stages and farmers’ wagons and buggies, with
+the whir and din that belong to them, are wanting.
+
+This being the port of entry, all vessels have to stop here, and they
+make a lively show about the wharves and in the bay. The winds stir the
+flags of every civilized nation, while the Indians in their long-beaked
+canoes glide about from ship to ship, satisfying their curiosity or
+trading with the crews. Keen traders these Indians are, and few indeed
+of the sailors or merchants from any country ever get the better of
+them in bargains. Curious groups of people may often be seen in the
+streets and stores, made up of English, French, Spanish, Portuguese,
+Scandinavians, Germans, Greeks, Moors, Japanese, and Chinese, of every
+rank and station and style of dress and behavior; settlers from many a
+nook and bay and island up and down the coast; hunters from the
+wilderness; tourists on their way home by the Sound and the Columbia
+River or to Alaska or California.
+
+The upper story of Port Townsend is charmingly located, wide bright
+waters on one side, flowing evergreen woods on the other. The streets
+are well laid out and well tended, and the houses, with their luxuriant
+gardens about them, have an air of taste and refinement seldom found in
+towns set on the edge of a wild forest. The people seem to have come
+here to make true homes, attracted by the beauty and fresh breezy
+healthfulness of the place as well as by business advantages, trusting
+to natural growth and advancement instead of restless “booming”
+methods. They perhaps have caught some of the spirit of calm moderation
+and enjoyment from their English neighbors across the water. Of late,
+however, this sober tranquillity has begun to give way, some whiffs
+from the whirlwind of real estate speculation up the Sound having at
+length touched the town and ruffled the surface of its calmness.
+
+A few miles up the bay is Fort Townsend, which makes a pretty picture
+with the green woods rising back of it and the calm water in front.
+Across the mouth of the Sound lies the long, narrow Whidbey Island,
+named by Vancouver for one of his lieutenants. It is about thirty miles
+in length, and is remarkable in this region of crowded forests and
+mountains as being comparatively open and low. The soil is good and
+easily worked, and a considerable portion of the island has been under
+cultivation for many years. Fertile fields, open, parklike groves of
+oak, and thick masses of evergreens succeed one another in charming
+combinations to make this “the garden spot of the Territory.”
+
+Leaving Port Townsend for Seattle and Tacoma, we enter the Sound and
+sail down into the heart of the green, aspiring forests, and find, look
+where we may, beauty ever changing, in lavish profusion. Puget Sound,
+“the Mediterranean of America” as it is sometimes called, is in many
+respects one of the most remarkable bodies of water in the world.
+Vancouver, who came here nearly a hundred years ago and made a careful
+survey of it, named the larger northern portion of it “Admiralty Inlet”
+and one of the long, narrow branches “Hood’s Canal,” applying the name
+“Puget Sound” only to the comparatively small southern portion. The
+latter name, however, is now applied generally to the entire inlet, and
+is commonly shortened by the people hereabouts to “The Sound.” The
+natural wealth and commercial advantages of the Sound region were
+quickly recognized, and the cause of the activity prevailing here is
+not far to seek. Vancouver, long before civilization touched these
+shores, spoke of it in terms of unstinted praise. He was sent out by
+the British government with the principal object in view of “acquiring
+accurate knowledge as to the nature and extent of any water
+communication which may tend in any considerable degree to facilitate
+an intercourse for the purposes of commerce between the northwest coast
+and the country on the opposite side of the continent,” vague
+traditions having long been current concerning a strait supposed to
+unite the two oceans. Vancouver reported that he found the coast from
+San Francisco to Oregon and beyond to present a nearly straight solid
+barrier to the sea, without openings, and we may well guess the joy of
+the old navigator on the discovery of these waters after so long and
+barren a search to the southward.
+
+His descriptions of the scenery—Mounts Baker, Rainier, St. Helen’s,
+etc.—were as enthusiastic as those of the most eager landscape lover of
+the present day, when scenery is in fashion. He says in one place: “To
+describe the beauties of this region will, on some future occasion, be
+a very grateful task for the pen of a skillful panegyrist. The serenity
+of the climate, the immeasurable pleasing landscapes, and the abundant
+fertility that unassisted nature puts forth, require only to be
+enriched by the industry of man with villages, mansions, cottages, and
+other buildings, to render it the most lovely country that can be
+imagined. The labor of the inhabitants would be amply rewarded in the
+bounties which nature seems ready to bestow on cultivation.” “A picture
+so pleasing could not fail to call to our remembrance certain
+delightful and beloved situations in old England.” So warm, indeed,
+were the praises he sung that his statements were received in England
+with a good deal of hesitation. But they were amply corroborated by
+Wilkes and others who followed many years later. “Nothing,” says
+Wilkes, “can exceed the beauty of these waters and their safety. Not a
+shoal exists in the Straits of Juan de Fuca, Admiralty Inlet, Puget
+Sound or Hood’s Canal, that can in any way interrupt their navigation
+by a 74-gun ship. I venture nothing in saying there is no country in
+the world that possesses waters like these.” And again, quoting from
+the United States Coast Survey, “For depth of water, boldness of
+approaches, freedom from hidden dangers, and the immeasurable sea of
+gigantic timber coming down to the very shores, these waters are
+unsurpassed, unapproachable.”
+
+The Sound region has a fine, fresh, clean climate, well washed both
+winter and summer with copious rains and swept with winds and clouds
+that come from the mountains and the sea. Every hidden nook in the
+depths of the woods is searched and refreshed, leaving no stagnant air;
+beaver meadows and lake basin and low and willowy bogs, all are kept
+wholesome and sweet the year round. Cloud and sunshine alternate in
+bracing, cheering succession, and health and abundance follow the
+storms. The outer sea margin is sublimely dashed and drenched with
+ocean brine, the spicy scud sweeping at times far inland over the
+bending woods, the giant trees waving and chanting in hearty accord as
+if surely enjoying it all.
+
+Heavy, long-continued rains occur in the winter months. Then every
+leaf, bathed and brightened, rejoices. Filtering drops and currents
+through all the shaggy undergrowth of the woods go with tribute to the
+small streams, and these again to the larger. The rivers swell, but
+there are no devastating floods; for the thick felt of roots and mosses
+holds the abounding waters in check, stored in a thousand thousand
+fountains. Neither are there any violent hurricanes here, At least, I
+never have heard of any, nor have I come upon their tracks. Most of the
+streams are clear and cool always, for their waters are filtered
+through deep beds of mosses, and flow beneath shadows all the way to
+the sea. Only the streams from the glaciers are turbid and muddy. On
+the slopes of the mountains where they rush from their crystal caves,
+they carry not only small particles of rock-mud, worn off the sides and
+bottoms of the channels of the glaciers, but grains of sand and pebbles
+and large boulders tons in weight, rolling them forward on their way
+rumbling and bumping to their appointed places at the foot of steep
+slopes, to be built into rough bars and beds, while the smaller
+material is carried farther and outspread in flats, perhaps for coming
+wheat fields and gardens, the finest of it going out to sea, floating
+on the tides for weeks and months ere it finds rest on the bottom.
+
+Snow seldom falls to any great depth on the lowlands, though it comes
+in glorious abundance on the mountains. And only on the mountains does
+the temperature fall much below the freezing point. In the warmest
+summer weather a temperature of eighty-five degrees or even more
+occasionally is reached, but not for long at a time, as such heat is
+speedily followed by a breeze from the sea. The most charming days here
+are days of perfect calm, when all the winds are holding their breath
+and not a leaf stirs. The surface of the Sound shines like a silver
+mirror over all its vast extent, reflecting its lovely islands and
+shores; and long sheets of spangles flash and dance in the wake of
+every swimming seabird and boat. The sun, looking down on the tranquil
+landscape, seems conscious of the presence of every living thing on
+which he is pouring his blessings, while they in turn, with perhaps the
+exception of man, seem conscious of the sun as a benevolent father and
+stand hushed and waiting.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII. The Forests of Washington
+
+
+When we force our way into the depths of the forests, following any of
+the rivers back to their fountains, we find that the bulk of the woods
+is made up of the Douglas spruce (_Pseudotsuga Douglasii_), named in
+honor of David Douglas, an enthusiastic botanical explorer of early
+Hudson’s Bay times. It is not only a very large tree but a very
+beautiful one, with lively bright-green drooping foliage, handsome
+pendent cones, and a shaft exquisitely straight and regular. For so
+large a tree it is astonishing how many find nourishment and space to
+grow on any given area. The magnificent shafts push their spires into
+the sky close together with as regular a growth as that of a
+well-tilled field of grain. And no ground has been better tilled for
+the growth of trees than that on which these forests are growing. For
+it has been thoroughly ploughed and rolled by the mighty glaciers from
+the mountains, and sifted and mellowed and outspread in beds hundreds
+of feet in depth by the broad streams that issued from their fronts at
+the time of their recession, after they had long covered all the land.
+
+The largest tree of this species that I have myself measured was nearly
+twelve feet in diameter at a height of five feet from the ground, and,
+as near as I could make out under the circumstances, about three
+hundred feet in length. It stood near the head of the Sound not far
+from Olympia. I have seen a few others, both near the coast and thirty
+or forty miles back in the interior, that were from eight to ten feet
+in diameter, measured above their bulging insteps; and many from six to
+seven feet. I have heard of some that were said to be three hundred and
+twenty-five feet in height and fifteen feet in diameter, but none that
+I measured were so large, though it is not at all unlikely that such
+colossal giants do exist where conditions of soil and exposure are
+surpassingly favorable. The average size of all the trees of this
+species found up to an elevation on the mountain slopes of, say, two
+thousand feet above sea level, taking into account only what may be
+called mature trees two hundred and fifty to five hundred years of age,
+is perhaps, at a vague guess, not more than a height of one hundred and
+seventy-five or two hundred feet and a diameter of three feet; though,
+of course, throughout the richest sections the size is much greater.
+
+In proportion to its weight when dry, the timber from this tree is
+perhaps stronger than that of any other conifer in the country. It is
+tough and durable and admirably adapted in every way for shipbuilding,
+piles, and heavy timbers in general. But its hardness and liability to
+warp render it much inferior to white or sugar pine for fine work. In
+the lumber markets of California it is known as “Oregon pine” and is
+used almost exclusively for spars, bridge timbers, heavy planking, and
+the framework of houses.
+
+The same species extends northward in abundance through British
+Columbia and southward through the coast and middle regions of Oregon
+and California. It is also a common tree in the cañons and hollows of
+the Wahsatch Mountains in Utah, where it is called “red pine” and on
+portions of the Rocky Mountains and some of the short ranges of the
+Great Basin. Along the coast of California it keeps company with the
+redwood wherever it can find a favorable opening. On the western slope
+of the Sierra, with the yellow pine and incense cedar, it forms a
+pretty well-defined belt at a height of from three thousand to six
+thousand feet above the sea, and extends into the San Gabriel and San
+Bernardino Mountains in Southern California. But, though widely
+distributed, it is only in these cool, moist northlands that it reaches
+its finest development, tall, straight, elastic, and free from limbs to
+an immense height, growing down to tide water, where ships of the
+largest size may lie close alongside and load at the least possible
+cost.
+
+Growing with the Douglas we find the white spruce, or “Sitka pine,” as
+it is sometimes called. This also is a very beautiful and majestic
+tree, frequently attaining a height of two hundred feet or more and a
+diameter of five or six feet. It is very abundant in southeastern
+Alaska, forming the greater part of the best forests there. Here it is
+found mostly around the sides of beaver-dam and other meadows and on
+the borders of the streams, especially where the ground is low. One
+tree that I saw felled at the head of the Hop-Ranch meadows on the
+upper Snoqualmie River, though far from being the largest I have seen,
+measured a hundred and eighty feet in length and four and a half in
+diameter, and was two hundred and fifty-seven years of age.
+
+In habit and general appearance it resembles the Douglas spruce, but it
+is somewhat less slender and the needles grow close together all around
+the branchlets and are so stiff and sharp-pointed on the younger
+branches that they cannot well be handled without gloves. The timber is
+tough, close-grained, white, and looks more like pine than any other of
+the spruces. It splits freely, makes excellent shingles and in general
+use in house-building takes the place of pine. I have seen logs of this
+species a hundred feet long and two feet in diameter at the upper end.
+It was named in honor of the old Scotch botanist Archibald Menzies, who
+came to this coast with Vancouver in 1792[23].
+
+The beautiful hemlock spruce with its warm yellow-green foliage is also
+common in some portions of these woods. It is tall and slender and
+exceedingly graceful in habit before old age comes on, but the timber
+is inferior and is seldom used for any other than the roughest work,
+such as wharf-building.
+
+The Western arbor-vitæ[24] (_Thuja gigantea_) grows to a size truly
+gigantic on low rich ground. Specimens ten feet in diameter and a
+hundred and forty feet high are not at all rare. Some that I have heard
+of are said to be fifteen and even eighteen feet thick. Clad in rich,
+glossy plumes, with gray lichens covering their smooth, tapering boles,
+perfect trees of this species are truly noble objects and well worthy
+the place they hold in these glorious forests. It is of this tree that
+the Indians make their fine canoes.
+
+Of the other conifers that are so happy as to have place here, there
+are three firs, three or four pines, two cypresses, a yew, and another
+spruce, the _Abies Pattoniana_[25]. This last is perhaps the most
+beautiful of all the spruces, but, being comparatively small and
+growing only far back on the mountains, it receives but little
+attention from most people. Nor is there room in a work like this for
+anything like a complete description of it, or of the others I have
+just mentioned. Of the three firs, one (_Picea grandis_)[26], grows
+near the coast and is one of the largest trees in the forest, sometimes
+attaining a height of two hundred and fifty feet. The timber, however,
+is inferior in quality and not much sought after while so much that is
+better is within reach. One of the others (_P. amabilis_, var.
+_nobilis_) forms magnificent forests by itself at a height of about
+three thousand to four thousand feet above the sea. The rich plushy,
+plumelike branches grow in regular whorls around the trunk, and on the
+topmost whorls, standing erect, are the large, beautiful cones. This is
+far the most beautiful of all the firs. In the Sierra Nevada it forms a
+considerable portion of the main forest belt on the western slope, and
+it is there that it reaches its greatest size and greatest beauty. The
+third species (_P. subalpina_) forms, together with _Abies Pattoniana_,
+the upper edge of the timberline on the portion of the Cascades
+opposite the Sound. A thousand feet below the extreme limit of tree
+growth it occurs in beautiful groups amid parklike openings where
+flowers grow in extravagant profusion.
+
+The pines are nowhere abundant in the State. The largest, the yellow
+pine (_Pinus ponderosa_), occurs here and there on margins of dry
+gravelly prairies, and only in such situations have I yet seen it in
+this State. The others (_P. monticola_ and _P. contorta_) are mostly
+restricted to the upper slopes of the mountains, and though the former
+of these two attains a good size and makes excellent lumber, it is
+mostly beyond reach at present and is not abundant. One of the
+cypresses (_Cupressus Lawsoniana_)[27] grows near the coast and is a
+fine large tree, clothed like the arbor-vitae in a glorious wealth of
+flat, feathery branches. The other is found here and there well up
+toward the edge of the timberline. This is the fine Alaska cedar (_C.
+Nootkatensis_), the lumber from which is noted for its durability,
+fineness of grain, and beautiful yellow color, and for its fragrance,
+which resembles that of sandalwood. The Alaska Indians make their canoe
+paddles of it and weave matting and coarse cloth from the fibrous brown
+bark.
+
+Among the different kinds of hardwood trees are the oak, maple,
+madrona, birch, alder, and wild apple, while large cottonwoods are
+common along the rivers and shores of the numerous lakes.
+
+The most striking of these to the traveler is the Menzies arbutus, or
+madrona, as it is popularly called in California. Its curious red and
+yellow bark, large thick glossy leaves, and panicles of waxy-looking
+greenish-white urn-shaped flowers render it very conspicuous. On the
+boles of the younger trees and on all the branches, the bark is so
+smooth and seamless that it does not appear as bark at all, but rather
+the naked wood. The whole tree, with the exception of the larger part
+of the trunk, looks as though it had been thoroughly peeled. It is
+found sparsely scattered along the shores of the Sound and back in the
+forests also on open margins, where the soil is not too wet, and
+extends up the coast on Vancouver Island beyond Nanaimo. But in no part
+of the State does it reach anything like the size and beauty of
+proportions that it attains in California, few trees here being more
+than ten or twelve inches in diameter and thirty feet high. It is,
+however, a very remarkable-looking object, standing there like some
+lost or runaway native of the tropics, naked and painted, beside that
+dark mossy ocean of northland conifers. Not even a palm tree would seem
+more out of place here.
+
+The oaks, so far as my observation has reached, seem to be most
+abundant and to grow largest on the islands of the San Juan and Whidbey
+Archipelago. One of the three species of maples that I have seen is
+only a bush that makes tangles on the banks of the rivers. Of the other
+two one is a small tree, crooked and moss-grown, holding out its leaves
+to catch the light that filters down through the close-set spires of
+the great spruces. It grows almost everywhere throughout the entire
+extent of the forest until the higher slopes of the mountains are
+reached, and produces a very picturesque and delightful effect;
+relieving the bareness of the great shafts of the evergreens, without
+being close enough in its growth to hide them wholly, or to cover the
+bright mossy carpet that is spread beneath all the dense parts of the
+woods.
+
+The other species is also very picturesque and at the same time very
+large, the largest tree of its kind that I have ever seen anywhere. Not
+even in the great maple woods of Canada have I seen trees either as
+large or with so much striking, picturesque character. It is widely
+distributed throughout western Washington, but is never found scattered
+among the conifers in the dense woods. It keeps together mostly in
+magnificent groves by itself on the damp levels along the banks of
+streams or lakes where the ground is subject to overflow. In such
+situations it attains a height of seventy-five to a hundred feet and a
+diameter of four to eight feet. The trunk sends out large limbs toward
+its neighbors, laden with long drooping mosses beneath and rows of
+ferns on their upper surfaces, thus making a grand series of richly
+ornamented interlacing arches, with the leaves laid thick overhead,
+rendering the underwood spaces delightfully cool and open. Never have I
+seen a finer forest ceiling or a more picturesque one, while the floor,
+covered with tall ferns and rubus and thrown into hillocks by the
+bulging roots, matches it well. The largest of these maple groves that
+I have yet found is on the right bank of the Snoqualmie River, about a
+mile above the falls. The whole country hereabouts is picturesque, and
+interesting in many ways, and well worthy a visit by tourists passing
+through the Sound region, since it is now accessible by rail from
+Seattle.
+
+Looking now at the forests in a comprehensive way, we find in passing
+through them again and again from the shores of the Sound to their
+upper limits, that some portions are much older than others, the trees
+much larger, and the ground beneath them strewn with immense trunks in
+every stage of decay, representing several generations of growth,
+everything about them giving the impression that these are indeed the
+“forests primeval,” while in the younger portions, where the elevation
+of the ground is the same as to the sea level and the species of trees
+are the same as well as the quality of the soil, apart from the
+moisture which it holds, the trees seem to be and are mostly of the
+same age, perhaps from one hundred to two or three hundred years, with
+no gray-bearded, venerable patriarchs—forming tall, majestic woods
+without any grandfathers.
+
+When we examine the ground we find that it is as free from those mounds
+of brown crumbling wood and mossy ancient fragments as are the growing
+trees from very old ones. Then perchance, we come upon a section
+farther up the slopes towards the mountains that has no trees more than
+fifty years old, or even fifteen or twenty years old. These last show
+plainly enough that they have been devastated by fire, as the black,
+melancholy monuments rising here and there above the young growth bear
+witness. Then, with this fiery, suggestive testimony, on examining
+those sections whose trees are a hundred years old or two hundred, we
+find the same fire records, though heavily veiled with mosses and
+lichens, showing that a century or two ago the forests that stood there
+had been swept away in some tremendous fire at a time when rare
+conditions of drouth made their burning possible. Then, the bare ground
+sprinkled with the winged seed from the edges of the burned district, a
+new forest sprang up, nearly every tree starting at the same time or
+within a few years, thus producing the uniformity of size we find in
+such places; while, on the other hand, in those sections of ancient
+aspect containing very old trees both standing and fallen, we find no
+traces of fire, nor from the extreme dampness of the ground can we see
+any possibility of fire ever running there.
+
+Fire, then, is the great governing agent in forest distribution and to
+a great extent also in the conditions of forest growth. Where fertile
+lands are very wet one half the year and very dry the other, there can
+be no forests at all. Where the ground is damp, with drouth occurring
+only at intervals of centuries, fine forests may be found, other
+conditions being favorable. But it is only where fires never run that
+truly ancient forests of pitchy coniferous trees may exist. When the
+Washington forests are seen from the deck of a ship out in the middle
+of the sound, or even from the top of some high, commanding mountain,
+the woods seem everywhere perfectly solid. And so in fact they are in
+general found to be. The largest openings are those of the lakes and
+prairies, the smaller of beaver meadows, bogs, and the rivers; none of
+them large enough to make a distinct mark in comprehensive views.
+
+Of the lakes there are said to be some thirty in King’s County alone;
+the largest, Lake Washington, being twenty-six miles long and four
+miles wide. Another, which enjoys the duckish name of Lake Squak, is
+about ten miles long. Both are pure and beautiful, lying imbedded in
+the green wilderness. The rivers are numerous and are but little
+affected by the weather, flowing with deep, steady currents the year
+round. They are short, however, none of them drawing their sources from
+beyond the Cascade Range. Some are navigable for small steamers on
+their lower courses, but the openings they make in the woods are very
+narrow, the tall trees on their banks leaning over in some places,
+making fine shady tunnels.
+
+The largest of the prairies that I have seen lies to the south of
+Tacoma on the line of the Portland and Tacoma Railroad. The ground is
+dry and gravelly, a deposit of water-washed cobbles and pebbles derived
+from moraines—conditions which readily explain the absence of trees
+here and on other prairies adjacent to Yelm. Berries grow in lavish
+abundance, enough for man and beast with thousands of tons to spare.
+The woods are full of them, especially about the borders of the waters
+and meadows where the sunshine may enter. Nowhere in the north does
+Nature set a more bountiful table. There are huckleberries of many
+species, red, blue, and black, some of them growing close to the
+ground, others on bushes eight to ten feet high; also salal berries,
+growing on a low, weak-stemmed bush, a species of gaultheria, seldom
+more than a foot or two high. This has pale pea-green glossy leaves two
+or three inches long and half an inch wide and beautiful pink flowers,
+urn-shaped, that make a fine, rich show. The berries are black when
+ripe, are extremely abundant, and, with the huckleberries, form an
+important part of the food of the Indians, who beat them into paste,
+dry them, and store them away for winter use, to be eaten with their
+oily fish. The salmon-berry also is very plentiful, growing in dense
+prickly tangles. The flowers are as large as wild roses and of the same
+color, and the berries measure nearly an inch in diameter. Besides
+these there are gooseberries, currants, raspberries, blackberries, and,
+in some favored spots, strawberries. The mass of the underbrush of the
+woods is made up in great part of these berry-bearing bushes. Together
+with white-flowered spiraea twenty feet high, hazel, dogwood, wild
+rose, honeysuckle, symphoricarpus, etc. But in the depths of the woods,
+where little sunshine can reach the ground, there is but little
+underbrush of any kind, only a very light growth of huckleberry and
+rubus and young maples in most places. The difficulties encountered by
+the explorer in penetrating the wilderness are presented mostly by the
+streams and bogs, with their tangled margins, and the fallen timber and
+thick carpet of moss covering all the ground.
+
+Notwithstanding the tremendous energy displayed in lumbering and the
+grand scale on which it is being carried on, and the number of settlers
+pushing into every opening in search of farmlands, the woods of
+Washington are still almost entirely virgin and wild, without trace of
+human touch, savage or civilized. Indians, no doubt, have ascended most
+of the rivers on their way to the mountains to hunt the wild sheep and
+goat to obtain wool for their clothing, but with food in abundance on
+the coast they had little to tempt them into the wilderness, and the
+monuments they have left in it are scarcely more conspicuous than those
+of squirrels and bears; far less so than those of the beavers, which in
+damming the streams have made clearings and meadows which will continue
+to mark the landscape for centuries. Nor is there much in these woods
+to tempt the farmer or cattle raiser. A few settlers established homes
+on the prairies or open borders of the woods and in the valleys of the
+Chehalis and Cowlitz before the gold days of California. Most of the
+early immigrants from the Eastern States, however, settled in the
+fertile and open Willamette Valley or Oregon. Even now, when the search
+for land is so keen, with the exception of the bottom lands around the
+Sound and on the lower reaches of the rivers, there are comparatively
+few spots of cultivation in western Washington. On every meadow or
+opening of any kind some one will be found keeping cattle, planting hop
+vines, or raising hay, vegetables, and patches of grain. All the large
+spaces available, even back near the summits of the Cascade Mountains,
+were occupied long ago. The newcomers, building their cabins where the
+beavers once built theirs, keep a few cows and industriously seek to
+enlarge their small meadow patches by chopping, girdling, and burning
+the edge of the encircling forest, gnawing like beavers, and scratching
+for a living among the blackened stumps and logs, regarding the trees
+as their greatest enemies—a sort of larger pernicious weed immensely
+difficult to get rid of.
+
+But all these are as yet mere spots, making no visible scar in the
+distance and leaving the grand stretches of the forest as wild as they
+were before the discovery of the continent. For many years the axe has
+been busy around the shores of the Sound and ships have been falling in
+perpetual storm like flakes of snow. The best of the timber has been
+cut for a distance of eight or ten miles from the water and to a much
+greater distance along the streams deep enough to float the logs.
+Railroads, too, have been built to fetch in the logs from the best
+bodies of timber otherwise inaccessible except at great cost. None of
+the ground, however, has been completely denuded. Most of the young
+trees have been left, together with the hemlocks and other trees
+undesirable in kind or in some way defective, so that the neighboring
+trees appear to have closed over the gaps make by the removal of the
+larger and better ones, maintaining the general continuity of the
+forest and leaving no sign on the sylvan sea, at least as seen from a
+distance.
+
+In felling the trees they cut them off usually at a height of six to
+twelve feet above the ground, so as to avoid cutting through the
+swollen base, where the diameter is so much greater. In order to reach
+this height the chopper cuts a notch about two inches wide and three or
+four deep and drives a board into it, on which he stands while at work.
+In case the first notch, cut as high as he can reach, is not high
+enough, he stands on the board that has been driven into the first
+notch and cuts another. Thus the axeman may often be seen at work
+standing eight or ten feet above the ground. If the tree is so large
+that with his long-handled axe the chopper is unable to reach to the
+farther side of it, then a second chopper is set to work, each cutting
+halfway across. And when the tree is about to fall, warned by the faint
+crackling of the strained fibers, they jump to the ground, and stand
+back out of danger from flying limbs, while the noble giant that had
+stood erect in glorious strength and beauty century after century, bows
+low at last and with gasp and groan and booming throb falls to earth.
+
+Then with long saws the trees are cut into logs of the required length,
+peeled, loaded upon wagons capable of carrying a weight of eight or ten
+tons, hauled by a long string of oxen to the nearest available stream
+or railroad, and floated or carried to the Sound. There the logs are
+gathered into booms and towed by steamers to the mills, where workmen
+with steel spikes in their boots leap lightly with easy poise from one
+to another and by means of long pike poles push them apart and,
+selecting such as are at the time required, push them to the foot of a
+chute and drive dogs into the ends, when they are speedily hauled in by
+the mill machinery alongside the saw carriage and placed and fixed in
+position. Then with sounds of greedy hissing and growling they are
+rushed back and forth like enormous shuttles, and in an incredibly
+short time they are lumber and are aboard the ships lying at the mill
+wharves.
+
+Many of the long, slender boles so abundant in these woods are saved
+for spars, and so excellent is their quality that they are in demand in
+almost every shipyard of the world. Thus these trees, felled and
+stripped of their leaves and branches, are raised again, transplanted
+and set firmly erect, given roots of iron and a new foliage of flapping
+canvas, and sent to sea. On they speed in glad, free motion, cheerily
+waving over the blue, heaving water, responsive to the same winds that
+rocked them when they stood at home in the woods. After standing in one
+place all their lives they now, like sight-seeing tourists, go round
+the world, meeting many a relative from the old home forest, some like
+themselves, wandering free, clad in broad canvas foliage, others
+planted head downward in mud, holding wharf platforms aloft to receive
+the wares of all nations.
+
+The mills of Puget sound and those of the redwood region of California
+are said to be the largest and most effective lumber-makers in the
+world. Tacoma alone claims to have eleven sawmills, and Seattle about
+as many; while at many other points on the Sound, where the conditions
+are particularly favorable, there are immense lumbering establishments,
+as at Ports Blakely, Madison, Discovery, Gamble, Ludlow, etc., with a
+capacity all together of over three million feet a day. Nevertheless,
+the observer coming up the Sound sees not nor hears anything of this
+fierce storm of steel that is devouring the forests, save perhaps the
+shriek of some whistle or the columns of smoke that mark the position
+of the mills. All else seems as serene and unscathed as the silent
+watching mountains.
+
+
+
+
+XIX. People and Towns of Puget Sound
+
+
+As one strolls in the woods about the logging camps, most of the
+lumbermen are found to be interesting people to meet, kind and obliging
+and sincere, full of knowledge concerning the bark and sapwood and
+heartwood of the trees they cut, and how to fell them without
+unnecessary breakage, on ground where they may be most advantageously
+sawed into logs and loaded for removal. The work is hard, and all of
+the older men have a tired, somewhat haggard appearance. Their faces
+are doubtful in color, neither sickly nor quite healthy-looking, and
+seamed with deep wrinkles like the bark of the spruces, but with no
+trace of anxiety. Their clothing is full of rosin and never wears out.
+A little of everything in the woods is stuck fast to these loggers, and
+their trousers grow constantly thicker with age. In all their movements
+and gestures they are heavy and deliberate like the trees above them,
+and they walk with a swaying, rocking gait altogether free from quick,
+jerky fussiness, for chopping and log rolling have quenched all that.
+They are also slow of speech, as if partly out of breath, and when one
+tries to draw them out on some subject away from logs, all the fresh,
+leafy, outreaching branches of the mind seem to have been withered and
+killed with fatigue, leaving their lives little more than dry lumber.
+Many a tree have these old axemen felled, but, round-shouldered and
+stooping, they too are beginning to lean over. Many of their companions
+are already beneath the moss, and among those that we see at work some
+are now dead at the top (bald), leafless, so to speak, and tottering to
+their fall.
+
+A very different man, seen now and then at long intervals but usually
+invisible, is the free roamer of the wilderness—hunter, prospector,
+explorer, seeking he knows not what. Lithe and sinewy, he walks erect,
+making his way with the skill of wild animals, all his senses in
+action, watchful and alert, looking keenly at everything in sight, his
+imagination well nourished in the wealth of the wilderness, coming into
+contact with free nature in a thousand forms, drinking at the fountains
+of things, responsive to wild influences, as trees to the winds. Well
+he knows the wild animals his neighbors, what fishes are in the
+streams, what birds in the forests, and where food may be found. Hungry
+at times and weary, he has corresponding enjoyment in eating and
+resting, and all the wilderness is home. Some of these rare, happy
+rovers die alone among the leaves. Others half settle down and change
+in part into farmers; each, making choice of some fertile spot where
+the landscape attracts him, builds a small cabin, where, with few wants
+to supply from garden or field, he hunts and farms in turn, going
+perhaps once a year to the settlements, until night begins to draw
+near, and, like forest shadows, thickens into darkness and his day is
+done. In these Washington wilds, living alone, all sorts of men may
+perchance be found—poets, philosophers, and even full-blown
+transcendentalists, though you may go far to find them.
+
+Indians are seldom to be met with away from the Sound, excepting about
+the few outlying hop ranches, to which they resort in great numbers
+during the picking season. Nor in your walks in the woods will you be
+likely to see many of the wild animals, however far you may go, with
+the exception of the Douglas squirrel and the mountain goat. The
+squirrel is everywhere, and the goat you can hardly fail to find if you
+climb any of the high mountains. The deer, once very abundant, may
+still be found on the islands and along the shores of the Sound, but
+the large gray wolves render their existence next to impossible at any
+considerable distance back in the woods of the mainland, as they can
+easily run them down unless they are near enough to the coast to make
+their escape by plunging into the water and swimming to the islands off
+shore. The elk and perhaps also the moose still exist in the most
+remote and inaccessible solitudes of the forest, but their numbers have
+been greatly reduced of late, and even the most experienced hunters
+have difficulty in finding them. Of bears there are two species, the
+black and the large brown, the former by far the more common of the
+two. On the shaggy bottom-lands where berries are plentiful, and along
+the rivers while salmon are going up to spawn, the black bear may be
+found, fat and at home. Many are killed every year, both for their
+flesh and skins. The large brown species likes higher and opener
+ground. He is a dangerous animal, a near relative of the famous
+grizzly, and wise hunters are very fond of letting him alone.
+
+The towns of Puget Sound are of a very lively, progressive, and
+aspiring kind, fortunately with abundance of substance about them to
+warrant their ambition and make them grow. Like young sapling sequoias,
+they are sending out their roots far and near for nourishment, counting
+confidently on longevity and grandeur of stature. Seattle and Tacoma
+are at present far in the lead of all others in the race for supremacy,
+and these two are keen, active rivals, to all appearances well matched.
+Tacoma occupies near the head of the Sound a site of great natural
+beauty. It is the terminus of the Northern Pacific Railroad, and calls
+itself the “City of Destiny.” Seattle is also charmingly located about
+twenty miles down the Sound from Tacoma, on Elliott Bay. It is the
+terminus of the Seattle, Lake Shore, and Eastern Railroad, now in
+process of construction, and calls itself the “Queen City of the Sound”
+and the “Metropolis of Washington.” What the populations of these towns
+number I am not able to say with anything like exactness. They are
+probably about the same size and they each claim to have about twenty
+thousand people; but their figures are so rapidly changing, and so
+often mixed up with counts that refer to the future that exact
+measurements of either of these places are about as hard to obtain as
+measurements of the clouds of a growing storm. Their edges run back for
+miles into the woods among the trees and stumps and brush which hide a
+good many of the houses and the stakes which mark the lots; so that,
+without being as yet very large towns, they seem to fade away into the
+distance.
+
+But, though young and loose-jointed, they are fast taking on the forms
+and manners of old cities, putting on airs, as some would say, like
+boys in haste to be men. They are already towns “with all modern
+improvements, first-class in every particular,” as is said of hotels.
+They have electric motors and lights, paved broadways and boulevards,
+substantial business blocks, schools, churches, factories, and
+foundries. The lusty, titanic clang of boiler making may be heard
+there, and plenty of the languid music of pianos mingling with the
+babel noises of commerce carried on in a hundred tongues. The main
+streets are crowded with bright, wide-awake lawyers, ministers,
+merchants, agents for everything under the sun; ox drivers and loggers
+in stiff, gummy overalls; back-slanting dudes, well-tailored and shiny;
+and fashions and bonnets of every feather and color bloom gayly in the
+noisy throng and advertise London and Paris. Vigorous life and strife
+are to be seen everywhere. The spirit of progress is in the air. Still
+it is hard to realize how much good work is being done here of a kind
+that makes for civilization—the enthusiastic, exulting energy displayed
+in the building of new towns, railroads, and mills, in the opening of
+mines of coal and iron and the development of natural resources in
+general. To many, especially in the Atlantic States, Washington is
+hardly known at all. It is regarded as being yet a far wild west—a dim,
+nebulous expanse of woods—by those who do not know that railroads and
+steamers have brought the country out of the wilderness and abolished
+the old distances. It is now near to all the world and is in possession
+of a share of the best of all that civilization has to offer, while on
+some of the lines of advancement it is at the front.
+
+Notwithstanding the sharp rivalry between different sections and towns,
+the leading men mostly pull together for the general good and
+glory,—building, buying, borrowing, to push the country to its place;
+keeping arithmetic busy in counting population present and to come,
+ships, towns, factories, tons of coal and iron, feet of lumber, miles
+of railroad,—Americans, Scandinavians, Irish, Scotch, and Germans being
+joined together in the white heat of work like religious crowds in time
+of revival who have forgotten sectarianism. It is a fine thing to see
+people in hot earnest about anything; therefore, however extravagant
+and high the brag ascending from Puget Sound, in most cases it is
+likely to appear pardonable and more.
+
+Seattle was named after an old Indian chief who lived in this part of
+the Sound. He was very proud of the honor and lived long enough to lead
+his grandchildren about the streets. The greater part of the lower
+business portion of the town, including a long stretch of wharves and
+warehouses built on piles, was destroyed by fire a few months ago [28],
+with immense loss. The people, however, are in no wise discouraged, and
+ere long the loss will be gain, inasmuch as a better class of
+buildings, chiefly of brick, are being erected in place of the
+inflammable wooden ones, which, with comparatively few exceptions, were
+built of pitchy spruce.
+
+With their own scenery so glorious ever on show, one would at first
+thought suppose that these happy Puget Sound people would never go
+sightseeing from home like less favored mortals. But they do all the
+same. Some go boating on the Sound or on the lakes and rivers, or with
+their families make excursions at small cost on the steamers. Others
+will take the train to the Franklin and Newcastle or Carbon River coal
+mines for the sake of the thirty- or forty-mile rides through the
+woods, and a look into the black depths of the underworld. Others again
+take the steamers for Victoria, Fraser River, or Vancouver, the new
+ambitious town at the terminus of the Canadian Railroad, thus getting
+views of the outer world in a near foreign country. One of the regular
+summer resorts of this region where people go for fishing, hunting, and
+the healing of diseases, is the Green River Hot Springs, in the Cascade
+Mountains, sixty-one miles east of Tacoma, on the line of the Northern
+Pacific Railroad. Green River is a small rocky stream with picturesque
+banks, and derives its name from the beautiful pale-green hue of its
+waters.
+
+Among the most interesting of all the summer rest and pleasure places
+is the famous “Hop Ranch” on the upper Snoqualmie River, thirty or
+forty miles eastward from Seattle. Here the dense forest opens,
+allowing fine free views of the adjacent mountains from a long stretch
+of ground which is half meadow, half prairie, level and fertile, and
+beautifully diversified with outstanding groves of spruces and alders
+and rich flowery fringes of spiraea and wild roses, the river
+meandering deep and tranquil through the midst of it. On the portions
+most easily cleared some three hundred acres of hop vines have been
+planted and are now in full bearing, yielding, it is said, at the rate
+of about a ton of hops to the acre. They are a beautiful crop, these
+vines of the north, pillars of verdure in regular rows, seven feet
+apart and eight or ten feet in height; the long, vigorous shoots
+sweeping round in fine, wild freedom, and the light, leafy cones
+hanging in loose, handsome clusters.
+
+Perhaps enough of hops might be raised in Washington for the wants of
+all the world, but it would be impossible to find pickers to handle the
+crop. Most of the picking is done by Indians, and to this fine, clean,
+profitable work they come in great numbers in their canoes, old and
+young, of many different tribes, bringing wives and children and
+household goods, in some cases from a distance of five or six hundred
+miles, even from far Alaska. Then they too grow rich and spend their
+money on red cloth and trinkets. About a thousand Indians are required
+as pickers at the Snoqualmie ranch alone, and a lively and merry
+picture they make in the field, arrayed in bright, showy calicoes,
+lowering the rustling vine pillars with incessant song-singing and fun.
+Still more striking are their queer camps on the edges of the fields or
+over on the river bank, with the firelight shining on their wild jolly
+faces. But woe to the ranch should fire-water get there!
+
+But the chief attractions here are not found in the hops, but in
+trout-fishing and bear-hunting, and in the two fine falls on the river.
+Formerly the trip from Seattle was a hard one, over corduroy roads; now
+it is reached in a few hours by rail along the shores of Lake
+Washington and Lake Squak, through a fine sample section of the forest
+and past the brow of the main Snoqualmie Fall. From the hotel at the
+ranch village the road to the fall leads down the right bank of the
+river through the magnificent maple woods I have mentioned elsewhere,
+and fine views of the fall may be had on that side, both from above and
+below. It is situated on the main river, where it plunges over a sheer
+precipice, about two hundred and forty feet high, in leaving the level
+meadows of the ancient lake basin. In a general way it resembles the
+well-known Nevada Fall in Yosemite, having the same twisted appearance
+at the top and the free plunge in numberless comet-shaped masses into a
+deep pool seventy-five or eighty yards in diameter. The pool is of
+considerable depth, as is shown by the radiating well-beaten foam and
+mist, which is of a beautiful rose color at times, of exquisite
+fineness of tone, and by the heavy waves that lash the rocks in front
+of it.
+
+Though to a Californian the height of this fall would not seem great,
+the volume of water is heavy, and all the surroundings are delightful.
+The maple forest, of itself worth a long journey, the beauty of the
+river-reaches above and below, and the views down the valley afar over
+the mighty forests, with all its lovely trimmings of ferns and flowers,
+make this one of the most interesting falls I have ever seen. The upper
+fall is about seventy-five feet high, with bouncing rapids at head and
+foot, set in a romantic dell thatched with dripping mosses and ferns
+and embowered in dense evergreens and blooming bushes, the distance to
+it from the upper end of the meadows being about eight miles. The road
+leads through majestic woods with ferns ten feet high beneath some of
+the thickets, and across a gravelly plain deforested by fire many years
+ago. Orange lilies are plentiful, and handsome shining mats of the
+kinnikinic, sprinkled with bright scarlet berries.
+
+From a place called “Hunt’s,” at the end of the wagon road, a trail
+leads through lush, dripping woods (never dry) to Thuja and Mertens,
+Menzies, and Douglas spruces. The ground is covered with the best
+moss-work of the moist lands of the north, made up mostly of the
+various species of hypnum, with some liverworts, marchantia,
+jungermannia, etc., in broad sheets and bosses, where never a dust
+particle floated, and where all the flowers, fresh with mist and spray,
+are wetter than water lilies. The pool at the foot of the fall is a
+place surpassingly lovely to look at, with the enthusiastic rush and
+song of the falls, the majestic trees overhead leaning over the brink
+like listeners eager to catch every word of the white refreshing
+waters, the delicate maidenhairs and aspleniums with fronds outspread
+gathering the rainbow sprays, and the myriads of hooded mosses, every
+cup fresh and shining.
+
+
+
+
+XX. An Ascent of Mount Rainier
+
+
+Ambitious climbers, seeking adventures and opportunities to test their
+strength and skill, occasionally attempt to penetrate the wilderness on
+the west side of the Sound, and push on to the summit of Mount Olympus.
+But the grandest excursion of all to be make hereabouts is to Mount
+Rainier, to climb to the top of its icy crown. The mountain is very
+high[29], fourteen thousand four hundred feet, and laden with glaciers
+that are terribly roughened and interrupted by crevasses and ice
+cliffs. Only good climbers should attempt to gain the summit, led by a
+guide of proved nerve and endurance. A good trail has been cut through
+the woods to the base of the mountain on the north; but the summit of
+the mountain never has been reached from this side, though many brave
+attempts have been made upon it.
+
+[Illustration: MOUNT RAINIER FROM THE SODA SPRINGS]
+
+Last summer I gained the summit from the south side, in a day and a
+half from the timberline, without encountering any desperate obstacles
+that could not in some way be passed in good weather. I was accompanied
+by Keith, the artist, Professor Ingraham, and five ambitious young
+climbers from Seattle. We were led by the veteran mountaineer and guide
+Van Trump, of Yelm, who many years before guided General Stevens in his
+memorable ascent, and later Mr. Bailey, of Oakland. With a cumbersome
+abundance of campstools and blankets we set out from Seattle, traveling
+by rail as far as Yelm Prairie, on the Tacoma and Oregon road. Here we
+made our first camp and arranged with Mr. Longmire, a farmer in the
+neighborhood, for pack and saddle animals. The noble King Mountain was
+in full view from here, glorifying the bright, sunny day with his
+presence, rising in godlike majesty over the woods, with the
+magnificent prairie as a foreground. The distance to the mountain from
+Yelm in a straight line is perhaps fifty miles; but by the mule and
+yellowjacket trail we had to follow it is a hundred miles. For,
+notwithstanding a portion of this trail runs in the air, where the
+wasps work hardest, it is far from being an air line as commonly
+understood.
+
+By night of the third day we reached the Soda Springs on the right bank
+of the Nisqually, which goes roaring by, gray with mud, gravel, and
+boulders from the caves of the glaciers of Rainier, now close at hand.
+The distance from the Soda Springs to the Camp of the Clouds is about
+ten miles. The first part of the way lies up the Nisqually Cañon, the
+bottom of which is flat in some places and the walls very high and
+precipitous, like those of the Yosemite Valley. The upper part of the
+cañon is still occupied by one of the Nisqually glaciers, from which
+this branch of the river draws its source, issuing from a cave in the
+gray, rock-strewn snout. About a mile below the glacier we had to ford
+the river, which caused some anxiety, for the current is very rapid and
+carried forward large boulders as well as lighter material, while its
+savage roar is bewildering.
+
+At this point we left the cañon, climbing out of it by a steep zigzag
+up the old lateral moraine of the glacier, which was deposited when the
+present glacier flowed past at this height, and is about eight hundred
+feet high. It is now covered with a superb growth of _Picea
+amabilis_[30]; so also is the corresponding portion of the right
+lateral. From the top of the moraine, still ascending, we passed for a
+mile or two through a forest of mixed growth, mainly silver fir, Patton
+spruce, and mountain pine, and then came to the charming park region,
+at an elevation of about five thousand feet above sea level. Here the
+vast continuous woods at length begin to give way under the dominion of
+climate, though still at this height retaining their beauty and giving
+no sign of stress of storm, sweeping upward in belts of varying width,
+composed mainly of one species of fir, sharp and spiry in form, leaving
+smooth, spacious parks, with here and there separate groups of trees
+standing out in the midst of the openings like islands in a lake. Every
+one of these parks, great and small, is a garden filled knee-deep with
+fresh, lovely flowers of every hue, the most luxuriant and the most
+extravagantly beautiful of all the alpine gardens I ever beheld in all
+my mountain-top wanderings.
+
+We arrived at the Cloud Camp at noon, but no clouds were in sight, save
+a few gauzy ornamental wreaths adrift in the sunshine. Out of the
+forest at last there stood the mountain, wholly unveiled, awful in bulk
+and majesty, filling all the view like a separate, new-born world, yet
+withal so fine and so beautiful it might well fire the dullest observer
+to desperate enthusiasm. Long we gazed in silent admiration, buried in
+tall daisies and anemones by the side of a snowbank. Higher we could
+not go with the animals and find food for them and wood for our own
+campfires, for just beyond this lies the region of ice, with only here
+and there an open spot on the ridges in the midst of the ice, with
+dwarf alpine plants, such as saxifrages and drabas, which reach far up
+between the glaciers, and low mats of the beautiful bryanthus, while
+back of us were the gardens and abundance of everything that heart
+could wish. Here we lay all the afternoon, considering the lilies and
+the lines of the mountains with reference to a way to the summit.
+
+At noon next day we left camp and began our long climb. We were in
+light marching order, save one who pluckily determined to carry his
+camera to the summit. At night, after a long easy climb over wide and
+smooth fields of ice, we reached a narrow ridge, at an elevation of
+about ten thousand feet above the sea, on the divide between the
+glaciers of the Nisqually and the Cowlitz. Here we lay as best we
+could, waiting for another day, without fire of course, as we were now
+many miles beyond the timberline and without much to cover us. After
+eating a little hardtack, each of us leveled a spot to lie on among
+lava-blocks and cinders. The night was cold, and the wind coming down
+upon us in stormy surges drove gritty ashes and fragments of pumice
+about our ears while chilling to the bone. Very short and shallow was
+our sleep that night; but day dawned at last, early rising was easy,
+and there was nothing about breakfast to cause any delay. About four
+o’clock we were off, and climbing began in earnest. We followed up the
+ridge on which we had spent the night, now along its crest, now on
+either side, or on the ice leaning against it, until we came to where
+it becomes massive and precipitous. Then we were compelled to crawl
+along a seam or narrow shelf, on its face, which we traced to its
+termination in the base of the great ice cap. From this point all the
+climbing was over ice, which was here desperately steep but fortunately
+was at the same time carved into innumerable spikes and pillars which
+afforded good footholds, and we crawled cautiously on, warm with
+ambition and exercise.
+
+At length, after gaining the upper extreme of our guiding ridge, we
+found a good place to rest and prepare ourselves to scale the dangerous
+upper curves of the dome. The surface almost everywhere was bare, hard,
+snowless ice, extremely slippery; and, though smooth in general, it was
+interrupted by a network of yawning crevasses, outspread like lines of
+defense against any attempt to win the summit. Here every one of the
+party took off his shoes and drove stout steel caulks about half an
+inch long into them, having brought tools along for the purpose, and
+not having made use of them until now so that the points might not get
+dulled on the rocks ere the smooth, dangerous ice was reached. Besides
+being well shod each carried an alpenstock, and for special
+difficulties we had a hundred feet of rope and an axe.
+
+Thus prepared, we stepped forth afresh, slowly groping our way through
+tangled lines of crevasses, crossing on snow bridges here and there
+after cautiously testing them, jumping at narrow places, or crawling
+around the ends of the largest, bracing well at every point with our
+alpenstocks and setting our spiked shoes squarely down on the dangerous
+slopes. It was nerve-trying work, most of it, but we made good speed
+nevertheless, and by noon all stood together on the utmost summit, save
+one who, his strength failing for a time, came up later.
+
+We remained on the summit nearly two hours, looking about us at the
+vast maplike views, comprehending hundreds of miles of the Cascade
+Range, with their black interminable forests and white volcanic cones
+in glorious array reaching far into Oregon; the Sound region also, and
+the great plains of eastern Washington, hazy and vague in the distance.
+Clouds began to gather. Soon of all the land only the summits of the
+mountains, St. Helen’s, Adams, and Hood, were left in sight, forming
+islands in the sky. We found two well-formed and well-preserved craters
+on the summit, lying close together like two plates on a table with
+their rims touching. The highest point of the mountain is located
+between the craters, where their edges come in contact. Sulphurous
+fumes and steam issue from several vents, giving out a sickening smell
+that can be detected at a considerable distance. The unwasted condition
+of these craters, and, indeed, to a great extent, of the entire
+mountain, would tend to show that Rainier is still a comparatively
+young mountain. With the exception of the projecting lips of the
+craters and the top of a subordinate summit a short distance to the
+northward, the mountains is solidly capped with ice all around; and it
+is this ice cap which forms the grand central fountain whence all the
+twenty glaciers of Rainier flow, radiating in every direction.
+
+The descent was accomplished without disaster, though several of the
+party had narrow escapes. One slipped and fell, and as he shot past me
+seemed to be going to certain death. So steep was the ice slope no one
+could move to help him, but fortunately, keeping his presence of mind,
+he threw himself on his face and digging his alpenstock into the ice,
+gradually retarded his motion until he came to rest. Another broke
+through a slim bridge over a crevasse, but his momentum at the time
+carried him against the lower edge and only his alpenstock was lost in
+the abyss. Thus crippled by the loss of his staff, we had to lower him
+the rest of the way down the dome by means of the rope we carried.
+Falling rocks from the upper precipitous part of the ridge were also a
+source of danger, as they came whizzing past in successive volleys; but
+none told on us, and when we at length gained the gentle slopes of the
+lower ice fields, we ran and slid at our ease, making fast, glad time,
+all care and danger past, and arrived at our beloved Cloud Camp before
+sundown.
+
+We were rather weak from want of nourishment, and some suffered from
+sunburn, notwithstanding the partial protection of glasses and veils;
+otherwise, all were unscathed and well. The view we enjoyed from the
+summit could hardly be surpassed in sublimity and grandeur; but one
+feels far from home so high in the sky, so much so that one is inclined
+to guess that, apart from the acquisition of knowledge and the
+exhilaration of climbing, more pleasure is to be found at the foot of
+the mountains than on their tops. Doubly happy, however, is the man to
+whom lofty mountain tops are within reach, for the lights that shine
+there illumine all that lies below.
+
+
+
+
+XXI. The Physical and Climatic Characteristics of Oregon
+
+
+Oregon is a large, rich, compact section of the west side of the
+continent, containing nearly a hundred thousand square miles of deep,
+wet evergreen woods, fertile valleys, icy mountains, and high, rolling
+wind-swept plains, watered by the majestic Columbia River and its
+countless branches. It is bounded on the north by Washington, on the
+east by Idaho, on the south by California and Nevada, and on the west
+by the Pacific Ocean. It is a grand, hearty, wholesome, foodful
+wilderness and, like Washington, once a part of the Oregon Territory,
+abounds in bold, far-reaching contrasts as to scenery, climate, soil,
+and productions. Side by side there is drouth on a grand scale and
+overflowing moisture; flinty, sharply cut lava beds, gloomy and
+forbidding, and smooth, flowery lawns; cool bogs, exquisitely plushy
+and soft, overshadowed by jagged crags barren as icebergs; forests
+seemingly boundless and plains with no tree in sight; presenting a wide
+range of conditions, but as a whole favorable to industry. Natural
+wealth of an available kind abounds nearly everywhere, inviting the
+farmer, the stock-raiser, the lumberman, the fisherman, the
+manufacturer, and the miner, as well as the free walker in search of
+knowledge and wildness. The scenery is mostly of a comfortable,
+assuring kind, grand and inspiring without too much of that dreadful
+overpowering sublimity and exuberance which tend to discourage effort
+and cast people into inaction and superstition.
+
+Ever since Oregon was first heard of in the romantic, adventurous,
+hunting, trapping Wild West days, it seems to have been regarded as the
+most attractive and promising of all the Pacific countries for farmers.
+While yet the whole region as well as the way to it was wild, ere a
+single road or bridge was built, undaunted by the trackless
+thousand-mile distances and scalping, cattle-stealing Indians, long
+trains of covered wagons began to crawl wearily westward, crossing how
+many plains, rivers, ridges, and mountains, fighting the painted
+savages and weariness and famine. Setting out from the frontier of the
+old West in the spring as soon as the grass would support their cattle,
+they pushed on up the Platte, making haste slowly, however, that they
+might not be caught in the storms of winter ere they reached the
+promised land. They crossed the Rocky Mountains to Fort Hall; thence
+followed down the Snake River for three or four hundred miles, their
+cattle limping and failing on the rough lava plains; swimming the
+streams too deep to be forded, making boats out of wagon-boxes for the
+women and children and goods, or where trees could be had, lashing
+together logs for rafts. Thence, crossing the Blue Mountains and the
+plains of the Columbia, they followed the river to the Dalles. Here
+winter would be upon them, and before a wagon road was built across the
+Cascade Mountains the toil-worn emigrants would be compelled to leave
+their cattle and wagons until the following summer, and, in the mean
+time, with the assistance of the Hudson’s Bay Company, make their way
+to the Willamette Valley on the river with rafts and boats.
+
+How strange and remote these trying times have already become! They are
+now dim as if a thousand years had passed over them. Steamships and
+locomotives with magical influence have well-nigh abolished the old
+distances and dangers, and brought forward the New West into near and
+familiar companionship with the rest of the world.
+
+Purely wild for unnumbered centuries, a paradise of oily, salmon-fed
+Indians, Oregon is now roughly settled in part and surveyed, its rivers
+and mountain ranges, lakes, valleys, and plains have been traced and
+mapped in a general way, civilization is beginning to take root, towns
+are springing up and flourishing vigorously like a crop adapted to the
+soil, and the whole kindly wilderness lies invitingly near with all its
+wealth open and ripe for use.
+
+In sailing along the Oregon coast one sees but few more signs of human
+occupation than did Juan de Fuca three centuries ago. The shore bluffs
+rise abruptly from the waves, forming a wall apparently unbroken,
+though many short rivers from the coast range of mountains and two from
+the interior have made narrow openings on their way to the sea. At the
+mouths of these rivers good harbors have been discovered for coasting
+vessels, which are of great importance to the lumbermen, dairymen, and
+farmers of the coast region. But little or nothing of these appear in
+general views, only a simple gray wall nearly straight, green along the
+top, and the forest stretching back into the mountains as far as the
+eye can reach.
+
+Going ashore, we find few long reaches of sand where one may saunter,
+or meadows, save the brown and purple meadows of the sea, overgrown
+with slippery kelp, swashed and swirled in the restless breakers. The
+abruptness of the shore allows the massive waves that have come from
+far over the broad Pacific to get close to the bluffs ere they break,
+and the thundering shock shakes the rocks to their foundations. No calm
+comes to these shores. Even in the finest weather, when the ships off
+shore are becalmed and their sails hang loose against the mast, there
+is always a wreath of foam at the base of these bluffs. The breakers
+are ever in bloom and crystal brine is ever in the air.
+
+[Illustration: THE OREGON SEA-BLUFFS]
+
+A scramble along the Oregon sea bluffs proves as richly exciting to
+lovers of wild beauty as heart could wish. Here are three hundred miles
+of pictures of rock and water in black and white, or gray and white,
+with more or less of green and yellow, purple and blue. The rocks,
+glistening in sunshine and foam, are never wholly dry—many of them
+marvels of wave-sculpture and most imposing in bulk and bearing,
+standing boldly forward, monuments of a thousand storms, types of
+permanence, holding the homes and places of refuge of multitudes of
+seafaring animals in their keeping, yet ever wasting away. How grand
+the songs of the waves about them, every wave a fine, hearty storm in
+itself, taking its rise on the breezy plains of the sea, perhaps
+thousands of miles away, traveling with majestic, slow-heaving
+deliberation, reaching the end of its journey, striking its blow,
+bursting into a mass of white and pink bloom, then falling spent and
+withered to give place to the next in the endless procession, thus
+keeping up the glorious show and glorious song through all times and
+seasons forever!
+
+Terribly impressive as is this cliff and wave scenery when the skies
+are bright and kindly sunshine makes rainbows in the spray, it is
+doubly so in dark, stormy nights, when, crouching in some hollow on the
+top of some jutting headland, we may gaze and listen undisturbed in the
+heart of it. Perhaps now and then we may dimly see the tops of the
+highest breakers, looking ghostly in the gloom; but when the water
+happens to be phosphorescent, as it oftentimes is, then both the sea
+and the rocks are visible, and the wild, exulting, up-dashing spray
+burns, every particle of it, and is combined into one glowing mass of
+white fire; while back in the woods and along the bluffs and crags of
+the shore the storm wind roars, and the rain-floods, gathering strength
+and coming from far and near, rush wildly down every gulch to the sea,
+as if eager to join the waves in their grand, savage harmony; deep
+calling unto deep in the heart of the great, dark night, making a sight
+and a song unspeakably sublime and glorious.
+
+In the pleasant weather of summer, after the rainy season is past and
+only occasional refreshing showers fall, washing the sky and bringing
+out the fragrance of the flowers and the evergreens, then one may enjoy
+a fine, free walk all the way across the State from the sea to the
+eastern boundary on the Snake River. Many a beautiful stream we should
+cross in such a walk, singing through forest and meadow and deep rocky
+gorge, and many a broad prairie and plain, mountain and valley, wild
+garden and desert, presenting landscape beauty on a grand scale and in
+a thousand forms, and new lessons without number, delightful to learn.
+Oregon has three mountain ranges which run nearly parallel with the
+coast, the most influential of which, in every way, is the Cascade
+Range. It is about six thousand to seven thousand feet in average
+height, and divides the State into two main sections called Eastern and
+Western Oregon, corresponding with the main divisions of Washington;
+while these are again divided, but less perfectly, by the Blue
+Mountains and the Coast Range. The eastern section is about two hundred
+and thirty miles wide, and is made up in great part of the treeless
+plains of the Columbia, which are green and flowery in spring, but
+gray, dusty, hot, and forbidding in summer. Considerable areas,
+however, on these plains, as well as some of the valleys countersunk
+below the general surface along the banks of the streams, have proved
+fertile and produce large crops of wheat, barley, hay, and other
+products.
+
+In general views the western section seems to be covered with one vast,
+evenly planted forest, with the exception of the few snow-clad peaks of
+the Cascade Range, these peaks being the only points in the landscape
+that rise above the timberline. Nevertheless, embosomed in this forest
+and lying in the great trough between the Cascades and coast mountains,
+there are some of the best bread-bearing valleys to be found in the
+world. The largest of these are the Willamette, Umpqua, and Rogue River
+Valleys. Inasmuch as a considerable portion of these main valleys was
+treeless, or nearly so, as well as surpassingly fertile, they were the
+first to attract settlers; and the Willamette, being at once the
+largest and nearest to tide water, was settled first of all, and now
+contains the greater portion of the population and wealth of the State.
+
+The climate of this section, like the corresponding portion of
+Washington, is rather damp and sloppy throughout the winter months, but
+the summers are bright, ripening the wheat and allowing it to be
+garnered in good condition. Taken as a whole, the weather is bland and
+kindly, and like the forest trees the crops and cattle grow plump and
+sound in it. So also do the people; children ripen well and grow up
+with limbs of good size and fiber and, unless overworked in the woods,
+live to a good old age, hale and hearty.
+
+But, like every other happy valley in the world, the sunshine of this
+one is not without its shadows. Malarial fevers are not unknown in some
+places, and untimely frosts and rains may at long intervals in some
+measure disappoint the hopes of the husbandman. Many a tale,
+good-natured or otherwise, is told concerning the overflowing abundance
+of the Oregon rains. Once an English traveler, as the story goes, went
+to a store to make some purchases and on leaving found that rain was
+falling; therefore, not liking to get wet, he stepped back to wait till
+the shower was over. Seeing no signs of clearing, he soon became
+impatient and inquired of the storekeeper how long he thought the
+shower would be likely to last. Going to the door and looking wisely
+into the gray sky and noting the direction of the wind, the latter
+replied that he thought the shower would probably last about six
+months, an opinion that of course disgusted the fault-finding Briton
+with the “blawsted country,” though in fact it is but little if at all
+wetter or cloudier than his own.
+
+No climate seems the best for everybody. Many there be who waste their
+lives in a vain search for weather with which no fault may be found,
+keeping themselves and their families in constant motion, like floating
+seaweeds that never strike root, yielding compliance to every current
+of news concerning countries yet untried, believing that everywhere,
+anywhere, the sky is fairer and the grass grows greener than where they
+happen to be. Before the Oregon and California railroad was built, the
+overland journey between these States across the Siskiyou Mountains in
+the old-fashioned emigrant wagon was a long and tedious one.
+Nevertheless, every season dissatisfied climate-seekers, too wet and
+too dry, might be seen plodding along through the dust in the old
+“49style,” making their way one half of them from California to Oregon,
+the other half from Oregon to California. The beautiful Sisson meadows
+at the base of Mount Shasta were a favorite halfway resting place,
+where the weary cattle were turned out for a few days to gather
+strength for better climates, and it was curious to hear those
+perpetual pioneers comparing notes and seeking information around the
+campfires.
+
+“Where are you from?” some Oregonian would ask.
+
+“The Joaquin.”
+
+“It’s dry there, ain’t it?”
+
+“Well, I should say so. No rain at all in summer and none to speak of
+in winter, and I’m dried out. I just told my wife I was on the move
+again, and I’m going to keep moving till I come to a country where it
+rains once in a while, like it does in every reg’lar white man’s
+country; and that, I guess, will be Oregon, if the news be true.”
+
+“Yes, neighbor, you’s heading in the right direction for rain,” the
+Oregonian would say. “Keep right on to Yamhill and you’ll soon be damp
+enough. It rains there more than twelve months in the year; at least,
+no saying but it will. I’ve just come from there, plumb drownded out,
+and I told my wife to jump into the wagon and we should start out and
+see if we couldn’t find a dry day somewhere. Last fall the hay was out
+and the wood was out, and the cabin leaked, and I made up my mind to
+try California the first chance.”
+
+“Well, if you be a horned toad or coyote,” the seeker of moisture would
+reply, “then maybe you can stand it. Just keep right on by the Alabama
+Settlement to Tulare and you can have my place on Big Dry Creek and
+welcome. You’ll be drowned there mighty seldom. The wagon spokes and
+tires will rattle and tell you when you come to it.”
+
+“All right, partner, we’ll swap square, you can have mine in Yamhill
+and the rain thrown in. Last August a painter sharp came along one day
+wanting to know the way to Willamette Falls, and I told him: ‘Young
+man, just wait a little and you’ll find falls enough without going to
+Oregon City after them. The whole dog-gone Noah’s flood of a country
+will be a fall and melt and float away some day.’” And more to the same
+effect.
+
+But no one need leave Oregon in search of fair weather. The wheat and
+cattle region of eastern Oregon and Washington on the upper Columbia
+plains is dry enough and dusty enough more than half the year. The
+truth is, most of these wanderers enjoy the freedom of gypsy life and
+seek not homes but camps. Having crossed the plains and reached the
+ocean, they can find no farther west within reach of wagons, and are
+therefore compelled now to go north and south between Mexico and
+Alaska, always glad to find an excuse for moving, stopping a few months
+or weeks here and there, the time being measured by the size of the
+camp-meadow, conditions of the grass, game, and other indications. Even
+their so-called settlements of a year or two, when they take up land
+and build cabins, are only another kind of camp, in no common sense
+homes. Never a tree is planted, nor do they plant themselves, but like
+good soldiers in time of war are ever ready to march. Their journey of
+life is indeed a journey with very matter-of-fact thorns in the way,
+though not wholly wanting in compensation.
+
+One of the most influential of the motives that brought the early
+settlers to these shores, apart from that natural instinct to scatter
+and multiply which urges even sober salmon to climb the Rocky
+Mountains, was their desire to find a country at once fertile and
+winterless, where their flocks and herds could find pasture all the
+year, thus doing away with the long and tiresome period of haying and
+feeding necessary in the eastern and old western States and
+Territories. Cheap land and good land there was in abundance in Kansas,
+Nebraska, Minnesota, and Iowa; but there the labor of providing for
+animals of the farm was very great, and much of that labor was crowded
+together into a few summer months, while to keep cool in summers and
+warm in the icy winters was well-nigh impossible to poor farmers.
+
+Along the coast and throughout the greater part of western Oregon in
+general, snow seldom falls on the lowlands to a greater depth than a
+few inches, and never lies long. Grass is green all winter. The average
+temperature for the year in the Willamette Valley is about 52 degrees,
+the highest and lowest being about 100 degrees and 20 degrees, though
+occasionally a much lower temperature is reached.
+
+The average rainfall is about fifty or fifty-five inches in the
+Willamette Valley, and along the coast seventy-five inches, or even
+more at some points—figures that bring many a dreary night and day to
+mind, however fine the effect on the great evergreen woods and the
+fields of the farmers. The rainy season begins in September or October
+and lasts until April or May. Then the whole country is solemnly soaked
+and poulticed with the gray, streaming clouds and fogs, night and day,
+with marvelous constancy. Towards the beginning and end of the season a
+good many bright days occur to break the pouring gloom, but whole
+months of rain, continuous, or nearly so, are not at all rare.
+Astronomers beneath these Oregon skies would have a dull time of it. Of
+all the year only about one fourth of the days are clear, while three
+fourths have more or less of fogs, clouds, or rain.
+
+The fogs occur mostly in the fall and spring. They are grand,
+far-reaching affairs of two kinds, the black and the white, some of the
+latter being very beautiful, and the infinite delicacy and tenderness
+of their touch as they linger to caress the tall evergreens is most
+exquisite. On farms and highways and in the streets of towns, where
+work has to be done, there is nothing picturesque or attractive in any
+obvious way about the gray, serious-faced rainstorms. Mud abounds. The
+rain seems dismal and heedless and gets in everybody’s way. Every face
+is turned from it, and it has but few friends who recognize its
+boundless beneficence. But back in the untrodden woods where no axe has
+been lifted, where a deep, rich carpet of brown and golden mosses
+covers all the ground like a garment, pressing warmly about the feet of
+the trees and rising in thick folds softly and kindly over every fallen
+trunk, leaving no spot naked or uncared-for, there the rain is
+welcomed, and every drop that falls finds a place and use as sweet and
+pure as itself. An excursion into the woods when the rain harvest is at
+its height is a noble pleasure, and may be safely enjoyed at small
+expense, though very few care to seek it. Shelter is easily found
+beneath the great trees in some hollow out of the wind, and one need
+carry but little provision, none at all of a kind that a wetting would
+spoil. The colors of the woods are then at their best, and the mighty
+hosts of the forest, every needle tingling in the blast, wave and sing
+in glorious harmony.
+
+“’T were worth ten years of peaceful life, one glance at this array.”
+
+
+The snow that falls in the lowland woods is usually soft, and makes a
+fine show coming through the trees in large, feathery tufts, loading
+the branches of the firs and spruces and cedars and weighing them down
+against the trunks until they look slender and sharp as arrows, while a
+strange, muffled silence prevails, giving a peculiar solemnity to
+everything. But these lowland snowstorms and their effects quickly
+vanish; every crystal melts in a day or two, the bent branches rise
+again, and the rain resumes its sway.
+
+While these gracious rains are searching the roots of the lowlands,
+corresponding snows are busy along the heights of the Cascade
+Mountains. Month after month, day and night the heavens shed their icy
+bloom in stormy, measureless abundance, filling the grand upper
+fountains of the rivers to last through the summer. Awful then is the
+silence that presses down over the mountain forests. All the smaller
+streams vanish from sight, hushed and obliterated. Young groves of
+spruce and pine are bowed down as by a gentle hand and put to rest, not
+again to see the light or move leaf or limb until the grand awakening
+of the springtime, while the larger animals and most of the birds seek
+food and shelter in the foothills on the borders of the valleys and
+plains.
+
+The lofty volcanic peaks are yet more heavily snow-laden. To their
+upper zones no summer comes. They are white always. From the steep
+slopes of the summit the new-fallen snow, while yet dry and loose,
+descends in magnificent avalanches to feed the glaciers, making
+meanwhile the most glorious manifestations of power. Happy is the man
+who may get near them to see and hear. In some sheltered camp nest on
+the edge of the timberline one may lie snug and warm, but after the
+long shuffle on snowshoes we may have to wait more than a month ere the
+heavens open and the grand show is unveiled. In the mean time, bread
+may be scarce, unless with careful forecast a sufficient supply has
+been provided and securely placed during the summer. Nevertheless, to
+be thus deeply snowbound high in the sky is not without generous
+compensation for all the cost. And when we at length go down the long
+white slopes to the levels of civilization, the pains vanish like snow
+in sunshine, while the noble and exalting pleasures we have gained
+remain with us to enrich our lives forever.
+
+The fate of the high-flying mountain snow-flowers is a fascinating
+study, though little may we see of their works and ways while their
+storms go on. The glinting, swirling swarms fairly thicken the blast,
+and all the air, as well as the rocks and trees, is as one smothering
+mass of bloom, through the midst of which at close intervals come the
+low, intense thunder-tones of the avalanches as they speed on their way
+to fill the vast fountain hollows. Here they seem at last to have found
+rest. But this rest is only apparent. Gradually the loose crystals by
+the pressure of their own weight are welded together into clear ice,
+and, as glaciers, march steadily, silently on, with invisible motion,
+in broad, deep currents, grinding their way with irresistible energy to
+the warmer lowlands, where they vanish in glad, rejoicing streams.
+
+In the sober weather of Oregon lightning makes but little show. Those
+magnificent thunderstorms that so frequently adorn and glorify the sky
+of the Mississippi Valley are wanting here. Dull thunder and lightning
+may occasionally be seen and heard, but the imposing grandeur of great
+storms marching over the landscape with streaming banners and a network
+of fire is almost wholly unknown.
+
+Crossing the Cascade Range, we pass from a green to a gray country,
+from a wilderness of trees to a wilderness of open plains, level or
+rolling or rising here and there into hills and short mountain spurs.
+Though well supplied with rivers in most of its main sections, it is
+generally dry. The annual rainfall is only from about five to fifteen
+inches, and the thin winter garment of snow seldom lasts more than a
+month or two, though the temperature in many places falls from five to
+twenty-five degrees below zero for a short time. That the snow is light
+over eastern Oregon, and the average temperature not intolerably
+severe, is shown by the fact that large droves of sheep, cattle, and
+horses live there through the winter without other food or shelter than
+they find for themselves on the open plains or down in the sunken
+valleys and gorges along the streams.
+
+When we read of the mountain ranges of Oregon and Washington with
+detailed descriptions of their old volcanoes towering snow-laden and
+glacier-laden above the clouds, one may be led to imagine that the
+country is far icier and whiter and more mountainous than it is. Only
+in winter are the Coast and Cascade Mountains covered with snow. Then
+as seen from the main interior valleys they appear as comparatively
+low, bossy walls stretching along the horizon and making a magnificent
+display of their white wealth. The Coast Range in Oregon does not
+perhaps average more than three thousand feet in height. Its snow does
+not last long, most of its soil is fertile all the way to the summits,
+and the greater part of the range may at some time be brought under
+cultivation. The immense deposits on the great central uplift of the
+Cascade Range are mostly melted off before the middle of summer by the
+comparatively warm winds and rains from the coast, leaving only a few
+white spots on the highest ridges, where the depth from drifting has
+been greatest, or where the rate of waste has been diminished by
+specially favorable conditions as to exposure. Only the great volcanic
+cones are truly snow-clad all the year, and these are not numerous and
+make but a small portion of the general landscape.
+
+As we approach Oregon from the coast in summer, no hint of snowy
+mountains can be seen, and it is only after we have sailed into the
+country by the Columbia, or climbed some one of the commanding summits,
+that the great white peaks send us greeting and make telling
+advertisements of themselves and of the country over which they rule.
+So, also, in coming to Oregon from the east the country by no means
+impresses one as being surpassingly mountainous, the abode of peaks and
+glaciers. Descending the spurs of the Rocky Mountains into the basin of
+the Columbia, we see hot, hundred-mile plains, roughened here the there
+by hills and ridges that look hazy and blue in the distance, until we
+have pushed well to the westward. Then one white point after another
+comes into sight to refresh the eye and the imagination; but they are
+yet a long way off, and have much to say only to those who know them or
+others of their kind. How grand they are, though insignificant-looking
+on the edge of the vast landscape! What noble woods they nourish, and
+emerald meadows and gardens! What springs and streams and waterfalls
+sing about them and to what a multitude of happy creatures they give
+homes and food!
+
+The principal mountains of the range are Mounts Pitt, Scott, and
+Thielson, Diamond Peak, the Three Sisters, Mounts Jefferson, Hood, St.
+Helen’s, Adams, Rainier, Aix, and Baker. Of these the seven first named
+belong to Oregon, the others to Washington. They rise singly at
+irregular distances from one another along the main axis of the range
+or near it, with an elevation of from about eight thousand to fourteen
+thousand four hundred feet above the level of the sea. From few points
+in the valleys may more than three or four of them be seen, and of the
+more distant ones of these only the tops appear. Therefore, speaking
+generally, each of the lowland landscapes of the State contains only
+one grand snowy mountain.
+
+The heights back of Portland command one of the best general views of
+the forests and also of the most famous of the great mountains both of
+Oregon and Washington. Mount Hood is in full view, with the summits of
+Mounts Jefferson, St. Helen’s, Adams, and Rainier in the distance. The
+city of Portland is at our feet, covering a large area along both banks
+of the Willamette, and, with its fine streets, schools, churches,
+mills, shipping, parks, and gardens, makes a telling picture of busy,
+aspiring civilization in the midst of the green wilderness in which it
+is planted. The river is displayed to fine advantage in the foreground
+of our main view, sweeping in beautiful curves around rich, leafy
+islands, its banks fringed with willows.
+
+A few miles beyond the Willamette flows the renowned Columbia, and the
+confluence of these two great rivers is at a point only about ten miles
+below the city. Beyond the Columbia extends the immense breadth of the
+forest, one dim, black, monotonous field with only the sky, which one
+is glad to see is not forested, and the tops of the majestic old
+volcanoes to give diversity to the view. That sharp, white, broad-based
+pyramid on the south side of the Columbia, a few degrees to the south
+of east from where you stand, is the famous Mount Hood. The distance to
+it in a straight line is about fifty miles. Its upper slopes form the
+only bare ground, bare as to forests, in the landscape in that
+direction. It is the pride of Oregonians, and when it is visible is
+always pointed out to strangers as the glory of the country, the
+mountain of mountains. It is one of the grand series of extinct
+volcanoes extending from Lassen’s Butte [31] to Mount Baker, a distance
+of about six hundred miles, which once flamed like gigantic watch-fires
+along the coast. Some of them have been active in recent times, but no
+considerable addition to the bulk of Mount Hood has been made for
+several centuries, as is shown by the amount of glacial denudation it
+has suffered. Its summit has been ground to a point, which gives it a
+rather thin, pinched appearance. It has a wide-flowing base, however,
+and is fairly well proportioned. Though it is eleven thousand feet
+high, it is too far off to make much show under ordinary conditions in
+so extensive a landscape. Through a great part of the summer it is
+invisible on account of smoke poured into the sky from burning woods,
+logging camps, mills, etc., and in winter for weeks at a time, or even
+months, it is in the clouds. Only in spring and early summer and in
+what there may chance to be of bright weather in winter is it or any of
+its companions at all clear or telling. From the Cascades on the
+Columbia it may be seen at a distance of twenty miles or thereabouts,
+or from other points up and down the river, and with the magnificent
+foreground it is very impressive. It gives the supreme touch of
+grandeur to all the main Columbia views, rising at every turn,
+solitary, majestic, awe-inspiring, the ruling spirit of the landscape.
+But, like mountains everywhere, it varies greatly in impressiveness and
+apparent height at different times and seasons, not alone from
+differences as to the dimness or transparency of the air. Clear, or
+arrayed in clouds, it changes both in size and general expression. Now
+it looms up to an immense height and seems to draw near in tremendous
+grandeur and beauty, holding the eyes of every beholder in devout and
+awful interest. Next year or next day, or even in the same day, you
+return to the same point of view, perhaps to find that the glory has
+departed, as if the mountain had died and the poor dull, shrunken mass
+of rocks and ice had lost all power to charm.
+
+Never shall I forget my first glorious view of Mount Hood one calm
+evening in July, though I had seen it many times before this. I was
+then sauntering with a friend across the new Willamette bridge between
+Portland and East Portland for the sake of the river views, which are
+here very fine in the tranquil summer weather. The scene on the water
+was a lively one. Boats of every description were gliding, glinting,
+drifting about at work or play, and we leaned over the rail from time
+to time, contemplating the gay throng. Several lines of ferry boats
+were making regular trips at intervals of a few minutes, and river
+steamers were coming and going from the wharves, laden with all sorts
+of merchandise, raising long diverging swells that make all the light
+pleasure craft bow and nod in hearty salutation as they passed. The
+crowd was being constantly increased by new arrivals from both shores,
+sailboats, rowboats, racing shells, rafts, were loaded with gayly
+dressed people, and here and there some adventurous man or boy might be
+seen as a merry sailor on a single plank or spar, apparently as deep in
+enjoyment as were any on the water. It seemed as if all the town were
+coming to the river, renouncing the cares and toils of the day,
+determined to take the evening breeze into their pulses, and be cool
+and tranquil ere going to bed.
+
+Absorbed in the happy scene, given up to dreamy, random observation of
+what lay immediately before me, I was not conscious of anything
+occurring on the outer rim of the landscape. Forest, mountain, and sky
+were forgotten, when my companion suddenly directed my attention to the
+eastward, shouting, “Oh, look! look!” in so loud and excited a tone of
+voice that passers-by, saunterers like ourselves, were startled and
+looked over the bridge as if expecting to see some boat upset. Looking
+across the forest, over which the mellow light of the sunset was
+streaming, I soon discovered the source of my friend’s excitement.
+There stood Mount Hood in all the glory of the alpenglow, looming
+immensely high, beaming with intelligence, and so impressive that one
+was overawed as if suddenly brought before some superior being newly
+arrived from the sky.
+
+The atmosphere was somewhat hazy, but the mountain seemed neither near
+nor far. Its glaciers flashed in the divine light. The rugged,
+storm-worn ridges between them and the snowfields of the summit, these
+perhaps might have been traced as far as they were in sight, and the
+blending zones of color about the base. But so profound was the general
+impression, partial analysis did not come into play. The whole mountain
+appeared as one glorious manifestation of divine power, enthusiastic
+and benevolent, glowing like a countenance with ineffable repose and
+beauty, before which we could only gaze in devout and lowly admiration.
+
+The far-famed Oregon forests cover all the western section of the
+State, the mountains as well as the lowlands, with the exception of a
+few gravelly spots and open spaces in the central portions of the great
+cultivated valleys. Beginning on the coast, where their outer ranks are
+drenched and buffeted by wind-driven scud from the sea, they press on
+in close, majestic ranks over the coast mountains, across the broad
+central valleys, and over the Cascade Range, broken and halted only by
+the few great peaks that rise like islands above the sea of evergreens.
+
+In descending the eastern slopes of the Cascades the rich, abounding,
+triumphant exuberance of the trees is quickly subdued; they become
+smaller, grow wide apart, leaving dry spaces without moss covering or
+underbrush, and before the foot of the range is reached, fail
+altogether, stayed by the drouth of the interior almost as suddenly as
+on the western margin they are stayed by the sea. Here and there at
+wide intervals on the eastern plains patches of a small pine (_Pinus
+contorta_) are found, and a scattering growth of juniper, used by the
+settlers mostly for fence posts and firewood. Along the stream bottoms
+there is usually more or less of cottonwood and willow, which, though
+yielding inferior timber, is yet highly prized in this bare region. On
+the Blue Mountains there is pine, spruce, fir, and larch in abundance
+for every use, but beyond this range there is nothing that may be
+called a forest in the Columbia River basin, until we reach the spurs
+of the Rocky Mountains; and these Rocky Mountain forests are made up of
+trees which, compared with the giants of the Pacific Slope, are mere
+saplings.
+
+
+
+
+XXII. The Forests of Oregon and their Inhabitants
+
+
+Like the forests of Washington, already described, those of Oregon are
+in great part made up of the Douglas spruce[32], or Oregon pine (_Abies
+Douglasii_). A large number of mills are at work upon this species,
+especially along the Columbia, but these as yet have made but little
+impression upon its dense masses, the mills here being small as
+compared with those of the Puget Sound region. The white cedar, or Port
+Orford cedar (_Cupressus Lawsoniana_, or _Chamæcyparis Lawsoniana_), is
+one of the most beautiful of the evergreens, and produces excellent
+lumber, considerable quantities of which are shipped to the San
+Francisco market. It is found mostly about Coos Bay, along the Coquille
+River, and on the northern slopes of the Siskiyou Mountains, and
+extends down the coast into California. The silver firs, the spruces,
+and the colossal arbor-vitæ, or white cedar[33](_Thuja gigantea_),
+described in the chapter on Washington, are also found here in great
+beauty and perfection, the largest of these (_Picea grandis_, Loud.;
+_Abies grandis_, Lindl.) being confined mostly to the coast region,
+where it attains a height of three hundred feet, and a diameter of ten
+or twelve feet. Five or six species of pines are found in the State,
+the most important of which, both as to lumber and as to the part they
+play in the general wealth and beauty of the forests, are the yellow
+and sugar pines (_Pinus ponderosa_ and _P. Lambertiana_). The yellow
+pine is most abundant on the eastern slopes of the Cascades, forming
+there the main bulk of the forest in many places. It is also common
+along the borders of the open spaces in Willamette Valley. In the
+southern portion of the State the sugar pine, which is the king of all
+the pines and the glory of the Sierra forests, occurs in considerable
+abundance in the basins of the Umpqua and Rogue Rivers, and it was in
+the Umpqua Hills that this noble tree was first discovered by the
+enthusiastic botanical explorer David Douglas, in the year 1826.
+
+This is the Douglas for whom the noble Douglas spruce is named, and
+many a fair blooming plant also, which will serve to keep his memory
+fresh and sweet as long as beautiful trees and flowers are loved. The
+Indians of the lower Columbia River watched him with lively curiosity
+as he wandered about in the woods day after day, gazing intently on the
+ground or at the great trees, collecting specimens of everything he
+saw, but, unlike all the eager fur-gathering strangers they had
+hitherto seen, caring nothing about trade. And when at length they came
+to know him better, and saw that from year to year the growing things
+of the woods and prairies, meadows and plains, were his only object of
+pursuit, they called him the “Man of Grass,” a title of which he was
+proud.
+
+He was a Scotchman and first came to this coast in the spring of 1825
+under the auspices of the London Horticultural Society, landing at the
+mouth of the Columbia after a long dismal voyage of eight months and
+fourteen days. During this first season he chose Fort Vancouver,
+belonging to the Hudson’s Bay Company, as his headquarters, and from
+there made excursions into the glorious wilderness in every direction,
+discovering many new species among the trees as well as among the rich
+underbrush and smaller herbaceous vegetation. It was while making a
+trip to Mount Hood this year that he discovered the two largest and
+most beautiful firs in the world (_Picea amabilis_ and _P. nobilis_—now
+called _Abies_), and from the seeds which he then collected and sent
+home tall trees are now growing in Scotland.
+
+In one of his trips that summer, in the lower Willamette Valley, he saw
+in an Indian’s tobacco pouch some of the seeds and scales of a new
+species of pine, which he learned were gathered from a large tree that
+grew far to the southward. Most of the following season was spent on
+the upper waters of the Columbia, and it was not until September that
+he returned to Fort Vancouver, about the time of the setting-in of the
+winter rains. Nevertheless, bearing in mind the great pine he had heard
+of, and the seeds of which he had seen, he made haste to set out on an
+excursion to the headwaters of the Willamette in search of it; and how
+he fared on this excursion and what dangers and hardships he endured is
+best told in his own journal, part of which I quote as follows:—
+
+October 26th, 1826. Weather dull. Cold and cloudy. When my friends in
+England are made acquainted with my travels I fear they will think that
+I have told them nothing but my miseries.... I quitted my camp early in
+the morning to survey the neighboring country, leaving my guide to take
+charge of the horses until my return in the evening. About an hour’s
+walk from the camp I met an Indian, who on perceiving me instantly
+strung his bow, placed on his left arm a sleeve of raccoon skin and
+stood on the defensive. Being quite sure that conduct was prompted by
+fear and not by hostile intentions, the poor fellow having probably
+never seen such a being as myself before, I laid my gun at my feet on
+the ground and waved my hand for him to come to me, which he did slowly
+and with great caution. I then made him place his bow and quiver of
+arrows beside my gun, and striking a light gave him a smoke out of my
+own pipe and a present of a few beads. With my pencil I made a rough
+sketch of the cone and pine tree which I wanted to obtain and drew his
+attention to it, when he instantly pointed with his hand to the hills
+fifteen or twenty miles distant towards the south; and when I expressed
+my intention of going thither, cheerfully set about accompanying me. At
+midday I reached my long- wished-for pines and lost no time in
+examining them and endeavoring to collect specimens and seeds. New and
+strange things seldom fail to make strong impressions and are therefore
+frequently overrated; so that, lest I should never see my friends in
+England to inform them verbally of this most beautiful and immensely
+grand tree, I shall here state the dimensions of the largest I could
+find among several that had been blown down by the wind. At three feet
+from the ground its circumference is fifty-seven feet, nine inches; at
+one hundred and thirty-four feet, seventeen feet five inches; the
+extreme length two hundred and forty-five feet.... As it was impossible
+either to climb the tree or hew it down, I endeavored to knock off the
+cones by firing at them with ball, when the report of my gun brought
+eight Indians, all of them painted with red earth, armed with bows,
+arrows, bone-tipped spears, and flint knives. They appeared anything
+but friendly. I explained to them what I wanted and they seemed
+satisfied and sat down to smoke; but presently I saw one of them string
+his bow and another sharpen his flint knife with a pair of wooden
+pincers and suspend it on the wrist of his right hand. Further
+testimony of their intentions was unnecessary. To save myself by flight
+was impossible, so without hesitation I stepped back about five paces,
+cocked my gun, drew one of the pistols out of my belt, and holding it
+in my left hand, the gun in my right, showed myself determined to fight
+for my life. As much as possible I endeavored to preserve my coolness,
+and thus we stood looking at one another without making any movement or
+uttering a word for perhaps ten minutes, when one at last, who seemed
+to be the leader, gave a sign that they wished for some tobacco; this I
+signified they should have if they fetched a quantity of cones. They
+went off immediately in search of them, and no sooner were they all out
+of sight than I picked up my three cones and some twigs of the trees
+and made the quickest possible retreat, hurrying back to my camp, which
+I reached before dusk. The Indian who last undertook to be my guide to
+the trees I sent off before gaining my encampment, lest he should
+betray me. How irksome is the darkness of night to one under such
+circumstances. I cannot speak a word to my guide, nor have I a book to
+divert my thoughts, which are continually occupied with the dread lest
+the hostile Indians should trace me hither and make an attack. I now
+write lying on the grass with my gun cocked beside me, and penning
+these lines by the light of my _Columbian candle_, namely, an ignited
+piece of rosin-wood.
+
+
+Douglas named this magnificent species _Pinus Lambertiana_, in honor of
+his friend Dr. Lambert, of London. This is the noblest pine thus far
+discovered in the forests of the world, surpassing all others not only
+in size but in beauty and majesty. Oregon may well be proud that its
+discovery was made within her borders, and that, though it is far more
+abundant in California, she has the largest known specimens. In the
+Sierra the finest sugar pine forests lie at an elevation of about five
+thousand feet. In Oregon they occupy much lower ground, some of the
+trees being found but little above tide-water.
+
+No lover of trees will ever forget his first meeting with the sugar
+pine. In most coniferous trees there is a sameness of form and
+expression which at length becomes wearisome to most people who travel
+far in the woods. But the sugar pines are as free from conventional
+forms as any of the oaks. No two are so much alike as to hide their
+individuality from any observer. Every tree is appreciated as a study
+in itself and proclaims in no uncertain terms the surpassing grandeur
+of the species. The branches, mostly near the summit, are sometimes
+nearly forty feet long, feathered richly all around with short, leafy
+branchlets, and tasseled with cones a foot and a half long. And when
+these superb arms are outspread, radiating in every direction, an
+immense crownlike mass is formed which, poised on the noble shaft and
+filled with sunshine, is one of the grandest forest objects
+conceivable. But though so wild and unconventional when full-grown, the
+sugar pine is a remarkably regular tree in youth, a strict follower of
+coniferous fashions, slim, erect, tapering, symmetrical, every branch
+in place. At the age of fifty or sixty years this shy, fashionable form
+begins to give way. Special branches are thrust out away from the
+general outlines of the trees and bent down with cones. Henceforth it
+becomes more and more original and independent in style, pushes boldly
+aloft into the winds and sunshine, growing ever more stately and
+beautiful, a joy and inspiration to every beholder.
+
+Unfortunately, the sugar pine makes excellent lumber. It is too good to
+live, and is already passing rapidly away before the woodman’s axe.
+Surely out of all of the abounding forest wealth of Oregon a few
+specimens might be spared to the world, not as dead lumber, but as
+living trees. A park of moderate extent might be set apart and
+protected for public use forever, containing at least a few hundreds of
+each of these noble pines, spruces, and firs. Happy will be the men
+who, having the power and the love and benevolent forecast to do this,
+will do it. They will not be forgotten. The trees and their lovers will
+sing their praises, and generations yet unborn will rise up and call
+them blessed.
+
+Dotting the prairies and fringing the edges of the great evergreen
+forests we find a considerable number of hardwood trees, such as the
+oak, maple, ash, alder, laurel, madrone, flowering dogwood, wild
+cherry, and wild apple. The white oak (_Quercus Garryana_) is the most
+important of the Oregon oaks as a timber tree, but not nearly so
+beautiful as Kellogg’s oak (_Q. Kelloggii_). The former is found mostly
+along the Columbia River, particularly about the Dalles, and a
+considerable quantity of useful lumber is made from it and sold,
+sometimes for eastern white oak, to wagon makers. Kellogg’s oak is a
+magnificent tree and does much for the picturesque beauty of the Umpqua
+and Rogue River Valleys where it abounds. It is also found in all the
+Yosemite valleys of the Sierra, and its acorns form an important part
+of the food of the Digger Indians. In the Siskiyou Mountains there is a
+live oak (_Q. chrysolepis_), wide-spreading and very picturesque in
+form, but not very common. It extends southward along the western flank
+of the Sierra and is there more abundant and much larger than in
+Oregon, oftentimes five to eight feet in diameter.
+
+The maples are the same as those in Washington, already described, but
+I have not seen any maple groves here equal in extent or in the size of
+the trees to those on the Snoqualmie River.
+
+The Oregon ash is now rare along the stream banks of western Oregon,
+and it grows to a good size and furnishes lumber that is for some
+purposes equal to the white ash of the Western States.
+
+Nuttall’s flowering dogwood makes a brave display with its wealth of
+show involucres in the spring along cool streams. Specimens of the
+flowers may be found measuring eight inches in diameter.
+
+The wild cherry (Prunus emarginata, var. mollis) is a small, handsome
+tree seldom more than a foot in diameter at the base. It makes valuable
+lumber and its black, astringent fruit furnishes a rich resource as
+food for the birds. A smaller form is common in the Sierra, the fruit
+of which is eagerly eaten by the Indians and hunters in time of need.
+
+The wild apple (_Pyrus rivularis_) is a fine, hearty, handsome little
+tree that grows well in rich, cool soil along streams and on the edges
+of beaver meadows from California through Oregon and Washington to
+southeastern Alaska. In Oregon it forms dense, tangled thickets, some
+of them almost impenetrable. The largest trunks are nearly a foot in
+diameter. When in bloom it makes a fine show with its abundant clusters
+of flowers, which are white and fragrant. The fruit is very small and
+savagely acid. It is wholesome, however, and is eaten by birds, bears,
+Indians, and many other adventurers, great and small.
+
+Passing from beneath the shadows of the woods where the trees grow
+close and high, we step into charming wild gardens full of lilies,
+orchids, heathworts, roses, etc., with colors so gay and forming such
+sumptuous masses of bloom, they make the gardens of civilization,
+however lovingly cared for, seem pathetic and silly. Around the great
+fire-mountains, above the forests and beneath the snow, there is a
+flowery zone of marvelous beauty planted with anemones, erythroniums,
+daisies, bryanthus, kalmia, vaccinium, cassiope, saxifrages, etc.,
+forming one continuous garden fifty or sixty miles in circumference,
+and so deep and luxuriant and closely woven it seems as if Nature, glad
+to find an opening, were economizing space and trying to see how may of
+her bright-eyed darlings she can get together in one mountain wreath.
+
+Along the slopes of the Cascades, where the woods are less dense,
+especially about the headwaters of the Willamette, there are miles of
+rhododendron, making glorious outbursts of purple bloom, and down on
+the prairies in rich, damp hollows the blue-flowered camassia grows in
+such profusion that at a little distance its dense masses appear as
+beautiful blue lakes imbedded in the green, flowery plains; while all
+about the streams and the lakes and the beaver meadows and the margins
+of the deep woods there is a magnificent tangle of gaultheria and
+huckleberry bushes with their myriads of pink bells, reinforced with
+hazel, cornel, rubus of many species, wild plum, cherry, and crab
+apple; besides thousands of charming bloomers to be found in all sorts
+of places throughout the wilderness whose mere names are refreshing,
+such as linnaea, menziesia, pyrola, chimaphila, brodiaea, smilacina,
+fritillaria, calochortus, trillium, clintonia, veratrum, cypripedium,
+goodyera, spiranthes, habenaria, and the rare and lovely “Hider of the
+North,” _Calypso borealis_, to find which is alone a sufficient object
+for a journey into the wilderness. And besides these there is a
+charming underworld of ferns and mosses flourishing gloriously beneath
+all the woods.
+
+Everybody loves wild woods and flowers more or less. Seeds of all these
+Oregon evergreens and of many of the flowering shrubs and plants have
+been sent to almost every country under the sun, and they are now
+growing in carefully tended parks and gardens. And now that the ways of
+approach are open one would expect to find these woods and gardens full
+of admiring visitors reveling in their beauty like bees in a clover
+field. Yet few care to visit them. A portion of the bark of one of the
+California trees, the mere dead skin, excited the wondering attention
+of thousands when it was set up in the Crystal Palace in London, as did
+also a few peeled spars, the shafts of mere saplings from Oregon or
+Washington. Could one of these great silver firs or sugar pines three
+hundred feet high have been transplanted entire to that exhibition, how
+enthusiastic would have been the praises accorded to it!
+
+Nevertheless, the countless hosts waving at home beneath their own sky,
+beside their own noble rivers and mountains, and standing on a
+flower-enameled carpet of mosses thousands of square miles in extent,
+attract but little attention. Most travelers content themselves with
+what they may chance to see from car windows, hotel verandas, or the
+deck of a steamer on the lower Columbia—clinging to the battered
+highways like drowning sailors to a life raft. When an excursion into
+the woods is proposed, all sorts of exaggerated or imaginary dangers
+are conjured up, filling the kindly, soothing wilderness with colds,
+fevers, Indians, bears, snakes, bugs, impassable rivers, and jungles of
+brush, to which is always added quick and sure starvation.
+
+As to starvation, the woods are full of food, and a supply of bread may
+easily be carried for habit’s sake, and replenished now and then at
+outlying farms and camps. The Indians are seldom found in the woods,
+being confined mainly to the banks of the rivers, where the greater
+part of their food is obtained. Moreover, the most of them have been
+either buried since the settlement of the country or civilized into
+comparative innocence, industry, or harmless laziness. There are bears
+in the woods, but not in such numbers nor of such unspeakable ferocity
+as town-dwellers imagine, nor do bears spend their lives in going about
+the country like the devil, seeking whom they may devour. Oregon bears,
+like most others, have no liking for man either as meat or as society;
+and while some may be curious at times to see what manner of creature
+he is, most of them have learned to shun people as deadly enemies. They
+have been poisoned, trapped, and shot at until they have become shy,
+and it is no longer easy to make their acquaintance. Indeed, since the
+settlement of the country, notwithstanding far the greater portion is
+yet wild, it is difficult to find any of the larger animals that once
+were numerous and comparatively familiar, such as the bear, wolf,
+panther, lynx, deer, elk, and antelope.
+
+As early as 1843, while the settlers numbered only a few thousands, and
+before any sort of government had been organized, they came together
+and held what they called “a wolf meeting,” at which a committee was
+appointed to devise means for the destruction of wild animals
+destructive to tame ones, which committee in due time begged to report
+as follows:—
+
+It being admitted by all that bears, wolves, panthers, etc., are
+destructive to the useful animals owned by the settlers of this colony,
+your committee would submit the following resolutions as the sense of
+this meeting, by which the community may be governed in carrying on a
+defensive and destructive war on all such animals:—
+    Resolved, 1st.—That we deem it expedient for the community to take
+    immediate measures for the destruction of all wolves, panthers, and
+    bears, and such other animals as are known to be destructive to
+    cattle, horses, sheep and hogs.
+    2d.—That a bounty of fifty cents be paid for the destruction of a
+    small wolf, $3.00 for a large wolf, $1.50 for a lynx, $2.00 for a
+    bear and $5.00 for a panther.
+
+
+This center of destruction was in the Willamette Valley. But for many
+years prior to the beginning of the operations of the “Wolf
+Organization” the Hudson’s Bay Company had established forts and
+trading stations over all the country, wherever fur-gathering Indians
+could be found, and vast numbers of these animals were killed. Their
+destruction has since gone on at an accelerated rate from year to year
+as the settlements have been extended, so that in some cases it is
+difficult to obtain specimens enough for the use of naturalists. But
+even before any of these settlements were made, and before the coming
+of the Hudson’s Bay Company, there was very little danger to be met in
+passing through this wilderness as far as animals were concerned, and
+but little of any kind as compared with the dangers encountered in
+crowded houses and streets.
+
+When Lewis and Clark made their famous trip across the continent in
+1804-05, when all the Rocky Mountain region was wild, as well as the
+Pacific Slope, they did not lose a single man by wild animals, nor,
+though frequently attacked, especially by the grizzlies of the Rocky
+Mountains, were any of them wounded seriously. Captain Clark was bitten
+on the hand by a wolf as he lay asleep; that was one bite among more
+than a hundred men while traveling through eight to nine thousand miles
+of savage wilderness. They could hardly have been so fortunate had they
+stayed at home. They wintered on the edge of the Clatsop plains, on the
+south side of the Columbia River near its mouth. In the woods on that
+side they found game abundant, especially elk, and with the aid of the
+friendly Indians who furnished salmon and “wapatoo” (the tubers of
+_Sagittaria variabilis_), they were in no danger of starving.
+
+But on the return trip in the spring they reached the base of the Rocky
+Mountains when the range was yet too heavily snow-laden to be crossed
+with horses. Therefore they had to wait some weeks. This was at the
+head of one of the northern branches of the Snake River, and, their
+scanty stock of provisions being nearly exhausted, the whole party was
+compelled to live mostly on bears and dogs; deer, antelope, and elk,
+usually abundant, were now scarce because the region had been closely
+hunted over by the Indians before their arrival.
+
+Lewis and Clark had killed a number of bears and saved the skins of the
+more interesting specimens, and the variations they found in size,
+color of the hair, etc., made great difficulty in classification.
+Wishing to get the opinion of the Chopumish Indians, near one of whose
+villages they were encamped, concerning the various species, the
+explorers unpacked their bundles and spread out for examination all the
+skins they had taken. The Indian hunters immediately classed the white,
+the deep and the pale grizzly red, the grizzly dark-brown—in short, all
+those with the extremities of the hair of a white or frosty color
+without regard to the color of the ground or foil—under the name of
+hoh-host. The Indians assured them that these were all of the same
+species as the white bear, that they associated together, had longer
+nails than the others, and never climbed trees. On the other hand, the
+black skins, those that were black with white hairs intermixed or with
+a white breast, the uniform bay, the brown, and the light
+reddish-brown, were classed under the name _yack-ah_, and were said to
+resemble each other in being smaller and having shorter nails, in
+climbing trees, and being so little vicious that they could be pursued
+with safety.
+
+Lewis and Clark came to the conclusion that all those with white-tipped
+hair found by them in the basin of the Columbia belonged to the same
+species as the grizzlies of the upper Missouri; and that the black and
+reddish-brown, etc., of the Rocky Mountains belong to a second species
+equally distinct from the grizzly and the black bear of the Pacific
+Coast and the East, which never vary in color.
+
+As much as possible should be made by the ordinary traveler of these
+descriptions, for he will be likely to see very little of any species
+for himself; not that bears no longer exist here, but because, being
+shy, they keep out of the way. In order to see them and learn their
+habits one must go softly and alone, lingering long in the fringing
+woods on the banks of the salmon streams, and in the small openings in
+the midst of thickets where berries are most abundant.
+
+As for rattlesnakes, the other grand dread of town dwellers when they
+leave beaten roads, there are two, or perhaps three, species of them in
+Oregon. But they are nowhere to be found in great numbers. In western
+Oregon they are hardly known at all. In all my walks in the Oregon
+forest I have never met a single specimen, though a few have been seen
+at long intervals.
+
+When the country was first settled by the whites, fifty years ago, the
+elk roamed through the woods and over the plains to the east of the
+Cascades in immense numbers; now they are rarely seen except by
+experienced hunters who know their haunts in the deepest and most
+inaccessible solitudes to which they have been driven. So majestic an
+animal forms a tempting mark for the sportsman’s rifle. Countless
+thousands have been killed for mere amusement and they already seem to
+be nearing extinction as rapidly as the buffalo. The antelope also is
+vanishing from the Columbia plains before the farmers and cattlemen.
+Whether the moose still lingers in Oregon or Washington I am unable to
+say.
+
+On the highest mountains of the Cascade Range the wild goat roams in
+comparative security, few of his enemies caring to go so far in pursuit
+and to hunt on ground so high and dangerous. He is a brave, sturdy
+shaggy mountaineer of an animal, enjoying the freedom and security of
+crumbling ridges and overhanging cliffs above the glaciers, oftentimes
+beyond the reach of the most daring hunter. They seem to be as much at
+home on the ice and snowfields as on the crags, making their way in
+flocks from ridge to ridge on the great volcanic mountains by crossing
+the glaciers that lie between them, traveling in single file guided by
+an old experienced leader, like a party of climbers on the Alps. On
+these ice-journeys they pick their way through networks of crevasses
+and over bridges of snow with admirable skill, and the mountaineer may
+seldom do better in such places than to follow their trail, if he can.
+In the rich alpine gardens and meadows they find abundance of food,
+venturing sometimes well down in the prairie openings on the edge of
+the timberline, but holding themselves ever alert and watchful, ready
+to flee to their highland castles at the faintest alarm. When their
+summer pastures are buried beneath the winter snows, they make haste to
+the lower ridges, seeking the wind-beaten crags and slopes where the
+snow cannot lie at any great depth, feeding at times on the leaves and
+twigs of bushes when grass is beyond reach.
+
+The wild sheep is another admirable alpine rover, but comparatively
+rare in the Oregon mountains, choosing rather the drier ridges to the
+southward on the Cascades and to the eastward among the spurs of the
+Rocky Mountain chain.
+
+Deer give beautiful animation to the forests, harmonizing finely in
+their color and movements with the gray and brown shafts of the trees
+and the swaying of the branches as they stand in groups at rest, or
+move gracefully and noiselessly over the mossy ground about the edges
+of beaver meadows and flowery glades, daintily culling the leaves and
+tips of the mints and aromatic bushes on which they feed. There are
+three species, the black-tailed, white-tailed, and mule deer; the last
+being restricted in its range to the open woods and plains to the
+eastward of the Cascades. They are nowhere very numerous now, killing
+for food, for hides, or for mere wanton sport, having well-nigh
+exterminated them in the more accessible regions, while elsewhere they
+are too often at the mercy of the wolves.
+
+Gliding about in their shady forest homes, keeping well out of sight,
+there is a multitude of sleek fur-clad animals living and enjoying
+their clean, beautiful lives. How beautiful and interesting they are is
+about as difficult for busy mortals to find out as if their homes were
+beyond sight in the sky. Hence the stories of every wild hunter and
+trapper are eagerly listened to as being possibly true, or partly so,
+however thickly clothed in successive folds of exaggeration and fancy.
+Unsatisfying as these accounts must be, a tourist’s frightened rush and
+scramble through the woods yields far less than the hunter’s wildest
+stories, while in writing we can do but little more than to give a few
+names, as they come to mind,—beaver, squirrel, coon, fox, marten,
+fisher, otter, ermine, wildcat,—only this instead of full descriptions
+of the bright-eyed furry throng, their snug home nests, their fears and
+fights and loves, how they get their food, rear their young, escape
+their enemies, and keep themselves warm and well and exquisitely clean
+through all the pitiless weather.
+
+For many years before the settlement of the country the fur of the
+beaver brought a high price, and therefore it was pursued with
+weariless ardor. Not even in the quest for gold has a more ruthless,
+desperate energy been developed. It was in those early beaver-days that
+the striking class of adventurers called “free trappers” made their
+appearance. Bold, enterprising men, eager to make money, and inclined
+at the same time to relish the license of a savage life, would set
+forth with a few traps and a gun and a hunting knife, content at first
+to venture only a short distance up the beaver streams nearest to the
+settlements, and where the Indians were not likely to molest them.
+There they would set their traps, while the buffalo, antelope, deer,
+etc., furnished a royal supply of food. In a few months their pack
+animals would be laden with thousands of dollars’ worth of fur.
+
+Next season they would venture farther, and again farther, meanwhile
+growing rapidly wilder, getting acquainted with the Indian tribes, and
+usually marrying among them. Thenceforward no danger could stay them in
+their exciting pursuit. Wherever there were beaver they would go,
+however far or wild,—the wilder the better, provided their scalps could
+be saved. Oftentimes they were compelled to set their traps and visit
+them by night and lie hid during the day, when operating in the
+neighborhood of hostile Indians. Not then venturing to make a fire or
+shoot game, they lived on the raw flesh of the beaver, perhaps seasoned
+with wild cresses or berries. Then, returning to the trading stations,
+they would spend their hard earnings in a few weeks of dissipation and
+“good time,” and go again to the bears and beavers, until at length a
+bullet or arrow would end all. One after another would be missed by
+some friend or trader at the autumn rendezvous, reported killed by the
+Indians, and—forgotten. Some men of this class have, from superior
+skill or fortune, escaped every danger, lived to a good old age, and
+earned fame, and, by their knowledge of the topography of the vast West
+then unexplored, have been able to render important service to the
+country; but most of them laid their bones in the wilderness after a
+few short, keen seasons. So great were the perils that beset them, the
+average length of the life of a “free trapper” has been estimated at
+less than five years. From the Columbia waters beaver and beaver men
+have almost wholly passed away, and the men once so striking a part of
+the view have left scarcely the faintest sign of their existence. On
+the other hand, a thousand meadows on the mountains tell the story of
+the beavers, to remain fresh and green for many a century, monuments of
+their happy, industrious lives.
+
+But there is a little airy, elfin animal in these woods, and in all the
+evergreen woods of the Pacific Coast, that is more influential and
+interesting than even the beaver. This is the Douglas squirrel
+(_Sciurus Douglasi_). Go where you will throughout all these noble
+forests, you everywhere find this little squirrel the master-existence.
+Though only a few inches long, so intense is his fiery vigor and
+restlessness, he stirs every grove with wild life, and makes himself
+more important than the great bears that shuffle through the berry
+tangles beneath him. Every tree feels the sting of his sharp feet.
+Nature has made him master-forester, and committed the greater part of
+the coniferous crops to his management. Probably over half of all the
+ripe cones of the spruces, firs, and pines are cut off and handled by
+this busy harvester. Most of them are stored away for food through the
+winter and spring, but a part are pushed into shallow pits and covered
+loosely, where some of the seeds are no doubt left to germinate and
+grow up. All the tree squirrels are more or less birdlike in voice and
+movements, but the Douglas is pre-eminently so, possessing every
+squirrelish attribute, fully developed and concentrated. He is the
+squirrel of squirrels, flashing from branch to branch of his favorite
+evergreens, crisp and glossy and sound as a sunbeam. He stirs the
+leaves like a rustling breeze, darting across openings in arrowy lines,
+launching in curves, glinting deftly from side to side in sudden
+zigzags, and swirling in giddy loops and spirals around the trunks, now
+on his haunches, now on his head, yet ever graceful and performing all
+his feats of strength and skill without apparent effort. One never
+tires of this bright spark of life, the brave little voice crying in
+the wilderness. His varied, piney gossip is as savory to the air as
+balsam to the palate. Some of his notes are almost flutelike in
+softness, while others prick and tingle like thistles. He is the
+mockingbird of squirrels, barking like a dog, screaming like a hawk,
+whistling like a blackbird or linnet, while in bluff, audacious
+noisiness he is a jay. A small thing, but filling and animating all the
+woods.
+
+Nor is there any lack of wings, notwithstanding few are to be seen on
+short, noisy rambles. The ousel sweetens the shady glens and cañons
+where waterfalls abound, and every grove or forest, however silent it
+may seem when we chance to pay it a hasty visit, has its
+singers,—thrushes, linnets, warblers,—while hummingbirds glint and
+hover about the fringing masses of bloom around stream and meadow
+openings. But few of these will show themselves or sing their songs to
+those who are ever in haste and getting lost, going in gangs formidable
+in color and accoutrements, laughing, hallooing, breaking limbs off the
+trees as they pass, awkwardly struggling through briery thickets,
+entangled like blue-bottles in spider webs, and stopping from time to
+time to fire off their guns and pistols for the sake of the echoes,
+thus frightening all the life about them for miles. It is this class of
+hunters and travelers who report that there are “no birds in the woods
+or game animals of any kind larger than mosquitoes.”
+
+Besides the singing birds mentioned above, the handsome Oregon grouse
+may be found in the thick woods, also the dusky grouse and Franklin’s
+grouse, and in some places the beautiful mountain partridge, or quail.
+The white-tailed ptarmigan lives on the lofty snow peaks above the
+timber, and the prairie chicken and sage cock on the broad Columbia
+plains from the Cascade Range back to the foothills of the Rocky
+Mountains. The bald eagle is very common along the Columbia River, or
+wherever fish, especially salmon, are plentiful, while swans, herons,
+cranes, pelicans, geese, ducks of many species, and water birds in
+general abound in the lake region, on the main streams, and along the
+coast, stirring the waters and sky into fine, lively pictures, greatly
+to the delight of wandering lovers of wildness.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII. The Rivers of Oregon
+
+
+Turning from the woods and their inhabitants to the rivers, we find
+that while the former are rarely seen by travelers beyond the immediate
+borders of the settlements, the great river of Oregon draws crowds of
+enthusiastic admirers to sound its praises. Every summer since the
+completion of the first overland railroad, tourists have been coming to
+it in ever increasing numbers, showing that in general estimation the
+Columbia is one of the chief attractions of the Pacific Coast. And well
+it deserves the admiration so heartily bestowed upon it. The beauty and
+majesty of its waters, and the variety and grandeur of the scenery
+through which it flows, lead many to regard it as the most interesting
+of all the great rivers of the continent, notwithstanding the claims of
+the other members of the family to which it belongs and which nobody
+can measure—the Fraser, McKenzie, Saskatchewan, the Missouri,
+Yellowstone, Platte, and the Colorado, with their glacier and geyser
+fountains, their famous cañons, lakes, forests, and vast flowery
+prairies and plains. These great rivers and the Columbia are intimately
+related. All draw their upper waters from the same high fountains on
+the broad, rugged uplift of the Rocky Mountains, their branches
+interlacing like the branches of trees. They sing their first songs
+together on the heights; then, collecting their tributaries, they set
+out on their grand journey to the Atlantic, Pacific, or Arctic Ocean.
+
+The Columbia, viewed as one from the sea to the mountains, is like a
+rugged, broad-topped, picturesque old oak about six hundred miles long
+and nearly a thousand miles wide measured across the spread of its
+upper branches, the main limbs gnarled and swollen with lakes and
+lakelike expansions, while innumerable smaller lakes shine like fruit
+among the smaller branches. The main trunk extends back through the
+Coast and Cascade Mountains in a general easterly direction for three
+hundred miles, when it divides abruptly into two grand branches which
+bend off to the northeastward and southeastward.
+
+The south branch, the longer of the two, called the Snake, or Lewis,
+River, extends into the Rocky Mountains as far as the Yellowstone
+National Park, where its head tributaries interlace with those of the
+Colorado, Missouri, and Yellowstone. The north branch, still called the
+Columbia, extends through Washington far into British territory, its
+highest tributaries reaching back through long parallel spurs of the
+Rockies between and beyond the headwaters of the Fraser, Athabasca, and
+Saskatchewan. Each of these main branches, dividing again and again,
+spreads a network of channels over the vast complicated mass of the
+great range throughout a section nearly a thousand miles in length,
+searching every fountain, however small or great, and gathering a
+glorious harvest of crystal water to be rolled through forest and plain
+in one majestic flood to the sea, reinforced on the way by tributaries
+that drain the Blue Mountains and more than two hundred miles of the
+Cascade and Coast Ranges. Though less than half as long as the
+Mississippi, it is said to carry as much water. The amount of its
+discharge at different seasons, however, has never been exactly
+measured, but in time of flood its current is sufficiently massive and
+powerful to penetrate the sea to a distance of fifty or sixty miles
+from shore, its waters being easily recognized by the difference in
+color and by the drift of leaves, berries, pine cones, branches, and
+trunks of trees that they carry.
+
+That so large a river as the Columbia, making a telling current so far
+from shore, should remain undiscovered while one exploring expedition
+after another sailed past seems remarkable, even after due allowance is
+made for the cloudy weather that prevails hereabouts and the broad
+fence of breakers drawn across the bar. During the last few centuries,
+when the maps of the world were in great part blank, the search for new
+worlds was fashionable business, and when such large game was no longer
+to be found, islands lying unclaimed in the great oceans, inhabited by
+useful and profitable people to be converted or enslaved, became
+attractive objects; also new ways to India, seas, straits, El Dorados,
+fountains of youth, and rivers that flowed over golden sands.
+
+Those early explorers and adventurers were mostly brave, enterprising,
+and, after their fashion, pious men. In their clumsy sailing vessels
+they dared to go where no chart or lighthouse showed the way, where the
+set of the currents, the location of sunken outlying rocks and shoals,
+were all unknown, facing fate and weather, undaunted however dark the
+signs, heaving the lead and thrashing the men to their duty and
+trusting to Providence. When a new shore was found on which they could
+land, they said their prayers with superb audacity, fought the natives
+if they cared to fight, erected crosses, and took possession in the
+names of their sovereigns, establishing claims, such as they were, to
+everything in sight and beyond, to be quarreled for and battled for,
+and passed from hand to hand in treaties and settlements made during
+the intermissions of war.
+
+The branch of the river that bears the name of Columbia all the way to
+its head takes its rise in two lakes about ten miles in length that lie
+between the Selkirk and main ranges of the Rocky Mountains in British
+Columbia, about eighty miles beyond the boundary line. They are called
+the Upper and Lower Columbia Lakes. Issuing from these, the young river
+holds a nearly straight course for a hundred and seventy miles in a
+northwesterly direction to a plain called “Boat Encampment,” receiving
+many beautiful affluents by the way from the Selkirk and main ranges,
+among which are the Beaver-Foot, Blackberry, Spill-e-Mee-Chene, and
+Gold Rivers. At Boat Encampment it receives two large tributaries, the
+Canoe River from the northwest, a stream about a hundred and twenty
+miles long; and the Whirlpool River from the north, about a hundred and
+forty miles in length.
+
+The Whirlpool River takes its rise near the summit of the main axis of
+the range on the fifty-fourth parallel, and is the northmost of all the
+Columbia waters. About thirty miles above its confluence with the
+Columbia it flows through a lake called the Punch-Bowl, and thence it
+passes between Mounts Hooker and Brown, said to be fifteen thousand and
+sixteen thousand feet high, making magnificent scenery; though the
+height of the mountains thereabouts has been considerably
+overestimated. From Boat Encampment the river, now a large, clear
+stream, said to be nearly a third of a mile in width, doubles back on
+its original course and flows southward as far as its confluence with
+the Spokane in Washington, a distance of nearly three hundred miles in
+a direct line, most of the way through a wild, rocky, picturesque mass
+of mountains, charmingly forested with pine and spruce—though the trees
+seem strangely small, like second growth saplings, to one familiar with
+the western forests of Washington, Oregon, and California.
+
+About forty-five miles below Boat Encampment are the Upper Dalles, or
+Dalles de Mort, and thirty miles farther the Lower Dalles, where the
+river makes a magnificent uproar and interrupts navigation. About
+thirty miles below the Lower Dalles the river expands into Upper Arrow
+Lake, a beautiful sheet of water forty miles long and five miles wide,
+straight as an arrow and with the beautiful forests of the Selkirk
+range rising from its east shore, and those of the Gold range from the
+west. At the foot of the lake are the Narrows, a few miles in length,
+and after these rapids are passed, the river enters Lower Arrow Lake,
+which is like the Upper Arrow, but is even longer and not so straight.
+
+A short distance below the Lower Arrow the Columbia receives the
+Kootenay River, the largest affluent thus far on its course and said to
+be navigable for small steamers for a hundred and fifty miles. It is an
+exceedingly crooked stream, heading beyond the upper Columbia lakes,
+and, in its mazy course, flowing to all points of the compass, it seems
+lost and baffled in the tangle of mountain spurs and ridges it drains.
+Measured around its loops and bends, it is probably more than five
+hundred miles in length. It is also rich in lakes, the largest,
+Kootenay Lake, being upwards of seventy miles in length with an average
+width of five miles. A short distance below the confluence of the
+Kootenay, near the boundary line between Washington and British
+Columbia, another large stream comes in from the east, Clarke’s Fork,
+or the Flathead River. Its upper sources are near those of the Missouri
+and South Saskatchewan, and in its course it flows through two large
+and beautiful lakes, the Flathead and the Pend d’Oreille. All the lakes
+we have noticed thus far would make charming places of summer resort;
+but Pend d’Oreille, besides being surpassingly beautiful, has the
+advantage of being easily accessible, since it is on the main line of
+the Northern Pacific Railroad in the Territory of Idaho. In the purity
+of its waters it reminds one of Tahoe, while its many picturesque
+islands crowned with evergreens, and its winding shores forming an
+endless variety of bays and promontories lavishly crowded with spiry
+spruce and cedar, recall some of the best of the island scenery of
+Alaska.
+
+About thirty-five miles below the mouth of Clark’s Fork the Columbia is
+joined by the Ne-whoi-al-pit-ku River from the northwest. Here too are
+the great Chaudiere, or Kettle, Falls on the main river, with a total
+descent of about fifty feet. Fifty miles farther down, the Spokane
+River, a clear, dashing stream, comes in from the east. It is about one
+hundred and twenty miles long, and takes its rise in the beautiful Lake
+Coeur d’Alene, in Idaho, which receives the drainage of nearly a
+hundred miles of the western slopes of the Bitter Root Mountains,
+through the St. Joseph and Coeur d’Alene Rivers. The lake is about
+twenty miles long, set in the midst of charming scenery, and, like Pend
+d’Oreille, is easy of access and is already attracting attention as a
+summer place for enjoyment, rest, and health.
+
+The famous Spokane Falls are in Washington, about thirty miles below
+the lake, where the river is outspread and divided and makes a grand
+descent from a level basaltic plateau, giving rise to one of the most
+beautiful as well as one of the greatest and most available of
+water-powers in the State. The city of the same name is built on the
+plateau along both sides of the series of cascades and falls, which,
+rushing and sounding through the midst, give singular beauty and
+animation. The young city is also rushing and booming. It is founded on
+a rock, leveled and prepared for it, and its streets require no grading
+or paving. As a power to whirl the machinery of a great city and at the
+same time to train the people to a love of the sublime and beautiful as
+displayed in living water, the Spokane Falls are unrivaled, at least as
+far as my observation has reached. Nowhere else have I seen such
+lessons given by a river in the streets of a city, such a glad,
+exulting, abounding outgush, crisp and clear from the mountains,
+dividing, falling, displaying its wealth, calling aloud in the midst of
+the busy throng, and making glorious offerings for every use of utility
+or adornment.
+
+From the mouth of the Spokane the Columbia, now out of the woods, flows
+to the westward with a broad, stately current for a hundred and twenty
+miles to receive the Okinagan, a large, generous tributary a hundred
+and sixty miles long, coming from the north and drawing some of its
+waters from the Cascade Range. More than half its course is through a
+chain of lakes, the largest of which at the head of the river is over
+sixty miles in length. From its confluence with the Okinagan the river
+pursues a southerly course for a hundred and fifty miles, most of the
+way through a dreary, treeless, parched plain to meet the great south
+fork. The Lewis, or Snake, River is nearly a thousand miles long and
+drains nearly the whole of Idaho, a territory rich in scenery, gold
+mines, flowery, grassy valleys, and deserts, while some of the highest
+tributaries reach into Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada. Throughout a great
+part of its course it is countersunk in a black lava plain and shut in
+by mural precipices a thousand feet high, gloomy, forbidding, and
+unapproachable, although the gloominess of its cañon is relieved in
+some manner by its many falls and springs, some of the springs being
+large enough to appear as the outlets of subterranean rivers. They gush
+out from the faces of the sheer black walls and descend foaming with
+brave roar and beauty to swell the flood below.
+
+From where the river skirts the base of the Blue Mountains its
+surroundings are less forbidding. Much of the country is fertile, but
+its cañon is everywhere deep and almost inaccessible. Steamers make
+their way up as far as Lewiston, a hundred and fifty miles, and receive
+cargoes of wheat at different points through chutes that extend down
+from the tops of the bluffs. But though the Hudson’s Bay Company
+navigated the north fork to its sources, they depended altogether on
+pack animals for the transportation of supplies and furs between the
+Columbia and Fort Hall on the head of the south fork, which shows how
+desperately unmanageable a river it must be.
+
+A few miles above the mouth of the Snake the Yakima, which drains a
+considerable portion of the Cascade Range, enters from the northwest.
+It is about a hundred and fifty miles long, but carries comparatively
+little water, a great part of what it sets out with from the base of
+the mountains being consumed in irrigated fields and meadows in passing
+through the settlements along its course, and by evaporation on the
+parched desert plains. The grand flood of the Columbia, now from half a
+mile to a mile wide, sweeps on to the westward, holding a nearly direct
+course until it reaches the mouth of the Willamette, where it turns to
+the northward and flows fifty miles along the main valley between the
+Coast and Cascade Ranges ere it again resumes its westward course to
+the sea. In all its course from the mouth of the Yakima to the sea, a
+distance of three hundred miles, the only considerable affluent from
+the northward is the Cowlitz, which heads in the glaciers of Mount
+Rainier.
+
+From the south and east it receives the Walla-Walla and Umatilla,
+rather short and dreary-looking streams, though the plains they pass
+through have proved fertile, and their upper tributaries in the Blue
+Mountains, shaded with tall pines, firs, spruces, and the beautiful
+Oregon larch (_Larix brevifolia_), lead into a delightful region. The
+John Day River also heads in the Blue Mountains, and flows into the
+Columbia sixty miles below the mouth of the Umatilla. Its valley is in
+great part fertile, and is noted for the interesting fossils discovered
+in it by Professor Condon in sections cut by the river through the
+overlying lava beds.
+
+The Deschutes River comes in from the south about twenty miles below
+the John Day. It is a large, boisterous stream, draining the eastern
+slope of the Cascade Range for nearly two hundred miles, and from the
+great number of falls on the main trunk, as well as on its many
+mountain tributaries, well deserves its name. It enters the Columbia
+with a grand roar of falls and rapids, and at times seems almost to
+rival the main stream in the volume of water it carries. Near the mouth
+of the Deschutes are the Falls of the Columbia, where the river passes
+a rough bar of lava. The descent is not great, but the immense volume
+of water makes a grand display. During the flood season the falls are
+obliterated and skillful boatmen pass over them in safety; while the
+Dalles, some six or eight miles below, may be passed during low water
+but are utterly impassable in flood time. At the Dalles the vast river
+is jammed together into a long, narrow slot of unknown depth cut sheer
+down in the basalt.
+
+This slot, or trough, is about a mile and a half long and about sixty
+yards wide at the narrowest place. At ordinary times the river seems to
+be set on edge and runs swiftly but without much noisy surging with a
+descent of about twenty feet to the mile. But when the snow is melting
+on the mountains the river rises here sixty feet, or even more during
+extraordinary freshets, and spreads out over a great breadth of massive
+rocks through which have been cut several other gorges running parallel
+with the one usually occupied. All these inferior gorges now come into
+use, and the huge, roaring torrent, still rising and spreading, at
+length overwhelms the high jagged rock walls between them, making a
+tremendous display of chafing, surging, shattered currents,
+counter-currents, and hollow whirls that no words can be made to
+describe. A few miles below the Dalles the storm-tossed river gets
+itself together again, looks like water, becomes silent, and with
+stately, tranquil deliberation goes on its way, out of the gray region
+of sage and sand into the Oregon woods. Thirty-five or forty miles
+below the Dalles are the Cascades of the Columbia, where the river in
+passing through the mountains makes another magnificent display of
+foaming, surging rapids, which form the first obstruction to navigation
+from the ocean, a hundred and twenty miles distant. This obstruction is
+to be overcome by locks, which are now being made.
+
+Between the Dalles and the Cascades the river is like a lake a mile or
+two wide, lying in a valley, or cañon, about three thousand feet deep.
+The walls of the cañon lean well back in most places, and leave here
+and there small strips, or bays, of level ground along the water’s
+edge. But towards the Cascades, and for some distance below them, the
+immediate banks are guarded by walls of columnar basalt, which are worn
+in many places into a great variety of bold and picturesque forms, such
+as the Castle Rock, the Rooster Rock, the Pillars of Hercules, Cape
+Horn, etc., while back of these rise the sublime mountain walls,
+forest-crowned and fringed more or less from top to base with pine,
+spruce, and shaggy underbrush, especially in the narrow gorges and
+ravines, where innumerable small streams come dancing and drifting
+down, misty and white, to join the mighty river. Many of these falls on
+both sides of the cañon of the Columbia are far larger and more
+interesting in every way than would be guessed from the slight glimpses
+one gets of them while sailing past on the river, or from the car
+windows. The Multnomah Falls are particularly interesting, and occupy
+fern-lined gorges of marvelous beauty in the basalt. They are said to
+be about eight hundred feet in height and, at times of high water when
+the mountain snows are melting, are well worthy of a place beside the
+famous falls of Yosemite Valley.
+
+[Illustration: CAPE HORN, COLUMBIA RIVER]
+
+According to an Indian tradition, the river of the Cascades once flowed
+through the basalt beneath a natural bridge that was broken down during
+a mountain war, when the old volcanoes, Hood and St. Helen’s, on
+opposite sides of the river, hurled rocks at each other, thus forming a
+dam. That the river has been dammed here to some extent, and within a
+comparatively short period, seems probable, to say the least, since
+great numbers of submerged trees standing erect may be found along both
+shores, while, as we have seen, the whole river for thirty miles above
+the Cascades looks like a lake or mill-pond. On the other hand, it is
+held by some that the submerged groves were carried into their places
+by immense landslides.
+
+Much of interest in the connection must necessarily be omitted for want
+of space. About forty miles below the Cascades the river receives the
+Willamette, the last of its great tributaries. It is navigable for
+ocean vessels as far as Portland, ten miles above its mouth, and for
+river steamers a hundred miles farther. The Falls of the Willamette are
+fifteen miles above Portland, where the river, coming out of dense
+woods, breaks its way across a bar of black basalt and falls forty feet
+in a passion of snowy foam, showing to fine advantage against its
+background of evergreens.
+
+Of the fertility and beauty of the Willamette all the world has heard.
+It lies between the Cascade and Coast Ranges, and is bounded on the
+south by the Calapooya Mountains, a cross-spur that separates it from
+the valley of the Umpqua.
+
+It was here the first settlements for agriculture were made and a
+provisional government organized, while the settlers, isolated in the
+far wilderness, numbered only a few thousand and were laboring under
+the opposition of the British Government and the Hudson’s Bay Company.
+Eager desire in the acquisition of territory on the part of these
+pioneer state-builders was more truly boundless than the wilderness
+they were in, and their unconscionable patriotism was equaled only by
+their belligerence. For here, while negotiations were pending for the
+location of the northern boundary, originated the celebrated
+“Fifty-four forty or fight,” about as reasonable a war-cry as the
+“North Pole or fight.” Yet sad was the day that brought the news of the
+signing of the treaty fixing their boundary along the forty-ninth
+parallel, thus leaving the little land-hungry settlement only a mere
+quarter-million of miles!
+
+As the Willamette is one of the most foodful of valleys, so is the
+Columbia one of the most foodful of rivers. During the fisher’s harvest
+time salmon from the sea come in countless millions, urging their way
+against falls, rapids, and shallows, up into the very heart of the
+Rocky Mountains, supplying everybody by the way with most bountiful
+masses of delicious food, weighing from twenty to eighty pounds each,
+plump and smooth like loaves of bread ready for the oven. The supply
+seems inexhaustible, as well it might. Large quantities were used by
+the Indians as fuel, and by the Hudson’s Bay people as manure for their
+gardens at the forts. Used, wasted, canned and sent in shiploads to all
+the world, a grand harvest was reaped every year while nobody sowed. Of
+late, however, the salmon crop has begun to fail, and millions of young
+fry are now sown like wheat in the river every year, from hatching
+establishments belonging to the Government.
+
+All of the Oregon waters that win their way to the sea are a tributary
+to the Columbia, save the short streams of the immediate coast, and the
+Umpqua and Rogue Rivers in southern Oregon. These both head in the
+Cascade Mountains and find their way to the sea through gaps in the
+Coast Range, and both drain large and fertile and beautiful valleys.
+Rogue River Valley is peculiarly attractive. With a fine climate, and
+kindly, productive soil, the scenery is delightful. About the main,
+central open portion of the basin, dotted with picturesque groves of
+oak, there are many smaller valleys charmingly environed, the whole
+surrounded in the distance by the Siskiyou, Coast, Umpqua, and Cascade
+Mountains. Besides the cereals nearly every sort of fruit flourishes
+here, and large areas are being devoted to peach, apricot, nectarine,
+and vine culture. To me it seems above all others the garden valley of
+Oregon and the most delightful place for a home. On the eastern rim of
+the valley, in the Cascade Mountains, about sixty miles from Medford in
+a direct line, is the remarkable Crater Lake, usually regarded as the
+one grand wonder of the region. It lies in a deep, sheer-walled basin
+about seven thousand feet above the level of the sea, supposed to be
+the crater of an extinct volcano.
+
+Oregon as it is today is a very young country, though most of it seems
+old. Contemplating the Columbia sweeping from forest to forest, across
+plain and desert, one is led to say of it, as did Byron of the ocean,—
+
+“Such as Creation’s dawn beheld, thou rollest now.”
+
+
+How ancient appear the crumbling basaltic monuments along its banks,
+and the gray plains to the east of the Cascades! Nevertheless, the
+river as well as its basin in anything like their present condition are
+comparatively but of yesterday. Looming no further back in the
+geological records than the Tertiary Period, the Oregon of that time
+looks altogether strange in the few suggestive glimpses we may get of
+it—forests in which palm trees wave their royal crowns, and strange
+animals roaming beneath them or about the reedy margins of lakes, the
+oreodon, the lophiodon, and several extinct species of the horse, the
+camel, and other animals.
+
+Then came the fire period with its darkening showers of ashes and
+cinders and its vast floods of molten lava, making quite another Oregon
+from the fair and fertile land of the preceding era. And again, while
+yet the volcanic fires show signs of action in the smoke and flame of
+the higher mountains, the whole region passes under the dominion of
+ice, and from the frost and darkness and death of the Glacial Period,
+Oregon has but recently emerged to the kindly warmth and life of today.
+
+
+
+
+XXIV. The Grand Cañon of the Colorado
+
+
+Happy nowadays is the tourist, with earth’s wonders, new and old,
+spread invitingly open before him, and a host of able workers as his
+slaves making everything easy, padding plush about him, grading roads
+for him, boring tunnels, moving hills out of his way, eager, like the
+Devil, to show him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory and
+foolishness, spiritualizing travel for him with lightning and steam,
+abolishing space and time and almost everything else. Little children
+and tender, pulpy people, as well as storm-seasoned explorers, may now
+go almost everywhere in smooth comfort, cross oceans and deserts scarce
+accessible to fishes and birds, and, dragged by steel horses, go up
+high mountains, riding gloriously beneath starry showers of sparks,
+ascending like Elijah in a whirlwind and chariot of fire.
+
+First of the wonders of the great West to be brought within reach of
+the tourist were the Yosemite and the Big Trees, on the completion of
+the first transcontinental railway; next came the Yellowstone and icy
+Alaska, by the northern roads; and last the Grand Cañon of the
+Colorado, which, naturally the hardest to reach, has now become, by a
+branch of the Santa Fé, the most accessible of all.
+
+Of course, with this wonderful extension of steel ways through our
+wildness there is loss as well as gain. Nearly all railroads are
+bordered by belts of desolation. The finest wilderness perishes as if
+stricken with pestilence. Bird and beast people, if not the dryads, are
+frightened from the groves. Too often the groves also vanish, leaving
+nothing but ashes. Fortunately, nature has a few big places beyond
+man’s power to spoil—the ocean, the two icy ends of the globe, and the
+Grand Cañon.
+
+[Illustration: THE GRAND CAÑON AT O’NEILL’S POINT]
+
+When I first heard of the Santa Fé trains running to the edge of the
+Grand Cañon of Arizona, I was troubled with thoughts of the
+disenchantment likely to follow. But last winter, when I saw those
+trains crawling along through the pines of the Coconino Forest and
+close up to the brink of the chasm at Bright Angel, I was glad to
+discover that in the presence of such stupendous scenery they are
+nothing. The locomotives and trains are mere beetles and caterpillars,
+and the noise they make is as little disturbing as the hooting of an
+owl in the lonely woods.
+
+In a dry, hot, monotonous forested plateau, seemingly boundless, you
+come suddenly and without warning upon the abrupt edge of a gigantic
+sunken landscape of the wildest, most multitudinous features, and those
+features, sharp and angular, are made out of flat beds of limestone and
+sandstone forming a spiry, jagged, gloriously colored mountain range
+countersunk in a level gray plain. It is a hard job to sketch it even
+in scrawniest outline; and, try as I may, not in the least sparing
+myself, I cannot tell the hundredth part of the wonders of its
+features—the side cañons, gorges, alcoves, cloisters, and amphitheaters
+of vast sweep and depth, carved in its magnificent walls; the throng of
+great architectural rocks it contains resembling castles, cathedrals,
+temples, and palaces, towered and spired and painted, some of them
+nearly a mile high, yet beneath one’s feet. All this, however, is less
+difficult than to give any idea of the impression of wild, primeval
+beauty and power one receives in merely gazing from its brink. The view
+down the gulf of color and over the rim of its wonderful wall, more
+than any other view I know, leads us to think of our earth as a star
+with stars swimming in light, every radiant spire pointing the way to
+the heavens.
+
+But it is impossible to conceive what the cañon is, or what impression
+it makes, from descriptions or pictures, however good. Naturally it is
+untellable even to those who have seen something perhaps a little like
+it on a small scale in this same plateau region. One’s most extravagant
+expectations are indefinitely surpassed, though one expects much from
+what is said of it as “the biggest chasm on earth”—“so big is it that
+all other big things—Yosemite, the Yellowstone, the Pyramids,
+Chicago—all would be lost if tumbled into it.” Naturally enough,
+illustrations as to size are sought for among other cañons like or
+unlike it, with the common result of worse confounding confusion. The
+prudent keep silence. It was once said that the “Grand Cañon could put
+a dozen Yosemites in its vest pocket.”
+
+The justly famous Grand Cañon of the Yellowstone is, like the Colorado,
+gorgeously colored and abruptly countersunk in a plateau, and both are
+mainly the work of water. But the Colorado’s cañon is more than a
+thousand times larger, and as a score or two of new buildings of
+ordinary size would not appreciably change the general view of a great
+city, so hundreds of Yellowstones might be eroded in the sides of the
+Colorado Cañon without noticeably augmenting its size or the richness
+of its sculpture.
+
+But it is not true that the great Yosemite rocks would be thus lost or
+hidden. Nothing of their kind in the world, so far as I know, rivals El
+Capitan and Tissiack, much less dwarfs or in any way belittles them.
+None of the sandstone or limestone precipices of the cañon that I have
+seen or heard of approaches in smooth, flawless strength and grandeur
+the granite face of El Capitan or the Tenaya side of Cloud’s Rest.
+These colossal cliffs, types of permanence, are about three thousand
+and six thousand feet high; those of the cañon that are sheer are about
+half as high, and are types of fleeting change; while glorious-domed
+Tissiack, noblest of mountain buildings, far from being overshadowed or
+lost in this rosy, spiry cañon company, would draw every eye, and, in
+serene majesty, “aboon them a’” she would take her place—castle,
+temple, palace, or tower. Nevertheless a noted writer, comparing the
+Grand Cañon in a general way with the glacial Yosemite, says: “And the
+Yosemite—ah, the lovely Yosemite! Dumped down into the wilderness of
+gorges and mountains, it would take a guide who knew of its existence a
+long time to find it.” This is striking, and shows up well above the
+levels of commonplace description, but it is confusing, and has the
+fatal fault of not being true. As well try to describe an eagle by
+putting a lark in it. “And the lark—ah, the lovely lark! Dumped down
+the red, royal gorge of the eagle, it would be hard to find.” Each in
+its own place is better, singing at heaven’s gate, and sailing the sky
+with the clouds.
+
+Every feature of Nature’s big face is beautiful,—height and hollow,
+wrinkle, furrow, and line,—and this is the main master-furrow of its
+kind on our continent, incomparably greater and more impressive than
+any other yet discovered, or likely to be discovered, now that all the
+great rivers have been traced to their heads.
+
+The Colorado River rises in the heart of the continent on the dividing
+ranges and ridges between the two oceans, drains thousands of snowy
+mountains through narrow or spacious valleys, and thence through cañons
+of every color, sheer-walled and deep, all of which seem to be
+represented in this one grand cañon of cañons.
+
+It is very hard to give anything like an adequate conception of its
+size; much more of its color, its vast wall-sculpture, the wealth of
+ornate architectural buildings that fill it, or, most of all, the
+tremendous impression it makes. According to Major Powell, it is about
+two hundred and seventeen miles long, from five to fifteen miles wide
+from rim to rim, and from about five thousand to six thousand feet
+deep. So tremendous a chasm would be one of the world’s greatest
+wonders even if, like ordinary cañons cut in sedimentary rocks, it were
+empty and its walls were simple. But instead of being plain, the walls
+are so deeply and elaborately carved into all sorts of
+recesses—alcoves, cirques, amphitheaters, and side cañons—that, were
+you to trace the rim closely around on both sides, your journey would
+be nearly a thousand miles long. Into all these recesses the level,
+continuous beds of rock in ledges and benches, with their various
+colors, run like broad ribbons, marvelously beautiful and effective
+even at a distance of ten or twelve miles. And the vast space these
+glorious walls enclose, instead of being empty, is crowded with
+gigantic architectural rock forms gorgeously colored and adorned with
+towers and spires like works of art.
+
+Looking down from this level plateau, we are more impressed with a
+feeling of being on the top of everything than when looking from the
+summit of a mountain. From side to side of the vast gulf, temples,
+palaces, towers, and spires come soaring up in thick array half a mile
+or nearly a mile above their sunken, hidden bases, some to a level with
+our standpoint, but none higher. And in the inspiring morning light all
+are so fresh and rosy-looking that they seem new-born; as if, like the
+quick-growing crimson snowplants of the California woods, they had just
+sprung up, hatched by the warm, brooding, motherly weather.
+
+In trying to describe the great pines and sequoias of the Sierra, I
+have often thought that if one of these trees could be set by itself in
+some city park, its grandeur might there be impressively realized;
+while in its home forests, where all magnitudes are great, the weary,
+satiated traveler sees none of them truly. It is so with these majestic
+rock structures.
+
+Though mere residual masses of the plateau, they are dowered with the
+grandeur and repose of mountains, together with the finely chiseled
+carving and modeling of man’s temples and palaces, and often, to a
+considerable extent, with their symmetry. Some, closely observed, look
+like ruins; but even these stand plumb and true, and show architectural
+forms loaded with lines strictly regular and decorative, and all are
+arrayed in colors that storms and time seem only to brighten. They are
+not placed in regular rows in line with the river, but “a’ through
+ither,” as the Scotch say, in lavish, exuberant crowds, as if nature in
+wildest extravagance held her bravest structures as common as
+gravel-piles. Yonder stands a spiry cathedral nearly five thousand feet
+in height, nobly symmetrical, with sheer buttressed walls and arched
+doors and windows, as richly finished and decorated with sculptures as
+the great rock temples of India or Egypt. Beside it rises a huge castle
+with arched gateway, turrets, watch-towers, ramparts, etc., and to
+right and left palaces, obelisks, and pyramids fairly fill the gulf,
+all colossal and all lavishly painted and carved. Here and there a
+flat-topped structure may be seen, or one imperfectly domed; but the
+prevailing style is ornate Gothic, with many hints of Egyptian and
+Indian.
+
+Throughout this vast extent of wild architecture—nature’s own capital
+city—there seem to be no ordinary dwellings. All look like grand and
+important public structures, except perhaps some of the lower pyramids,
+broad-based and sharp-pointed, covered with down-flowing talus like
+loosely set tents with hollow, sagging sides. The roofs often have
+disintegrated rocks heaped and draggled over them, but in the main the
+masonry is firm and laid in regular courses, as if done by square and
+rule.
+
+Nevertheless they are ever changing; their tops are now a dome, now a
+flat table or a spire, as harder or softer strata are reached in their
+slow degradation, while the sides, with all their fine moldings, are
+being steadily undermined and eaten away. But no essential change in
+style or color is thus effected. From century to century they stand the
+same. What seems confusion among the rough earthquake-shaken crags
+nearest one comes to order as soon as the main plan of the various
+structures appears. Every building, however complicated and laden with
+ornamental lines, is at one with itself and every one of its neighbors,
+for the same characteristic controlling belts of color and solid strata
+extend with wonderful constancy for very great distances, and pass
+through and give style to thousands of separate structures, however
+their smaller characters may vary.
+
+Of all the various kinds of ornamental work displayed—carving, tracery
+on cliff faces, moldings, arches, pinnacles—none is more admirably
+effective or charms more than the webs of rain-channeled taluses.
+Marvelously extensive, without the slightest appearance of waste or
+excess, they cover roofs and dome tops and the base of every cliff,
+belt each spire and pyramid and massy, towering temple, and in
+beautiful continuous lines go sweeping along the great walls in and out
+around all the intricate system of side cañons, amphitheaters, cirques,
+and scallops into which they are sculptured. From one point hundreds of
+miles of the fairy embroidery may be traced. It is all so fine and
+orderly that it would seem that not only had the clouds and streams
+been kept harmoniously busy in the making of it, but that every
+raindrop sent like a bullet to a mark had been the subject of a
+separate thought, so sure is the outcome of beauty through the stormy
+centuries. Surely nowhere else are there illustrations so striking of
+the natural beauty of desolation and death, so many of nature’s own
+mountain buildings wasting in glory of high desert air—going to dust.
+See how steadfast in beauty they all are in their going. Look again and
+again how the rough, dusty boulders and sand of disintegration from the
+upper ledges wreathe in beauty for ashes—as in the flowers of a prairie
+after fires—but here the very dust and ashes are beautiful.
+
+Gazing across the mighty chasm, we at last discover that it is not its
+great depth nor length, nor yet these wonderful buildings, that most
+impresses us. It is its immense width, sharply defined by precipitous
+walls plunging suddenly down from a flat plain, declaring in terms
+instantly apprehended that the vast gulf is a gash in the once unbroken
+plateau, made by slow, orderly erosion and removal of huge beds of
+rocks. Other valleys of erosion are as great—in all their dimensions
+some are greater—but none of these produces an effect on the
+imagination at once so quick and profound, coming without study, given
+at a glance. Therefore by far the greatest and most influential feature
+of this view from Bright Angel or any other of the cañon views is the
+opposite wall. Of the one beneath our feet we see only fragmentary
+sections in cirques and amphitheaters and on the sides of the
+out-jutting promontories between them, while the other, though far
+distant, is beheld in all its glory of color and noble proportions—the
+one supreme beauty and wonder to which the eye is ever turning. For
+while charming with its beauty it tells the story of the stupendous
+erosion of the cañon—the foundation of the unspeakable impression made
+on everybody. It seems a gigantic statement for even nature to make,
+all in one mighty stone word, apprehended at once like a burst of
+light, celestial color its natural vesture, coming in glory to mind and
+heart as to a home prepared for it from the very beginning. Wildness so
+godful, cosmic, primeval, bestows a new sense of earth’s beauty and
+size. Not even from high mountains does the world seem so wide, so like
+a star in glory of light on its way through the heavens.
+
+I have observed scenery-hunters of all sorts getting first views of
+yosemites, glaciers, White Mountain ranges, etc. Mixed with the
+enthusiasm which such scenery naturally excites, there is often weak
+gushing, and many splutter aloud like little waterfalls. Here, for a
+few moments at least, there is silence, and all are in dead earnest, as
+if awed and hushed by an earthquake—perhaps until the cook cries
+“Breakfast!” or the stable-boy “Horses are ready!” Then the poor
+unfortunates, slaves of regular habits, turn quickly away, gasping and
+muttering as if wondering where they had been and what had enchanted
+them.
+
+Roads have been made from Bright Angel Hotel through the Coconino
+Forest to the ends of outstanding promontories, commanding extensive
+views up and down the cañon. The nearest of them, three or four miles
+east and west, are O’Neill’s Point and Rowe’s Point; the latter,
+besides commanding the eternally interesting cañon, gives wide-sweeping
+views southeast and west over the dark forest roof to the San Francisco
+and Mount Trumbull volcanoes—the bluest of mountains over the blackest
+of level woods.
+
+Instead of thus riding in dust with the crowd, more will be gained by
+going quietly afoot along the rim at different times of day and night,
+free to observe the vegetation, the fossils in the rocks, the seams
+beneath overhanging ledges once inhabited by Indians, and to watch the
+stupendous scenery in the changing lights and shadows, clouds, showers,
+and storms. One need not go hunting the so-called “points of interest.”
+The verge anywhere, everywhere, is a point of interest beyond one’s
+wildest dreams.
+
+As yet, few of the promontories or throng of mountain buildings in the
+cañon are named. Nor among such exuberance of forms are names thought
+of by the bewildered, hurried tourist. He would be as likely to think
+of names for waves in a storm. The Eastern and Western Cloisters, Hindu
+Amphitheater, Cape Royal, Powell’s Plateau, Grand View Point, Point
+Sublime, Bissell and Moran Points, the Temple of Set, Vishnu’s Temple,
+Shiva’s Temple, Twin Temples, Tower of Babel, Hance’s Column—these
+fairly good names given by Dutton, Holmes, Moran, and others are
+scattered over a large stretch of the cañon wilderness.
+
+All the cañon rock-beds are lavishly painted, except a few neutral bars
+and the granite notch at the bottom occupied by the river, which makes
+but little sign. It is a vast wilderness of rocks in a sea of light,
+colored and glowing like oak and maple woods in autumn, when the
+sun-gold is richest. I have just said that it is impossible to learn
+what the cañon is like from descriptions and pictures. Powell’s and
+Dutton’s descriptions present magnificent views not only of the cañon
+but of all the grand region round about it; and Holmes’s drawings,
+accompanying Dutton’s report, are wonderfully good. Surely faithful and
+loving skill can go no farther in putting the multitudinous decorated
+forms on paper. But the _colors_, the living rejoicing _colors_,
+chanting morning and evening in chorus to heaven! Whose brush or
+pencil, however lovingly inspired, can give us these? And if paint is
+of no effect, what hope lies in pen-work? Only this: some may be
+incited by it to go and see for themselves.
+
+No other range of mountainous rock-work of anything like the same
+extent have I seen that is so strangely, boldly, lavishly colored. The
+famous Yellowstone Cañon below the falls comes to mind; but, wonderful
+as it is, and well deserved as is its fame, compared with this it is
+only a bright rainbow ribbon at the roots of the pines. Each of the
+series of level, continuous beds of carboniferous rocks of the cañon
+has, as we have seen, its own characteristic color. The summit
+limestone beds are pale yellow; next below these are the beautiful
+rose-colored cross-bedded sandstones; next there are a thousand feet of
+brilliant red sandstones; and below these the red wall limestones, over
+two thousand feet thick, rich massy red, the greatest and most
+influential of the series, and forming the main color-fountain. Between
+these are many neutral-tinted beds. The prevailing colors are
+wonderfully deep and clear, changing and blending with varying
+intensity from hour to hour, day to day, season to season; throbbing,
+wavering, glowing, responding to every passing cloud or storm, a world
+of color in itself, now burning in separate rainbow bars streaked and
+blotched with shade, now glowing in one smooth, all-pervading ethereal
+radiance like the alpenglow, uniting the rocky world with the heavens.
+
+The dawn, as in all the pure, dry desert country is ineffably
+beautiful; and when the first level sunbeams sting the domes and
+spires, with what a burst of power the big, wild days begin! The dead
+and the living, rocks and hearts alike, awake and sing the new-old song
+of creation. All the massy headlands and salient angles of the walls,
+and the multitudinous temples and palaces, seem to catch the light at
+once, and cast thick black shadows athwart hollow and gorge, bringing
+out details as well as the main massive features of the architecture;
+while all the rocks, as if wild with life, throb and quiver and glow in
+the glorious sunburst, rejoicing. Every rock temple then becomes a
+temple of music; every spire and pinnacle an angel of light and song,
+shouting color hallelujahs.
+
+As the day draws to a close, shadows, wondrous, black, and thick, like
+those of the morning, fill up the wall hollows, while the glowing
+rocks, their rough angles burned off, seem soft and hot to the heart as
+they stand submerged in purple haze, which now fills the cañon like a
+sea. Still deeper, richer, more divine grow the great walls and
+temples, until in the supreme flaming glory of sunset the whole cañon
+is transfigured, as if all the life and light of centuries of sunshine
+stored up and condensed in the rocks was now being poured forth as from
+one glorious fountain, flooding both earth and sky.
+
+Strange to say, in the full white effulgence of the midday hours the
+bright colors grow dim and terrestrial in common gray haze; and the
+rocks, after the manner of mountains, seem to crouch and drowse and
+shrink to less than half their real stature, and have nothing to say to
+one, as if not at home. But it is fine to see how quickly they come to
+life and grow radiant and communicative as soon as a band of white
+clouds come floating by. As if shouting for joy, they seem to spring up
+to meet them in hearty salutation, eager to touch them and beg their
+blessings. It is just in the midst of these dull midday hours that the
+cañon clouds are born.
+
+A good storm cloud full of lightning and rain on its way to its work on
+a sunny desert day is a glorious object. Across the cañon, opposite the
+hotel, is a little tributary of the Colorado called Bright Angel Creek.
+A fountain-cloud still better deserves the name “Angel of the Desert
+Wells”—clad in bright plumage, carrying cool shade and living water to
+countless animals and plants ready to perish, noble in form and
+gesture, seeming able for anything, pouring life-giving, wonder-working
+floods from its alabaster fountains, as if some sky-lake had broken. To
+every gulch and gorge on its favorite ground is given a passionate
+torrent, roaring, replying to the rejoicing lightning—stones, tons in
+weight, hurrying away as if frightened, showing something of the way
+Grand Cañon work is done. Most of the fertile summer clouds of the
+cañon are of this sort, massive, swelling cumuli, growing rapidly,
+displaying delicious tones of purple and gray in the hollows of their
+sun-beaten houses, showering favored areas of the heated landscape, and
+vanishing in an hour or two. Some, busy and thoughtful-looking, glide
+with beautiful motion along the middle of the cañon in flocks, turning
+aside here and there, lingering as if studying the needs of particular
+spots, exploring side cañons, peering into hollows like birds seeding
+nest-places, or hovering aloft on outspread wings. They scan all the
+red wilderness, dispensing their blessings of cool shadows and rain
+where the need is the greatest, refreshing the rocks, their offspring
+as well as the vegetation, continuing their sculpture, deepening gorges
+and sharpening peaks. Sometimes, blending all together, they weave a
+ceiling from rim to rim, perhaps opening a window here and there for
+sunshine to stream through, suddenly lighting some palace or temple and
+making it flare in the rain as if on fire.
+
+Sometimes, as one sits gazing from a high, jutting promontory, the sky
+all clear, showing not the slightest wisp or penciling, a bright band
+of cumuli will appear suddenly, coming up the cañon in single file, as
+if tracing a well-known trail, passing in review, each in turn darting
+its lances and dropping its shower, making a row of little vertical
+rivers in the air above the big brown one. Others seem to grow from
+mere points, and fly high above the cañon, yet following its course for
+a long time, noiseless, as if hunting, then suddenly darting lightning
+at unseen marks, and hurrying on. Or they loiter here and there as if
+idle, like laborers out of work, waiting to be hired.
+
+Half a dozen or more showers may oftentimes be seen falling at once,
+while far the greater part of the sky is in sunshine, and not a
+raindrop comes nigh one. These thundershowers from as many separate
+clouds, looking like wisps of long hair, may vary greatly in effects.
+The pale, faint streaks are showers that fail to reach the ground,
+being evaporated on the way down through the dry, thirsty air, like
+streams in deserts. Many, on the other hand, which in the distance seem
+insignificant, are really heavy rain, however local; these are the gray
+wisps well zigzagged with lightning. The darker ones are torrent rain,
+which on broad, steep slopes of favorable conformation give rise to
+so-called “cloudbursts”; and wonderful is the commotion they cause. The
+gorges and gulches below them, usually dry, break out in loud uproar,
+with a sudden downrush of muddy, boulder-laden floods. Down they all go
+in one simultaneous gush, roaring like lions rudely awakened, each of
+the tawny brood actually kicking up a dust at the first onset.
+
+During the winter months snow falls over all the high plateau, usually
+to a considerable depth, whitening the rim and the roofs of the cañon
+buildings. But last winter, when I arrived at Bright Angel in the
+middle of January, there was no snow in sight, and the ground was dry,
+greatly to my disappointment, for I had made the trip mainly to see the
+cañon in its winter garb. Soothingly I was informed that this was an
+exceptional season, and that the good snow might arrive at any time.
+After waiting a few days, I gladly hailed a broad-browed cloud coming
+grandly on from the west in big promising blackness, very unlike the
+white sailors of the summer skies. Under the lee of a rim-ledge, with
+another snow-lover, I watched its movements as it took possession of
+the cañon and all the adjacent region in sight. Trailing its gray
+fringes over the spiry tops of the great temples and towers, it
+gradually settled lower, embracing them all with ineffable kindness and
+gentleness of touch, and fondled the little cedars and pines as they
+quivered eagerly in the wind like young birds begging their mothers to
+feed them. The first flakes and crystals began to fly about noon,
+sweeping straight up the middle of the cañon, and swirling in
+magnificent eddies along the sides. Gradually the hearty swarms closed
+their ranks, and all the cañon was lost in gray bloom except a short
+section of the wall and a few trees beside us, which looked glad with
+snow in their needles and about their feet as they leaned out over the
+gulf. Suddenly the storm opened with magical effect to the north over
+the cañon of Bright Angel Creek, inclosing a sunlit mass of the cañon
+architecture, spanned by great white concentric arches of cloud like
+the bows of a silvery aurora. Above these and a little back of them was
+a series of upboiling purple clouds, and high above all, in the
+background, a range of noble cumuli towered aloft like snow-laden
+mountains, their pure pearl bosses flooded with sunshine. The whole
+noble picture, calmly glowing, was framed in thick gray gloom, which
+soon closed over it; and the storm went on, opening and closing until
+night covered all.
+
+Two days later, when we were on a jutting point about eighteen miles
+east of Bright Angel and one thousand feet higher, we enjoyed another
+storm of equal glory as to cloud effects, though only a few inches of
+snow fell. Before the storm began we had a magnificent view of this
+grander upper part of the cañon and also of the Coconino Forest and the
+Painted Desert. The march of the clouds with their storm banners flying
+over this sublime landscape was unspeakably glorious, and so also was
+the breaking up of the storm next morning—the mingling of silver-capped
+rock, sunshine, and cloud.
+
+Most tourists make out to be in a hurry even here; therefore their days
+or hours would be best spent on the promontories nearest the hotel. Yet
+a surprising number go down the Bright Angel Trail to the brink of the
+inner gloomy granite gorge overlooking the river. Deep cañons attract
+like high mountains; the deeper they are, the more surely are we drawn
+into them. On foot, of course, there is no danger whatever, and, with
+ordinary precautions, but little on animals. In comfortable tourist
+faith, unthinking, unfearing, down go men, women, and children on
+whatever is offered, horse, mule, or burro, as if saying with Jean
+Paul, “fear nothing but fear”—not without reason, for these cañon
+trails down the stairways of the gods are less dangerous than they
+seem, less dangerous than home stairs. The guides are cautious, and so
+are the experienced, much-enduring beasts. The scrawniest Rosinantes
+and wizened-rat mules cling hard to the rocks endwise or sidewise, like
+lizards or ants. From terrace to terrace, climate to climate, down one
+creeps in sun and shade, through gorge and gully and grassy ravine,
+and, after a long scramble on foot, at last beneath the mighty cliffs
+one comes to the grand, roaring river.
+
+To the mountaineer the depth of the cañon, from five thousand to six
+thousand feet, will not seem so very wonderful, for he has often
+explored others that are about as deep. But the most experienced will
+be awestruck by the vast extent of huge rock monuments of pointed
+masonry built up in regular courses towering above, beneath, and round
+about him. By the Bright Angel Trail the last fifteen hundred feet of
+the descent to the river has to be made afoot down the gorge of Indian
+Garden Creek. Most of the visitors do not like this part, and are
+content to stop at the end of the horse trail and look down on the
+dull-brown flood from the edge of the Indian Garden Plateau. By the new
+Hance Trail, excepting a few daringly steep spots, you can ride all the
+way to the river, where there is a good spacious camp-ground in a
+mesquite grove. This trail, built by brave Hance, begins on the highest
+part of the rim, eight thousand feet above the sea, a thousand feet
+higher than the head of Bright Angel Trail, and the descent is a little
+over six thousand feet, through a wonderful variety of climate and
+life. Often late in the fall, when frosty winds are blowing and snow is
+flying at one end of the trail, tender plants are blooming in balmy
+summer weather at the other. The trip down and up can be made afoot
+easily in a day. In this way one is free to observe the scenery and
+vegetation, instead of merely clinging to his animal and watching its
+steps. But all who have time should go prepared to camp awhile on the
+riverbank, to rest and learn something about the plants and animals and
+the mighty flood roaring past. In cool, shady amphitheaters at the head
+of the trail there are groves of white silver fir and Douglas spruce,
+with ferns and saxifrages that recall snowy mountains; below these,
+yellow pine, nut pine, juniper, hop-hornbeam, ash, maple, holly-leaved
+berberis, cowania, spiraea, dwarf oak, and other small shrubs and
+trees. In dry gulches and on taluses and sun-beaten crags are sparsely
+scattered yuccas, cactuses, agave, etc. Where springs gush from the
+rocks there are willow thickets, grassy flats, and bright, flowery
+gardens, and in the hottest recesses the delicate abronia, mesquite,
+woody compositae, and arborescent cactuses.
+
+The most striking and characteristic part of this widely varied
+vegetation are the cactaceae—strange, leafless, old-fashioned plants
+with beautiful flowers and fruit, in every way able and admirable.
+While grimly defending themselves with innumerable barbed spears, they
+offer both food and drink to man and beast. Their juicy globes and
+disks and fluted cylindrical columns are almost the only desert wells
+that never go dry, and they always seem to rejoice the more and grow
+plumper and juicier the hotter the sunshine and sand. Some are
+spherical, like rolled-up porcupines, crouching in rock-hollows beneath
+a mist of gray lances, unmoved by the wildest winds. Others, standing
+as erect as bushes and trees or tall branchless pillars crowned with
+magnificent flowers, their prickly armor sparkling, look boldly abroad
+over the glaring desert, making the strangest forests ever seen or
+dreamed of. _Cereus giganteus_, the grim chief of the desert tribe, is
+often thirty or forty feet high in southern Arizona. Several species of
+tree yuccas in the same desert, laden in early spring with superb white
+lilies, form forests hardly less wonderful, though here they grow
+singly or in small lonely groves. The low, almost stemless _Yucca
+baccata_, with beautiful lily flowers and sweet banana-like fruit,
+prized by the Indians, is common along the cañon rim, growing on lean,
+rocky soil beneath mountain mahogany, nut pines, and junipers, beside
+dense flowery mats of _Spiræa cæspitosa_ and the beautiful
+pinnate-leaved _Spiræa millefolia_. The nut pine (_Pinus edulis_)
+scattered along the upper slopes and roofs of the cañon buildings, is
+the principal tree of the strange dwarf Coconino Forest. It is a
+picturesque stub of a pine about twenty-five feet high, usually with
+dead, lichened limbs thrust through its rounded head, and grows on
+crags and fissured rock tables, braving heat and frost, snow and
+drought, and continuing patiently, faithfully fruitful for centuries.
+Indians and insects and almost every desert bird and beast come to it
+to be fed.
+
+To civilized people from corn and cattle and wheat-field countries the
+cañon at first sight seems as uninhabitable as a glacier crevasse,
+utterly silent and barren. Nevertheless it is the home of the multitude
+of our fellow-mortals, men as well as animals and plants. Centuries ago
+it was inhabited by tribes of Indians, who, long before Columbus saw
+America, built thousands of stone houses in its crags, and large ones,
+some of them several stories high, with hundreds of rooms, on the mesas
+of the adjacent regions. Their cliff-dwellings, almost numberless, are
+still to be seen in the cañon, scattered along both sides from top to
+bottom and throughout its entire length, built of stone and mortar in
+seams and fissures like swallows’ nests, or on isolated ridges and
+peaks. The ruins of larger buildings are found on open spots by the
+river, but most of them aloft on the brink of the wildest, giddiest
+precipices, sites evidently chosen for safety from enemies, and
+seemingly accessible only to the birds of the air. Many caves were also
+used as dwelling-places, as were mere seams on cliff-fronts formed by
+unequal weathering and with or without outer or side walls; and some of
+them were covered with colored pictures of animals. The most
+interesting of these cliff-dwellings had pathetic little ribbon-like
+strips of garden on narrow terraces, where irrigating water could be
+carried to them—most romantic of sky-gardens, but eloquent of hard
+times.
+
+In recesses along the river and on the first plateau flats above its
+gorge were fields and gardens of considerable size, where irrigating
+ditches may still be traced. Some of these ancient gardens are still
+cultivated by Indians, descendants of cliff-dwellers, who raise corn,
+squashes, melons, potatoes, etc., to reinforce the produce of the many
+wild food-furnishing plants—nuts, beans, berries, yucca and cactus
+fruits, grass and sunflower seeds, etc.—and the flesh of animals—deer,
+rabbits, lizards, etc. The cañon Indians I have met here seem to be
+living much as did their ancestors, though not now driven into
+rock-dens. They are able, erect men, with commanding eyes, which
+nothing that they wish to see can escape. They are never in a hurry,
+have a strikingly measured, deliberate, bearish manner of moving the
+limbs and turning the head, are capable of enduring weather, thirst,
+hunger, and over-abundance, and are blessed with stomachs which triumph
+over everything the wilderness may offer. Evidently their lives are not
+bitter.
+
+The largest of the cañon animals one is likely to see is the wild
+sheep, or Rocky Mountain bighorn, a most admirable beast, with limbs
+that never fail, at home on the most nerve-trying precipices,
+acquainted with all the springs and passes and broken-down jumpable
+places in the sheer ribbon cliffs, bounding from crag to crag in easy
+grace and confidence of strength, his great horns held high above his
+shoulders, wild red blood beating and hissing through every fiber of
+him like the wind through a quivering mountain pine.
+
+Deer also are occasionally met in the cañon, making their way to the
+river when the wells of the plateau are dry. Along the short spring
+streams beavers are still busy, as is shown by the cottonwood and
+willow timber they have cut and peeled, found in all the river
+drift-heaps. In the most barren cliffs and gulches there dwell a
+multitude of lesser animals, well-dressed, clear-eyed, happy little
+beasts—wood rats, kangaroo rats, gophers, wood mice, skunks, rabbits,
+bobcats, and many others, gathering food, or dozing in their sun-warmed
+dens. Lizards, too, of every kind and color are here enjoying life on
+the hot cliffs, and making the brightest of them brighter.
+
+Nor is there any lack of feathered people. The golden eagle may be
+seen, and the osprey, hawks, jays, hummingbirds, the mourning dove, and
+cheery familiar singers—the black-headed grosbeak, robin, bluebird,
+Townsend’s thrush, and many warblers, sailing the sky and enlivening
+the rocks and bushes through all the cañon wilderness.
+
+Here at Hance’s river camp or a few miles above it brave Powell and his
+brave men passed their first night in the cañon on the adventurous
+voyage of discovery thirty-three[34] years ago. They faced a thousand
+dangers, open or hidden, now in their boats gladly sliding down swift,
+smooth reaches, now rolled over and over in back-combing surges of
+rough, roaring cataracts, sucked under in eddies, swimming like
+beavers, tossed and beaten like castaway drift—stout-hearted,
+undaunted, doing their work through it all. After a month of this they
+floated smoothly out of the dark, gloomy, roaring abyss into light and
+safety two hundred miles below. As the flood rushes past us,
+heavy-laden with desert mud, we naturally think of its sources, its
+countless silvery branches outspread on thousands of snowy mountains
+along the crest of the continent, and the life of them, the beauty of
+them, their history and romance. Its topmost springs are far north and
+east in Wyoming and Colorado, on the snowy Wind River, Front, Park, and
+Sawatch Ranges, dividing the two ocean waters, and the Elk, Wahsatch,
+Uinta, and innumerable spurs streaked with streams, made famous by
+early explorers and hunters. It is a river of rivers—the Du Chesne, San
+Rafael, Yampa, Dolores, Gunnison, Cochetopa, Uncompahgre, Eagle, and
+Roaring Rivers, the Green and the Grand, and scores of others with
+branches innumerable, as mad and glad a band as ever sang on mountains,
+descending in glory of foam and spray from snow-banks and glaciers
+through their rocky moraine-dammed, beaver-dammed channels. Then, all
+emerging from dark balsam and pine woods and coming together, they
+meander through wide, sunny park valleys, and at length enter the great
+plateau and flow in deep cañons, the beginning of the system
+culminating in this grand cañon of cañons.
+
+Our warm cañon camp is also a good place to give a thought to the
+glaciers which still exist at the heads of the highest tributaries.
+Some of them are of considerable size, especially those on the Wind
+River and Sawatch ranges in Wyoming and Colorado. They are remnants of
+a vast system of glaciers which recently covered the upper part of the
+Colorado basin, sculptured its peaks, ridges, and valleys to their
+present forms, and extended far out over the plateau region—how far I
+cannot now say. It appears, therefore, that, however old the main trunk
+of the Colorado may be, all its widespread upper branches and the
+landscapes they flow through are new-born, scarce at all changed as yet
+in any important feature since they first came to light at the close of
+the Glacial Period.
+
+The so-called Grand Colorado Plateau, of which the Grand Cañon is only
+one of the well-proportioned features, extends with a breadth of
+hundreds of miles from the flanks of the Wahsatch and Park Mountains to
+the south of the San Francisco Peaks. Immediately to the north of the
+deepest part of the cañon it rises in a series of subordinate plateaus,
+diversified with green meadows, marshes, bogs, ponds, forests, and
+grovy park valleys, a favorite Indian hunting ground, inhabited by elk,
+deer, beaver, etc. But far the greater part of the plateau is good
+sound desert, rocky, sandy, or fluffy with loose ashes and dust,
+dissected in some places into a labyrinth of stream-channel chasms like
+cracks in a dry clay-bed, or the narrow slit crevasses of
+glaciers—blackened with lava flows, dotted with volcanoes and beautiful
+buttes, and lined with long continuous escarpments—a vast bed of
+sediments of an ancient sea-bottom, still nearly as level as when first
+laid down after being heaved into the sky a mile or two high.
+
+Walking quietly about in the alleys and byways of the Grand Cañon city,
+we learn something of the way it was made; and all must admire effects
+so great from means apparently so simple; rain striking light hammer
+blows or heavier in streams, with many rest Sundays; soft air and
+light, gentle sappers and miners, toiling forever; the big river sawing
+the plateau asunder, carrying away the eroded and ground waste, and
+exposing the edges of the strata to the weather; rain torrents sawing
+cross-streets and alleys, exposing the strata in the same way in
+hundreds of sections, the softer, less resisting beds weathering and
+receding faster, thus undermining the harder beds, which fall, not only
+in small weathered particles, but in heavy sheer-cleaving masses,
+assisted down from time to time by kindly earthquakes, rain torrents
+rushing the fallen material to the river, keeping the wall rocks
+constantly exposed. Thus the cañon grows wider and deeper. So also do
+the side cañons and amphitheaters, while secondary gorges and cirques
+gradually isolate masses of the promontories, forming new buildings,
+all of which are being weathered and pulled and shaken down while being
+built, showing destruction and creation as one. We see the proudest
+temples and palaces in stateliest attitudes, wearing their sheets of
+detritus as royal robes, shedding off showers of red and yellow stones
+like trees in autumn shedding their leaves, going to dust like
+beautiful days to night, proclaiming as with the tongues of angels the
+natural beauty of death.
+
+Every building is seen to be a remnant of once continuous beds of
+sediments,—sand and slime on the floor of an ancient sea, and filled
+with the remains of animals,—and every particle of the sandstones and
+limestones of these wonderful structures to be derived from other
+landscapes, weathered and rolled and ground in the storms and streams
+of other ages. And when we examine the escarpments, hills, buttes, and
+other monumental masses of the plateau on either side of the cañon, we
+discover that an amount of material has been carried off in the general
+denudation of the region compared with which even that carried away in
+the making of the Grand Cañon is as nothing. Thus each wonder in sight
+becomes a window through which other wonders come to view. In no other
+part of this continent are the wonders of geology, the records of the
+world’s auld lang syne, more widely opened, or displayed in higher
+piles. The whole cañon is a mine of fossils, in which five thousand
+feet of horizontal strata are exposed in regular succession over more
+than a thousand square miles of wall-space, and on the adjacent plateau
+region there is another series of beds twice as thick, forming a grand
+geological library—a collection of stone books covering thousands of
+miles of shelving, tier on tier, conveniently arranged for the student.
+And with what wonderful scriptures are their pages filled—myriad forms
+of successive floras and faunas, lavishly illustrated with colored
+drawings, carrying us back into the midst of the life of a past
+infinitely remote. And as we go on and on, studying this old, old life
+in the light of the life beating warmly about us, we enrich and
+lengthen our own.
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+Footnotes:
+
+[by the editor of the 1918 original of this text]:
+
+[1] This essay was written early in 1875.
+
+[2] The wild sheep of California are now classified as _Ovis nelsoni_.
+Whether those of the Shasta region belonged to the latter species, or
+to the bighorn species of Oregon, Idaho, and Washington, is still an
+unsettled question.
+
+[3] An excerpt from a letter to a friend, written in 1873.
+
+[4] Muir at this time was making Yosemite Valley his home.
+
+[5] An obsolete genus of plants now replaced in the main by
+_Chrysothamnus_ and _Ericameria_.
+
+[6] An early local name for what is now known as Lassen Peak, or Mt.
+Lassen. In 1914 its volcanic activity was resumed with spectacular
+eruptions of ashes, steam, and gas.
+
+[7] Pronounced Too’-lay.
+
+[8] Letter dated “Salt Lake City, Utah, May 15, 1877.”
+
+[9] Letter dated “Salt Lake City, Utah, May 19, 1877.”
+
+[10] Letter dated “Lake Point, Utah, May 20, 1877.”
+
+[11] Letter dated “Salt Lake, July, 1877.”
+
+[12] Letter dated “September 1, 1877.”]
+
+[13] Letter written during the first week of September, 1877.
+
+[14] The spruce, or hemlock, then known as _Abies Douglasii_ var.
+_macrocarpa_ is now called _Pseudotsuga macrocarpa_.
+
+[15] Written at Ward, Nevada, in September, 1878.
+
+[16] See footnote 5.
+
+[17] Written at Eureka, Nevada, in October, 1878.
+
+[18] Now called _Pinus monophylla_, or one-leaf piñon.
+
+[19] Written at Pioche, Nevada, in October, 1878.
+
+[20] Written at Eureka, Nevada, in November, 1878.
+
+[21] Date and place of writing not given. Published in the _San
+Francisco Evening Bulletin_, January 15, 1879.
+
+[22] November 11, 1889; Muir’s description probably was written toward
+the end of the same year.
+
+[23] This tree, now known to botanists as _Picea sitchensis_, was named
+_Abies Menziesii_ by Lindley in 1833.
+
+[24] Also known as “canoe cedar,” and described in Jepson’s _Silva of
+California_ under the more recent specific name _Thuja plicata_.
+
+[25] Now classified as _Tsuga mertensiana_ Sarg.
+
+[26] Now _Abies grandis_ Lindley.
+
+[27] _Chamæcyparis lawsoniana_ Parl. (Port Orford cedar) in Jepson’s
+_Silva_.
+
+[28] 1889.
+
+[29] A careful re-determination of the height of Rainier, made by
+Professor A. G. McAdie in 1905, gave an altitude of 14,394 feet. The
+Standard Dictionary wrongly describes it is “the highest peak (14,363
+feet) within the United States.” The United States Baedeker and
+railroad literature overstate its altitude by more than a hundred feet.
+
+[30] Doubtless the red silver fir, now classified as _Abies amabilis_.
+
+[31] Lassen Peak on recent maps.
+
+[32] _Pseudotsuga taxifolia_ Brit.
+
+[33] _Thuja plicata_ Don.
+
+[34] Muir wrote this description in 1902; Major J. W. Powell made his
+descent through the canyon, with small boats, in 1869.
+
+
+Note from the transcriber:
+
+A phrase Muir uses that readers might doubt: “fountain range,” by which
+he means a mountainous area where rain or snow fall that is the source
+of water for a river or stream downslope. So it is not a typographical
+error for “mountain range”! Another odd phrase is “(something) is well
+worthy (something else)” rather than “well worth” or “well worthy of.”
+He uses this at least twice in this work.—jg
+
+
+
+
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