Initial commitHEADmain

56 files changed, 28571 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d7b82bc
--- /dev/null
+++ b/.gitattributes
@@ -0,0 +1,4 @@
+*.txt text eol=lf
+*.htm text eol=lf
+*.html text eol=lf
+*.md text eol=lf
diff --git a/75697-0.txt b/75697-0.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..39d25f1
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75697-0.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,12321 @@
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75697 ***
+
+
+
+
+
+THE END OF THE TRAIL
+
+[Illustration: _From a photograph by H. A. Erickson, Coronado, Cal._
+
+THE PROMISED LAND.
+
+Looking southward to the Gulf of California—and Mexico.]
+
+
+
+
+BOOKS BY E. ALEXANDER POWELL
+
+PUBLISHED BY CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
+
+
+    THE LAST FRONTIER: THE WHITE MAN’S WAR FOR
+      CIVILIZATION IN AFRICA. Illustrated. 8vo  _net_ $1.50
+
+    GENTLEMEN ROVERS. Illustrated. 8vo          _net_ $1.50
+
+    THE END OF THE TRAIL. Illustrated. 8vo      _net_ $3.00
+
+
+
+
+                                   THE
+                             END OF THE TRAIL
+
+                            THE FAR WEST FROM
+                      NEW MEXICO TO BRITISH COLUMBIA
+
+                                    BY
+                      E. ALEXANDER POWELL, F.R.G.S.
+      AUTHOR OF “THE LAST FRONTIER,” “GENTLEMEN ROVERS,” ETC., ETC.
+
+                _WITH FORTY-EIGHT FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS
+                                AND A MAP_
+
+                                 NEW YORK
+                         CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
+                                   1914
+
+                           COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY
+                         CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
+
+                         Published November, 1914
+
+                              [Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+                                    TO
+                     MY FRIEND AND FELLOW-ADVENTURER
+                              ALBERT C. KUHN
+                                    OF
+                            RANCHO YERBA BUENA
+                    IN “THE VALLEY OF HEART’S DELIGHT”
+
+
+
+
+FOREWORD
+
+
+In the dim dawn of history the Aryans, forsaking the birthplace of the
+race upon the Caspian shore, poured through the passes of the Caucasus
+and peopled Europe. By caravel and merchantman adventuring Europeans
+crossed the western ocean and established a fringe of settlements along
+this continent’s eastern rim. The American pioneers, taking up the
+historic march, slowly but inexorably pressed westward, from the Hudson
+to the Ohio, from the Ohio to the Mississippi, from the Mississippi
+across the plains, across the Rockies, until athwart the line of their
+advance they found another ocean. They could go no farther, for beyond
+that ocean lay the overpopulated countries of the yellow race. The white
+man had completed his age-long migration toward the beckoning West; his
+march was finished; in the golden lands which look upon the Pacific he
+had come to the End of the Trail.
+
+In the great march which substituted the wheat-field for the desert,
+the orchard for the forest, the work was done by the hardiest breed of
+adventurers that ever foreran the columns of civilisation—the Pioneers.
+And the pioneer has always lived on the frontier. Most people believe
+that there is no longer any quarter of this continent that can properly
+be called the frontier and that the pioneer is as extinct as the
+buffalo. To prove that they are wrong I have written this book. Though
+the gambler and the gun-fighter have vanished before the storm of public
+disapproval; though the bison no longer roams the ranges; though the
+express rider has given way to the express-train; in the hinterland of
+that vast region which sweeps westward and northward from the Pecos to
+the Skeena, and which includes New Mexico, Arizona, California, Oregon,
+Washington, British Columbia, frontier conditions still endure and the
+frontiersman is still to be found. In the unexplored and unexploited
+portions of this, “the Last West,” white-topped prairie schooners—full
+sisters of those which crossed the plains in ’49—creak into the
+wilderness in the wake of the home seeker; the settler chops his little
+farmstead from the virgin forest and rears his cabin of logs from the
+trees which grew upon the site; mile-long pack-trains wend their way
+into the northern wild; six-horse Concord coaches tear along the roads
+amid rolling clouds of dust, their scarlet bodies swaying drunkenly upon
+their leathern springs; out in the back country, where the roads run
+out and the trails begin, the cow-puncher still rides the ranges in his
+picturesque panoply of high-crowned Stetson and Angora chaps and vivid
+shirt. But this is the last call. It is the last chance to see a nation
+in the primeval stage of its existence. In a few more years, a very few,
+there will be no place on this continent, or on any continent, that can
+truthfully be called the frontier, and with it will disappear, never to
+return, those stern and hardy figures—the pioneer, the prospector, the
+packer, the puncher—who won for us the West.
+
+The _real_ West—and by the term I do not mean that sun-kissed,
+flower-carpeted coast zone, with its orange groves and apple orchards,
+its palatial mansions and luxurious hotels, its fashionable resorts
+and teeming, all-of-a-sudden cities, which stretches from San Diego to
+Vancouver and which to the Eastern visitor represents “the West”—cannot
+be seen from the terraces of tourist hostelries or the observation
+platforms of transcontinental trains. Because I wished to visit those
+portions of the West which cannot be viewed from a car-window and because
+I wished to acquaint myself with the characteristics and problems and
+ideals of the people who dwell in them, I travelled from Mexico to the
+borders of Alaska by motor-car—the only time, I believe, that a car has
+made that journey on its own wheels and under its own power. Because that
+journey was so crowded with incident and obstacle and adventure, and
+because the incidents and obstacles and adventures thus encountered so
+graphically illustrate the conditions which prevail in “the Last West,”
+is my excuse for having to a certain extent made a personal narrative of
+the following chapters.
+
+Without entering into a tedious recital of distances and road conditions,
+I have outlined certain routes which the motorist who contemplates
+turning the bonnet of his car westward might follow with profit and
+pleasure. With no desire to usurp the guide-book’s place, I have deemed
+it as important to describe that enchanted littoral which has become
+the nation’s winter playground as to depict that back country which the
+tourist seldom sees. Though I hold no brief for boards of trade and
+kindred organisations, I have incorporated the more significant facts and
+figures as to land values, soils, crops, climates, and resources which
+every prospective home-seeker wishes to know. But, more than anything
+else, I have tried to convey something of the spell of that big, open,
+unfenced, keep-on-the-grass, do-as-you-please, glad-to-see-you land and
+of the spirit of energy, industry, and determination which animates the
+kindly, hospitable, big-hearted, broad-minded, open-handed men who dwell
+there. They are the modern Argonauts, the present-day Pioneers. To them,
+across the miles, I lift my glass.
+
+                                                      E. ALEXANDER POWELL.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+  CHAPTER                                     PAGE
+
+     I. CONQUERORS OF SUN AND SAND               1
+
+    II. THE SKYLANDERS                          33
+
+   III. CHOPPING A PATH TO TO-MORROW            61
+
+    IV. THE LAND OF DREAMS-COME-TRUE            95
+
+     V. WHERE GOLD GROWS ON TREES              123
+
+    VI. THE COAST OF FAIRYLAND                 155
+
+   VII. THE VALLEY OF HEART’S DELIGHT          187
+
+  VIII. THE MODERN ARGONAUTS                   211
+
+    IX. THE INLAND EMPIRE                      237
+
+     X. “WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON”               271
+
+    XI. A FRONTIER ARCADY                      305
+
+   XII. BREAKING THE WILDERNESS                329
+
+  XIII. CLINCHING THE RIVETS OF EMPIRE         351
+
+   XIV. BACK OF BEYOND                         387
+
+    XV. THE MAP THAT IS HALF UNROLLED          419
+
+        INDEX                                  455
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+  The Promised Land                                          _Frontispiece_
+
+                                                               FACING PAGE
+
+  A Desert Dawn in New Mexico                                            4
+
+  Santa Fé: the Most Picturesque City between the Oceans                18
+
+  Remains of an Ancient Civilisation                                    24
+
+  The Land of the Turquoise Sky                                         38
+
+  Acoma: Supposed Ancient Site and Present Site                         40
+
+  Acoma as It is To-Day                                                 44
+
+  Acoma Hunter Home from the Hunt                                       48
+
+  Acoma Artisans                                                        50
+
+  “Dance Mad!”                                                          52
+
+  Young Acomans                                                         54
+
+  The Education of a Young Hopi                                         56
+
+  The Pyramid-Pueblo of Taos                                            58
+
+  The Passing of the Puncher                                            64
+
+  Where the Roads Run Out and the Trails Begin                          72
+
+  The Trail of a Thousand Thrills                                       88
+
+  Throwing the Diamond Hitch                                            90
+
+  Scenes in the Motor Journey Through Arizona                           98
+
+  Not in Catalonia but in California                                   120
+
+  A Modern Version of the Sermon on the Mount                          130
+
+  Santa Barbara, a City of Contrasts                                   168
+
+  The Mission of Santa Barbara                                         170
+
+  Lake Tahoe from the Slopes of the High Sierras                       232
+
+  The Yosemite—and a Lady Who Didn’t Know Fear                         250
+
+  Yosemite Youngsters, White and Red                                   252
+
+  The Greatest Oil Fields in the World                                 260
+
+  Over the Tehachapis                                                  262
+
+  The Overland Mail                                                    274
+
+  In the Oregon Hinterland                                             284
+
+  “Where Rolls the Oregon”                                             300
+
+  Where Rods Bend Double and Reels Go Whir-r-r-r                       324
+
+  What the Road-Builders Have Done in Washington                       332
+
+  The Unexplored Olympics                                              344
+
+  Where the Salmon Come from                                           348
+
+  Outposts of Civilisation                                             354
+
+  Breaking the Wilderness                                              356
+
+  Pack-Horses and a Pack-Dog                                           358
+
+  In the Great, Still Land                                             362
+
+  Sport on Vancouver Island                                            376
+
+  Life at the Back of Beyond                                           380
+
+  Transport on America’s Last Frontier                                 382
+
+  Transport on America’s Last Frontier                                 384
+
+  Scenes on the Cariboo Trail                                          400
+
+  Some Ladies from the Upper Skeena                                    422
+
+  Where No Motor-Car Had Ever Gone: Some Incidents of Mr. Powell’s
+    Journey Through the British Columbian Wilderness                   428
+
+  Some Siwash Cemeteries                                               448
+
+  Heraldry in the Hinterland                                           450
+
+  A Land of Sublimity and Magnificence and Grandeur, of Gloom
+    and Loneliness and Dread                                           452
+
+  Map of the Far West, from New Mexico to British Columbia,
+    Showing the Route Followed by the Author             _at end of volume_
+
+
+
+
+THE END OF THE TRAIL
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+CONQUERORS OF SUN AND SAND
+
+  “The song of the deed in the doing, of the work still hot from the hand;
+  Of the yoke of man laid friendly-wise on the neck of a tameless land.
+  While your merchandise is weighing, we will bit and bridle and rein
+  The floods of the storm-rocked mountains and lead them down to the plain;
+  And the foam-ribbed, dark-hued waters, tired from that mighty race,
+  Shall lie at the feet of palm and vine and know their appointed place;
+  And out of that subtle union, desert and mountain-flood,
+  Shall be homes for a nation’s choosing, where no homes else had stood.”
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+CONQUERORS OF SUN AND SAND
+
+
+“Isn’t this invigorating?” said a passenger on the Sunset Limited to a
+lounger on a station platform as he inhaled delightedly the crisp, clear
+air of New Mexico.
+
+“No, sir,” replied the man, who happened to be a native filled with civic
+pride; “this is Deming.”
+
+The story _may_ be true, of course; but if it isn’t it ought to be,
+for it is wholly typical of the attitude of the citizens of the
+youngest-but-one of our national family. Indeed, I had not spent
+twenty-four hours within the borders of the State before I had discovered
+that the most characteristic and likeable qualities of its inhabitants
+are their pride and faith in the land wherein they dwell. And this
+despite the fact that their neighbours across the line in Arizona refer
+to New Mexico slightingly—though not without some truth—as a State “where
+they dig for water and plough for wood.”
+
+Perhaps no region in the world, certainly none in the United States, has
+changed so remarkably in the space of a single decade. Ten years ago the
+only things suggested by a mention of New Mexico were cowboys, Hopi
+snake-dances, Navajo blankets, and Harvey eating-houses. Five years ago
+Deming was as typical a cow-town as you could find west of the Pecos.
+Gin-palaces and gambling-hells were running twenty-four hours a day;
+cattlemen in Angora chaps and high-crowned sombreros lounged under the
+shade of the wooden awnings and used the sidewalks of yellow pine for
+cuspidors; wiry, unkempt cow-ponies stood in rows along the hitching
+rails which lined a street ankle-deep in dust. Those were the careless
+days of “chaps and taps and latigo-straps,” when writers of the Wild West
+school of fiction could find characters, satisfying as though made to
+their order, in every barroom, and groups of spurred and booted figures
+awaited the moving-picture man (who had not then come into his own) on
+every corner.
+
+All southern New Mexico was held by experts—at least they called
+themselves experts—to be a waterless and next-to-good-for-nothing waste.
+Government engineers had traversed the region and, without considering
+it worth the time or trouble to sink test wells, had written it down in
+their reports as being a worthless desert; and the gentlemen who make
+the school geographies and the atlases followed suit by painting it a
+speckled yellow, like the Sahara and the Kalahari. Real-estate operators,
+racing westward to earn a few speculative millions in California, glanced
+from the windows of their Pullmans at the tedious expanse of sun-swept
+sand and, with a regretful sigh that Providence had been so careless as
+to forget the water, settled back to their magazines and their cigars.
+So the cattlemen who had turned their longhorns in among the straggling
+scrub, to get such a living as they could from the sparse desert grasses,
+were left in undisturbed possession, and if their uniform success in
+finding water wherever they sank their infrequent wells suggested any
+agricultural possibilities they were careful to keep the thought to
+themselves.
+
+[Illustration: _From a photograph copyright by Fred Harvey._
+
+A DESERT DAWN IN NEW MEXICO.]
+
+One day, however, one of the men in the Pullman, instead of leaning
+back regretfully, descended from the train, hired a horse, and rode out
+into the mesquite-dotted waste. He told the liveryman that he was a
+prospector, and, in a manner of speaking, he was. Being, incidentally,
+the manager of one of the largest and most profitable ranches in
+California, he was as familiar with the vagaries of the desert as a
+cowboy is with the caprices of his pony; and, moreover, he understood
+the science of irrigation from I to N. After a few days of quiet
+investigation he dropped into the commissioner’s office in Deming one
+morning and filed a claim for several hundred acres of land. Most of
+those who heard about it said that he was merely a fool of a tenderfoot
+who was throwing away his time and money and who ought to have a guardian
+appointed to take care of him, but some of the wise old cattlemen looked
+worried. Within a fortnight he had erected his machinery and was drilling
+for water. And wherever his wells went down, there water came up: fine,
+clear, sparkling water—gallons and gallons of it. It soused the thirsty
+desert and turned its good-for-nothing sand into good-for-anything loam.
+The seeds which the far-seeing Californian planted, sprouted, and the
+sprouts became blades, and the blades shot into stalks of alfalfa and
+corn and cane—and the future of all southern New Mexico was assured.
+
+The news of the discovery of water in the Mimbres valley and of the
+miracles that had been performed through its agency spread over the
+country as though by wireless, and sun-tanned, horny-handed men from half
+the States in the Union began to pile into Deming by every train, eager
+to take up the land while it was still to be had under the hospitable
+terms of the Homestead and Desert Land acts. It was in 1910 that the
+Californian, John Hund, sunk his first well; when I was in the office of
+the United States commissioner in Deming four years later I found that
+the nearest unoccupied land was sixteen miles from the city limits.
+
+Should you ever have occasion to fly over New Mexico in an aeroplane
+you will have no difficulty whatever in recognising the Mimbres valley;
+viewed from the sky it looks exactly like a bright-green rug spread
+across one end of a vast hardwood floor. Most of the valley holdings
+were, I noticed, of but ten or twenty acres, comparatively few of them
+being more than fifty, for the New Mexican homesteader has found that
+his bank-account increases faster if he cultivates ten acres thoroughly
+rather than a hundred superficially. This lesson they have had hammered
+into them not alone from experience but from observing the operations
+of a couple of almond-eyed brethren named Wah, hailing originally,
+I believe, from Canton, who own a twenty-three-acre truck-farm near
+Deming. Those vineyards on the slopes of Capri and those farmsteads
+clinging to the rocky hillsides of Calabria, where soil of any kind is
+so precious that every inch is tended with pathetic care, seem but crude
+and amateurish efforts in agriculture when compared with the efforts
+to which these Chinese brothers have carried their intensive farming.
+Though watered only by a small and primitive well, their farm graphically
+illustrates what can be accomplished by paying attention to those
+little things which the American farmer is accustomed contemptuously to
+disregard, as well as being an object-lesson in the remarkable variety
+of fruits and vegetables which the valley is capable of producing. These
+Chinamen make every one of their acres produce three crops of vegetables
+a year. Not a foot of soil is wasted. They even begrudge the narrow
+strips which are used for paths. Fruit-trees and grape-vines border the
+banks of the irrigation channels, and peas, beans, and tomatoes are grown
+between melon rows. A drove of corpulent porkers attend voraciously to
+the garden refuse and even the reservoir has had its usefulness doubled
+by being stocked with fish. Were the New Mexicans notoriously _not_
+lotus-eaters, the Brothers Wah would doubtless find still another use for
+their reservoir by raising in it the Egyptian water-lily. It is paying
+attention to such relatively insignificant details as these which makes
+J. Chinaman, Esquire, the best gardener in the world. It pays, too,
+for they told me in Deming that the Wahs, from their twenty-three-acre
+holding, are increasing their bank-account at the rate of eight thousand
+dollars a year. After noting the cordiality with which they were greeted
+by the president of the local bank, I did not doubt it. I should like to
+have a bank president greet me the way he did them.
+
+I have seen many remarkable farming countries—in Rhodesia, for example,
+and the hinterland of Morocco, and the Crimea, and the prairie provinces
+of Canada, not to mention the Santa Clara and the Imperial valleys of
+California—but I can recall none where soil and climate seemed to have
+combined so effectively to befriend the farmer as in the valley of the
+Mimbres. Imagine what a comfort it must be to do your farming in a region
+where you will never have to worry about how long it will be before it
+rains, nor to tramp about in the mud afterward. As the annual rainfall
+in this portion of New Mexico does not exceed eight inches, there is
+a generous margin left for sunshine. Instead of praying for rain, and
+then cursing his luck because it doesn’t come, or because it comes too
+heavily, the New Mexican farmer strolls over to his artesian well and
+throws over an electric switch which sets the pump agoing. When his
+fields are sufficiently irrigated he throws the switch back again. From
+the view-point of health it would be hard to improve upon the climate
+of the Mimbres valley, or, for that matter, of any other portion of
+New Mexico, its elevation of four thousand three hundred feet, taken
+with the fact that it is in the same latitude as Algeria and Japan and
+southernmost California, giving it summers which are hot without being
+humid or oppressive and winters which are never uncomfortably cold.
+
+Like their neighbours in other parts of the Southwest, the farmers of
+southern New Mexico have gone daft over alfalfa. To me—I might as well
+admit it frankly—one patch of alfalfa looks exactly like another, and
+they all look extremely uninteresting, but I suppose that if they were
+netting me from fifty to seventy-five dollars an acre a year, as they
+are their owners, I would take a more lively interest in them. I never
+arrived at a town in New Mexico, dirty, hungry, and tired, but that there
+was a group of eager boosters with a dust-covered automobile awaiting me
+at the station.
+
+“Jump right in,” they would say. “We have an alfalfa field over here that
+we want to show you. It’s only about thirty miles across the desert and
+we’ll get you back before the hotel dining-room is closed.”
+
+They’re as enthusiastic about a patch of alfalfa in New Mexico as the
+Esquimaux of Labrador are about a stranded whale.
+
+If you have an idea that you would like to be a hardy frontiersman and
+wear a broad-brimmed hat and become the owner of a ranch somewhere in
+that region which lies between the Gila and the Pecos, it were well
+to disabuse yourself of several erroneous impressions which seem
+to prevail about life in the Southwest. In the first place, you can
+dress just as much like the ranchmen whom you have seen depicted in
+the magazines as you wish—fleecy _chaparejos_ and a horsehair hat
+band and a pair of spurs that jingle like an approaching four-in-hand
+when the wearer walks and all the rest of the paraphernalia—for they
+are a tolerant folk, are the New Mexicans, and have become accustomed
+to all sorts of queer doings by newcomers. In many respects they are
+the politest people that I know. When I was in New Mexico I carried a
+cane, and no one even smiled. But the newcomer must not imagine that
+he can gallop madly across the ranges, at least in the vicinity of the
+towns, for he is more likely than not to be hauled up before a justice
+of the peace and fined for trespassing on some one’s alfalfa field or
+cabbage patch. (Cabbages, though painfully prosaic, are about the most
+profitable crop you can grow in New Mexico; they pay as high as three
+hundred and fifty dollars an acre.) And the intending rancher must
+make up his mind that he must begin at the beginning. New Mexico is no
+place for the agriculturist _de luxe_ who expects to sit on the piazza
+of his ranch-house and watch the hired men do the work. No, sirree! It
+is a roll-up-your-sleeves-spit-on-your-hands-and-pitch-in land where
+every one works and is proud of it. And there is always enough to do,
+goodness knows! This is virgin soil, remember, and first of all it has
+to be cleared of the _piñon_ and mesquite and chaparral which cover it.
+This clearing and grubbing costs on an average, so I was told, about
+five dollars an acre, but you get a supply of fire-wood in return—and
+there’s nothing that makes a cheerier blaze on a winter’s night than a
+hearth heaped with the roots of mesquite. In other countries you chop
+down your fuel with an axe; in New Mexico you dig it up with a hoe.
+Then there is the matter of well digging, which, including the cost of
+boring, machinery, and housing, works out at from fifteen to twenty-five
+dollars an acre. Since the construction of several large power-plants,
+the cost of pumping has been greatly reduced by the use of electricity.
+It is quite possible, of course, for the five or ten acre man to secure
+tracts close to town with all the preliminary work done for him, water
+being provided from a central pumping plant and his pro-rata share of the
+capitalised cost added to the price of his land, which may be purchased,
+like a piano or an encyclopedia, on the instalment plan. That will be
+about all, I think, for facts and figures.
+
+One of the most interesting things about the settlers with whom I talked
+in southern New Mexico is that, so far as any previous knowledge of
+agriculture was concerned, most of them were the veriest amateurs. One
+man whom I met had taught school in Iowa for a quarter of a century, but
+along in middle life he decided that there was more money to be made
+in teaching corn and cabbages how to shoot than there was in teaching
+the same thing to the young idea. Another was a Methodist clergyman
+from Kentucky who told me that he had never had a real conception of
+the hell-fire he preached about until he started in one scorching July
+morning to sink an artesian well in the desert. Still a third successful
+settler had been a physician in Oklahoma, while there are any number
+of “long-horned Texicans,” as the Texan cattlemen are called, who have
+moved over into New Mexico and become farmers. Scattered through the
+country are a few Englishmen; not of the club-lounging, bar-loafing,
+remittance-man type so common in Canada and Australia, but energetic,
+hard-working youngsters who are earnestly engaged in building homes for
+themselves in a new country and under an adopted flag. Not all of the
+Englishmen who have come out to New Mexico have proven so steady or
+successful, however, for a few years ago an English syndicate purchased
+a Spanish land grant of some two million acres in the vicinity of Raton
+and sent out a complete equipment of British managers, superintendents,
+foremen, butlers, valets, men servants, lodge keepers, gardeners,
+coachmen, and other functionaries, not to mention coaches, tandem carts,
+a pack of foxhounds, and other paraphernalia of the sporting life. A man
+who witnessed their detrainment at Raton told me that it was more fun
+than watching the unloading of the Greatest Show on Earth. It was a great
+life those Englishmen led while it lasted—tea at four every afternoon,
+evening clothes for dinner, and then a few rubbers of bridge—but it
+ended in the property being taken over at forced sale by a group of
+hard-headed Hollanders, who harnessed the four-in-hands to ploughs, used
+the tandem carts for hauling wood, set the hounds to churning butter, and
+are making the big place pay dividends regularly.
+
+Some two hundred miles north of Deming as the mail-train goes is
+Albuquerque, the metropolis of the State—if the term metropolis can
+properly be applied to a place with not much over twelve thousand
+inhabitants—set squarely in the centre of the one hundred and twenty-two
+thousand square mile parallelogram which is New Mexico. Albuquerque is
+a railway centre of considerable importance, for from there one can
+get through cars north to Denver and Pike’s Peak, south to the borders
+of Mexico and its revolutions, and west to the Golden Gate. One of the
+things that struck me most forcibly about Albuquerque—and the observation
+is equally applicable to all the rest of New Mexico—is that instead of
+having weather they enjoy climate. It is pretty hard to beat a land where
+the moths have a chance to eat holes in your overcoat but never in your
+bed blankets. Climate is, in fact, Albuquerque’s most valuable asset,
+and she trades on it for all she is worth—and it is worth to her several
+million dollars per annum. It is one of the few cities that I know of
+where they want and welcome invalids and say so frankly. They could not
+do otherwise with any consistency, however, for half the leading citizens
+of the town arrived there on their backs, clinging desperately to life,
+and were lifted out of the car window on a stretcher. These one-time
+invalids are to-day as husky, energetic, up-and-doing men as you will
+find anywhere. Heretofore Albuquerque has been much too busy catering
+to the wants of the thousands of tourists and invalids who step onto
+its station platform each year to pay much attention to agricultural
+development; but bordering on the town are several thousand acres of as
+fine, healthy desert as you will find anywhere outside of the Sahara.
+They are enclosed, as though by a great garden wall, by the Manzano
+ranges, and the gentleman who whirled me across the billiard-table
+surface of the desert in his motor-car told me that the government now
+has an irrigation project under consideration which, by damming the
+waters of the Rio Grande, will reclaim upward of four hundred thousand
+acres of this arid land. And the great government irrigation projects now
+in operation elsewhere in the Southwest have shown that water can produce
+as many things from a desert as the late Monsieur Hermann could from
+a gentleman’s hat. So one of these days, I expect, the country around
+Albuquerque, from the city limits to the distant foot-hills, will be as
+green with alfalfa as Ireland is with shamrock.
+
+They have a commercial club in Albuquerque that _is_ a club. At first I
+thought I had wandered into a hotel by mistake, for, with its spacious
+lobby, its busy billiard-tables, its handsome rugs and furniture, and
+the mahogany desk with the solicitous clerk behind it, it is about as
+distantly related to the usual commercial club as one could well imagine.
+It gives those men in the community who are doing things, and the others
+who want to be doing things or ought to be doing things, a place where
+they can meet and discuss, over tall, thin glasses with ice tinkling in
+them, the perennial problems of taxes, pavements, irrigation, crops,
+fishing, house building, automobiles, and the climate. I would suggest to
+the club’s board of governors, however, that it take steps to remove the
+undertaker’s establishment which flanks the entrance. When one drops into
+a place to get some facts regarding the desirability of settling there,
+it is not exactly reassuring to be greeted by a pile of coffins.
+
+Whoever was responsible for the architecture of the University of New
+Mexico buildings, which stand in the outskirts of Albuquerque, deserves
+a metaphorical slap of commendation. New Mexico is a young State and not
+yet overly rich in this world’s goods, so that if, with their limited
+resources, they had attempted to erect collegiate buildings along the
+usual hackneyed lines, with Doric porticoes and gilded cupolas and all
+that sort of thing, the result would probably have looked more like a
+third-rate normal school than like a State university. But they did
+nothing of the sort. Instead, they erected buildings adapted from the
+ancient communal cliff dwellings, constructing them of the native adobe,
+which is durable, inexpensive, warm in winter and in summer cool. All
+the decorations, inside and out, are Indian symbols and pictures painted
+in dull colors upon the adobe walls. Thus, at a moderate cost, they have
+a group of buildings which typify the history of New Mexico and are in
+harmony with its strongly characteristic landscape; which are admirably
+suited to the climate; and which are unique among collegiate institutions
+in that they are modelled after those great houses in which the Hopi
+lived and worked before the dawn of history on the American continent.
+
+Santa Fé, the capital of the State, is, to my way of thinking, the
+quaintest and most fascinating city between the oceans. Very old, very
+sleepy, very picturesque, it presents more neglected opportunities than
+any place I know. I should like to have a chance to stage-manage Santa
+Fé, for the scenery, which ranks among the best efforts of the Great
+Scene Painter, is all set and the costumed actors are waiting in the
+wings for their cues. Give it the advertising it deserves and the curtain
+could be rung up to a capacity house. Where else within our borders is
+there a three-hundred-year-old palace whose red-tiled roof has sheltered
+nearly five-score governors—Spanish, Pueblo, Mexican, and American? (In
+a back room of the palace, as you doubtless know, General Lew Wallace,
+while governor of New Mexico, wrote “Ben Hur.”) Where else are Indians
+in scarlet blankets and beaded moccasins, their braided hair hanging in
+front of their shoulders in long plaits, as common sights in the streets
+as are traffic policemen on Broadway? Where else can you see groups of
+cow-punchers on sweating, dancing ponies and sullen-faced Mexicans in
+high-crowned hats and gaudy sashes, and dusty prospectors with their
+patient pack-mules plodding along behind them, and diminutive burros
+trotting to market under burdens so enormous that nothing can be seen of
+the burro but his ears and tail?
+
+Though at present it is only a sleepy and forgotten backwater, with the
+main arteries of commerce running along their steel channels a score of
+miles away, Santa Fé could be made, at a small expenditure of anything
+save energy and taste, one of the great tourist Meccas of America. To
+begin with, it is the only place still left in the United States where
+Buffalo Bill’s Wild West could merge into the landscape without causing
+a stampede. Those who know how much pains and money were spent by the
+municipality of Brussels in restoring a single square of that city to
+its original mediæval picturesqueness, whole blocks of brick and stone
+having to be torn down to produce the desired effect, will appreciate the
+possibilities of Santa Fé, where the necessary restorations have only to
+be made in inexpensive adobe. Desultory efforts are being made, it is
+true, to induce the residents to promote this scheme for a harmonious
+ensemble by restricting their architecture to those quaint and simple
+designs so characteristic of the country, the Board of Trade providing
+an object-lesson in the possibilities of the humble adobe by erecting
+a charming little two-room cottage, with an open fireplace, a veranda,
+and a pergola, at a total expense of one hundred dollars, but every now
+and then the sought-for architectural harmony is given a rude jolt by
+some one who could not resist the attractions of Queen Anne gables or
+Clydesdale piazza columns or Colonial red-brick-and-green-blinds.
+
+Set at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo Range, a mile above the level of
+the sea, with one of the kindliest all-the-year-round climates in the
+world, and with an atmosphere which is far more Oriental than American,
+Santa Fé has the making of just such another “show town” as Biskra,
+in southern Algeria, where Hichens laid the scene of “The Garden of
+Allah.” If its citizens would wake up to its possibilities sufficiently
+to advertise it as scores of Californian towns with not half of its
+attractions are advertised; if they would restore the more historically
+important of the crumbling adobe buildings to their original condition
+and erect their new buildings in the same characteristic and inexpensive
+style; if they would keep the streets alive with the colourful figures
+of blanketed Indians and Mexican venders of silver filigree; and if the
+local hotel would have the originality to meet the incoming trains with
+a four-horse Concord coach, such as is inseparably associated with the
+Santa Fé Trail, instead of a ramshackle bus, they would soon have so many
+visitors piling into the New Mexican capital that they could not take
+care of them. But they are a _dolce far niente_ folk, are the people of
+Santa Fé, and I expect that they will placidly continue along the same
+happy, easy, sleepy path that they have always followed. And perhaps it
+is just as well that they should.
+
+[Illustration: A dwelling.
+
+A street.
+
+ _From a photograph copyright by Jess Nusbaum._ Interior of a room.
+
+SANTA FÉ: THE MOST PICTURESQUE CITY BETWEEN THE OCEANS.]
+
+“They call me Santa Fé for short,” the New Mexican capital might answer
+if one inquired its name, “but my whole name is La Ciudad Real de la
+Santa Fé de San Francisco,” which, translated into our own tongue,
+means “The Royal City of the Holy Faith of Saint Francis.” It is some
+name—there is no denying that—but historically the town is quite able to
+live up to it. Fifteen years before the anchor of the _Mayflower_ rumbled
+down off New England’s rocky coast, Juan de Oñate, an adventurous and
+gold-hungry gentleman of Spain, marching up from Mexico, had raised over
+the Indian pueblo which had occupied this site from time beyond reckoning
+the banner of Castile. In 1680 came the great Indian revolt; the Spanish
+soldiers and settlers were surprised and massacred and the brown-robed
+friars were slain on the altars of the churches they had built. For
+twelve years the Pueblos ruled the land. Then came De Vargas, at the
+head of a column of steel-capped and cuirassed soldiery and, after a
+ferocious reckoning with the Indians, retook the city in the name of his
+Most Catholic Majesty of Spain. With the overthrow of Spanish dominion
+in Mexico, the City of the Holy Faith became the northernmost outpost of
+the Mexican Republic, and Mexican it remained until that August morning
+in 1846 when General Kearney and his brass-helmeted dragoons clattered
+into its plaza and raised on the palace flagstaff a flag that was never
+to come down. That episode is commemorated by a marble shaft which rises
+amid the cottonwoods on the historic plaza. On its base are carved the
+words in which General Kearney proclaimed the annexation of New Mexico
+to the United States:
+
+“_We come as friends to make you a part of the representative government.
+In our government all men are equal. Every man has a right to serve God
+according to his conscience and his heart._”
+
+At the other end of the plaza another monument marks the end of the
+famous Santa Fé Trail, over which, in prairie-schooners and Concord
+coaches and on the backs of mules and horses, was borne the commerce of
+the prairies. Santa Fé was to the historic trail of which it was the
+end what Bagdad is to the caravan routes across the Persian desert. No
+sooner would the lead team of one of these mile-long wagon-trains top
+the surrounding hills than word of its approach would spread through
+Santa Fé like wildfire. “_Los Americanos! Los Carros! La Caravana!_”
+the inhabitants would call to one another as they turned their faces
+plazaward, for the coming of a wagon-train was as much of an event as
+is the arrival of a steamer at a South Sea island. By the time that the
+first of the creaking, white-topped wagons, with its five yoke of oxen,
+had come to a halt before the custom-house, every inhabitant of the
+town was in the streets. A necessary preliminary to any trading was for
+the chief trader to make a call of ceremony upon the Spanish governor
+and, after a laboured interchange of salutes and compliments, to pay
+him the enormous toll of five hundred dollars per wagon imposed by the
+Spanish government upon wagon-trains coming from the United States.
+It came out of the pockets of the Spaniards in the end, however, for
+the American traders simply added it to the prices which they charged
+for their merchandise, which were high enough already, goodness knows:
+linen brought four dollars a yard, broadcloth twenty-five dollars a
+yard, and everything else in proportion. It is no wonder that the
+traders of the plains often retired as wealthy men. Stephen B. Elkins
+came to New Mexico, where he was to found his fortune, as bull-whacker
+in a wagon-train; one of the traders, Bent by name, came in time to sit
+himself in the governor’s palace in Santa Fé; and Kit Carson’s earlier
+years were spent in guiding these commercial expeditions. With the
+driving of the last spike in the Union Pacific Railroad, however, the
+importance of Santa Fé as a half-way house on the overland route to
+California vanished, and since then it has dwelt, contentedly enough, in
+its glorious climate and its memories of the past.
+
+Up the Cañon of the Santa Fé, over the nine-thousand-foot Dalton Divide,
+and down into the Cañon of the Macho, several hundred gentlemen, in
+garments of a somewhat conspicuous pattern provided by the State,
+are building what will in time take rank as one of the world’s great
+highways. It is to be called the Scenic Highway, and when it is
+completed it will form a section of the projected Camino Real from
+Denver to El Paso. It promises to be to the American Southwest what the
+Sorrento-Amalfi Drive is to southern Italy and the famous Corniche Road
+is to the south of France. By means of switchbacks—twenty-two of them in
+all—it will wind up the precipitous slopes of the great Dalton Divide,
+twist and turn among the snow-capped titans of the Sangre de Cristo
+Range, skirt the edges of sheer precipices and dizzy chasms, drop down
+through the leafy solitudes of the Pecos Forest Reserve, and then stretch
+its length across the rolling uplands toward Taos, the pyramid-city of
+the Pueblos.
+
+Within a hundred-mile radius of Santa Fé are three of the most wonderful
+“sights” in this or any other country: the hill-city of Acoma, the
+pyramid-pueblo of Taos (both of which are described at length in the
+succeeding chapter) and the Pajarito National Park. The Pajarito
+(in Spanish, remember, the j takes the sound of h) provides what is
+unquestionably the richest field of archæological research in the United
+States, the remains of the inconceivably ancient civilisation with which
+it is literally strewn, bearing much the same relation to the history of
+the New World that the ruins of Upper Egypt do to that of the Old. To
+reach the Pajarito, where the ruins of the cave people exist, you can
+ride or drive or motor. As the distance from Santa Fé is only about forty
+miles, if you are willing to get up with the chickens you can make it in
+a single day. Comfortable sleeping quarters and excellent meals can be
+had at the hospitable ranch-house of Judge Abbott, or, if you prefer, you
+can take along a pair of blankets and some provisions and sleep high and
+dry in a cave once occupied by one of your very remote ancestors. The
+very courteous gentlemen in charge of the American School of Archæology
+at Santa Fé are always glad to furnish information regarding the best way
+to enter the Pajarito. Twenty odd miles north of Santa Fé and, debouching
+quite unexpectedly upon the flat summit of a mesa, you look down upon the
+iridescent ribbon which is the Rio Grande as it twists and turns between
+the sheer, smooth walls of chalky rock which form the sides of White
+Rock Cañon. Coming into this great gorge at right angles are the smaller
+cañons—chief among them the one known as the Rito de los Frijoles—in
+whose precipitous walls the cave folk hewed their homes. Some of these
+smaller cañons are hundreds of feet above the bed of the Rio Grande, with
+openings barely wide enough to let the mountain streams fall through into
+the river below.
+
+You must picture the Rito de los Frijoles as an immensely long and
+narrow cañon—so narrow that Rube Marquard could probably pitch a stone
+across—with walls as steep and smooth and twice as high as those of
+the Flatiron Building. Then you must picture the lower face of this
+rocky wall as being literally honeycombed by thousands—and when I say
+thousands I do not mean hundreds—of windows and doors and port-holes
+and apertures and other openings to caves hollowed from the soft
+rock of the cliffs. It is a city of the dead, silent as a mausoleum,
+mysterious as the lines of the hand, older than recorded history. This
+once populous city consisted of a single street, _twelve miles long_,
+its cave-dwellings, which were reached by ladders or by steps cut in the
+soft tufa, rising above each other, tier on tier, like some Gargantuan
+apartment building. Such portions of the face of the cliff as are not
+perforated with doors and windows are embellished with pictographs,
+many of them in an extraordinary state of preservation, which, if the
+sight-seeing public only knew it, are as interesting and far more
+perplexing than the wall-paintings in the Tombs of the Kings at Thebes.
+On the floor of the valley the archæologists have laid bare the ruins
+of a circular community house which, when viewed from above, bears a
+striking resemblance to the ancient Greek theatre at Taormina, while on
+the Puyé to the north a communal building of twelve hundred rooms—larger
+than the Waldorf-Astoria—has been excavated. Farther down the Rito is
+the stone circle or dancing floor to which the prehistoric young folk
+descended to make merry, while their parents kept an eye on them from
+their houses in the cliff. (I doubt not that, when the sun began to
+sink behind the Jemez, some skin-clad mother would lean from the window
+of her fifth-story flat and shrilly call to her daughter, engrossed in
+learning the steps of the prehistoric equivalent of the tango on the
+dancing floor below: “A-ya, come up this minute! You hear me? Your paw’s
+just come home with a dinosaur and he wants it cooked for supper.”) Three
+miles up the cañon, half a thousand feet up the face of the cliff, is
+the arched ceremonial cave where, secure from prying eyes, this strange
+people performed their still stranger rites. Thanks to the energy of
+the American Archæological Society, this cave has been restored to the
+same condition in which it was when prehistoric lodge members worked
+their mysterious degrees and made the quaking initiates ride the goat.
+Though it is the aim of the society to year by year restore portions of
+the Rito until the whole cañon has returned to its original condition,
+such difficulty has been experienced in obtaining the necessary funds
+that at the present rate of progress it will take a century to effect a
+complete restoration. Yet our millionaires pour out their wealth like
+water to promote the excavation and restoration of the ruins of alien
+peoples in other lands. Though carloads of pottery and utensils have
+been carted away to enrich museums and private collections, the surface
+of the Pajarito has been scarcely scratched, _more than twenty thousand_
+communal caves and dwellings remaining to tempt the seekers of lost
+cities. Where did the inhabitants of this strange city go—and why? What
+swept their civilisation away? When did the age-old silence fall? These
+are questions which even the archæologists do not attempt to answer. All
+that they can assert with any degree of certainty is that the caves which
+underlie the communal dwellings in the Pajarito yield ample evidence of
+having been occupied by human beings in the days of the lava flow, when
+the mastodon and the dinosaur roamed the land and the world was very,
+very young.
+
+[Illustration: “The arched ceremonial cave where ... this strange people
+performed their still stranger rites.”
+
+“The archæologists have laid bare the ruins of a circular community
+house.”
+
+REMAINS OF AN ANCIENT CIVILISATION.]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Of the three great elemental industries of New Mexico—cattle raising,
+sheep raising, and mining—cattle raising was the first and, more
+than any other, gave colour to the country. The early Spanish and
+Mexican settlers were cow-men, and the old Sonora stock, “all horns and
+backbone,” may still be seen on some of the interior ranges, though they
+are now almost a thing of the past. Then came the great wagon-trains
+of Texans, California bound, many of whom, attracted by the wealth of
+pasturage, stopped off and turned their long-horned cattle out on the
+grass-grown desert. As Texas and the Middle West became fenced and
+civilised, the old-time cattlemen drove their herds farther and farther
+toward the setting sun. In those days there were no sheep to compete for
+the pasture; mountains and desert were clothed with grass so rich and
+long that they looked as though they were upholstered in green velvet;
+there was not a strand of barbed wire between the Pecos and the Colorado.
+New Mexico was indeed the cow-man’s paradise. Though the range has in
+many places been ruined by droughts and overstocking; though a woolly
+wave has encroached upon the lands which the cow-man had regarded as
+inalienably his own, there are, nevertheless, close to a million head
+of cattle within the borders of the State, by far the greater part of
+which are Herefords and Durhams, for the imported stock has increased the
+cow-man’s profits out of all proportion to the initial expense.
+
+Feeding with equal right and freedom upon the same public domain are
+upward of five million head of sheep, for New Mexico is the home of the
+wool industry in America. The early Spanish settlers kept large flocks
+of the straight-necked, coarse-wooled Mexican sheep in the country around
+Santa Fé, and from them the Navajos and Moquis, those industrious weavers
+of blankets and workers in silver, soon stole or bartered for enough to
+start a sheep business of their own, it being said that a third of all
+the sheep in the State are now owned by Indians. Unlike cattle, sheep,
+in cool weather, can exist without water for a month at a time; so, when
+the desert turns from yellow to green in the spring, they drift out over
+it in great flocks which look for all the world like fleecy clouds. Each
+flock, which usually consists of several thousand sheep, is attended by a
+herder and his “rustler,” who cooks, packs in supplies, and brings water
+in casks from the nearest stream for the use of the herder and his dogs,
+the juicy browse providing all the moisture that the sheep require.
+
+Owing to its warm, dry weather, New Mexico is one of the earliest
+shearing stations in the world, the work beginning the latter part of
+January and lasting until the first of May. In this time enough wool is
+clipped to supply a considerable portion of the people of the United
+States with suits and blankets. Until quite recently the shearing of the
+wool was a long and tedious task, even the more expert hand shearers
+seldom being able to average more than sixty or seventy fleeces a day.
+When machine shearing was introduced into New Mexico a few years age,
+however, this daily average was promptly doubled. Sheep-shearers are
+probably the best-paid and hardest-working class of men in the world,
+receiving from seven to eight and a half cents a head and averaging one
+hundred and twenty-five sheep a day. The best of them, however, shear
+from two to three hundred sheep in a single day, the record, I believe,
+being three hundred and twenty-five. As the shearing season only lasts
+through six months of the year, during which time they must travel from
+Texas to Montana, the unionised shearers demand and receive high wages,
+some of them making as much as twenty dollars a day. Yet, in spite of
+this and of the grazing fee of six cents a head for all sheep that feed
+on forest reserves, it is safe to say that the wool-growers are the most
+prosperous men in New Mexico.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The social fabric of New Mexico is a curious blending of Mexicans,
+Indians, and Americans. Of these elements the Mexicans are by far the
+most numerous, their customs, costumes, and language lending a decidedly
+Spanish flavour to the country. Living for the most part in scattered
+settlements along the mountain streams or in their own quarters in the
+towns, they enjoy a lazy, irresponsible, and not uncomfortable existence
+in return for their humble labour, not differing materially, either in
+their mode of life, manners, or morals, from their kinsmen below the
+Rio Grande. Shiftless, indolent, indifferently honest, the peons of
+New Mexico, like the South African Kaffirs and the Egyptian fellaheen,
+are nevertheless invaluable to the welfare of the State, for they
+perform practically all the labour on the ranches, mines, and railways.
+Politically they are an element to be reckoned with, about seventy-five
+per cent of the population of Santa Fé being Mexicans, while sixty per
+cent of the State Legislature is from the same race. As a result of this
+Latin preponderance in the population, practically all Americans in New
+Mexico are compelled to have at least a working knowledge of Spanish,
+which is really the _lingua franca_ of the country, it being by no means
+unusual to find one who speaks it better than the Mexicans themselves.
+Owing to the great influx of settlers during the last few years, the
+Mexican proportion of the population has been greatly reduced, as is
+confirmed by the increasing use of the English language and of English
+newspapers.
+
+One of the strangest religious sects in the world—the Penitentes—are
+recruited from the Mexican element of the population. Although this
+dread form of religious fanaticism has its centre in the region about
+San Mateo, it permeates peon life in every quarter of the State. For the
+Penitente is not an Indian; he is a Mexican. The Indians of the Pueblos
+repudiate Penitente practices. Neither is the Penitente a Catholic, for
+the Church has fought his terrible rites tooth and nail, though thus
+far it has fought them in vain. He is really a grim survivor of those
+secret orders whose fanaticism and religious excesses became a byword
+even in the calloused Europe of the Middle Ages. The sect is divided
+into two branches: the Brothers of Light—_La Luz_—and the Brothers of
+Darkness—_Las Tinieblas_. Though they hold secret meetings with more
+or less regularity throughout the year in their lodges or _morados_,
+they are really active only during the forty days of Lent. During that
+period both men and women flog their naked backs with scourges of aloe
+fibre, wind their limbs with wire or rope so tightly as to stop the
+circulation, lie for hours at a time on beds of cactus, make pilgrimages
+to mountain shrines with their unstockinged feet in shoes filled with
+jagged flints, stagger torturing miles across the sun-baked desert under
+the weight of enormous crosses, while on Good Friday this carnival of
+torture culminates in one of their number, chosen by lot, actually being
+crucified. It has been a number of years, however, since a Penitente has
+died on the cross, for, since the law came to New Mexico, they have found
+it wiser to fasten their willing victim to the cross with rope instead of
+nails. Though sporadic efforts have been made to break up the sect, they
+have thus far been unsuccessful, as it is no secret that many men high in
+the political life of New Mexico bear on their backs the tattooed cross
+which is the symbol of the order.
+
+Though the growth of the white population has heretofore been slow,
+it has begun to increase by leaps and bounds with the development of
+irrigation. Though New Mexico now contains representatives from every
+State in the Union and from pretty much every country in the world, the
+average run of society exhibits a tendency toward high-crowned hats that
+shows the dominating influence of Texas. They are, I think, the most
+hospitable folk that I have ever met; they are tolerant of other people’s
+opinions; have a tendency to ride rather than walk; are ready to fight at
+the drop of the hat; hate to count their money; lie only for the sake of
+entertainment; like a big proposition; and know how to handle it—there
+you have them, the gentlemen of New Mexico. But don’t go out to New
+Mexico, my Eastern friends, with the idea that you can butt into society
+with the aid of a good cigar—because you can’t. They are a free-born,
+free-living, free-speaking folk, are the dwellers out in the back country
+where the desert meets the mountains and the mountains meet the sky, and
+they don’t give a whoop-and-hurrah whether you come or stay away.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Such, in brief, bold outline, is the New Mexico of to-day. I have
+tried to paint you a picture, as well as I know how, of the progress,
+potentialities, and prospects of this, the youngest but one of the
+sisterhood of States. Though New Mexico, as a Territory, was willing
+enough to be a synonym for Indian villages and snake-dances and cavorting
+cowboys, the State of New Mexico stands for something very different
+indeed. Though it welcomes the tourists who come-look-see-spend-go, it
+prefers the settlers who are prepared to stay and make it their home.
+Unlike its sister State of Arizona, New Mexico does not suffer from that
+greatest of privations—lack of water—for the mountain-flood waters that
+now go to waste would store great reservoirs, there is the flow of
+numerous streams and river systems, and below the surface are artesian
+belts of water waiting only to be tapped by the farmer’s well. That the
+soil, once watered, is very fertile is best proved by the orchards,
+gardens, and meadows which cover the valleys of the Mimbres and the
+Pecos. Ten years ago the cattlemen of New Mexico used to say that it
+took “sixty acres to raise a steer”; to-day, thanks to irrigation, a
+single acre of alfalfa does the business. In gold, silver, coal, and
+copper the State is very rich—the largest copper mine in the world is at
+Silver City—while its turquoise deposits surpass those of Persia. And the
+people are as big-hearted and broad-minded and open-handed as you will
+find anywhere on earth. Taking it by and large, therefore, a man with
+some experience, a little capital, plenty of energy and ambition, and an
+intimate acquaintance with hard work should go a long way in New Mexico.
+He would find down there a big, new, unfenced, up-and-doing country and
+a set of sun-bronzed, iron-hard, self-reliant men of whom any country
+might be proud. These men are the modern _conquistadores_, for they have
+conquered sun and sand. To-day they are only commonplace farmers, but,
+when history has granted them the justice of perspective, they will be
+called the Pioneers.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+THE SKYLANDERS
+
+  “Here still a lofty rock remains,
+    On which the curious eye may trace
+  (Now wasted half by wearing rains)
+    The fancies of a ruder race.
+
+  ...
+
+  And long shall timorous Fancy see
+    The painted chief, and pointed spear,
+  And Reason’s self shall bow the knee
+    To shadows and delusions here.”
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+THE SKYLANDERS
+
+
+Six minutes after midnight the mail-train came thundering out of nowhere.
+With hissing steam and brakes asqueal it paused just long enough for me
+to drop off and then roared on its transcontinental way again to the
+accompaniment of a droning chant which quickly dropped into diminuendo,
+its scarlet tail lamps disappearing at forty miles an hour, leaving me
+abandoned in the utter darkness of the desert. The Casa Alvarado at
+Albuquerque, with its red-shaded candles and snowy napery, where I had
+dined only four hours before, seemed very far away. Some one flashed a
+lantern in my face and a voice behind it inquired:
+
+“Are you the gent that’s goin’ to Acoma?”
+
+“I am,” said I, “if I can get there.”
+
+“Well, I reckon you’ll get there all right, seein’ as how the trader at
+Laguna’s sent a rig over for you. Bob made a little money on a bunch o’
+cattle a while back and he’s been pretty damned independent ever since
+’bout takin’ folks over to Acoma. Says it’s too hard on his horses. But
+when Bob says he’ll do a thing he does it. Hi, Charlie!” he shouted, “you
+over there?”
+
+A guttural affirmative came out of the blackness. As the loquacious
+station agent made no offer to light my footsteps, I cautiously picked
+my way across the rails, slid down a steep embankment into a ditch,
+scrambled out of it, and descried before me the vague outlines of a
+ramshackle vehicle drawn by a pair of wiry, unkempt ponies.
+
+“How?” grunted the driver, who, as my eyes became accustomed to the
+darkness, I saw was an Indian, his hair, plaited in two long braids with
+strands of vivid flannel interwoven, hanging in front of his shoulders,
+schoolgirl fashion. I clambered in, the Indian spoke to his ponies, and,
+breaking into a lope, they swung off across the desert, the wretched
+vehicle lurching and pitching behind them.
+
+It is an unforgettable experience, a ride across the New Mexican desert
+in the night-time. The sky is like purple velvet and the stars seem very
+near. The silence is not the peaceful stillness that comes with nightfall
+in settled regions, but the mysterious, uncanny hush that hangs over
+other ancient and deserted lands—Upper Egypt, for example, and Turkestan.
+Our way was lined with dim, fantastic shapes whose phantom arms seemed to
+warn or beckon or implore, but which, in the prosaic light of morning,
+resolved themselves into clumps of piñon, and mesquite, and prickly-pear.
+The ponies shied suddenly at a stirring in the underbrush—probably a
+rattlesnake disturbed—and in the distance a coyote gave dismal tongue.
+Slipping and sliding down a declivity so abrupt that the axles were level
+with the ponies’ backs, we rattled across the stone-strewn bed of an
+_arroyo seco_, as they term a dried-up watercourse in that half-Spanish
+region, and clattered into a settlement whose squat, flat-roofed hovels
+of adobe, unlighted and silent as the houses of Pompeii, showed dimly on
+either hand.
+
+“Laguna?” I inquired.
+
+“Uh-huh,” responded my taciturn companion, pulling up his ponies
+sharply before a dwelling considerably more pretentious than the rest.
+“Trader’s,” he added laconically.
+
+As, stiff, chilled, and weary, I scrambled down, the door swung open to
+reveal a lean figure in shirt and trousers, silhouetted by the light from
+a guttering candle.
+
+“I’m the trader,” said he. “I reckon you’re the party we’ve been
+expectin’. We ain’t got much accommodation to offer you, but, such as it
+is, you’re welcome to it. I’m afeard my youngsters’ll keep you awake,
+though. I’ve got six on ’em an’ they’ve all got the whoopin’-cough, so me
+an’ my old woman hain’t had a chanct to shet our eyes for the last week.”
+
+It wasn’t the cough-harassed children who kept me wide-eyed and tossing
+through the night, however. It was Sheridan, I think, who remarked that
+had the fleas of a certain bed upon which he once slept been unanimous,
+they could easily have pushed him out. Had the tiny hordes which were in
+possession of my couch had an insect Kitchener to organise and lead them,
+I should certainly have had to spend the night upon the floor. I learned
+afterward that the Indians of the neighbouring pueblos have a name for
+Laguna which, in the white man’s tongue, means “Scratch-town.”
+
+From Laguna to Acoma is a four hours’ drive across the desert. It is very
+rough and more than once I feared that I should require the services of
+an osteopath to rejoint my vertebræ. And it is inconceivably dusty, the
+ponies kicking up clouds of fine, shifting sand which fills your eyes
+and nose and ears and sifts through your garments until you feel as
+though you were covered with sandpaper instead of skin. The sun beats
+down until the arid expanse of the desert is as hot as the whitewashed
+base of a railway-station stove at white heat. Everything considered,
+it is not the sort of a drive that one would choose for pleasure, but
+it is a very wonderful drive nevertheless, for the New Mexican desert
+is a kaleidoscope of colour. It is a land of black rocks and orange
+sand, flecked with discouraged, hopeless-looking clumps of sage-green
+vegetation; of violet, and amethyst, and purple mountain ranges; and
+overhead a sky of the brightest blue you will find anywhere outside a
+wash-tub. The cloud effects are the most beautiful I have ever seen,
+great masses of fleecy cirrus drifting lazily, like flocks of new-washed
+sheep, across the turquoise sky. Everywhere the colours are splashed on
+with a barbaric, almost a theatrical, touch. It is a regular back-drop
+of a country; its scenery looks as though it should have been painted on
+a curtain. When a party of Indians, with scarlet handkerchiefs twisted
+about their heads pirate fashion, lope by astride of spotted ponies, the
+illusion is complete. “You’re not really in New Mexico, you know,” you
+say to yourself. “This is much too theatrical to be real. You’re sitting
+in an orchestra chair watching a play, that’s what you’re doing.”
+
+[Illustration: _From a photograph by A. C. Vroman._
+
+THE LAND OF THE TURQUOISE SKY.
+
+“Great masses of fleecy cirrus drifting lazily, like flocks of new-washed
+sheep, across the turquoise sky.”]
+
+Swinging sharply around the shoulder of a sand-dune, a mesa—a table-land
+of rock—reared itself out of the plain as unexpectedly as a slap in
+the face. The driver pointed unconcernedly with his whip. “_La Mesa
+Encantada_,” he grunted. The Enchanted Mesa! Was there ever a name which
+so reeked with mystery and romance? Picture, if you can, a bandbox-shaped
+rock, almost flat on top and covering as much ground as a good-sized city
+square, higher than the Times Building in New York and with sides almost
+as perpendicular, set down in the middle of the flattest, yellowest
+desert the imagination can conceive. Seen from the distance, it suggests
+the stump of an inconceivably gigantic tree—a tree a thousand feet in
+diameter and sawed squarely off four hundred and thirty feet above the
+ground. On one side it is as sheer and smooth as that face of Gibraltar
+which looks Spainward, and when the evening sun strikes it slantingly
+it turns the monstrous mass of sandstone into a pile of rosy coral. It
+is one of the most impressive things that I have ever seen. Solitary,
+silent, mysterious, redolent of legend and superstition, older than Time
+itself, it suggests, without in any way resembling, those Colossi of
+Memnon which stare out across the desert from ruined Thebes.
+
+Those disputatious cousins Science and Tradition seem to have agreed for
+once that the original Acoma stood on the top of the _Mesa Encantada_,
+or Katzimo, as the Indians call it, in the days when the world was
+very young. Ever since Katzimo first attracted scientific attention
+the archælogists have quarrelled like cats and dogs over this question
+of whether it had ever been inhabited, just as they are quarrelling in
+Palestine as to the site of Calvary. A few years ago the Smithsonian
+Institution, desirous of settling the controversy for good and all,
+despatched to New Mexico a gentleman of an inquiring turn of mind,
+who succeeded in performing the supposedly impossible feat of scaling
+the sheer cliffs which, from time beyond reckoning, have guarded the
+secret of the mesa. On the plateau at the top he found fragments of
+earthenware utensils, which would seem to prove quite conclusively that
+it had been inhabited in long-past ages by human beings, thus supporting
+the traditions which prevail among the Indians regarding this mighty
+monolith. Whether the Enchanted Mesa has ever been inhabited I do not
+know; no one knows; and, to tell the truth, it does not greatly matter.
+According to the legend current among the Pueblos, this island in the air
+was originally accessible by means of a huge, detached fragment leaning
+against it at such an angle that it formed a precarious and perilous
+ladder to the top. Its difficulty of access was more than compensated
+for, however, by its security from the attacks of enemies, whether on
+two feet or four, for Katzimo is supposed to have echoed to human
+voices in those dim and distant days when the mastodon and the dinosaur
+roamed the land. The Indian legend has it that, while the men of the
+tribe were absent on a hunting expedition and the able-bodied women were
+hoeing corn in the fields below, some cataclysm of nature—most probably
+an earthquake—jarred loose the ladder rock and toppled it over into the
+plain, leaving the town on the summit as completely cut off from human
+help as though it were on another planet. The women and children thus
+isolated perished miserably from starvation, and their spirits, so the
+Indians will assure you, still haunt the summit of Katzimo. On any windy
+night you can hear them for yourself, moaning and wailing for the help
+that never came. That is why it were easier to persuade a Mississippi
+darky to spend a night in a graveyard than to induce an Indian to linger
+in the vicinity of the Enchanted Mesa after dark.
+
+[Illustration: _From a photograph by A. C. Vroman._
+
+“A bandbox-shaped rock, higher than the Times Building in New York and
+with sides almost as perpendicular.”
+
+_From a photograph by A. C. Vroman._
+
+“The mesa on which the modern Acoma is perched might be likened to a
+gigantic billiard-table three hundred and fifty-seven feet high.”
+
+ACOMA: SUPPOSED ANCIENT SITE AND PRESENT SITE.]
+
+The survivors of the tribe chose as the site of their new town the top
+of a somewhat lower mesa, three miles or so from their former home. If
+the Enchanted Mesa resembles a titanic bandbox, the mesa on which the
+modern Acoma is perched might be likened to a gigantic billiard-table,
+three hundred and fifty-seven feet high, seventy acres in area upon its
+level top, and supported by precipices which are not merely perpendicular
+but in many cases actually overhanging. It presents one of the most
+striking examples of erosion in the world, does Acoma, the sand which
+has been hurled against it by the wind of ages, as by a natural
+sand-blast, having cut the soft rock into forms more fantastic than were
+ever conjured up by Little Nemo in his dreams. Battlements, turrets,
+arches, minarets, and gargoyles of weather-worn, tawny-tinted rock rise
+on every hand. There are two routes to the summit and both of them
+require leathern lungs and seasoned sinews. One, called, if I remember
+rightly, the “Padre’s Path,” is little more than a crevasse in the solid
+rock, its ascent necessitating the vigorous use of knees and elbows
+as well as hands and feet, it being about as easy to negotiate as the
+outside of the Statue of Liberty. The other path, which is considerably
+longer, suggests the stone-paved ascent to some stronghold of the Middle
+Ages—and, when you come to think about it, that is precisely what it
+is—the resemblance being heightened by the massive battlements of eroded
+rock between which it winds and the strings of patient donkeys which plod
+up it, faggot-laden. Though of fair width near the bottom, it gradually
+narrows as it zigzags upward, finally becoming so slim that there is
+not room between the face of the cliff and the brink of the precipice
+for two donkeys to pass. It was at this inauspicious spot that I first
+encountered one of these dwellers in the sky—“skylanders” they might
+fittingly be called. He was a low-browed, sullen-looking fellow, with a
+skin the colour of a well-worn saddle and an expression about as pleasant
+as a rainy morning. His shock of coarse black hair had been bobbed
+just below the ears and was kept back from his eyes by the inevitable
+_banda_; his legs were encased in _chaparejos_ of fringed buckskin, and
+his shirt tails fluttered free. He came jogging down the perilous pathway
+astride of a calico donkey and, with the background of rocks and sand,
+cut a very striking and savage figure indeed. “He’ll make a perfectly
+bully picture,” I said to myself, and, suiting the action to the thought,
+I unlimbered my camera and ambushed myself behind a projecting shoulder
+of rock. As he swung into the range of my lens I snapped the shutter.
+It was speeded up to a hundredth of a second, but in much less time
+than that he had dismounted and was coming for me with a club. I have
+read somewhere that the Acomas are a mild-mannered, inoffensive folk.
+Well, perhaps. Still, I was glad that I had in my jacket pocket the
+largest-sized automatic used by a civilised people, and I was still
+gladder when Man-That-Wouldn’t-Have-His-Picture-Taken, glimpsing its
+ominous outline through the cloth, moved sullenly away, shaking his stick
+and muttering sentiments which needed no translation. He was an artist
+in the way he laid on his curses, was that Indian. An army mule-skinner
+would have taken off his hat to him in admiration.
+
+Of all the nineteen pueblos of New Mexico, Acoma is the most interesting
+by far. Indeed, I do not think that I am permitting my enthusiasm to get
+the better of my discrimination when I class it with Urga, Khiva, Mecca,
+the troglodyte town of Medenine in southern Tunisia, and Timbuktu as one
+of the half dozen most interesting semicivilised places in existence.
+Where else in all the world can you find a town hanging, as it were,
+between land and sky and reached by some of the dizziest trails ever trod
+by human feet; a town of many-floored but doorless dwellings, which have
+ladders instead of stairs and whose windows are of gypsum instead of
+glass; a town where the women build and own the houses and the men weave
+the women’s gowns; where the husbands take the names of their wives and
+the children the names of their mothers; where the belongings of a dead
+man are destroyed upon his grave and the ghosts are distracted so that
+his spirit may have time to escape; a town where religious mysteries, as
+incredible as those of voodooism and as jealously guarded as those of
+Lhasa, are performed in an underground chamber as impossible of access by
+the uninitiated as the Kaaba? Where else shall you find such a place as
+that, I ask you? Tell me that.
+
+[Illustration: _From a photograph by A. C. Vroman._
+
+“The massive battlements of eroded rock between which it winds ...
+suggest the stone-paved ascent to some stronghold of the Middle Ages.”
+
+_From a photograph by A. C. Vroman._
+
+“You gain access to the first floor of an Acoma dwelling precisely as
+you gain access to the hold of a ship.”
+
+ACOMA AS IT IS TO-DAY.]
+
+Acoma has the unassailable distinction of being the oldest continuously
+inhabited town within our borders, though how old the archæologists
+have been unable to conjecture, much less positively say. Certain it is
+that it was ancient when the Great Navigator set foot on the beach of
+San Salvador; that it was hoary with antiquity when the Great Captain
+and his mail-clad men-at-arms came marching up from Vera Cruz for the
+taking of Mexico. One needs to be very close under its beetling cliffs
+before any sign of the village can be detected, as the houses are of the
+same color and, indeed of the same material as the rock upon which they
+stand and so far above the plain that, as old Casteñeda, the chronicler
+of Coronado’s expedition in 1540, records, “it was a very good musket
+that could throw a ball as high.” The lofty situation of the town and
+the effect of bleakness produced by the entire absence of vegetation
+and by the cold, grey rock of which it is built reminded me of San
+Marino, that mountain-top capital of a tiny republic in the Apennines,
+while in the startling abruptness with which the mesa rears itself out
+of the desert there is a suggestion of those strange monasteries of
+Metéora, perched on their rocky columns above the Thessalian plain. The
+village proper consists of three parallel blocks of houses running east
+and west perhaps a thousand feet and skyward forty. They are, in fact,
+primeval apartment-houses, each block being partitioned by cross-walls
+into separate little homes which have no interior communication with
+each other. Each of these blocks is three stories high, with a sheer
+wall behind but terraced in front, so that it looks like a flight of
+three gigantic steps. (At the sister pueblo of Taos, a hundred miles or
+so to the northward, this novel architectural scheme has been carried
+even further by building the houses six and even seven stories high
+and terracing them on all four sides so that they form a pyramid.) The
+second story is set well back on the roof of the first, thus giving
+it a broad, uncovered terrace across its entire front, and the third
+story is similarly placed upon the second. In Acoma, which has about
+seven hundred people, there are scarcely a dozen doors on the ground;
+and these indicate the abodes of those progressive citizens who, not
+satisfied with what was good enough for their fathers, must be for ever
+experimenting with some new-fangled device. Barring these cases of recent
+innovation, there are no doors to the lower floor, the only access to
+a house being by a rude ladder to the first terrace. If you are making
+a call on the occupants of the first story, you wriggle through a tiny
+trap-door in the floor of the second and literally drop in upon them—so
+literally that your hosts see your feet before they see your face. It is
+a novel experience ... yes, indeed. You gain access to the first floor of
+an Acoma dwelling precisely as you gain access to the hold of a ship—by
+climbing a ladder to the deck and then descending through a hatchway.
+If you wish to leave your visiting-card at the third-floor apartment
+or if you have a hankering to see the view from the topmost roof, you
+can ascend quite easily by means of queer little steps notched in the
+division walls. The ground floor is always occupied by the senior members
+of the family, the second terrace is allotted to the daughter first
+married, and the upper flat goes to the daughter who gets a husband next.
+If there are other married daughters they must seek apartments elsewhere
+or live with grandpa and grandma in the basement.
+
+Most writers about Acoma seem to be particularly impressed with the
+cleanliness of its inhabitants and the neatness of their homes. I don’t
+like to shatter any illusions, but it struck me that the much-vaunted
+neatness of these people consisted mainly in covering their beds with
+scarlet blankets and whitewashing their walls. I have heard visitors
+exclaim enthusiastically as they peered in through an open doorway: “Why,
+I wouldn’t mind sleeping there at all.” They are perfectly welcome to
+so far as I am concerned. As for me, I much prefer a warm blanket and
+the open mesa. All of the Pueblo Indians are as ignorant of the elements
+of sanitation as a Congo black. If you doubt it, visit one of these sky
+cities on a scorching summer’s day when there is no wind blowing. As an
+old frontiersman in Albuquerque confided to me: “Say, friend, I’d ruther
+have a skunk hangin’ round my tent than to have to spend a night to
+leeward o’ one of them there Hopi towns.”
+
+Civilisation has evidently found the rocky path to Acoma too steep to
+climb, for when I was there not a soul in the place spoke a word of
+English. There was a daughter of the village who had been educated at
+Carlisle—Marie was her name, I think—but she was away on a visit. Perhaps
+she couldn’t stand the loneliness of being the only civilised person in
+the community. That is one of the deplorable features incident to our
+system of Indian education. A youth is sent to Carlisle or Hampton or
+Riverside, as the case may be, and after being broken to the white man’s
+ways is sent back to his own people on the theory that, by force of
+example, he will alter their mode of living. But he rarely does anything
+of the sort, for his fellow tribesmen either resent his attempts to
+introduce innovations or treat him with the same contemptuous tolerance
+with which the hidebound residents of a country village regard the youth
+who is “college l’arned.” So, after a time, becoming discouraged by the
+futility of attempting to teach his people something that they don’t want
+to know, he either goes out into the world to earn his own livelihood as
+best he may or else he again leaves his shirt tails outside his breeches,
+daubs his face with paint on dance days, and, forgetting how to use a
+fork and napkin, goes back to the manners and usages of his fathers.
+But you mustn’t get the idea that Acoma is wholly uncivilised, for it
+isn’t. One household has an iron bed with large brass knobs, another
+boasts a rocking-chair, and a third possesses a sewing-machine. But the
+most convincing proof that these untutored children of the sky possess a
+strain of culture is in the fact that Acoma can boast no phonograph to
+greet the visitor with the raucous strains of “Every Little Movement” and
+“Alexander’s Ragtime Band.”
+
+[Illustration: _From a photograph copyright by Fred Harvey._
+
+ACOMA HUNTER HOME FROM THE HUNT.]
+
+In many respects the most remarkable feature of Acoma is its immense
+adobe church, built upward of three centuries ago. It is remarkable
+because every stick and every adobe brick in it was carried up the
+heart-breaking, back-breaking trails from the plains three hundred feet
+below on the backs of patient Indians. There are timbers in that church
+a foot and a half square and forty feet long, brought by human muscle
+alone from the mountains a long day’s march away. And it is no tiny
+chapel, remember, but a building of enormous proportions, with walls
+ten feet thick and sixty feet high, and covering more ground than any
+modern church in America. As a monument of patient toil it is hardly less
+wonderful than the Pyramids; it was as long in building as the Children
+of Israel were in getting out of the wilderness. Above its gaudy altar
+hangs a royal gift, the town’s most treasured possession—a painting of
+San José, presented to Acoma two centuries and a half ago by his Most
+Catholic Majesty Charles the Second of Aragon and Castile. Faded and
+time-dimmed though it is, that picture once nearly caused an Indian
+war. Some years ago the neighbouring pueblo of Laguna, suffering from
+drought and cattle sickness and all manner of disasters, looked on the
+prosperity of Acoma and ascribed it to the patronage of the painted San
+José. So Laguna, believing that if the saint could bring prosperity to
+one pueblo, he could bring it to another, asked Acoma for the loan of
+the picture, and, after a tribal council, the request was granted. Their
+confidence in the saint was justified, for no sooner had the picture
+been transferred to the walls of Laguna’s bell-hung, mud-walled mission
+church than the rains came and the crops sprouted, and the cattle throve,
+and the tourists, leaning from their car windows, bought more pottery
+and blankets than they ever had before. After a time, however, Acoma
+gently intimated to Laguna that a loan was not a gift and asked for the
+return of the picture. Whereupon the Lagunas retorted that if possession
+was nine points of the law in the white man’s country, in the Indian
+country it was ten points—and then some, and that if the Acomas wanted
+the picture they could come and take it—if they could. For several weeks
+there was much sharpening of knives and cleaning of Winchesters in both
+pueblos, and at night the high mesa of Acoma resounded to those same war
+chants which preceded the massacre of Zaldivar and his Spaniards. But the
+saner counsels of the Indian agent prevailed, for these hill-folk are at
+heart a peaceable people, and they were induced to submit the dispute
+over the picture to the arbitrament of the white man’s courts. Perhaps it
+was well for the peace of central New Mexico that Judge Kirby Benedict,
+who heard the case, decided in favour of the plaintiffs and ordered the
+picture restored to Acoma forthwith. But when the messengers sent from
+Acoma to bring the sacred treasure back arrived at Laguna they found that
+the picture had mysteriously disappeared. But while riding dejectedly
+back to Acoma to break the news of the calamity they discovered under
+a mesquite bush, midway between the two pueblos—God be praised!—the
+missing picture. The Acomas instantly recognised, of course, that San
+José, released from bondage, had started homeward of his own volition
+and had doubtless sought shelter in the shade of the mesquite bush until
+the heat of the day had passed. He hangs once more on the wall of the
+ancient church, just where he did when he came, all fresh and shiny, from
+Madrid, and every morning the hill people file in and cross themselves
+before him and mutter a little prayer.
+
+[Illustration: _From a photograph by A. C. Vroman._
+
+The pottery painter.
+
+_From a photograph by A. C. Vroman._
+
+The blanket weaver.
+
+_From a photograph by A. C. Vroman._
+
+The turquoise driller.
+
+ACOMA ARTISANS.]
+
+In front of the church is the village graveyard, a depression in the rock
+forty feet deep and two hundred square, filled with earth brought on the
+backs of women from the far plain. It took them nearly forty years to
+make it. Is it any wonder that the patient, moccasined feet of centuries
+have sunk their imprint in the rock six inches deep? And the work was
+done by women! Imagine the New York suffragettes carrying enough dirt in
+sacks to the top of the Metropolitan Building to make a graveyard there.
+The bones lie thick on the surface soil, now literally a bank of human
+limestone. Dig down into that ghastly stratum and you would doubtless
+find among the myriads of bleached and grinning skulls some that had been
+cleft by sword-blade or pierced by bullet—grim reminders of that day, now
+three centuries agone, when Oñate’s men-at-arms carried Acoma by storm
+and put three thousand of its defenders to the sword, as was the Spanish
+custom. A funeral in Acoma’s sun-seared graveyard is worth journeying
+a long, long way to see. When the still form, wrapped in its costliest
+blanket, has been lowered into its narrow resting-place among the
+skeletons of its fathers; when upon the earth above it has been broken
+the symbolic jar of water; when the relatives have brought forth pottery
+and weapons and clothing to be broken and rent upon the grave that they
+may go with their departed owner; when all these weird rites have been
+performed the wailing mourners file away to those desolate houses where
+the shamans are blinding the eyes of the ghosts that they may not find
+the trail of the soul which has set out on its four days’ journey to the
+Land That Lies Beyond the Ranges. It is a strange business.
+
+American dominion has not yet resulted in destroying the picturesque
+costumes of the Acomas, and I hope to Heaven that it never will.
+Civilisation has enough to answer for in substituting the unlovely
+garments of Europe for the beautiful and becoming costumes of China and
+Japan. In Acoma the people always look as though they were dressed up
+for visitors, although, as a matter of fact, they are nothing of the
+sort. Like all barbarians, they are fond of colours. The tendencies of a
+man may be pretty accurately gauged by the manner in which he wears his
+shirt. If he lets it hang outside his trousers he is a dyed-in-the-wool
+conservative, and you can make up your mind that he has no glass in
+_his_ windows or doors to _his_ ground floor. But if he tucks it into
+his trousers, white-man fashion, it may be taken as a sign that he is
+a progressive, an aboriginal Bull Mooser, as it were, in which case he
+usually goes a step further by hiding the picturesque _banda_, with
+its suggestion of the buccaneers, beneath a sombrero several sizes too
+large. On dance days, however, liberals and conservatives alike discard
+their shirts and trousers for the primitive breech-clouts of their
+savage ancestors, streak and ring their lithe, brown bodies with red and
+yellow pigments, surmount their none too lovely features with fantastic
+head-dresses, and transform themselves into very ferocious and repellent
+figures indeed. A Hopi in his dancing dress looks like the creature of a
+bad dream.
+
+[Illustration: _From a photograph by A. C. Vroman._
+
+“DANCE MAD!”
+
+“On dance days they streak and ring their lithe bronze bodies with
+red and yellow pigments, surmount their none too lovely features with
+fantastic head-dresses, and transform themselves into the creatures of a
+bad dream.”]
+
+The women wear a peculiar sort of tunic, somewhat resembling that worn
+by their cousins on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, which exposes the
+neck and one round, bronze shoulder. The garment is well chosen, for
+the Acomas have the finest necks and busts of any women that I know.
+This is due, no doubt, to the fact that they carry all the water used
+in their houses from the communal reservoir in _tinajas_ balanced on
+their heads, frequently up a ladder and two steep flights of stairs,
+thus unconsciously developing a litheness of figure and a mould of form
+that would arouse the envy of Gaby des Lys. Over their shoulders is
+drawn a little shawl, generally of vivid scarlet. Then there is more
+scarlet in the kilts which reach from the waist to the knees and a
+contrast in the black stockings which come to the ankle, leaving bare
+their dainty feet—the smallest and prettiest women’s feet that I have
+ever seen. The feet of all these hill-folk are abnormally small, the
+result, doubtless, of the constant clutching of the uneven rock. The
+picturesqueness of the women’s costumes is enormously increased by the
+quantities of turquoise-studded silver jewellery which they affect,
+which tinkles musically when they walk. This jewellery, which they
+hammer out of Mexican _pesos_, obtaining the turquoises from the rich
+and highly profitable local mines, forms one of the Acomas’ chief
+sources of revenue, for they sell great quantities of it to the agents
+of the curiosity dealers along the railway and these resell it to the
+tourists on the transcontinental trains at a profit of many hundred per
+cent. They make several other forms of decorative wares: blankets, for
+example—though the Hopi blankets are not to be spoken of in the same
+breath with the beautiful products of the looms of their unfriendly
+Navajo neighbours—and pottery jars which they patiently decorate in fine
+grey-black designs and burn over dung-fed fires. Everything considered,
+their work is probably the most artistic done by any Indians in America
+to-day.
+
+But to return to the highway of narrative from which I find that I
+have inadvertently wandered. When a girl is old enough to get married,
+which is usually about the time that she reaches her twelfth birthday,
+she is expected to arrange her lustrous blue-black hair in two large
+whorls, like doughnuts, one on each side of her dainty head. The whorl
+is supposed to typify the squash blossom, which is the Hopi emblem of
+maidenhood. To arrange this complicated coiffure is a long day’s task,
+and after it is once made the owner puts herself to acute discomfort by
+sleeping on a wooden head-rest, so as not to disarrange it. When a girl
+marries, which she generally does very early in her teens, she must no
+longer wear the _nash-mi_, as the whorls are called. Instead, her hair
+is done up in two pendent rolls, symbolical of the ripened squash, which
+is the Hopi emblem of fruitfulness. And after you have seen the litters
+of fat, brown babies which gambol like puppies before every door, and
+the rows of roguish children’s faces which peer down at you from every
+sun-scorched housetop, you begin to think that there must be some virtue
+in this symbolical hair-dressing after all.
+
+[Illustration: _From a photograph by A. C. Vroman._
+
+“When a girl is old enough to get married she is expected to arrange her
+lustrous, blue-black hair in two large whorls.”
+
+_From a photograph by A. C. Vroman._
+
+“Rows of roguish children’s faces which peer down at you from every
+sun-baked housetop.”
+
+YOUNG ACOMANS.]
+
+Acoma is Mrs. Pankhurst’s dream come true. From time beyond reckoning the
+women have possessed the privileges and power for which their pale-faced
+sisters are so strenuously striving. Not only is Mrs. Acoma the ruler
+of her household but she is absolute owner of the house and all that is
+in it. In fact, a man is not permitted to own a house at all, and if
+his wife wishes to put him out of her house she may. Instead of a woman
+taking her husband’s name after marriage, he takes hers, and the children
+that they have also take the name of their mother. In other words, if Mr.
+Smith marries Miss Jones he becomes Mr. Jones and their children are the
+little Joneses. And the men accept their feminine rôles even to playing
+nursemaid while the women do the work, it being not the exception but
+the rule to see even the governors and war captains dandling squalling
+papooses on their knees or toting them up and down the main street on
+their backs. A comic artist couldn’t raise a smile in Acoma, for he would
+find that all his pet jokes are there accepted facts.
+
+[Illustration: _From a photograph copyright by Fred Harvey_.
+
+His first riding lesson.
+
+_From a photograph copyright by Fred Harvey_.
+
+The dancing lesson.
+
+_From a photograph copyright by Fred Harvey_.
+
+The history lesson.
+
+THE EDUCATION OF A YOUNG HOPI.]
+
+Even more interesting than Acoma, from an architectural standpoint,
+is the pyramid pueblo of Taos (pronounced as though it were spelled
+“_tous_,” if you please). This strange town—in many respects the most
+extraordinary in the world—is built on the floor of a mountain-girdled
+valley, some seventy miles due north from Santa Fé, and can best
+be reached by leaving the main line of the railway at Barrancas or
+Servilleta and driving out to the pueblo by wagon or stage. Though it
+is quite possible to reach Taos from Santa Fé in a single day, the
+journey is a very fatiguing one, it being much better to spend the night
+at the ranch-house at Arroyo Hondo and go on to the pueblo in comfort
+the next morning. There are really two towns—the white man’s and the
+Indian’s—four miles apart. White man’s Taos consists of little more than
+a sun-swept plaza bordered on all four sides by Mexican houses of adobe,
+while running off from the plaza are numerous dim and narrow alleys,
+likewise lined by humble dwellings of whitewashed mud, in one of which
+that immortal hero of American boyhood, Kit Carson, lived and died.
+For Taos, you must understand, was long the terminus of that historic
+trail by which the traders and trappers from Kansas and Missouri went
+down into the Southwest. Here, then, came such famous frontiersmen as
+Carson and Jim Bridger, and Manuel Lisa, and Jedediah Smith to barter
+beads and calico and rum for blankets and turquoises and furs. Save for
+a few greybeards who dwell in their memories of the exciting past, the
+frontiersmen have all passed round that dark turning from which no man
+returns, and Taos plaza hears the jingle of their spurs and the clatter
+of their high-heeled boots no more. In their stead have come another
+breed of men, who carry palettes instead of pistols and who confront the
+Indian with brushes instead of bowie-knives; for Taos, because of its
+extraordinary wealth of sun and shadow, of yellow deserts and purple
+mesas, of scarlet blankets and white walls, has become the rendezvous
+for a group of brilliant painters who are perpetuating on canvas the red
+men of the terraced houses. Seen at dusk or in the dimness of the early
+dawn, Taos bears a striking resemblance to the low, squat pyramids at
+Sakkara, for it consists, in fact, of two huge pyramidal structures,
+one six the other seven stories high, with a stream meandering between.
+In their general construction the houses of Taos are like those of
+Acoma, but instead of being terraced only on the front, they are built
+in two huge squares which are terraced on all four sides, looking from
+a little distance like the pyramids which children erect with stone
+building-blocks. These two huge apartment houses together accommodate
+upward of eight hundred souls. Like other Hopi dwellings, they can only
+be entered by means of ladders, pulling up the ladder after him being
+the Pueblo’s way of bolting his door. Though it needs iron muscles and
+leathern lungs to reach the apartments at the top, the view over the
+surrounding country well repays the exertion. Taos presents, I suppose,
+the nearest approach to socialistic life that this country has yet known,
+for the houses are built and occupied communally, the truck-gardens,
+grain-fields, and grazing lands are held in common, and if there is a
+surplus of hay or grain it is sold by the community.
+
+The communal form of government existing among the Hopi has proven so
+successful in practice that the Bureau of Indian Affairs has long since
+adopted the policy of leaving well enough alone. Although these Indians
+of the terraced houses are wards of the nation, to use a term which has
+become almost ironic, the white man’s law stops short at the boundaries
+of their pueblos, for they make their own laws, enforce them with their
+own police, maintain their own courts of justice, and inflict their own
+peculiar punishments. In Taos, for example, the stocks are still used
+as a punishment for misdemeanours, though the Indians go the Puritans
+one better by clamping down the culprit’s head as well as his hands
+and feet. At the head of the Pueblo system of government is an elected
+governor, known as the _cacique_, whose word is law with a capital L.
+Associated with him is a council of wise men called _mayores_, whose
+powers are a sort of cross between those of a board of aldermen and a
+college faculty. The activities of this patriarchal council frequently
+assume an almost parental character, it being customary for it to advise
+the young men of the pueblo when to marry—and whom. If an Indian gets
+into a dispute with a white man the case is tried in the county court,
+but differences between themselves are settled according to their own
+time-honoured customs. Though the police force of Acoma consists of but
+a solitary constable, whose uniform is a gilt cord around the crown of
+his sombrero, he takes himself quite as seriously as a member of the
+Broadway traffic squad, and, judging from his magnificent physique and
+the extremely businesslike revolver swinging from his hip, I doubt not
+that he would prove quite as efficient in an emergency.
+
+[Illustration: _From a photograph by A. C. Vroman._
+
+THE PYRAMID-PUEBLO OF TAOS.
+
+“At Taos the novel architectural scheme has been carried even further by
+building the houses five and even six stories high and terracing them on
+all four sides, so that they form a sort of pyramid.”]
+
+The Hopi are as stern and inflexible in the administration of those
+laws regulating the conduct of the community as were the Old Testament
+prophets. When a member of the tribe plays football with the public
+morals, as occasionally happens, he or she is tried by the _mayores_
+and, if found guilty, is expelled from the pueblo, bag and baggage. The
+system is as efficacious as it is inexpensive. As it chanced, I had an
+opportunity to see this novel form of punishment in operation. I was
+descending from the mesa at Acoma with my Laguna driver, who, in the
+absence of Carlisle-taught Marie, had served as my interpreter. He was
+a surly, taciturn fellow whose name, if my memory serves me faithfully,
+was Kill Hi. It should have been Kill Joy. As we reached the foot of the
+precipitous path my attention was attracted by a crowd, composed of the
+major portion of the pueblo’s population, which was stolidly watching
+four Indians—the constable and three others—loading a woman whose hands
+and feet were bound with ropes into a wagon. Despite her screams and
+struggles, they tossed her in as indifferently as they would a sack of
+meal.
+
+“Who is she? What’s the matter?” I asked Kill Hi.
+
+“Oh, nothin’ much,” was the indifferent answer. “She damn bad woman. They
+no want her here. They tell her to get out quick—vamoose. She no go. So
+they take her off in wagon like you see.”
+
+“But what are they going to do with her?”
+
+“Oh, I don’ know. Dump her out in desert, mebbe.”
+
+“But what will happen to her?” I persisted. “Won’t she starve to death?”
+
+“Oh, I don’ know,” said Kill Hi carelessly, cramping the buckboard so
+that I could get in. “Mebbe. P’raps. Acomas, they queer folks; not like
+other people.”
+
+He was quite right—they certainly are _not_.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+CHOPPING A PATH TO TO-MORROW
+
+  “We’re the men that always march a bit before
+    Though we cannot tell the reason for the same;
+  We’re the fools that pick the lock that holds the door—
+    Play and lose and pay the candle for the game.
+  There’s no blaze nor trail nor roadway where we go;
+    There’s no painted post to point the right-of-way,
+  But we swing our sweat-grained helves and we chop a path ourselves
+    To To-morrow from the land of Yesterday.”
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+CHOPPING A PATH TO TO-MORROW
+
+
+They came bucketing into town at a hand-gallop, hat brims flapping, spurs
+jingling, tie-down straps streaming, their ponies kicking the dusty road
+into a yellow haze behind them. With their gay neckerchiefs and sheepskin
+chaps they formed as vivid a group as one could find outside a Remington.
+They pulled up with a great clatter of hoofs in front of the Golden West
+saloon and, leaving their panting mounts standing dejectedly, heads to
+the ground and reins trailing, went stamping into the bar. Having had
+previous experience with their sort, I made bold to follow them through
+the swinging doors; for more unvarnished facts about a locality, its
+people, politics, progress, and prospects, are to be had over a mahogany
+bar than any place I know except a barber’s chair.
+
+“What’ll it be, boys?” sang out one of them, as they sprawled
+themselves over the polished mahogany. I expected to see the bartender
+matter-of-coursely shove out a black bottle and six small glasses, for,
+according to all the accepted canons of the cow country, as I had known
+it a dozen years before, there was only one kind of a drink ever ordered
+at a bar. So, when two of the party expressed a preference for ginger ale
+and the other four allowed that they would take lemonade, I felt like
+going to the door and taking another look at the straggling frontier town
+and at the cactus-dotted desert which surrounded it, just to make sure I
+really was in Arizona and not at Chautauqua, New York.
+
+It required scant finesse to engage one of the lemonade drinkers in
+amicable and illuminating conversation.
+
+“Round-up hereabouts?” I inquired, by way of making an opening.
+
+“Nope,” said my questionee. “Leastways not as I knows of. You see,” he
+continued confidentially, “we’ve quit cow-punching. We’ve tied up with
+the movies.”
+
+“With the what?” I queried.
+
+“The movies—the moving-picture people, you know,” he explained. “You see,
+the folks back East have gone plumb crazy on these here Wild West picture
+plays and we’re gratifying ’em at so much per. Wagon-train attacked by
+Indians—good-lookin’ girl carried off by one of the bucks—cow-punchers
+to the rescue, and all that sort of thing. It’s good pay and easy work,
+and the grub’s first-rate. Yes, sirree, it’s got cow-punching beaten to a
+frazzle. I reckon you’re from the East yourself, ain’t you?”
+
+I admitted that I was, adding that my bag was labelled “New York.”
+
+“The hell you say!” he exclaimed, regarding me with suddenly increased
+respect. “From what I hearn tell that sure must be some wicked town.
+Gambling joints runnin’ wide open, an’ every one packs a gun, I hear,
+an’ shootin’ scraps so frequent no one thinks nothing about ’em. It
+ain’t a safe place to live, I say. Now, down here in Arizony things is
+different. We’re peaceable, we are. We don’t stand for no promisc’us
+gun-play and, barring one or two of the mining towns, there ain’t a poker
+palace left, and I wouldn’t be so blamed surprised if this State went dry
+in a year or two. Well, s’long, friend,” he added, sweeping off his hat,
+“I’m pleased to’ve made your acquaintance. The feller with the camera’s
+waitin’ an’ we’ve got to get out an’ run off a few miles of film so’s to
+amuse the people back East.”
+
+[Illustration: THE PASSING OF THE PUNCHER.
+
+“Cowboys cavorting in front of cinematographs instead of corralling
+cattle—that’s what civilisation has done for Arizona.”]
+
+I stood in the doorway of the Golden West saloon and watched them as
+they swung easily into their saddles and went tearing up the street
+in a rolling cloud of dust. Then I went on my way, marvelling at the
+mutability of things. “That’s what civilisation does for a country,”
+I said to myself. “Lemonade instead of liquor; policemen instead of
+pistol fighters; cowboys cavorting in front of cinematographs instead
+of corralling cattle.” At first blush—I confess it frankly—I was as
+disappointed as a boy who wakes up to find it raining on circus morning,
+for I had revisited the Southwest expecting to find the same easy-going,
+devil-may-care, whoop-her-up-boys life so characteristic of that
+country’s territorial days. Instead I found a busy, prosperous State,
+still picturesque in many of its aspects but as orderly and peaceful as
+Commonwealth Avenue on a Sunday morning.
+
+It wasn’t much of a country, was Arizona, the first time I set foot in
+it, upward of a dozen years ago. A howling wilderness is what the Old
+Testament prophets would have called it, I suppose, and they wouldn’t
+have been far wrong either. Certainly Moses and his Israelites could
+not have wandered through a region more forbidding. Sand and sage-brush
+and cactus; snakes and lizards and coyotes; grim purple mountains in
+the distance and, flaming in a cloudless sky, a sun pitiless as fate.
+Cattlemen and sheepmen still fought for supremacy on the ranges; faro
+players still drove a roaring business in the mining-camps and the
+cow-towns; men’s coats screened but did not altogether conceal the
+ominous outline of the six-shooter. As building materials adobe and
+corrugated iron still predominated. Portland cement, the barbed-wire
+fence, the irrigation ditch, and alfalfa had yet to come into their
+own. In those days—and they were not so very long ago, if you
+please—A-r-i-z-o-n-a spelled Frontier with a capital F.
+
+I recall a little incident of that first visit, insignificant enough
+in itself but strangely prophetical of the changes which were to come.
+Riding across the most desolate and inhospitable country I had ever seen,
+a roughly written notice, nailed over the door of a ramshackle adobe
+ranch-house standing solitary in the desert, riveted my attention. The
+ill-formed letters, scrawled apparently with a sheep brush dipped in tar,
+read:
+
+  40 MILES FROM WOOD
+  40 MILES FROM WATER
+  40 FEET FROM HELL
+  GOD BLESS OUR HOME
+
+As I pulled up my horse, fascinated by the grim humour of the lines, the
+rancher appeared in the doorway and, with the hospitality characteristic
+of those who dwell in the earth’s waste places, bade me dismount and
+rest. Such of his face as was not bearded had been tanned by sun and
+wind to the colour of a well-smoked brier; corduroy trousers belted over
+lean hips and a flannel shirt open at the throat accentuated a figure as
+iron-hard and sinewy as a mountain-lion. About his eyes, puckered at the
+outer corners into innumerable little wrinkles by much staring across
+sun-scorched ranges, lurked the humorous twinkle which suggested the
+Yankee or the Celt.
+
+“I stopped to read your sign,” I explained. “If things are as
+discouraging as all that I suppose you’ll pull out of here the first
+chance you get?”
+
+“Not by a jugful!” he exclaimed. “I’m here to stay. You mustn’t take that
+sign too seriously; it’s just my brand of humour. This country don’t look
+up to much now, I admit, but come back here in a few years, friend, and
+you’ll need to be introduced to it all over again.”
+
+“But you’ve no water,” I remarked sceptically.
+
+“We’ll have that before long. You see,” he explained eagerly, “the
+Colorado’s not so very far away and there’s considerable talk about the
+government’s damming it and bringing the water down here in diversion
+canals and irrigation ditches. If the government doesn’t help us, then
+we’ll sink artesian wells and get the water that way. Once get water
+on it and this soil’ll do the rest. Why, friend, this land’ll raise
+anything—_anything!_ I’m going to put in alfalfa the first year or two,
+until I get on my feet, and then I’m going to raise citrus fruits.
+There’s never enough frost here to worry about, and all we need is water
+to make this the finest soil for orange growing on God’s green earth.
+Just remember what I’m telling you,” he concluded impressively, tapping
+my knee with his forefinger to emphasise his words, “though things look
+damned discouraging just now, this is going to be a great country some
+day.”
+
+As I rode across the desert I turned in my saddle to wave him a
+farewell, but he had already forgotten me. He was marking, in the
+bone-dry, cactus-dotted soil, the places where he was going to set
+out his orange-trees. Though our paths have not crossed again, I have
+always remembered him. Resolute, resourceful, optimistic, self-reliant,
+blessed with a sense of humour which jeers at obstacles and laughs
+discouragements away, with as fanatic a faith in the future of the land
+as has a Moslem in the Koranic paradise, he has typified for me those
+pioneers who, by their indomitable courage and unyielding tenacity, are
+converting the arid deserts of the Southwest into a veritable garden of
+the Lord.
+
+Recently, after a lapse of little more than a decade, I passed that way
+again. So amazing were the changes which had taken place in that brief
+interim that, just as my optimist had prophesied, I needed a second
+introduction to the land. Where I had left a desert, arid, sun-baked,
+forbidding, I found fields where sleek cattle grazed knee-deep in
+alfalfa, and groves ablaze with golden fruit. Stretching away to the
+foot-hills were roads which would have done credit to John Macadam, and
+scattered along them at intervals were prosperous looking ranch-houses of
+cement or wood; there was a post-office and a trim row of stores, and a
+schoolhouse with a flag floating over it; straggling cottonwoods marked
+the courses of the irrigation streams and in the air was the cheerful
+sound of running water. There were two things which had brought about
+this miracle—pluck and water.
+
+Nowhere has the white man fought a more courageous fight or won a more
+brilliant victory than in Arizona. His weapons have been the transit and
+the level, the drill and the dredge, the pick and the spade; and the
+enemy which he has conquered has been the most stubborn of all foes—the
+hostile forces of Nature. The story of how the white man, within the
+space of less than thirty years, penetrated and explored and mapped this
+almost unknown region; of how he carried law and order and justice into a
+section which had never had so much as a speaking acquaintance with any
+one of the three before; of how, realising the necessity for means of
+communication, he built highways of steel across this territory from east
+to west and from north to south; of how, undismayed by the savageness
+of the countenance which the desert turned upon him, he laughed, and
+rolled up his sleeves, and spat on his hands, and slashed the face of
+the desert with canals and irrigating ditches, and filled those canals
+and ditches with water brought from deep in the earth or high in the
+mountains; and of how, in the conquered and submissive soil, he replaced
+the aloe with alfalfa, the mesquite with maize, the cactus with cotton,
+forms one of the most inspiring chapters in our history. It is one of the
+epics of civilisation, this reclamation of the Southwest, and its heroes
+are, thank God, Americans.
+
+Other desert regions have been redeemed by irrigation; Egypt, for
+example, and Mesopotamia, and parts of the Sudan, but the peoples of
+all those regions lay stretched out in the shade of a convenient palm,
+metaphorically speaking, and waited for some one with more energy than
+themselves to come along and do the work. But the Arizonians, mindful
+of the fact that God, the government, and Carnegie help those who help
+themselves, spent their days wielding pick and shovel and their evenings
+in writing letters to Washington with toil-hardened hands. After a time
+the government was prodded into action and the great dams at Laguna
+and Roosevelt are the result. Then the people, organising themselves
+into co-operative leagues and water-users’ associations, took up the
+work of reclamation where the government left off, and it is to these
+energetic, persevering men who have drilled wells and ploughed fields and
+dug ditches through the length and breadth of that great region which
+stretches from Yuma to Tucson that the metamorphosis of Arizona is due.
+
+More misconceptions are prevalent about Arizona than about any other
+region on the continent. The reclamation phase of its development has
+been so emphasised and advertised that among most of those who have not
+seen it for themselves the impression exists that it is a flat, arid,
+sandy, treeless country, a small portion of which has, miraculously
+enough, proved amenable to irrigation. This impression has been confirmed
+by various writers who, sacrificing accuracy for a phrase, have dubbed
+Arizona “the American Egypt,” which, to one who is really familiar with
+the physical characteristics of the Nile country and the agricultural
+disabilities under which its people labour, seems a left-handed
+compliment at best. Egypt—barring the swamp-lands of the Delta and a
+fringe of cultivation along the Nile—is a country of sun-baked yellow
+sand, as arid, flat, and treeless as an expanse of asphalt pavement.
+Arizona is nothing of the sort. In its most arid regions there is a small
+growth of green even in the dry season, while after the rains the desert
+bursts into a brilliancy and diversity of bloom incredible to one who has
+not seen it. How many people who have not visited Arizona are aware that
+within the borders of this “desert State” is the largest pine forest in
+the United States—six thousand square miles in area? Egypt, on the other
+hand, is, with the exception of the date-palm, virtually treeless. In
+Egypt there is not a hill worthy the name between Alexandria and Wady
+Halfa; Arizona has range after range of mountains which rise two miles
+and more into the air. Egypt is not a white man’s land and never will be.
+Arizona will never be anything else. If it is necessary to drag in Egypt
+at all (save as concerns antiquities) then, for goodness sake, pay the
+Khedive’s country a real compliment by calling it “the African Arizona.”
+
+[Illustration: _From a photograph by H. A. Erickson, Coronado, Cal._
+
+WHERE THE ROADS RUN OUT AND THE TRAILS BEGIN.
+
+The Arizona desert: “It is more or less rolling country, corrugated by
+buttes and mesas and unexpected outcroppings of rock, its surface covered
+by a confused tangle of desert vegetation.”]
+
+The thing that surprised me most in Arizona was the desert. An Arab would
+not call it desert at all; a Bedouin would never feel at home upon it.
+I had expected to find a waste of sand, treeless, shrubless, plantless,
+incapable of supporting anything—yellow as molten brass, sun-scorched,
+unrelenting. That is the desert as one knows it in Africa and in Asia.
+The Arizona desert is something very different indeed. In the first
+place, it is not yellow at all but a sort of bluish-grey; “driftwood”
+is probably the term which an interior decorator would use to describe
+its peculiarly soft and elusive colouring. Neither is it flat nor has
+it the sand-dunes so characteristic of the Sahara. On the contrary, it
+is a more or less rolling country, corrugated by buttes and mesas and
+unexpected outcroppings of rock and sometimes gashed by _arroyos_, its
+surface covered with a confused tangle of desert vegetation so whimsical
+and fantastic in the forms it assumes that it looks for all the world
+like a prim New England garden gone violently insane. There is the
+_cholla_, for example, whose fuzzy white spines, so innocent-looking at
+a distance, might deceive the stranger into supposing that it was a sort
+of wildcat cousin of the gentle pussy-willow; the towering _sajuaro_,
+often forty feet in height and bearing a striking resemblance to those
+mammoth candelabra which flank the altars of Spanish cathedrals; the
+octopus-like _ocatilla_, whose slender, sinuous branches, tipped with
+scarlet blossoms, seem to be for ever groping for something which they
+cannot find; the grotesque prickly pear, looking not unlike a collection
+of green pincushions, abristle with pins and glued together at the edges;
+the sombre creosote bush, the scraggy mesquite, the silvery grease-wood,
+the bright green _paloverde_. These, with the white blossoms of the
+yucca and the pink, orange, yellow, scarlet, and crimson flowers of the
+cacti, the brilliant shades of the rock strata, the purples and violets
+and blues of the encircling mountains, the fleecy clouds drifting like
+great flocks of unshorn sheep across an ultramarine sky, combine to form
+a picture as far removed from the desert of our imagination as one could
+well conceive. Less picturesque than these colour effects, the portrayal
+of which would have taxed the genius of Whistler, but more interesting
+to the farmer, are the fine indigenous grasses which spring up over the
+mesas after the summer rains (some of them being, indeed, extraordinarily
+independent of the rainfall) and furnish ample if not abundant pasturage
+for live stock. I am quite aware, of course, that those California-bound
+tourists who gather their impressions of Arizona from the observation
+platform of a mail-train while streaking across the country at fifty
+miles an hour are accustomed to dismiss the subject of its possibilities
+with a wave of the hand and the dictum: “Nothing to it but sun, sand,
+and sage-brush.” Were those same people to see New York City from the
+rear end of a train they would assert that it consisted of nothing but
+tenements and tunnels. It is easy to magnify the barrenness of an arid
+region, and, that being so, I would respectfully suggest to the people
+of Arizona (and I make no charge for the suggestion) that they instruct
+their legislators to enact a law banishing any one found guilty of
+applying the defamatory misnomer “desert” to any portion of the State.
+
+Though it were not well to take too literally the panegyrics of the
+soil and its potentialities which every board of trade and commercial
+club in the State print and distribute by the ton, there is no playing
+hide-and-seek with the fact that the soil of a very large part of Arizona
+is as versatile as it is productive. At the celebration with which the
+people of Yuma marked the completion of the Colorado River project,
+prizes were awarded for _forty-three distinct products of the soil_. To
+recount them would be to enumerate practically every fruit, vegetable,
+and cereal native to the temperate zone and many of those ordinarily
+found only in the torrid, for Arizona combines in an altogether
+exceptional degree the climatic characteristics of them both. This not
+being a seedsman’s catalogue, it is enough to say that the list began
+with alfalfa and ended with yams.
+
+Everything considered, I am inclined to think that the shortest road
+to agricultural prosperity lies through an Arizona alfalfa field, for
+this proliferous crop, whose fecundity would put a guinea-pig to shame,
+possesses the admirable quality of making the land on which it is grown
+richer with each cutting. They told me some prodigious alfalfa yarns in
+Arizona, but, as each district goes its neighbour’s record a few tons to
+the acre better, I will content myself with mentioning that, in certain
+parts of the State, as many as _twelve crops of alfalfa have been cut in
+a year_. I wonder what your Eastern farmer, who thanks his lucky stars if
+he can get one good crop of hay in a year, would think of life in a land
+like this?
+
+Certain of the orange-growing sections of Arizona have been unwisely
+advertised as “frostless.” This is not true, for there is no place
+within our borders which is wholly free from frost. It is quite true,
+however, that the citrus groves of southern Arizona stand a better
+chance of escaping the ravages of frost than those in any other part
+of the country. The fruit ripens, moreover, considerably earlier, the
+Arizona growers being able to place their oranges, lemons, and grapefruit
+on Eastern dinner-tables a full month in advance of their Californian
+competitors.
+
+Unless I am very much mistaken, two products hitherto regarded as alien
+to our soil—the Algerian date and Egyptian cotton—are bound to prove
+important factors in the agricultural future of Arizona. There is no tree
+which produces so large a quantity of fruit and at the same time requires
+so little attention as the date-palm when once it gets in bearing,
+date-palm groves in North Africa, where the prices are very low, yielding
+from five to ten dollars a tree per annum. They are, as it were, the
+camels among trees, for they thrive in soil so sandy and waterless that
+any other tree would die from sheer discouragement. The date-palm has
+long since passed the experimental stage in Arizona—the heavily laden
+groves, which any one who cares to take the trouble can see for himself
+at several places in the southern part of the State, giving ocular
+evidence of the success with which this toothsome fruit can be grown
+under American conditions. The other crop which has, I am convinced, a
+rosy future in Arizona is Egyptian cotton, which will thrive on less
+water than any crop grown under irrigation. The fibre of the Egyptian
+cotton being about three times the length of the ordinary American-grown
+staple, it can always find a profitable market among thread manufacturers
+when our Southern cotton frequently goes unharvested because prices are
+too low to pay for picking, an average of about fifty-five million pounds
+of Egyptian cotton being imported into the United States each year. With
+the fertile soil, the warm, dry climate, and the water resources which
+are being so rapidly developed, the day is not far distant when the
+traveller through certain sections of Arizona will look out of the window
+of his Pullman at a fleeting landscape of fleecy white.
+
+“That isn’t snow, is it, George?” he will ask the porter, and that
+grinning Ethiopian will answer:
+
+“No, suh, dat ain’t snow—dat’s ’Gyptian cotton.”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This is no virgin, untried soil, remember. Centuries before the great
+Genoese navigator set foot on the beach of San Salvador, southern
+Arizona was the home of a dense and prosperous population, skilled
+in agriculture and past masters in irrigation, the canals which
+they constructed, the ruins of which may still be seen, providing
+object-lessons for the engineers of to-day. It is peculiarly interesting
+to recall that when the crusaders were battling with the Saracens in
+Palestine, when the Byzantine Empire was at the height of its glory, when
+the Battle of Hastings had yet to be fought, when Canute of Denmark ruled
+in England, a remarkable degree of civilisation prevailed in this remote
+corner of the Americas. By civilisation I mean that the inhabitants of
+this region dwelt in desert sky-scrapers four, five, perhaps even six
+stories in height, that they possessed an organised government, that they
+had evolved a practical co-operative system not unlike the water-users’
+associations of the Arizona of to-day, and that, by means of a system
+of dams, aqueducts, and reservoirs—the remains of which may still be
+seen—they had succeeded in reclaiming a by no means inconsiderable
+region. So great became the agricultural prosperity of this early people
+that it excited the cupidity of the warlike tribes to the north, who, in
+a series of forays probably extending over decades, at last succeeded
+in exterminating or driving out this agricultural population. Their
+many-storied dwellings crumbled, the canals and aqueducts which they
+constructed fell into disrepair, the soil once again dried up for lack
+of water and returned in time to its original state, the habitat of the
+cactus and the mesquite, the haunt of the coyote and the snake.
+
+Centuries passed, during which migratory bands of Indians were the only
+visitors to this silent and deserted land. Then, trudging up from the
+Spanish settlements to the southward, came Brother Marcos de Niza in his
+sandals and woollen robe. He, the first white man to set foot in Arizona,
+after penetrating as far northward as the Zuñi towns, returned to Mexico,
+or New Spain, as it was then called, where he related what he had seen
+to one of the Spanish officials, Don Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, who
+promptly equipped an expedition and started northward on his own account.
+Followed by half a thousand Spanish horse and foot, a few hundred
+friendly Indians, and a mile-long mule train, the expedition wound across
+the burning deserts of Chihuahua, over the snow-clad mountains of Sonora,
+through rivers swollen into torrents by the spring rains, and so into
+Arizona, where, raising the red-and-yellow banner, he took possession
+of all this country in the name of his Most Catholic Majesty of Spain.
+This was in the year of grace 1540, when the ghost of Anne Boleyn still
+disturbed the sleep of Henry VIII and when Solyman the Magnificent was
+hammering at the gates of Budapest. By the beginning of the seventeenth
+century the country now comprising the State of Arizona was dotted with
+Spanish priests, who, in their missions of sun-dried bricks, devoted
+themselves to the disheartening task of Christianising the Indians. In
+1680, however, came the great Indian revolt; the friars were slain upon
+their altars, their missions were ransacked and destroyed, and the work
+of civilisation which they had begun was set back a hundred years.
+
+The nineteenth century was approaching its quarter mark before the first
+American frontiersmen, pushing southward from the Missouri in quest
+of furs and gold, penetrated Arizona. Came then in rapid succession
+the Mexican War, which resulted in the cession to the United States
+of New Mexico, which then included all that portion of Arizona lying
+north of the Gila River; the discovery of gold in California, which,
+by drawing attention to the country south of the Gila as a desirable
+transcontinental railway route, resulted in its purchase under the
+terms of the Gadsden Treaty; and the outbreak of the Civil War, a
+Confederate invasion of Arizona in 1862 resulting in its organisation
+as a Territory of the Union. The early period of American rule was
+extremely unsettled; Indian massacres and the dangerous elements which
+composed the population—prospectors, cow-punchers, adventurers, gamblers,
+bandits, horse thieves—leading to one of the worst though one of the most
+picturesque periods of our frontier history. On February the 14th, 1912,
+the Territory of Arizona was admitted to the sisterhood of States, and
+George W. P. Hunt, its first elected governor, standing on the steps of
+the capitol, swung his hat in the air and called on the assembled crowd
+for three cheers as a ball of bunting ran up the staff and broke out into
+a flag with eight-and-forty stars.
+
+Notwithstanding the fact that the area of Arizona is greater than
+that of Italy, there are only three communities in the State—Phœnix,
+Tucson, and Prescott—which by any stretch of the census taker’s figures
+are entitled to be called cities. They are, however, as far removed
+from the whoop-and-hurrah, let-her-go-Gallegher cow-towns which most
+outlanders associate with the Southwest as a young, attractive, and
+well-poised college girl is from a wild-eyed and dishevelled, militant
+suffragette. Phœnix, the capital, I had pictured as consisting of
+a broad and very dusty main street bordered by houses of adobe and
+unpainted wooden shacks, its sidewalks of yellow pine shaded by wooden
+awnings, with cow-ponies tied to the railings and with every other place
+a temple to the goddesses of Alcohol or Chance. I was—I admit it with
+shame—as ignorant as all that, and this is my medium of apology. As
+a matter of fact, Phœnix is as modern and up-to-the-minute as a girl
+just back from Paris. Its streets are paved so far into the country
+that you wonder if the Venezuelan asphalt beds are likely to hold out.
+Its leading hotels are as liberally bathtubised as those of Broadway,
+and the head waiter in the Adams House café will hand you a menu which
+contains every gastronomic delicacy from caviare d’Astrachan to fromage
+de Brie. Gambling is as unfashionable as it is at Lake Mohonk, the
+municipal regulations being so stringent that such innocent affairs as
+raffles, church fairs, and grab-bags are practically prohibited, while
+the charge for a liquor licence has been placed at such a prohibitive
+figure that gentlemen with dry throats are compelled to walk several
+blocks before they can find a place with swinging doors. Tucson, on the
+other hand, still retains many of its Mexican characteristics. It is a
+town of broad and sometimes abominably dusty streets lined with many
+buildings of staring white adobe, the sidewalks along its principal
+business thoroughfares being shaded by hospitable wooden awnings, which
+are a godsend to the pedestrian during the fierce heat of midsummer.
+It is a picturesque and interesting town, is Tucson, and, as the
+guide-book writers put it, will well repay a visit—provided the weather
+is not too hot and the visit is not too long. Prescott, magnificently
+situated on a mountainside in the Black Hills, is the centre of an
+incredibly rich mining region—did you happen to know that Arizona is
+the greatest producer of copper in the world, its output exceeding
+that of Montana or Michigan or Mexico? The feature of Prescott that I
+remember most distinctly is the “Stope” room in the Yavapai Club, an
+architectural conceit which produces the effect of a stope, or gallery in
+a mine—fitting tribute of the citizens of a mining town to the industry
+which gives it being.
+
+Should you ever find yourself on the Santa Fé, Prescott & Phœnix Railway,
+which is the only north-and-south line in the State, forming a link
+between the Santa Fé and Southern Pacific systems, I hope that you will
+tell the conductor to let you off at Hot Springs Junction, which is the
+station for Castle Hot Springs, which lie a score or so of miles beyond
+the sound of the locomotive’s raucous shriek, in a cañon of the Bradshaw
+Mountains. It is a _dolce far niente_ spot—a peaceful backwater of the
+tumultuous stream of life. Hemmed in on every side by precipitous walls
+of rock is a toy valley carpeted with lush, green grass and dotted with
+palms and fig trees and innumerable varieties of cacti and clumps of
+giant cane. A mountain stream meanders through it, and on the hillside
+above the scattered buildings of the hotel, whose low roofs and deep,
+cool verandas, taken in conjunction with the subtropic vegetation,
+vividly recall the dak-bungalows in the Indian hills, are three great
+pools screened by hedges of bamboo, in which one can go a-swimming in
+midwinter without having any preliminary shivers, as the temperature of
+the water ranges from 115 to 122 degrees.
+
+When I was at Castle Hot Springs I struck up an acquaintance with an
+old-time prospector who asserted that he was the original discoverer of
+the place.
+
+“It was nigh on forty year ago,” he began, reminiscently. “I’d been
+prospectin’ up on the headwaters of the Verde. One day, while I was
+ridin’ through the foot-hills west o’ here a war party of ’Paches struck
+my trail, an’ the fust thing I knowed the hull blamed bunch was after me
+lickety-split as fast as their ponies could lay foot to ground. I was
+ridin’ a pinto that could run like hell let loose in a rainstorm, and as
+she was middlin’ fresh I reckoned I wouldn’t have much trouble gettin’
+away from ’em, an’ I wouldn’t, neither, if I’d been tol’rable familiar
+with the country hereabouts. But I warn’t; and by gum, friend, if I
+didn’t ride plumb into this very cañon! Yes, sirree, that’s just what I
+went an’ done! Its walls rose up as steep an’ smooth as the side of a
+house in front o’ me an’ to the right o’ me an’ to the left o’ me—an’
+behind me were the Injuns, yellin’ an’ whoopin’ like the red devils that
+they were. I seen that it was all over but the shoutin’, for there warn’t
+no possible chanct to escape—not one!”
+
+“And what happened to you?” interrupted an excited listener.
+
+“What happened to me?” was the withering answer. “Hell, what could
+happen? They killed me, damn ’em; _they killed me!_”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+From a climatic standpoint Arizona is really a tropic country modified in
+the north by its elevation. It has no summer or winter in the generally
+accepted sense, but instead a short rainy season in July and August and
+a dry one the rest of the year. In the spring and fall dust-storms are
+frequent—and if you have never experienced an Arizona dust-storm you have
+something to be thankful for—while in the summer it gets so hot that
+I have seen them cover the skylight of the Hotel Adams in Phœnix with
+canvas and keep a stream of water playing on it from sunup to sundown.
+The warmest part of the State, and, in fact, the warmest place north of
+the lowlands of the Isthmus—barring Death Valley—is the valley of the
+lower Gila in the neighbourhood of Yuma, where the mercury in a shaded
+thermometer not infrequently climbs to the 130 mark. It should be said,
+however, that, owing to the extreme dryness of the air, evaporation from
+moist surfaces is very rapid, so that the high temperatures of southern
+Arizona are decidedly less oppressive than much lower temperatures in a
+humid atmosphere. As a result of this dryness and of the all-pervading
+sunshine, Arizona has in recent years come to be looked upon as a
+great natural sanitarium, and to it flock thousands of sufferers from
+catarrhal and tubercular diseases. Everything considered, however, I do
+not believe that Arizona is by any means an ideal sick-man’s country;
+for, particularly in advanced stages of tuberculosis, there is always the
+danger of overstimulation, the patient, buoyed up by the champagne-like
+quality of the air, feeling well before he is well and overexerting
+himself in consequence.
+
+Perhaps the innate politeness of the Arizonians was never put to a
+severer test than it was a few years ago, when Mr. Chauncey Depew, then
+at the height of his fame as a speaker, utilised the opportunity afforded
+by changing engines at Yuma to address a few remarks to the assembled
+citizens of the place from the platform of his private car. Now Yuma,
+as I have already remarked, has the reputation of being the red-hottest
+spot north of Panama, and its residents are correspondingly touchy when
+any illusion is made to the torridness of their climate. Imagine their
+feelings, then, when Mr. Depew, in the course of his remarks, dragged
+in the bewhiskered story of the soldier who died at Fort Yuma from a
+combination of sunstroke and delirium tremens. The following night his
+bunkie received a spirit message from the departed. “Dear Bill,” it ran,
+“please send down my blankets.” Now that story is hoary with antiquity. I
+have heard it told in the officers’ mess at Aden, and at Bahrein at the
+head of the Persian Gulf, and on the terrace of the club in Zanzibar,
+with its locale laid in each of those places, and I haven’t the least
+doubt in the world but that it evoked a yawn from King Rameses when it
+was told to him in Thebes. Yet the inhabitants of Yuma, with a politeness
+truly Chesterfieldian, not only did not yawn or groan or hiss when Mr.
+Depew saddled the ancient libel upon their town, but it is said that one
+or two of them even laughed hoarsely. The Arizonian heat is not of the
+sunstroke variety, however, and the thrasher gangs work right through it
+all summer from ten to fourteen hours a day; and this, remember, is only
+in the desert half of the State—the mountain half is as high and cool as
+you could wish, with snow-capped mountains and green grass and running
+water and fish and game everywhere.
+
+Speaking of game, certain portions of Arizona still offer opportunities
+aplenty for the sportsman who knows how to ride and can stand fatigue. In
+the foot-hills of the Catalina Range mountain-lions are almost as common
+as are back-yard cats in Brooklyn. Patience, perseverance, and a pack
+of well-trained “b’ar dogs” rarely fail to provide the hunter with an
+opportunity to swing his front sights onto a black bear or a cinnamon on
+the Mogollon Plateau. Spotted leopards, or jaguars, frequently make their
+way into the southern counties from Mexico and serve to furnish handsome
+rugs for the ranch-houses of the region. Though small herds of antelope
+are still occasionally seen, the law has stepped in at the eleventh hour
+and fifty-ninth minute and prevented their complete extermination. But
+if you want an experience to relate over the coffee and cigars that will
+make your friends’ stories of bear hunting in British Columbia and moose
+hunting in Maine sound as tame and commonplace as woodchuck shooting on
+the farm, why don’t you run down to that portion of Arizona lying along
+the Mexican border and hunt wild camels? I’m perfectly serious—there
+_are_ wild camels there. They came about in this fashion: Along in the
+late seventies, if I am not mistaken, the Department of Agriculture,
+thinking to confer an inestimable boon on the struggling settlers of
+the arid Southwest, imported several hundred head of camels from Egypt,
+arguing that if they could carry heavy burdens over great stretches of
+waterless and pastureless desert in Africa, there was no reason why they
+could not do the same thing in Arizona, where almost identically the
+same conditions prevailed. But the paternalistic officials in Washington
+failed to take into account the prejudices of the packers. Now, the camel
+is a supercilious and ill-natured beast, quite different from the patient
+and uncomplaining burro, but the Arabs, who have grown up with him, as it
+were, make allowance for the peculiarities of his disposition and get
+along with him accordingly. Not so the Arizona packer. He took a hearty
+dislike to the ship of the desert from the first and never let pass an
+opportunity to do it harm. As a result of this hostility and abuse, many
+of the poor beasts died and the remainder were finally turned loose in
+the desert to shift for themselves. If they have not multiplied they at
+least have not decreased and are still to be found in those uninhabited
+stretches of desert which lie along the Mexican frontier. They are not
+protected by law and are wild enough and speedy enough to require some
+hunting; so if you want to add to your collection of trophies a head
+that, as a cowboy acquaintance of mine put it, is really “rayshayshay,”
+you can’t do better than to go into the desert and bag a dromedary.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In speaking of Arizona it must be borne in mind that the State consists
+of two distinct regions, as dissimilar in climate and physiography
+as Florida and Maine. Theirs is the difference between plateau and
+plain, between sandstone and sand, between pine and palm. If you will
+take a pencil and ruler and draw a line diagonally across the map of
+the State, from Mojave City on the Colorado, to Bisbee on the Mexican
+border, you will have a rough idea of the extent of these two zones.
+That portion of the State lying to the north of this imaginary line is
+a six-thousand-foot-high plateau, mountainous and heavily forested,
+with green grass and running water and cold, dry winters, and an
+annual rainfall which frequently exceeds thirty inches. To the south
+of this quartering line lies a tremendous stretch of arid but fertile
+land, broken at intervals by hills and mountain ranges, with a sparse
+vegetation and an annual rainfall which, particularly in the vicinity
+of the Colorado, often does not exceed three inches. It is in this
+southern portion, however, that the future of Arizona lies, for the
+success of the great irrigation projects at Roosevelt and Laguna (and
+which will doubtless be followed in the not far distant future by similar
+undertakings on the Santa Cruz, the San Pedro, the Agua Frio, the Verde,
+the Little Colorado, and the lower Gila) have given convincing proof that
+all that its arid soil requires is water to transform it into a land of
+farms and orchards and gardens, in which the energetic man of modest
+means—and it is such men who form the backbone of every country—can find
+a generous living and a delightful home.
+
+[Illustration: THE TRAIL OF A THOUSAND THRILLS.
+
+The road from Phœnix to the Roosevelt Dam—“its right angle corners and
+hairpin turns are calculated to make the hair of the motorist permanently
+pompadour.”]
+
+A grave injustice has been done to the people of the State by those
+fiction writers who have depicted Arizona society as consisting of
+cow-punchers, faro dealers, and bad men. The pictures they still persist
+in drawing of towns shot up by drunken cowboys, of saloons and poker
+palaces running at full blast, of stage-coaches and mail-trains held up
+and robbed, are as much out of date, if the reading public only knew
+it, as crinoline skirts and flowered satin vests. As a matter of fact,
+Arizona claims the most law-abiding population in the United States, and
+the claim is copper-riveted by the criminal records. The gambler and
+the gun fighter have disappeared, driven out by the force of public
+disapproval. The Arizona Rangers, that picturesque body of constabulary
+which policed the country in territorial days, have been disbanded
+because there is no longer work for them to do. While it is not to be
+denied that a large number of the citizens, particularly in the range
+country, still carry firearms, it must not be inferred that crime is
+winked at or that murder is regarded with a whit more tolerance than
+it is in the East. The sheriffs and marshals of Arizona are famous as
+“go-gitters” and a very large proportion of the gentry whom they have
+gone for and gotten are promptly given free board and lodging in a large
+stone building at Florence, on the outer walls of which men pace up and
+down with Winchesters over the shoulders. The Arizona State Penitentiary
+at Florence is one of the most modern and humanely conducted penal
+institutions in the United States, being under the direct supervision of
+Governor Hunt, who is one of the foremost advocates of prison reform in
+the country. When I visited the penitentiary with the governor, instead
+of spending the night at the residence of the warden, he insisted on
+occupying a cell in “murderer’s row.” His experiment in introducing the
+honour system in the Arizona prisons has met with such pronounced success
+that roads and bridges are now being constructed throughout the State by
+gangs of prisoners in charge of unarmed wardens. In this connection they
+tell an amusing story of an English tourist who was getting his first
+view of Arizona from the observation platform of a Pullman. As the train
+tore westward his attention was attracted by the conspicuous suits worn
+by a force of men engaged in building a bridge.
+
+“I say,” he inquired, screwing a monocle into his eye and addressing
+himself to the Irish brakeman, “who are the johnnies in the striped
+clothing?”
+
+“Thim’s som uv Guv’nor Hunt’s pets from th’ Sthate prison,” was the
+answer. “Most av thim’s murtherers too.”
+
+“My word!” exclaimed the Briton, staring the harder. “Isn’t it jolly
+dangerous to have murderers running loose about the country like that?
+What?”
+
+“Not at all,” the brakeman answered carelessly; “yez see, sorr, in most
+cases there was exterminating circumstances.”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The other day, when the promoters of Phœnix’s annual carnival wished
+to obtain a stage-coach to use in the street pageants, they could not
+find one in the State; they had all been bought by the moving-picture
+concerns. A stage still runs over the mountains from Phœnix to Globe,
+driven by a gentleman who chews tobacco and wears a broad-brimmed hat,
+but it has sixty-horse-power engines under it and the fashion in which
+the driver takes the giddy turns—he assured me that he went round them
+on two wheels so as to save rubber—is calculated to make the passengers’
+hair permanently pompadour. Out in the back country, where the roads
+run out and the trails begin, the cow-puncher is still to be found,
+but he, like the longhorns which he herds, is rapidly retreating before
+civilisation’s implacable advance.
+
+[Illustration: _From a photograph by H. A. Erickson, Coronado, Cal._
+
+THROWING THE DIAMOND HITCH.
+
+“Out in the back country ... the old, picturesque life of the frontier
+is still to be found.”]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The history of Arizona divides itself into three epochs—the aboriginal,
+the exploratory, and the reclamatory, or, if you prefer, the Indian,
+the Spanish, and the American—and each of these epochs is typified by
+a remarkable and wholly characteristic structure: the ruins of Casa
+Grande, the Mission of San Xavier del Bac, and the Roosevelt Dam. Casa
+Grande—“the Great House”—or Chichitilaca, to give it its Aztec name,
+which rises from the desert some sixty miles southeast of Phœnix, is the
+most remarkable plain ruin in the whole Southwest and the only one of
+its kind in the United States. It is a four-storied house of sun-dried
+puddled clay, forming, with its cyclopean walls, its low doorways so
+designed that any enemy would have to enter on hands and knees, and
+its labyrinth of rooms, courtyards, and corridors, a striking and
+significant relic of a forgotten people. Already a ruin when discovered,
+in 1694, by the Jesuit Father Kino, how old it is or who built it even
+the archæologists have been unable to decide. Its crumbling ruins are
+emblematic of a race of sturdy red men, growers of grain and breeders of
+cattle, whose energy and resource wrested this region from the desert,
+and who were driven out of it by the greed of a stronger and more warlike
+people.
+
+In the shadow of the foot-hills, where the Santa Rita Mountains sweep
+down to meet the desert half a dozen miles outside Tucson, stands the
+white Mission of San Xavier del Bac. It is the sole survivor of that
+chain of outposts of the church which the friars of the Spanish orders
+stretched across Arizona in their campaign of proselytism three centuries
+ago. I saw it for the first time at sunset, its splendid, carved façade
+rose-tinted by the magic radiance of twilight, its domes and towers
+and minarets silhouetted against the purple of the mountains as though
+carved from ivory. Perhaps it is the dramatic effect produced as,
+swinging sharply around the corner of the foot-hills, one comes upon it
+suddenly, standing white and solitary and lovely between the desert and
+the sky, but I shall always rank it with the Taj Mahal, the Alhambra,
+and the Mosque of Sultan Hassan as one of the most beautiful buildings I
+have ever seen. If California had that mission she would advertise and
+exploit it to the skies, but they don’t seem to pay much attention to
+it in Arizona, being too much occupied, I suppose, with other and more
+important things. In fact, I had to inquire of three people in the hotel
+at Tucson before I could learn just where it was. Although the patter of
+monastic sandals upon its flagged floors has ceased these many years,
+San Xavier is neither deserted nor run down, for the sonorous phrases
+of the mass are still heard daily from its altar, serene and smiling
+nuns conduct a school for Indian children within the precincts of its
+white-walled cloisters, and at twilight the angelus-bell still booms
+its brazen summons and the red men from the adjacent reservation come
+trooping in for evening prayer. The last of the Arizona missions, it
+stands as a fitting memorial to the courageous _padres_ who first brought
+Christianity to Arizona, many of them at the cost of their lives.
+
+Eighty miles north of Phœnix, at the back of the Superstition Mountains
+and almost under the shadow of the Four Peaks, is the great Roosevelt
+Dam—the last word, as it were, in the American chapter of Arizona’s
+history. Those who know whereof they speak have estimated that four
+fifths of the State is fitted, so far as the potentialities of the soil
+is concerned, for agriculture, but hitherto the lack of rainfall has
+reduced the available area to that which lay within the capabilities of
+the somewhat meagre streams to irrigate. This was particularly true of
+the region of which Phœnix is the centre. Came then quiet, efficient men
+who proceeded to perform a modern version of the miracle of Moses, for,
+behold, they smote the rock and where there had been no water before
+there was now water and to spare. Across a narrow cañon in the mountains
+they built a Gargantuan dam of sandstone and cement to hold in check
+and to conserve for use in the dry season the waters of the river which
+swirled through it. The great artificial lake, twenty-five square miles
+in area, thus created, holds water enough to cover more than a million
+and a quarter acres with a foot of water and assures a permanent supply
+to the two hundred and forty thousand acres included in the project.
+The farmers of the Salt River valley, which comprises the territory
+under irrigation, forming themselves into an association, entered into a
+contract with the government to repay the cost of the dam in ten years,
+whereupon it will become the property of the landowners themselves; the
+water, under the terms of the agreement, becoming appurtenant to the
+land. Just as the crumbling ruins at Casa Grande serve as a reminder of
+a race long since dead and gone, and as the white mission at Tucson is a
+memorial to the Spaniards who came after them, so is the mighty dam at
+Roosevelt, together with its accompanying prosperity, a monument to the
+courage, daring, and resource of the American. It is a very wonderful
+work that is being done down there in Arizona, and to the toil-hardened,
+sun-tanned men who are doing it I am proud to raise my hat. Such men are
+pioneers of progress, carpenters of empire, and they are chopping a path
+for you and me, my friends, “to To-morrow from the land of Yesterday.”
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+THE LAND OF DREAMS-COME-TRUE
+
+  “It lies where God hath spread it,
+    In the gladness of His eyes,
+  Like a flame of jewelled tapestry
+    Beneath His shining skies;
+  With the green of woven meadows,
+    And the hills in golden chains,
+  The light of leaping rivers,
+    And the flash of poppied plains.
+
+  ...
+
+  Sun and dews that kiss it,
+    Balmy winds that blow,
+  The stars in clustered diadems
+    Upon its peaks of snow;
+  The mighty mountains o’er it,
+    Below, the white seas swirled—
+  Just California stretching down
+    The middle of the world.”
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+THE LAND OF DREAMS-COME-TRUE
+
+
+Because it is at the very bottom of the map and almost athwart the
+imaginary line which separates the Land of Mañana from the Land of
+Do-It-Now, the Imperial Valley seems the logical place to begin a journey
+through southern California. The term “southern California,” let me
+add, is usually applied to that portion of the State lying south of
+the Tehachapis, which would probably form the boundary in the event of
+California splitting into two States—an event which is by no means as
+unlikely as most outsiders suppose. No romance of the West—and that is
+where most of the present-day romances, newspaper, magazine, book, and
+film, come from—excels that of the Imperial Valley. These half a million
+sun-scorched acres which snuggle up against the Mexican boundary, midway
+between San Diego and Yuma, have proven themselves successors of the
+gold-fields as producers of sudden wealth; they are an agricultural Cave
+of Al-ed-Din. Now, the trouble with writing about the Imperial Valley
+is that if you tell the truth you will be accused of being a booster.
+But, to paraphrase Davy Crockett: “Be sure your facts are right, then go
+ahead.” And I am sure of my facts. You may believe them or not, just as
+you please.
+
+Not much more than a decade ago two brothers, freighting across the
+Colorado Desert from Yuma to San Diego, stumbled upon twelve human
+skeletons, white-bleached, upon the sand—grim tokens of a prospecting
+party which had perished from thirst. To-day the Colorado Desert is no
+more. Almost on the spot where those distorted skeletons were found a
+city has risen—a city with cement sidewalks and asphalted streets and
+electric lights and concrete office-buildings and an Elks’ Hall and
+moving-picture houses; a city whose municipal council recently passed
+an ordinance prohibiting the hitching of teams on the main business
+thoroughfare, “to prevent congestion of traffic,” as a local paper
+explained in breaking the news to the farmers. About the time that we
+changed the date-lines on our business stationery from 189- to 190- this
+was as desolate, arid, and hopeless-looking a region as you could have
+found between the oceans—and I’m not specifying which oceans either.
+Even the coyotes, as some one has remarked, used to make their last
+will and testament before venturing to cross it. In 1902 the United
+States Department of Agriculture sent one of its soil experts—at least
+he was called an expert—to this region to investigate its agricultural
+possibilities. Here is what he reported: “Aside from the alkali, which
+renders part of the soil practically worthless, some of the land is
+so rough from gullies or sand-dunes that the expense of levelling it
+is greater than warranted by its value. In the one hundred and eight
+thousand acres surveyed, 27.4 per cent are sand-dunes or rough land....
+The remainder of the level land contains too much alkali to be safe,
+except for resistant crops. One hundred and twenty-five thousand acres
+have already been taken up by prospective settlers, many of whom talk
+of planting crops which it will be absolutely impossible to grow. They
+must early find that it is useless to attempt their growth.” If the
+sun-bronzed settlers had followed this cock-sure advice, the Imperial
+would still be a waste of sun-swept sand. But pioneers are not made that
+way. Instead of becoming discouraged and moving away after reading the
+report of the government expert, they merely grinned confidently and
+went on clearing the sage-brush from their land—for sixty miles to the
+eastward, across a country as flat as a hotel piazza, the Colorado River,
+with its wealth of water, rolled down to the sea. And water was all that
+was needed to turn these thirsty sands into pastures and orchards and
+gardens. The government curtly declining to lend its aid, the settlers
+went ahead and brought the water in themselves. It took determination
+and perspiration, a lot of both, to dig a diversion canal across those
+threescore miles of burning desert, but by the end of 1902 the work
+was done, the valley was introduced to its first drink of water, and
+the first crops were begun. To-day the Imperial Valley, with its seven
+hundred miles of canals, is the greatest body of irrigated land in the
+world. In 1900 the government was offering land there for a dollar and
+a quarter an acre. In 1914 land was selling (_selling_, mind you, not
+merely being offered) for _just a thousand times that sum_.
+
+[Illustration: How Mr. and Mrs. Powell saw Arizona.
+
+“One comes upon it suddenly, standing white and solitary and lovely
+between the desert and the sky.”
+
+SCENES IN THE MOTOR JOURNEY THROUGH ARIZONA.]
+
+Its soil is, I suppose, everything considered, the most fertile and
+versatile in the world. Its one hundred and twenty-five thousand acres of
+alfalfa yield twelve crops a year. I was shown a patch of thirty-three
+acres from which forty-five head of cattle are fed the year round. Later
+on another proud and prosperous husbandman showed me some land which
+had produced two and a half bales of long-staple cotton to the acre.
+Early in February the valley growers begin to export fresh asparagus;
+their shipments cease in April, when districts farther north begin
+to produce, and start again in the fall when asparagus has once more
+become a luxury. Pears ripen in December; figs are being picked at
+Christmas; grapes are sent out by the car-load in early June, six weeks
+before they ripen elsewhere save under glass. The valley is famous for
+its cantaloups, which are protected during their early growth by paper
+drinking cups. It would seem, indeed, as though Nature was trying to
+recompense the Imperial Valley for the unhappiness of her earlier years
+by giving her the earliest and the latest crops. A restricted region in
+the northeastern part of the valley is the only spot in the New World in
+which the Deglet Noor date—a variety so jealously guarded by the Arabs
+that few samples of it have ever been smuggled out of the remote Saharan
+oases of which it is a native—matures and can be commercially grown.
+
+Barely a dozen years have slipped by since the Imperial Valley was
+wedded to the Colorado River. From that union have sprung five towns
+which are now large enough to wear long pants—Imperial, El Centre,
+Calexico, Holtville, and Brawley—while several other communities are
+in the knickerbocker stage of development. Though scarcely a decade
+separates them from the yellow desert, they resemble frontier towns
+about as much as does Gary, Ind. The wooden shacks and corrugated-iron
+huts so characteristic of most new Western towns are wholly lacking
+in their business districts. The buildings are for the most part of
+concrete in the appropriate Spanish mission style; every building
+is designed to harmonise with its neighbours on either side; every
+building has its _portales_, or porticoed arcade, over the sidewalk,
+thus providing pedestrians with a welcome protection from the sun; for,
+though the valley boosters never cease to emphasise the fact that there
+is practically no humidity, they forget to add that in summer the air is
+like a blast from an open furnace door.
+
+When I was in the valley I dined with a friend one night on the terrace
+of the very beautiful country club of El Centro. Pink-shaded candles cast
+a rosy glow upon the faultless napery and silver of our table and all
+about us were similar tables at which sat sun-tanned, prosperous-looking
+men in white flannels and women in filmy gowns. Silent-footed Orientals
+slipped to and fro like ghosts, bearing chafing-dishes and gaily coloured
+ices and tall, thin glasses with ice tinkling in them. When the coffee
+had been set beside us we lighted our cigars and, leaning back in great
+contentment, looked meditatively out upon the moonlit countryside. Amid
+the dark patches of alfalfa and the shadow-dappled plots which I knew to
+be truck-gardens; through the ghostly branches of the eucalyptus, whose
+leaves stirred ever so gently in the night breeze, gleamed the cheerful
+lights of many bungalows.
+
+“A dozen years ago,” said my host impressively, “that country out there
+was a howling wilderness. Its only products were cactus and sage-brush.
+Its only inhabitants were the coyote, the lizard, and the snake. The man
+who ventured into it carried his life in his hands. Look at it now—one of
+the garden spots of the world! It’s one of God’s own miracles, isn’t it?”
+
+And I agreed with him that it was.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+From El Centro to San Diego is something over a hundred miles, but until
+very recently it might as well have been three hundred, so far as freight
+or passenger traffic between the two places was concerned, that being the
+approximate distance by the roundabout railway route. Though a railway is
+now in course of construction which will eventually give the valley towns
+direct communication with Yuma and San Diego, the enterprising merchants
+of the latter city had no intention of waiting for the completion of
+the railway to get the rich valley trade. So they raised a quarter of a
+million dollars and with that money they proceeded to build a highway
+into the Imperial Valley. Over that highway, which is as good as any
+one would ask to ride on, rolls an unending procession of motor-trucks,
+bearing seeds and harness and farming implements and phonographs and
+pianos and brass beds from San Diego stores to Imperial Valley ranches,
+and poultry and early fruit and grain from those ranches back to San
+Diego. That illustrates the sort of people that the San Diegans are. It
+is almost unnecessary to add that the road has already paid for itself
+with interest.
+
+To understand the peculiar geography of San Diego, and of its joyous
+little sister Coronado, you must picture in your mind a U-shaped harbour
+containing twenty square miles of the bluest water you will find anywhere
+outside a bathtub. Strewn upon the gently sloping hillsides which form
+the bottom of the U are the chalk-white buildings and tree-lined,
+flower-banked boulevards which make San Diego look like one of those
+imaginary cities which scene-painters are so fond of painting for
+back-drops of comic operas. The right-hand horn of the U corresponds to
+the rocky headland known as Point Loma, where Madame Tingley and her
+disciples of the Universal Brotherhood theosophise under domes of violet
+glass; and in the very middle of the U, or, in other words, in the middle
+of San Diego harbor, on an almost-island whose sandy surface has been
+lawned and flower-bedded and landscaped into one of the beauty-spots of
+the world, is Coronado.
+
+Coronado isn’t really an island, you understand, for it is connected with
+the mainland by a sandy shoe-string a dozen miles long and so narrow that
+even a duffer could drive a golf-ball across it. There is nothing quite
+like Coronado anywhere. It may convey something to you if I say that it
+is a combination of Luxor, Sorrento, and Palm Beach. And then some. It
+is one of those places where, unless you have on a Panama hat and white
+shoes and flannel trousers (in the case of ladies I don’t insist on the
+trousers, of course), you feel awkward and ill-dressed and out of the
+picture. You know the sort of thing I mean. There are miles of curving,
+asphalted parkways, bordered by acres of green-plush lawns; and set down
+on the lawns are quaint stone-and-shingle bungalows with roses clambering
+over them, and near-Tudor mansions of beam and plaster, and the most
+beautiful villas of white stucco with green-tiled roofs, which look as if
+they had been brought over entire from Fiesole or the Lake of Como. Over
+near the shore is the Polo Club, which does not confine its activities
+to polo, as its name would imply, but, like the Sporting Club of Cairo,
+caters to the golfer and the tennis player, and the racing enthusiast
+as well. Every afternoon during the polo season _tout le monde_ goes
+pouring out to the Polo Club in motors and carriages, on horseback, on
+street-cars, and afoot, to gossip along the side lines and swagger about
+in the saddling paddock and cheer themselves hoarse when eight young
+gentlemen in vivid silk shirts and white breeches and tan boots, and
+hailing from London or New York or San Francisco or Honolulu or Calgary,
+as the case may be, go streaking down the field in a maelstrom of dust
+and colour and waving mallets and flying hoofs. After it is all over
+and the colours of the winning team have been hoisted to the top of the
+flagstaff and the losers have drunk the health of the victors from a
+Gargantuan loving-cup, every one goes piling back to the great hostelry,
+whose red-roofed towers and domes and gables rising above the palm groves
+form a picture which is almost Oriental as they silhouette themselves,
+black, fantastic, and alluring, against the kaleidoscopic evening sky.
+
+There are certain hotels which, because of the surpassing beauty of their
+situation or their historic or literary associations or the traditions
+connected with them, have come to be looked upon as institutions,
+rather than mere caravansaries, which it is the duty of every traveller
+to see, just as he should see Les Invalides and the Pantheon and the
+Alcazar, and, if his purse will permit, to stop at. In such a class I
+put Shepheard’s in Cairo, the Hermitage at Monte Carlo, the Danieli
+in Venice, the Bristol in Paris, the Lord Warden at Dover, the Mount
+Nelson at Cape Town, Raffles’s at Singapore, the Waldorf-Astoria in New
+York, the Mission Inn at Riverside, the Hotel del Monte at Monterey,
+and the Hotel del Coronado. It is by no means new, is the Coronado, nor
+is it particularly up-to-date, and from an architectural standpoint
+it leaves much to be desired, but it shares with the other famous
+hotels I have mentioned that indefinable something called “atmosphere”
+and it stands at one of those crossways where the routes of tourist
+travel meet. To find anything to equal the brilliant scene for which
+its great lobby is the stage you will have to go to the east coast of
+Florida or Egypt or the Riviera. From New Year’s to Easter its spacious
+corridors and broad verandas are thronged with more interesting types
+of people than any place I know save only Monte Carlo. Suppose we sit
+down for a few minutes, you and I, and watch the passing show. There
+are slim, white-shouldered women whose gowns bespeak the Rue de la Paix
+as unmistakably as though you could read their labels, and other women
+whose gowns are just as unmistakably the products of dressmakers in
+Schenectady and Sioux City and Terre Haute. There are well-groomed young
+men, well-groomed old men, and overgroomed men of all ages; men bearing
+famous names and men whose names are notorious rather than famous. There
+are big-game hunters, polo players, professional gamblers, adventurers,
+explorers, novelists, mine owners, bankers, landowners who reckon their
+acres by the million, and cattlemen who count their longhorns by the tens
+of thousands. There are English earls, and French marquises, and German
+counts; there are women of Society, of society, and of near-society; men
+and women whose features the newspapers and bill-boards have made as
+familiar as the faces of Dr. Woodbury and Mr. Gillette, and, mingling
+with all the rest, plain, every-day folk hailing from pretty much
+everywhere between Portland, Ore., and Portland, Me., and whose money it
+is, when all is said and done, which makes this sort of thing possible.
+They come here for rest, so they take pains to assure you, but they are
+never idle. They bathe in the booming breakers when the people beyond the
+Sierras are shivering before their bathtubs; they play golf and tennis as
+regularly as they take their meals; they gallop their ponies madly along
+the yellow beach in the early morning; they fish off the coast for tuna
+and jewfish and barracuda; they take launches across the bay to see the
+flying men swoop and circle above the army aviation school; they watch
+the submarines dive and gambol like giant porpoises in the placid waters
+of the harbour; they play auction bridge on the sun-swept verandas or
+poker in the seclusion of the smoking-room; and after dinner they tango
+and hesitate and one-step in the big ballroom until the orchestra puts
+up its instruments from sheer exhaustion. At Coronado no one ever lets
+business interfere with pleasure. If you want to talk business you had
+better take the ferryboat across the bay to San Diego.
+
+San Diego’s history stretches back into the past for close on four
+hundred years. Her harbour was the first on all that devious coast-line
+which reaches from Cape San Lucas to the Straits of Juan de Fuca in which
+a white man’s anchor rumbled down and a white man’s sails were furled.
+In her soil were planted the first vine and the first olive tree. The
+first cross was raised here, and the first church built, and beneath the
+palms which were planted by the _padres_ in the valley that nestles just
+back of the hill on which the city sits the first lessons in Christianity
+were taught to the primitive people who inhabited this region when the
+paleface came. Here began that remarkable chain of outposts of the church
+which Father Junipero Serra and his indomitable Franciscans stretched
+northward to Sonoma, six hundred miles away. And here likewise began El
+Camino Real, the King’s Highway, which linked together the one-and-twenty
+missions and which forms to-day the longest continuous highway in the
+world, and, without exaggeration, the most beautiful, the most varied,
+and the most interesting.
+
+I don’t know the population of San Diego, because a census taken
+yesterday would be much too low to-morrow. The San Diegans claim that
+they arrive at the number of the city’s inhabitants by the simple method
+of having the census enumerators meet the trains to count the people when
+they get off. For, as they ingenuously argue, any one who once comes to
+San Diego never goes away again, unless it be to hurry back home and pack
+his things. In a country where both population and property values have
+increased like guinea-pigs, the growth of San Diego is spoken of with
+something akin to awe. In the year that Grant was elected President, a
+second-hand furniture dealer named Alonzo Horton closed his little shop
+in San Francisco and with the savings of a lifetime—some say two hundred
+and sixty dollars, some eight hundred—in a belt about his waist, took
+passage on a steamer down the Californian coast. With this money he
+bought, at twenty-six cents an acre, most of what is now San Diego. Some
+of those lots which the shrewd old furniture dealer thus acquired could
+not now be bought for less than a cool half million! Two decades later
+came John D. Spreckels, bringing with him the millions he had amassed
+in sugar, and gave to San Diego a street-railway, electric lights, a
+water-system, one of the most beautiful theatres on the continent, and a
+solid mile of steel-and-concrete office-buildings of uniform height and
+harmonious design.
+
+The people of San Diego are adamantine in their conviction that theirs
+is a city of destiny. They assert that within a single decade the name
+of San Diego will be as familiar on maps, and newspapers and bills of
+lading as New Orleans or Genoa or Yokohama or Calcutta or Marseilles.
+And they have some copper-riveted facts with which to back up their
+assertions. In the first place, so they will tell you, they have the
+harbour; sixteen miles long, forty to sixty feet deep, and protected
+from storms or a hostile fleet by a four-hundred-foot wall of rock. When
+the fortifications now in course of construction are completed San Diego
+will be as safe from attack by sea as though it were on the Erie Canal.
+Secondly, San Diego is the first American port of call for westbound
+vessels passing through the Panama Canal, and one of these days, unless
+the plans of the Naval Board of Strategy miscarry, it will become a
+great fortified coaling station and naval base, for it is within easy
+striking distance of the trans-Pacific lanes of commerce. Thirdly, it is
+the logical outlet for the newly developed sections of the Southwest,
+the grade between Houston and San Diego, for example, being the lowest
+on the continent—and commerce follows the lines of least resistance.
+Fourthly (this sounds like a Presbyterian sermon, doesn’t it?), San
+Diego will soon have a rich and prosperous hinterland, without which
+all her other advantages would go for nothing, to supply and to draw
+from. Experts on agricultural development have assured me that the day
+is coming when the Imperial Valley, of which San Diego is already the
+recognised _entrepôt_, will support as many inhabitants as the Valley
+of the Nile. Nor is this assertion nearly as visionary as it sounds,
+for the zone of cultivation in the Nile country is, remember, only a
+few miles wide. Beyond the Imperial Valley lie the constantly spreading
+orchards and alfalfa fields which are the result of the Yuma and Gila
+River projects. East of Yuma is the great region, of which Phœnix is
+the centre, which acquired prosperity almost in a single night from the
+Roosevelt Dam. East of Phœnix again the Casa Grande irrigation scheme is
+converting good-for-nothing desert into good-for-anything loam. Beyond
+Casa Grande the great corporation known as Tucson Farms is redeeming
+a large area by means of its canals and ditches, while still farther
+eastward the titanic dam at Elephant Butte, which the government is
+building to conserve the waters of the Rio Grande, will snatch from the
+clutches of the New Mexican desert a region as large as a New England
+State. And these are not paper projects, mind you. Some of them are
+completed and in full swing; others are in course of construction, so
+that by 1920 an almost continuous zone of irrigated, cultivated, and
+highly productive land will stretch from San Diego as far eastward as the
+Rio Grande. And, as the San Diegans gleefully point out, the settlers on
+these new lands will find San Diego nearer by from one hundred to two
+hundred miles than any other port on the Pacific Coast as a place to ship
+their products and to do their shopping. But the people of San Diego
+are such notorious boosters that before swallowing the things they told
+me I sprinkled them quite liberally with salt. In fact, I wasn’t really
+convinced of the genuineness of San Diego’s prospects until I happened
+to meet one evening on a hotel terrace a member of America’s greatest
+banking-house—a house whose credit and prestige are so unquestioned that
+its support is a hall-mark of financial worth.
+
+“What do you think about this San Diego proposition?” I asked him
+carelessly, as we sat over our cigars. “Is it another Egyptian bubble
+which will shortly burst?”
+
+“That was what I thought it was when I came out here,” he answered, “but
+since investigating conditions I have changed my mind. It looks so good
+to us, in fact, that we intend to back up our judgment by investing
+several millions.”
+
+So far as attracting visitors is concerned, San Diego’s most valuable
+asset is her climate. Though the southernmost of our Pacific ports and
+in the same latitude as Syria and the North African littoral, it has the
+most equable climate on the continent, the records of the United States
+Weather Bureau showing less than one hour a year when the mercury is
+above 90 or below 32. According to these same official records, the sun
+shines on three hundred and fifty-six days out of the three hundred and
+sixty-five, so that rain is literally a nine days’ wonder. San Diego’s
+climate is that of Alaska in summer and of Arabia in winter, and, if you
+don’t believe it, the San Diegans will prove it by means of a temperature
+chart, zigzagging across which are two lines, one bright red, the other
+blue, which denote summer and winter climates circling the globe and
+which converge at only one point on it—San Diego. As a result of these
+unique climatic conditions, San Diego, unlike most resort cities, has
+two seasons instead of one. The Eastern tourists have hardly taken
+their departure in the spring before the hotels and boarding-houses
+begin to fill up with people who have come here to escape the torrid
+heat of a Southwestern summer. Many of these summer visitors are small
+ranchers from Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah, and from across the line
+in Chihuahua and Sonora, to whom the rates charged at the hotels would
+be prohibitive. To accommodate this class of visitors there has sprung
+into being on the beach at Coronado a “tent city.” The “tents” consist
+for the most part of one or two room bungalows with palm-thatched roofs
+and walls and wooden floors and equipped with running water, sanitary
+arrangements, and cooking appliances. The Coronado Tent City contains
+nearly two thousand of these dwellings which can be rented at absurdly
+low figures. For those who do not care to do their own cooking the
+management has provided a restaurant where simple but well-cooked meals
+can be had at nominal prices; there is a dancing pavilion for the young
+people, a casino on whose verandas the mothers can gossip and sew and
+at the same time keep an eye on their children playing on the sand, and
+a club house with pool-tables and reading-matter for the men. The place
+is kept scrupulously clean, it is thoroughly policed, hoodlumism is not
+tolerated, and, everything considered, it seemed to me a most admirable
+and inexpensive solution of the perennial summer-vacation problem for
+people of modest means.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Because I wanted to see something more than that narrow coastwise
+zone which comprises all that the average winter tourist ever sees of
+California; because I wanted to obtain a more intimate knowledge of
+the country and its people than comes from a car-window point of view;
+because I wanted to penetrate into those portions of the back country
+still undisturbed by the locomotive’s raucous shriek and eat at quaint
+inns and sleep in ranch-houses and stop when and where I pleased to
+converse with all manner of interesting people, I decided to do my
+travelling by motor-car. And so, on a winter’s sunny morning, when the
+flower vendors in the plaza of San Diego were selling roses at ten
+cents a bunch and the unfortunates who dwelt beyond the Sierras, rim
+were begging their janitors for goodness’ sake to turn on more steam,
+I turned the nose of my car northward and stepped on her tail, and
+with a rush and roar we were off on a journey which was to end only at
+the borders of Alaska. As, with engines purring sweet music, the car
+breasted the summit of the Linda Vista grade our breath was almost taken
+away by the startling grandeur of the panorama which suddenly unrolled
+itself before us. At our backs rose the mountains of Mexico, purple,
+mysterious, forbidding, grim. Spread below us, like a map in bas-relief,
+lay the orchard-covered plains of California; to the left the Pacific
+heaved lazily beneath the sun; to the right the snow-crowned Cuyamacas
+swept grandly up to meet the sky, and before us the beckoning yellow road
+stretched away ... away ... away.
+
+I have never been able to resist the summons of the open road. I always
+want to find out what is at the other end. It goes somewhere, you see,
+and I always have the feeling that, far off in the distance, where
+it swerves suddenly behind a wood or disappears in the depths of a
+rock-walled cañon or drops out of sight quite unexpectedly behind a
+hill, there is something mysterious and magical waiting to be found.
+About the road there is something primitive and imperishable. Did it
+ever occur to you that it has been the greatest factor in the making
+of history, in the spread of Christianity, in the march of progress?
+Some one has said, and truly, that the rate and direction of human
+progress has always been determined by the roads of a people. For a time
+the marvel of modern inventions caused the road to be forgotten. The
+steamship sailed majestically away in contempt of the road upon the shore
+and the locomotive sounded its jeering screech at every crossing along
+its right of way. But still the road stayed on. But now the miracle of
+the motor-car has brought the road into its own again and started me
+ajourneying in the latest product of twentieth-century civilisation,
+with the strength of threescore horses beneath its throbbing hood, up
+that historic highway which has been travelled in turn by Don Vasquez
+del Coronado and his steel-clad men-at-arms, by Padre Serra in his
+sandals and woollen robe, by Jedediah Smith, the first American to find
+his way across the ranges, by Frémont the Pathfinder, by the Argonauts,
+by Spanish _caballeros_ and Mexican _vaqueros_ and American pioneers,
+by priests afoot and soldiers on horseback and peasants on the backs of
+patient burros, by lumbering ox-carts and white-topped prairie-schooners
+and six-horse Concord stages—and now by automobiles. In El Camino Real
+is epitomised the history and romance of the West. It is to western
+America what the Via Appia was to Rome, the Great North Road to England.
+It has been in turn a trail of torture, a course of conquest, a road of
+religion, a route to riches, a path of progress, a highway to happiness.
+He who can traverse it with no thought for anything save the number of
+miles which his indicator shows and for the comforts of the hotel ahead;
+who is so lacking in imagination that he cannot see the countless phantom
+shadows who charge it with their unseen presence; who is incapable of
+appreciating that in it are all the panorama and procession of the West,
+had much better stay at home. The only thing that such a person would
+understand would be a danger-signal or a traffic policeman’s club.
+
+I am convinced that if the several thousand Americans who go on annual
+motor trips through Europe, either taking their cars with them or hiring
+them on the other side, could only be made to realise that on the edge
+of the Western ocean they can find roads as smooth and well built as the
+English highways or the _routes nationales_ of France, and mountains as
+high and sublimely beautiful as the Alps or the Pyrenees, and scenery
+more varied and lovely than is to be found between Christiania and Capri,
+and vegetation as luxuriant and hotels more luxurious than on the Côte
+d’Azur, and a milder, sunnier, more equable climate than anywhere else
+on the globe, they would come pouring out in such numbers that there
+wouldn’t be garages enough to hold their cars. In 1913 the legislature of
+California voted eighteen millions of dollars for the improvement of the
+roads, and that great sum is being so judiciously expended in conjunction
+with the appropriations made by the other coast states that by early in
+1915 a motorist can start from the Mexican border and drive northward
+to Vancouver—a distance considerably greater than from Cherbourg to
+Constantinople—with as good a road as any one could ask for beneath his
+tires all the way.
+
+It is very close to one hundred and forty miles from San Diego to
+Riverside if you take the route which passes the rambling, red-tiled,
+adobe ranch-house famous as the home of _Ramona_; dips down into Mission
+Valley, where from behind its screen of palms and eucalyptus peers
+the crumbling and dilapidated façade of the first of the Californian
+missions; swirls through La Jolla with its enchanted ocean caverns;
+climbs upward in long sweeps and zigzags through the live-oak groves
+behind Del Mar; pauses for a moment at Oceanside for a farewell look at
+the lazy turquoise sea, and then suddenly swings inland past Mission
+San Luis Rey and the mission chapel of Pala and the Lake of Elsinore.
+That is the route that we took and, though it is not the shortest, it is
+incomparably the most beautiful and the most interesting. We found by
+experience that one hundred and forty miles is about as long a day’s run
+as one can make with comfort and still permit of ample time for meals
+and for leisurely pauses at places of interest along the way. Once, in
+the French Midi, I motored with a friend who had chartered a car by the
+month with the agreement that he was to be permitted to run four hundred
+kilometres a day. It mattered not at all how fascinating or historically
+interesting was the region we were traversing, we must needs tear through
+it as though the devil were at our wheels. We couldn’t stop anywhere, my
+host explained, because if we did he wouldn’t be able to get the full
+allowance of mileage to which he was entitled. Some day, however, I’m
+going through that same country again and see the things I missed. Next
+time I think that I shall go on a bicycle. With highways as smooth as the
+promenade-deck of an ocean liner it is a temptation to burn up the road,
+of course, particularly if your car has plenty of power and your driver
+knows how to keep his wits about him. But that sort of thing, especially
+in a country which has so many sights worth seeing as California, smacks
+altogether too much of those impossible persons who boast of having
+“done” the Louvre or the Pitti in an hour. Half the pleasure of motoring,
+to my way of thinking, is in being able to stop when and where you
+please—_and stopping_.
+
+Between San Diego and Oceanside the road hugs the coast as though it
+were a long-lost brother. It is wide and smooth and for long stretches
+led through acres and acres of yellow mustard. This, with the vivid blue
+of the sea on one side and the emerald green of the wooded hillsides on
+the other, made the country we were traversing resemble the flag of some
+Central American republic. I think that the most beautiful of the little
+coast towns through which the road winds is Del Mar, perched high on a
+cypress-covered hill looking westward to Cathay. This is the home of the
+Torrey pine, which is found nowhere else in the world. In the springtime
+the mesas above the sea are all aflame with yellow dahlias and the
+hillsides at the back are as gay with wild flowers as a woman’s Easter
+bonnet. Del Mar is an interesting example of the rehabilitation of a
+down-and-out town. A few years ago it was little more than a straggling,
+grass-grown street lined with decrepit, weather-beaten houses. A
+far-sighted corporation discovered the ramshackle little hamlet, bought
+it, subdivided it, laid out miles of contour drives and a golf course,
+and built a little gem of a hostelry, modelled and named after the
+inn at Stratford-on-Avon, on the hill above the sea. Now the place is
+awake, animated, prosperous. Bathers dot its ten-mile crescent of silver
+sand; artists pitch their easels beneath the shadow of the friendly
+live-oaks; on the flower-carpeted hill slopes have sprung up the villas
+and bungalows of the rich. A few miles farther up the coast you can lunch
+beneath the vine-hung pergolas of the quaint Miramar at Oceanside, nor
+does it require an elastic imagination to pretend that the hills behind,
+grey-green with olive groves, are those of Amalfi and that the lazy,
+sun-kissed sea below you is the Mediterranean instead of the Pacific.
+
+Four miles inland from Oceanside, in a swale between low hills, stands
+all that is left of the Mission of San Luis, Rey de Francia, which, as
+its name denotes, is dedicated to Saint Louis, King of France. Begun when
+Washington was President of the United States and Alta California was
+still a province of New Spain, completed when the nineteenth century was
+but a two-year-old, and secularised by the Mexican authorities after the
+expulsion of the Spaniards in 1834, the historic mission has once again
+passed into the hands of the Franciscan Order which built it and is now
+a training-school for priests who wish to carry the cross into foreign
+lands. The ruins of the mission—which, thanks to the indefatigable
+efforts of the priest in charge, are being restored to a semblance of
+their original condition as fast as he is able to raise the money—are
+among the most picturesque in California. We stopped there on a golden
+afternoon, when the sunlight, sifted and softened by the interlacing
+branches of the ancient olive trees, cast a veil of yellow radiance upon
+the crumbling, weather-worn façade and filtered through the arches of
+those cloistered corridors where the cowled and cassocked brethren of
+Saint Francis were wont to pace up and down in silent meditation, telling
+their beads and muttering their prayers.
+
+Nestling in a hollow of the hills, twenty miles northeast of San Luis
+Rey, over a road which is comparatively little travelled and only
+indifferently smooth, is the _asistencia_ or mission chapel of San
+Antonio de Pala. Even though it were not on the road to Riverside,
+it would be well worth going out of one’s way to see because of its
+picturesque _campanario_, with a cactus sprouting from its top, and
+the adjacent Indian village with its curious burial-ground. The little
+town, which centres, of course, about the chapel, the agency, and the
+trader’s, stands on the banks of the San Luis Rey River, with high
+mountains rising abruptly all around. Here, in sheet-iron huts provided
+by a paternal government and brought bodily from the East and set up in
+this secluded valley, dwell all that is left of the Palatingwa tribe—a
+living refutation of our boast that we have given a square deal to the
+Indian. Once each year the Palatingwas are visited by their friends of
+neighbouring tribes, and for a brief time the mountain valley resounds to
+the barbaric clamour of the tom-toms and to the plaintive, pagan chants
+which were heard in this land before the paleface came. The mission
+chapel, after standing empty for many years, once more has a priest, and
+at sunset the bell in the ancient campanile sends its mellow summons
+booming across the surrounding olive groves and the copper-coloured
+villagers, just as did their fathers in Padre Serra’s time, come trooping
+in for evening prayer.
+
+[Illustration: _From a photograph by Avery Edwin Field._
+
+_From a photograph by Avery Edwin Field._
+
+NOT IN CATALONIA BUT IN CALIFORNIA.
+
+“A great hotel which combines the architectural features of the
+Californian missions—cloisters, patios, brick-paved corridors, bell-hung
+campaniles, ivy-covered buttresses—with an Old World atmosphere and
+charm.”]
+
+But of all the California missions, from San Diego in the south to
+Sonoma in the north, the one I like the best is the Mission Miller at
+Riverside—and any one who has ever stopped there will unhesitatingly
+agree with me. Its real name, you must understand, is the Mission
+Inn, and there is no hostelry like it anywhere else in the world.
+At least I, who am tolerably familiar with the hotels of five-score
+countries, know of none. In it Frank Miller, the Master of the Inn, as
+he loves to be called, has succeeded in commercialising romance to an
+extraordinary degree. He might be said, indeed, to have taken the cent
+from sentiment. In other words, he has built a great hotel which combines
+the architectural features of the most interesting of the Californian
+missions—cloisters, patios, quadrangles, brick-paved corridors, bell-hung
+campaniles, ivy-covered buttresses, slender date-palms with flaming
+macaws screeching in them—with an Old World atmosphere and charm, and in
+such a setting he dispenses the same genial and personal hospitality
+which was a characteristic of the Spanish _padres_ in the days when the
+travellers along El Camino Real depended on the missions for food and
+shelter.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+WHERE GOLD GROWS ON TREES
+
+  “Dost thou know that sweet land where the orange flowers grow?
+  Where the fruits are like gold and the red roses blow?”
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+WHERE GOLD GROWS ON TREES
+
+
+It was in the heyday of the Second Empire. The French army was at its
+autumn manœuvres and the country round about Rheims was aswarm with
+troopers in brass helmets and infantry in baggy red breeches. Louis
+Napoleon was directing the operations in person. Riding one day through
+a vineyard at the head of a brigade, he suddenly pulled up his horse and
+turned in his saddle.
+
+“Halt!” he ordered. “Column right into line! Attention! Present ... arms!”
+
+“But who are you saluting, sire?” inquired one of his generals in
+astonishment, spurring alongside.
+
+“The grapes, _mon général_,” replied the Emperor; “for do they not
+represent the wealth and prosperity of France?”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was the astonishing prosperity of the orange belt which brought the
+incident to mind. For an entire morning we had been motoring among the
+orange groves which make of Riverside an island in an emerald sea. The
+endless orchards whose shiny-leaved trees drooped under their burden of
+pumpkin-coloured fruit; the chalk-white villas and the blossom-smothered
+bungalows of which we caught fleeting glimpses between the ordered rows;
+the oiled roads, so smooth and level that no child could look on them
+without longing for roller-skates; the motor-cars standing at almost
+every doorstep—all these things spelled prosperity in capital letters.
+
+“It seems to me,” I remarked to the gentleman who was acting as our
+guide (these same orange groves had made him a millionaire in less than
+a decade), “that it would not be unbefitting if the people of Riverside
+followed the example of Louis Napoleon when he saluted the grapes”; and I
+told him the story of the Emperor in the vineyard.
+
+“You are quite right,” said he. “Would you mind stopping the car?” and,
+standing in the tonneau very erect and soldierly, he lifted his hat.
+
+“My Lady Citrona,” he said gravely, “I have the honour to salute you, for
+it is to you that the prosperity of southern California is chiefly due.”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+What its harbour has done for San Diego, what its climate has done for
+Santa Barbara, its oranges have done for Riverside. Thirty years ago you
+could not have found it on the map. To-day it is the richest community
+_per caput_—which is the Latin for inhabitant—between the ice-floes of
+the Arctic and the Gatun Dam. At least that is what Mr. Bradstreet—the
+gentleman, you know, who publishes the large green volume which tells
+you whether the people you meet are worth cultivating—says, and he
+ought to know what he is talking about. Though it can boast few if any
+“show-places” such as are proudly pointed out to the open-mouthed tourist
+in Pasadena and Santa Barbara, it is a pleasant place in which to dwell,
+is this happy, sunny, easy-going capital of the citrus kingdom. It is
+as substantial-looking as a retired banker; it is as spick and span as
+a ward in a hospital; it is as satisfying as a certified cheque—and,
+incidentally, it is as dry as the desert of Sahara. You are regarded
+with suspicion if you are overheard asking the druggist for alcohol for
+a spirit-lamp. It is, moreover, the only place I know that has foiled
+the exaggeratory tendencies of the picture post-card makers. Its oranges
+are so glaringly yellow, its trees so vividly green, its poinsettias so
+flamingly red, its snow-topped mountains so snowily white, its skies so
+bright a blue that the post-card artists have had to be truthful in spite
+of themselves.
+
+I think that the spirit of Riverside is epitomised by two great
+wrought-iron baskets which flank the entrance to the dining-room of its
+famous hostelry, the Mission Inn. One of them is filled with oranges, the
+other with flowers. And you are expected to help yourself; not merely to
+take one as a souvenir, you understand, but to fill your pockets, fill
+your arms. “That’s what they’re there for,” the Master of the Inn will
+tell you. That little touch does more than anything else to make you
+feel that southern California really is a land of fruit and flowers and
+that they are not hidden behind the garden walls of the rich but can be
+enjoyed by everyone. It goes far toward counteracting the unfavourable
+impression a stranger receives in a certain ornate hotel in Los Angeles
+where he is charged forty cents for a sliced orange!
+
+Ciceroned by the orange millionaire, we motored up a zigzag boulevard,
+with many horseshoe bends and hairpin turns, to the summit of Mount
+Rubidoux, a domesticated and highly landscaped mountainette within the
+city limits. Moses and his footsore Israelites, looking down upon the
+Promised Land, could have seen nothing fairer than the view which greeted
+us on that winter’s Sunday morning. I doubt if there has been anything
+more peacefully enchanting than a Sunday morning in southern California
+in the orange season since a “To Let” sign was nailed to the gates of the
+Garden of Eden. It suggests, without in any way resembling, such a number
+of things: a stained-glass window in a church, for example; an Easter
+wedding; Italy in the springtime ... but perhaps you don’t grasp just
+what I mean.
+
+From Rubidoux’s rocky base the furrowed orange groves, looking exactly
+like quilted comforters of bright-green silk, stretch away, away, until
+they meet just such a yellow arid desert as Riverside used to be before
+the water came, and the desert sweeps up to meet tawny foot-hills, and
+the foot-hills blend into amethystine mountain ranges and these rise
+into snowy peaks which gleam and sparkle against a sapphire sky. And
+from the orange groves rises that same subtle, intoxicating fragrance
+(for you know, no doubt, that orange-trees bear blossoms and fruit at
+the same time) that you get when the organist strikes up the march from
+“Lohengrin” and the bride floats up the aisle. The significant thing
+about it all, however, is not the surpassing beauty and extraordinary
+luxuriance of the vegetation, but the fact that there is any vegetation
+here at all. No longer ago than when women wore bustles this region was a
+second cousin to the Sahara, dry as a treatise on mathematics, dusty as a
+country pike on circus day, but which now, thanks to the faith, patience,
+energy, and courage of a handful of horticulturists, has been transformed
+into a land which is a cross between a back-drop at a theatre and a
+fruit-store window.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Once each year, toward the close of the fasting month of Ramazan, the
+Arabs of the Sahara make a pilgrimage to a spot in the desert near
+Biskra, in southern Algeria. From a thousand miles around they come—by
+horse and by camel and on the backs of asses—for the sake of a prayer in
+the yellow desert at break of day. This “Great Prayer,” as it is called,
+is one of the most impressive ceremonies that I have ever witnessed,
+and I little thought that I should ever see its like again—certainly
+not in my own land and among my own people. Once each year the people
+of Riverside and the surrounding country also make a pilgrimage. They
+set out in the darkness of early Easter morning, afoot, ahorseback, in
+carriages, and in panting motor-cars, and assemble on the summit of
+Mount Rubidoux in the first faint light of dawn. They group themselves,
+fittingly enough, about the cross which has been erected in memory
+of Padre Junipero Serra, that indomitable friar who first brought
+Christianity to the Californias, and who, on his weary journeys between
+the missions which he founded, not infrequently spread his blankets for
+the night at the foot of this same hill. Last year upward of six thousand
+people gathered under the shadow of the Serra cross to greet the Easter
+morn. As sunrise approached, a group of girls from the Indian School,
+standing on a rocky eminence, sang “He Is Risen,” and then, as a red
+glow in the east heralded the coming of the sun, the sweet, clear notes
+of a cornet rang out upon the morning air in the splendid bars of “The
+Holy City.” Just as the last notes died away a spark of light—brighter
+than the arc-lamps which still glared in the streets of the city
+below—appeared above the San Bernardino’s topmost rim and a moment later
+the full orb of the sun burst forth in all its dazzling glory, turning
+the purple mountains into peaks of glowing amethyst and the sombre
+valleys into emerald islands swimming in a sea of lavender haze. “Lord,
+Thou hast been my dwelling-place in all generations.... I will lift up
+mine eyes to the hills from whence cometh my help,” chanted the people in
+solemn unison. And then Dr. Henry van Dyke, fittingly garbed in a Norfolk
+jacket and knickerbockers, with a mammoth boulder for a pulpit, read his
+“God of the Open Air.” With the Amen of the benediction there ended the
+most significant and impressive service that I have ever heard under
+the open sky and one which sharply refutes the frequent assertion that
+America is lacking in those quaint ceremonies and picturesque observances
+which make Europe so attractive to the traveller.
+
+[Illustration: A MODERN VERSION OF THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT.
+
+The Easter sunrise service on Mount Rubidoux, near Riverside, “sharply
+refutes the frequent assertion that America is lacking in those quaint
+ceremonies and picturesque observances which make Europe so attractive to
+the traveller.”]
+
+It is threescore miles from Riverside to Pasadena, provided you go via
+Redlands, Smiley Heights, and San Bernardino, and it is flowers and
+fruit-trees all the way. Just as every visitor to London asks to be
+directed to Kew Gardens, so every visitor to the orange belt asks to be
+shown Smiley Heights. Its late owner was a hotel proprietor of national
+fame who amassed a fortune by running his great summer hostelries at
+Lake Mohonk, N. Y., in conformance with the discipline of the Methodist
+Church, among the rules which the guests are required to observe being
+one which states that “visitors are not expected to arrive or depart
+on the Sabbath.” Smiley Heights is a remarkable object-lesson in the
+horticultural miracles which can be performed in California with water
+and patience. When bought by Mr. Smiley it was a barren, bone-dry mesa,
+whose entire six hundred acres did not have sufficient vegetation to
+support a goat, but which, by the lavish use of water, and fertilisers,
+and the employment of a small army of landscape architects and gardeners,
+has been transformed into a beauty-spot which is worth using several
+gallons of gasoline to see. In Cañon’s Crest, to give the place the
+name bestowed by its owner, is epitomised the story of all southern
+California, for on every side of this semitropic garden of pines, palms,
+peppers, oranges, olives, lemons, figs, acacias, bamboos, deodars, and
+roses, roses, roses, stretches the sage-brush-covered desert from which
+it was snatched and to which, were it deprived of care and water, it
+would quickly return. If you will look from the right-hand window of your
+north-bound train, just before it reaches Redlands, you can see it for
+yourself: a flower-smothered, tree-covered table-land rising abruptly
+from an arid plain.
+
+I wonder if other motorists get as much enjoyment from the signs along
+the way as I do. The notices along the Californian roads struck me as
+being more original and amusing than any that I had ever seen. Most
+of them were worded with an after-you-my-dear-Alphonse politeness
+which made acquiescence with their courteous requests a pleasure,
+though occasionally we were confronted with a warning couched in such
+threatening terms that it seemed to shake a metaphorical fist in our
+faces. Who, I ask you, would not cheerfully slow down to lawful speed in
+the face of the stereotyped request which is used on the roads between
+Riverside and Pasadena: “Speed limit thirty miles an hour—a reasonable
+compliance with this request will be deeply appreciated”? Another time,
+however, as we were humming along one of those stretches of oiled
+delight which make the speedometer needle flutter like a lover’s heart,
+we were greeted, as we swept into the outskirts of some Orangeburg or
+Citronville, by a great brusque placard which menaced us in staring black
+letters with the threat: “Fifty dollars fine for exceeding the speed
+limit.” As a result we crept through the town as sedately as though we
+were following a hearse, which was, I suppose, the very effect the city
+fathers aimed to produce, but as we left the limits of the municipality
+our resentment was dispelled by a sign so placed as to catch the eye of
+the departing motorist. It read: “So long, friend! Come again.”
+
+There is one word that you should never, _never_ mention in the orange
+belt and that is—frost. That severe frosts are few and far between
+is perfectly true, as is attested by the fact that the road from
+Riverside to Pasadena runs through a vast forest of treasure-bearing
+trees. That there is another and less joyous side to the business of
+raising breakfast-table fruit was brought sharply home to me, however,
+by noting that the orchards I passed were dotted with hundreds, yes,
+thousands, of little cylindrical oil-stoves—the kind that they use in
+New England farmhouses to heat the bedroom enough to take a bath in on
+Sunday mornings. When the weather observer in Los Angeles flashes to the
+orange-growing centres a warning of an impending frost, the countryside
+turns out _en masse_ as though to repel an invader, and soon the groves
+are dotted with myriad pin-points of flame as the orchardists wage their
+desperate battle with the cold, with stoves, braziers, smudge-pots, and
+bonfires for their weapons. Though at long intervals a frost comes which
+does wide-spread and incalculable damage, as in 1913, that they _are_
+infrequent is best proved by the fact that automobile, phonograph, and
+encyclopedia salesmen find their most profitable markets in the orange
+belt.
+
+The cultivation of citrus fruits has been so systematised of recent years
+that nowadays, if one is to believe the alluringly worded prospectuses
+issued by the concerns engaged in selling citrus lands, all the owner of
+an orange grove has to do is to sit in a rocking-chair on his veranda,
+watch his trees grow and his fruit ripen, have it picked, packed, and
+marketed by proxy, and pocket the money which comes rolling in. According
+to the specious arguments of the realty dealers, it is as simple as
+taking candy from children. You simply can’t lose. According to them, it
+works out something after this fashion. Prof. Nathaniel Nutt, principal
+of a school at Skaneateles, N.Y., decides that when his teaching days are
+over he would like to spend his carpet-slipper years on an orange grove
+under California’s sunny skies. Lured by the glowing advertisements, he
+invests in ten acres of land planted to young trees and piped for water.
+The price is five hundred dollars an acre, of which he pays one fifth
+down and the balance in four annual instalments. By the time that his
+grove is old enough to bear, therefore, it will be fully paid for. In
+its fifth year—according to the dealer, at least—Mr. Nutt’s grove will
+yield him fruit to the value of five hundred dollars an acre, so that
+it will pay for itself the very first year after it comes into bearing.
+Moreover, during the five years that must of necessity intervene before
+the trees can be expected to droop under their golden crop, there is no
+real necessity for Mr. Nutt’s coming to California, for, by the payment
+of a purely nominal sum, he can have his grove cultivated, irrigated,
+and cared for under the direction of expert horticulturists while he
+continues to teach the Skaneateles youngsters their three R’s. As soon as
+the grove comes into bearing he will be notified, whereupon he will send
+in his resignation to the School Board, pack his grip, buy a ticket to
+California, and settle down as an orange grower with an assured income
+of five thousand dollars a year (ten acres multiplied by five hundred
+dollars, you see) for life. Simple, isn’t it? But let us suppose, just
+for the sake of argument, that about the time that Prof. Nutt’s trees
+come into bearing a devastating frost comes along and in a single night
+wipes his orchard out. Is it likely that he will be able to stand the
+financial strain of setting out another grove and irrigating it and
+fertilising it and caring for it for another five years? All of which
+goes to prove that orange growing is no business for people of limited
+means. Like speculating in Wall Street, it is an occupation which should
+only be followed by those who have sufficient resources to tide them over
+serious reverses and long periods of waiting. For such as those, however,
+there is no denying that gold grows on orange-trees.
+
+Citrus growing, as I have already remarked, has been greatly simplified
+of late by the organisation of growers’ unions. These unions are a result
+of the long and bitter struggle the citrus growers have waged to oust
+the intrenched middlemen and speculators. A few years ago the growers
+found themselves facing the alternatives of organisation or bankruptcy.
+They chose the former. The first to organise were the Riverside growers,
+who built a common packing-house, put a general manager in charge, and
+sent their fruit to it to be inspected, packed, sold, and shipped. So
+successful did the experiment prove that other districts soon followed
+Riverside’s example, until to-day there is no orange-growing section
+in the State that does not have its own packing-house. But the growers
+did not stop there. They soon found that, if they were to get the
+top-of-the-market prices for their fruit, some system must be devised
+for getting market quotations at the eleventh hour and fifty-ninth
+minute and then diverting their shipments to the highest market. Here
+is an example: a car-load of oranges from Redlands might arrive in the
+Milwaukee freight yards the same day as a car-load from San Bernardino,
+in which case the Milwaukee market would be glutted, while in Saint Paul
+there might be a shortage of the golden fruit. To meet this necessity
+the local packing-houses grouped themselves together in shipping
+exchanges, of which there are now in the neighbourhood of a hundred
+and thirty, handling sixty per cent of California’s citrus crop. But,
+as the industry grew, still another organisation was needed: a big
+central fruit exchange to handle problems of transportation, to gather
+information about the markets, and to supply daily quotations, and legal,
+technical, and scientific information. Thus there came into being the big
+central exchange, as a result of which the growers have been enabled
+to market their own fruit regardless of the speculators. This central
+exchange keeps a salaried agent on every important market in the country.
+No commissions and no dividends are paid; there is no profit feature
+whatsoever. Against each box of fruit passing through the exchange is
+assessed the exact expense of handling, and the entire proceeds, less
+only this expense, are remitted to the grower. The local packing-house
+unions exist solely to pick, pack, and ship; the district unions exist
+solely to handle the local problems of the association; the central union
+exists for the purpose of gathering and supplying quotations and other
+information. Each of these unions is duly incorporated and has a board of
+directors, the growers electing the directors of the district union and
+these in turn electing the directors of the central union. Each union is
+a pure democracy—one vote a man, independent of his financial status or
+his acreage.
+
+Few outsiders appreciate the enormous proportions to which California’s
+citrus industry has grown. Three of every four oranges grown in the
+United States come from Californian groves, which yield a fifth of the
+entire citrus production of the world. The orange and lemon groves of
+California now amount to approximately a quarter of a million acres and
+are increasing at the rate of twenty-five thousand acres a year, for,
+as it takes a grove five years to come into bearing and nine years to
+reach maturity, population multiplies faster than the groves can grow.
+Notwithstanding this formidable array of facts and figures, it is open
+to grave doubt whether an orange grove is a safe investment for a person
+of modest means. Though a great deal of money has unquestionably been
+made in citrus growing, there is no denying the fact that it is a good
+deal of a gamble. One of the largest and most successful growers in
+California, a pioneer in the industry, said to me not long ago: “If the
+best friend I have in the world sent me a cheque for ten thousand dollars
+and asked me to invest it for him in citrus property, I would send it
+back to him unless I knew that there was plenty of money where that came
+from. I have made money in orange growing, it is true, but only because
+there has never been a time that I have not had ample resources to fall
+back on.” And here is the other side of the shield. We stopped for lunch
+one day at the rose-covered bungalow of a young widow whose husband had
+died a few years before, leaving her with two small children and twenty
+acres of oranges.
+
+“These twenty acres,” she told me, as we sat on the terrace over the
+coffee, “pay for the maintenance of this house, for the education of
+my two youngsters, for the up-keep of my little motor-car, and for my
+annual trips back East. And I don’t have to economise by wearing cotton
+stockings, either.”
+
+I have shown you both sides of the orange question; you can decide it for
+yourself.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Some one with a poetic fancy and an imagination that worked overtime
+has asserted that Pasadena means “the Pass to Eden.” Though this is,
+to say the least, a decidedly free translation, it is, nevertheless, a
+peculiarly fitting one, for I doubt if there is any spot on earth where
+Adam and Eve would feel more at home than in the enchanting region of
+oak-studded foot-hills and poppy-carpeted valleys to which Pasadena is
+the gateway. What Cannes and Mentone and Nice are to Europe, Pasadena is
+to America: a place where the fortunate ones who can afford it can idle
+away their winters amid the same luxurious surroundings and under the
+same _cielo sereno_ that they would find on the Côte d’Azur. Enclosed
+on three sides by a mountain wall which effectually protects it from
+the cold land winds, Pasadena nestles amid its subtropical gardens on
+the level floor of the San Gabriel Valley, ten miles from _La Puebla
+de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles_, to give the second city of
+California its full name. It is said, by the way, that the people of
+Los Angeles have twenty-three distinct ways of pronouncing the name
+of their city. Mr. Charles Lummis, the author, who is a recognised
+authority on the Southwest, has attempted to secure a correct and uniform
+pronunciation of the city’s name by distributing among his friends the
+following:
+
+  “My Lady would remind you, please,
+  Her name is not ‘Lost Angy Lees’
+  Nor Angy anything whatever.
+  She trusts her friend will be so clever
+  To share her fit historic pride,
+  The _g_ should not be jellified;
+  Long _o_, _g_ hard and rhyme with ‘yes’
+  And all about Los Angeles.”
+
+It is a Spotless Town in real life, is Pasadena. It is as methodically
+laid out as a Nuremburg toy village; it is as immaculate as a new pair of
+white kid gloves. At the height of the season, which begins immediately
+after New York’s tin-horn-and-champagne debauch on New-Year’s Eve and
+lasts until Fifth Avenue is ablaze with Easter millinery, you can find
+more private cars side-tracked in Pasadena railway yards and more
+high-powered automobiles on its boulevards than at any pleasure resort
+in the world. It is much frequented by the less spectacular class of
+millionaires, to whom the frivolity of the Palm Beach life does not
+appeal, and more than once I have seen on the terrace of the Hotel Green
+enough men whose names are household words to form a quorum of the
+board of directors of the Steel Trust. Though dedicated to pleasure,
+Pasadena has an extraordinary number of large and beautiful churches,
+and, as their pulpits are frequently occupied by divines of international
+reputation, they are generally filled to the doors. In fact, I have
+counted upward of three hundred motor-cars parked in front of two
+fashionable churches in Colorado Street.
+
+Just as the Eastern visitor to San Francisco is invariably shown three
+“sights”—Chinatown, Golden Gate Park, and the Cliff House, so, when
+he goes to Pasadena, he is shown Orange Grove Avenue, taken through
+the Busch Gardens, and hauled up Mount Lowe. Orange Grove Avenue is a
+mile-long, hundred-foot-wide stretch of asphalt bordered throughout its
+entire length by palms, pepper-trees, and plutocrats. We drove along
+it quite slowly, taking a resident with us to point out the houses
+and retail any odds and ends of gossip about the people who lived in
+them, like the lecturers on the rubberneck coaches. It was almost as
+interesting as reading the advertising pages in the magazines, for most
+of the names he mentioned were familiar ones: we had seen them hundreds
+of times on soap and tooth-powder and ham and corsets and safety-razors.
+Then we motored over to the Busch Gardens, which were the hobby of the
+late St. Louis brewer and on which he lavished the profits of goodness
+knows how many kegs of beer. Though exceedingly beautiful in spots, they
+are too much of a horticultural _pousse-café_ to be wholly satisfying.
+Roses and orchids and pansies and morning-glories and geraniums and
+asters are exquisite by themselves, but they don’t look particularly
+well crowded into the same vase. That is the trouble with the Busch
+Gardens. The profusion of subtropical vegetation is characteristically
+Californian; the sweeping greensward, overshadowed by gnarled and hoary
+live-oaks, recalls the manor parks of England; the prim, clipped hedges
+and the _jets d’eau_ suggest Versailles; the gravelled promenades,
+bordered by marble seats and rows of stately cypress, bear the
+unmistakable stamp of Italy; while the cast-iron dogs and deer and gnomes
+which are scattered about in the most unexpected places could have come
+from nowhere on earth save the Rhineland.
+
+The climax of a stay in Pasadena is the trip up Mount Lowe. You can no
+more escape it and preserve your self-respect than you can go to Lucerne
+and escape going up the Rigi. From Rubio Cañon, near the city limits, a
+cable incline which in Switzerland would be called a funicular, climbs
+up the mountainside at a perfectly appalling grade. All the way up you
+speculate as to what would happen if the cable _should_ break. When two
+thirds of the way to the summit the passengers are transferred to an
+electric car which, alternately clinging like a spider to the mountain’s
+precipitous face or creeping across giddy cañons by means of cobweb
+bridges, twists and turns its hair-raising way upward to the Alpine
+Tavern, a mile above the level of the valley floor. The far-flung orange
+groves with the sun shining upon them, the white villas of Pasadena and
+Altadena peeping coquettishly from amid the live-oaks, the rounded,
+moleskin-coloured foot-hills splotched with yellow poppies, the double
+rows of blue-grey eucalyptus (in Australia they call them blue-gums)
+and the white highways which run between them, in the distance the
+towering sky-line of Los Angeles beneath its pall of smoke, and, farther
+still, the islands of San Clemente and Santa Catalina rising, violet and
+alluring, from the sun-flecked sea, combine to form a picture the Great
+Artist has but rarely equalled.
+
+Different people, different tastes. Those who prefer the whoop-and-hurrah
+of popular seaside resorts can gratify their tastes to the limit at any
+one of the long and beautiful beaches—Long Beach, Redondo, Santa Monica,
+Venice—which adjoin Los Angeles. Here the amusements which await the
+visitor are limited only by his pocketbook and his endurance. The scenes
+along this coast of joy in summer beggar description. The splendid sands
+are alive with bathers; the promenades, lined with all the peripatetic
+shows of a popular seaside resort, swarm with good-natured, jostling,
+happy-go-lucky crowds. There is no rowdyism, as is the rule rather than
+the exception at similar resorts in the East, and there is amazingly
+little vulgarity, the boisterous element which prevails, say, at Coney
+Island, being totally lacking, this being due, no doubt, to the fact
+that several of the beaches have “gone dry.” At Long Beach the really
+beautiful Virginia, than which there are not half a dozen finer seaside
+hotels in the United States, provides accommodation for those who wish to
+combine the hurly-burly of Manhattan Beach with the more sedate pleasures
+of Marblehead or Narragansett. At Redondo you can risk your neck on the
+largest scenic railway in the world (they called them roller-coasters
+when I was a boy), or you can bathe in the largest indoor swimming pool
+in the world, or you can go down on the beach and disport yourself in the
+surf of the largest ocean in the world, though it is only fair to add
+that this last is not the exclusive property of Redondo. At Santa Monica
+you can sit on a terrace overlooking the sea and eat fried sand-dabs—a
+fish for which this portion of the Californian littoral is famous and
+which is as delicious as the pompano of New Orleans. At Venice you can
+lean back in a gondola, while a gentleman of Italian extraction in white
+ducks and a red sash pilots you through a series of lagoons and canals,
+and, if you have a sufficiently vigorous imagination, you may be able
+to make yourself believe that you are in the city of the Doges. Though
+somewhat noisy and nearly always crowded—which is, of course, precisely
+what their promoters want—the Los Angeles beaches provide the cleanest
+amusements and the most wholesome atmosphere of any places of their kind
+that I know.
+
+Though Los Angeles is fifteen miles from the sea as the aeroplane flies,
+and considerably farther by the shortest railway route, the Angelenos
+have done their best to mitigate this unfortunate circumstance by
+attempting to convert the indifferent harbour of San Pedro, twenty miles
+away, into a great artificial seaport. Everything that money can do has
+been done. The national government has dredged and improved the harbour
+and built a huge breakwater at enormous cost, and Los Angeles, which
+has extended her municipal limits so as to include San Pedro, has spent
+millions more in the construction of several miles of concrete quays
+and the installation of the most powerful and modern electric loading
+machinery. There is even under serious consideration a plan for digging
+a ship-canal from San Pedro to Los Angeles so that seagoing vessels can
+discharge and take on cargo in the heart of the commercial district.
+Though in time, as a result of the impetus provided by the completion
+of the Panama Canal and the astounding growth of Los Angeles, which
+now has a population of considerably over half a million (in 1890 it
+had only fifty thousand), San Pedro will doubtless develop into a port
+of considerable importance for coastwise commerce, its limitations are
+not likely to permit of its ever becoming a dangerous rival of its great
+sister ports of San Francisco and San Diego. The attitude of the San
+Franciscans toward the laudable efforts of Los Angeles to get a harbour
+of her own is amusingly illustrated by a story they tell upon the coast.
+When the big breakwater was completed and San Pedro was ready to do
+business, Los Angeles celebrated the great event with a banquet, among
+the guests of honour being a gentleman prominent in the civic life of
+San Francisco. Toward the close of an evening of self-congratulation and
+of fervid oratory on Los Angeles’s dazzling future as one of the great
+seaports of the world, the San Franciscan was called upon to respond to a
+toast.
+
+“I have listened with the deepest interest, gentlemen,” he began, “to
+what the speakers of the evening have had to say regarding your new
+harbour at San Pedro, and I have been impressed with a feeling of regret
+that this magnificent harbour, which you have constructed at so great an
+expenditure of money and effort, is not more easy of access from your
+beautiful city. Now it strikes me, gentlemen, that you could overcome
+this unfortunate circumstance by laying a pipe-line from Los Angeles to
+San Pedro. Then, if you would suck as hard as you have been blowing this
+evening, you would soon have the Pacific Ocean at your front door.”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Strung along the coast of California, from Point Loma to Point
+Concepcion, are the Channel Islands. Counting only the larger ones, they
+number twelve: three Coronados, four Santa Catalinas, and five in the
+Santa Barbara group; but if you include them all, small as well as large,
+there are thirty-five distinct links in the island chain which stretches
+from wind-swept San Miguel to the Coronados. What the Azores, Madeira,
+and the Canaries are to Europe, these enchanted isles are to the Pacific
+Coast. They have the climatic charm of the Riviera without its summer
+heat; the delights of its winters without the raw, cold winds which sweep
+down from the Maritime Alps. With their palms and semitropic verdure they
+have all the appearance of the tropics, yet they have not a tropical
+climate, the winters having the crispness of an Eastern October and the
+summers being cooler than any portion of the Atlantic seaboard south of
+Nova Scotia.
+
+Southernmost of the chain and not more than ten miles southwest from San
+Diego as the sea-gull flies is the group of rock-bound islets known as
+Los Coronados, which belong to Mexico. Though uninhabited and extremely
+rough, they are surrounded by forests of kelp and form famous fishing
+grounds for the big game of the deep. About a hundred miles to the
+northward, off the coast of Los Angeles County, is the group of which
+Santa Catalina is the largest and the most famous. Though Santa Catalina
+is only twenty-seven miles from San Pedro, the port of Los Angeles,
+it takes the _Cabrillo_, owing to her tipsy gait and the choppy sea
+which generally prevails in the channel, nearly three hours to make the
+passage, which is as notorious for producing _mal de mer_ as that across
+the Straits of Dover.
+
+The prehistoric people who inhabited Santa Catalina during the Stone Age,
+and of whom many traces have been found in the kitchen-middens which dot
+the island, were first awakened to the fact that the world contained
+others than themselves when the Spanish sea-adventurer Cabrillo dropped
+the anchors of his caravels off their shores. Nearly a century passed
+away and then Philip III gave the island to one of his generals as a
+present. Some two hundred years were gathered into the past before Pio
+Pico, the Mexican governor of Alta California, sold the island for the
+price of a horse and saddle. In later years various other transfers took
+place from time to time, James Lick, who lies buried under his great
+telescope on Mount Hamilton, being for a period lord of the island. Later
+it was purchased as a prospective silver mine by an English syndicate,
+but the ore ran out and the disgusted Britishers were glad to dispose of
+it to the Banning Company, which is the present owner.
+
+Santa Catalina, which is about twenty-seven miles long, is shaped,
+with great appropriateness, like a fish, the smaller portion, which
+corresponds to the tail, being connected with the main body of the
+island by a sandy isthmus. The island is surrounded on all sides by a
+dense jungle of kelp and other marine plants, whose wonders visitors are
+able to view from glass-bottomed boats. The topography of the island
+is scarcely less striking than the sea gardens which surround it. From
+the mountain peaks which rise to a height of two thousand feet or more,
+V-shaped cañons, their ridges pitched like the roof of a Swiss chalet,
+sweep down, ever widening, to the silver beaches of the sea. On the
+southern slopes cactus and sage-brush, grim offspring of the desert,
+cling to the naked, sun-baked rocks; on the other, the cooler side,
+dense, growths of mountain lilac, manzanita, chaparral, elder and other
+flowering shrubs form a striking contrast. Most of the vast acreage of
+the island is a sheep ranch and wild-goat range, but one cañon at the
+eastern end is devoted to the visitor and filled by the charming town
+of Avalon with a winter population of seven or eight hundred, which
+in summer increases to that many thousand. Avalon is unlike any other
+place that I know. It is built on the shore of a crescent-shaped bay
+at the mouth of a deep cañon which almost bisects the island. At the
+upper end of this cañon a great wall formed by a mountain ridge protects
+the town from ocean winds and gives it what is probably the nearest
+approach in the world to the “perfect climate.” The quaint houses of
+the town, many of them of charming and distinctive design, cling to the
+rocky hillsides and dot the slopes of the cañons, adapting themselves,
+with characteristic Americanism, to circumstances and conditions.
+Along the water-front are the large hotels, a concert pavilion, and
+the aquarium—which, by the way, has a larger variety of marine animals
+than the famous aquarium at Naples; farther up the beach is a large and
+handsome bath-house where hundreds bathe daily, and in the cañon at the
+back of the town are the picturesque and sporting golf-links and the
+tennis-courts. Though the island offers the visitor an extraordinary
+diversity of amusements, Avalon’s _raison d’être_ is angling with rod and
+reel and everything is subservient to that. To it, as big-game hunters
+go to Africa, come fishermen from the farthermost corners of the world
+in quest of the big game of the sea. From the south side of the Bay of
+Avalon a long pier wades out into the water. Just as the bridge across
+the Arno in Florence is the resort of the gold and silver smiths, so this
+pier is the resort of the professional tuna boatmen. Along it, on either
+side, are ranged their booths or stands, each with its elaborate display
+of the paraphernalia of deep-sea fishing; a placard over each booth bears
+the owner’s name and his power-boat is anchored close by. At the end of
+the pier is a singular object which resembles a gallows. Beside it is a
+locked scales. On the gallows-like affair the great game-fish are hung
+and photographed, and on the scales all the fish taken in the tournaments
+are weighed by the official weighers of the Tuna Club.
+
+If you will glance to starboard as the _Cabrillo_ steams slowly into
+Avalon Harbour, you will notice a modest, brown frame building, with a
+railed terrace dotted with armchairs, built on piles above the water.
+This is the Tuna Club, the most famous institution of its kind in the
+world. To become eligible to membership in this unique club one must take
+on a rod of not over sixteen ounces or under six feet and with a line
+of not more than twenty-four threads, a fish weighing over one hundred
+pounds. If elected one receives the coveted blue button, which is the
+angler’s Legion of Honour and to obtain which has cost many fishermen
+thousands of dollars and years of patience, while others have won it
+in a single day. The club holds organised tournaments throughout the
+fishing season, offering innumerable trophy cups and medals of gold,
+silver, and bronze for the largest tuna, albacore, sea-bass, yellowtail,
+and bonito caught by its members. I might mention, in passing, that the
+largest tuna ever taken was caught off Santa Catalina by Colonel C. P.
+Morehouse, of Pasadena, in 1899; when placed on the official scales the
+indicator registered two hundred and fifty-one pounds. I know of no more
+interesting way in which to pass an evening than to sit on the terrace
+of the Tuna Club, looking out across the moonlit bay, and listen to
+the tales told by these veterans of rod and reel: of Judge Beaman, who
+hooked a tuna off Avalon and was towed by the angry monster to Redondo,
+a distance of thirty miles, or of Mr. Wood, who played a fish for seven
+hours before it could be brought to gaff. I have yarned with professional
+elephant and lion hunters in the clubs at Mombasa and Zanzibar, and I
+give you my word that their stories were not a whit more fascinating than
+the tales of battles with marine monsters which I listened to on the
+terrace of the Tuna Club at Avalon.
+
+Santa Catalina’s nearest neighbour is San Clemente, twenty miles long,
+whose northern shore is a wonderland of grottoes, caves, and cliffs and
+on whose rolling upland pastures browse many thousand head of sheep. A
+hundred miles or so to the northward are the islands composing the Santa
+Barbara group: Anacapa, Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, and San Miguel. The coast
+of Anacapa—“the ever-changing”—is a maze of strange caverns gnawed from
+the rock by the hungry sea, one of them, of vast size, having once served
+as a retreat for the pirates who formerly plied their trade along this
+coast, and now for sea-lions and seals, a skipper from Santa Barbara
+doing a thriving business in capturing these animals and selling them for
+exhibition purposes, the seals of Santa Cruz being in demand by showmen
+all over the world because of their intelligence and willingness to
+learn. The island, which is arid and deserted, is a sheep ranch; the fact
+that there is little or no water on it apparently causing no discomfort
+to the sheep, as their coats become so soaked at night as a result of the
+dense fogs that by morning each animal is literally a walking sponge.
+
+Barring Santa Catalina, Santa Cruz is by far the most interesting and
+attractive of the Channel Islands, being worthy of a visit if for no
+other reason than to see its painted caves, which have been worn by the
+waves into the most fantastic shapes and dyed by the salts gorgeous and
+varied colors. Viewed from the sea, Santa Cruz appears to be but a jumble
+of lofty hills, sheer cliffs, and barren, purple mountains, gashed and
+scarred by cañons and gorges in all directions. But once you have crossed
+this rocky barrier which hems the island in, you find yourself in the
+loveliest Valley that the imagination could well conceive, with palms and
+oleanders and bananas growing everywhere and a climate as perfect and
+considerably milder than that of Avalon. The island is the property of
+the Caire estate; its proprietor is a Frenchman, and French and Italian
+labourers are employed exclusively on the ranch and in the vineyards
+which cover the interior of the island. When you set foot within the
+valley you leave America behind. The climate is that of southern France.
+The vineyard is a European vineyard. The brown-skinned folk who work in
+it speak the patois of the French or Italian peasantry. The ranch-houses,
+of plastered and whitewashed brick, with their iron balconies and their
+quaint and brilliant gardens, might have been transplanted bodily from
+Savoy, while the great flocks of sheep grazing contentedly upon the
+encircling hills complete the illusion that you are in the Old World
+instead of within a hundred miles of the newest metropolis in the New.
+There are two distinct seasons at Santa Cruz—the sheep-shearing and the
+vintage—when the French and Italian islanders are reinforced by large
+numbers of Barbareños, from Santa Barbara across the channel, who pick
+the grapes in September and twice yearly shear the sheep. Though the
+surface of the island is cut in every direction by cañons, gulches,
+and precipices, the Barbareño horsemen, who are descended from the old
+Mexican vaquero stock, mounted on the agile island ponies, in rounding up
+the sheep, ride at top speed down precipitous cliffs and along the brinks
+of giddy chasms which an ordinary mortal would hesitate to negotiate with
+hobnailed boots and an alpenstock. It is a thrilling and hair-raising
+exhibition of horsemanship and nerve and, should you ever happen to be
+along that coast at shearing time, I would advise you to obtain a permit
+from the Caire family and go over to Santa Cruz to see it.
+
+Sport in the Channel Islands is not confined to fishing, for there is
+excellent wild-goat shooting on Santa Catalina and wild-boar shooting
+on Santa Cruz. Though both goats and boars are doubtless descended from
+domestic animals introduced by the early Spaniards, they have lived so
+long in a state of freedom that they provide genuinely exciting sport.
+These wild pigs are dangerous beasts for an unmounted, unarmed man to
+meet, however, for they combine the staying qualities of a Georgia
+razor-back with the ferocity of a Moroccan boar and will charge a man
+without the slightest hesitation.
+
+Taking them by and large, the Channel Islands are, I believe, unique.
+Where else, pray, within a half day’s sail of a city of six hundred
+thousand people, can one explore pirates’ caves, pick bananas from the
+trees, shoot wild goat and wild boar, angle for the largest fish in
+existence, and, no matter what the season of the year, dwell in a climate
+of perpetual spring?
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+THE COAST OF FAIRYLAND
+
+  “All in the golden weather, forth let us ride to-day,
+  You and I together on the King’s Highway.
+  The blue skies above us, and below the shining sea;
+  There’s many a road to travel, but it’s this road for me.
+
+  ...
+
+  It’s a long road and sunny, it’s a long road and old,
+  And the brown _padres_ made it for the flocks of the fold;
+  They made it for the sandals of the sinner folk that trod
+  From the fields in the open to the mission-house of God.
+
+  ...
+
+  We will take the road together through the morning’s golden glow,
+  And we’ll dream of those who trod it in the mellowed long ago;
+  We will stop at the Missions where the sleeping _padres_ lay,
+  And we’ll bend a knee above them for their souls’ sake to pray.
+
+  We’ll ride through the valleys where the blossom’s on the tree,
+  Through the orchards and the meadows with the bird and the bee,
+  And we’ll take the rising hills where the manzanitas grow,
+  Past the grey tails of waterfalls where blue violets blow.
+
+  Old conquistadores, O brown priests and all,
+  Give us your ghosts for company when night begins to fall;
+  There’s many a road to travel, but it’s this road to-day,
+  With the breath of God above us on the King’s Highway.”
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+THE COAST OF FAIRYLAND
+
+
+Following the example of the late J. Cæsar, Esquire, the well-known Roman
+politician, who districted Gaul into three parts, California might be
+divided into three provinces of pleasure: the Sierras, the Sequoias, and
+the Sands. Though nowhere separated by a journey of more than a single
+day at most, these three zones are as dissimilar in their physical and
+climatical characteristics and in the recreations they offer to the
+visitor as the coast of Brittany is from the Engadine, as the Black
+Forest is from the Italian Lakes, or, coming nearer home, as unlike
+each other as the White Mountains are unlike Atlantic City, as Muskoka
+is unlike Bar Harbour. Within the confines of a region five hundred
+miles long and barely two hundred wide may be found as many varieties of
+climate, scenery, and recreation as are provided by all the resorts of
+eastern America and Europe put together.
+
+That California’s summer climate is even more delightful than its
+whiter climate is a fact which not one outlander in a hundred seems
+able to comprehend. Because the paralysing cold of an Eastern winter
+is equalised by a correspondingly sweltering summer, your average
+Easterner, who has heard all his life of California’s winter climate,
+finds it impossible to disabuse himself of the conviction that a region
+which is so climatically blessed by Nature during one half of the year
+must, as a matter of course, be cursed with intolerable weather during
+the other half, so as to strike, as it were, an average. A climate
+which is equally inviting in January and in July is altogether beyond
+his comprehension. He fails to understand why Nature does not treat
+California as impartially as she does other regions, making her pay for
+balmy, cloudless winter days with summers marked by scorching heat and
+torrential rains. Summer in California is really equivalent to an Eastern
+June. The nights are always cool, and the blankets, instead of being
+packed away in moth balls, cover you to the chin. There is no humidity
+and the air, which in most summer climates is about as invigorating
+as lemonade, is as crisp and sparkling as dry champagne. Nor is there
+any rain. This is literal. There is, I repeat, no rain. Each August
+the Bohemian Club of San Francisco produces its famous Grove Play in a
+natural amphitheatre formed by the rocks and redwoods of the Californian
+forest. The cost of the production runs into many thousands of dollars
+and involves many months of effort, but the preparations are made with
+the absolute assurance that the performance will be unmarred by rain.
+In a quarter of a century the club members have not been disturbed by
+so much as a sprinkle. Did you ever plan a motor trip or a picnic or
+a fishing excursion during an Eastern summer only to be awakened on
+the morning of the appointed day by the rain pattering on the roof?
+That sort of thing doesn’t happen in California any more than it does
+in Egypt. Pick out your midsummer day, no matter whether it is a week
+or a month or a year ahead, and on that morning you will find the
+weather waiting for you at the front door. This absence of rain is not
+an entirely unmitigated blessing, however, for it means dust. And such
+dust! I have never seen any region so intolerably dusty as is the Great
+Valley of California in midsummer except the Attic Plain. A jack-rabbit
+scurrying across the desert sends up a column of dust like an Indian
+signal-fire. Along the coast, however, the dust nuisance is ameliorated
+to some extent by the summer fogs which come rolling in from the sea
+at dawn, leaving the countryside as fresh and sparkling as though it
+had been sprinkled by a heavy dew. The farther up the coast you go,
+the heavier these fogs become, until, north of Monterey, they resemble
+the driving mists so characteristic of the Scottish highlands. For the
+benefit of golfers I might add that these moisture-laden fogs make
+possible the chain of splendid turf golf-links which begin at Monterey,
+the courses farther south, where there is but little moisture during the
+summer, being characterised by greens of oiled sand and fairways which
+during six months of the year are as dry and hard as a bone. Artists will
+tell you that the summer landscapes of California are far more beautiful
+than its winter ones, and I am inclined to believe that they are right,
+for in June the countryside, with its unnumbered _nuances_ of green and
+purple, is transformed, as though by the wave of a magician’s wand, into
+a dazzling land of russets and burnt oranges and chromes and yellows.
+
+California may best be described as a great walled garden with one
+side facing on the sea. It is separated from those unfortunate regions
+which lie at the back of it by the most remarkable garden wall in all
+the world. This wall, which is, on an average, two miles high, is five
+hundred miles long, having Mount San Jacinto for its southern and Mount
+Shasta for its northern corner. At the back of the garden rises, peak on
+peak, range on range, the snow-clad Sierra Nevada. Gradually descending,
+the high peaks give way to lesser ones, the ranges dwindle to foot-hills,
+the foot-hills run out in cañons and grassy valleys, the valley slopes
+become clothed with forests, the forests merge into groves of gnarled,
+fantastic live-oaks, and these in turn to gorse-covered dunes which
+sweep down to meet the sea. The whole of this vast garden—mountain,
+forest, and shore—is dotted with accommodations for the visitor which
+are adapted to all tastes and to all purses and which range all the way
+from huge caravansaries which rival those of Ostend and Aix-les-Bains,
+of Narragansett and Lake Placid, to tented cities pitched beneath the
+whispering redwoods or beside the murmuring sea.
+
+Unless you have seen the Lago di Garda at its bluest, unless you have
+loitered beneath the palms which line the Promenade des Anglais at Nice,
+unless you have bathed on the white sands of Waikiki, unless you have
+motored along the Corniche Road, with the sun-flecked Mediterranean on
+the one hand and the dim blue outline of the Alps upon the other, you
+cannot picture with any degree of accuracy the beauties of this enchanted
+littoral. From Cannes, where the Mediterranean Riviera properly begins,
+to San Remo, where it ends, is barely one hundred miles, every foot of
+which is so built over with hotels and villas and straggling villages
+that you feel as though you were passing through a city, the impression
+being heightened by the gendarmes who stare at you suspiciously and by
+the admonitory notices which confront you at every turn. From Coronado,
+where the Californian Riviera begins, to the Golden Gate, where it
+ends, is six hundred miles, and every foot of that six hundred miles
+is through a veritable garden of the Lord. Along this coast date-palms
+and giant cacti give place to citrus groves ablaze with golden fruit
+and these, in turn, merge into the grey-green of the olive; the olive
+groves change to orchards of peach and apricot and prune, and these lose
+themselves in time in hillsides green with live-oaks, and the live-oaks
+turn to redwoods and the redwoods yield to pines. Bordering this historic
+coastal highway—El Camino Real, it is still called—are vast ranches
+whose hillsides are alive with grazing flocks and herds; great estates,
+triumphs of the landscape-gardener’s skill, with close-clipped hedges and
+velvet lawns from amid which rise Norman châteaux and Italian villas and
+Elizabethan manor-houses; quaint bungalows with deep, cool verandas,
+half hidden by blazing gardens; and, of course, hotels—dozens and dozens
+of them, with roses tumbling in cascades of colour over stucco walls and
+cool terraces shaded by red-striped awnings. It is indeed an enchanted
+coast, and I, who had always boasted to myself that I had seen too many
+of the world’s beauty-spots to give my allegiance to any one of them,
+have—I admit it frankly—fallen victim to its spell.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Between Los Angeles and Ventura lies one of the most flourishing
+agricultural regions in the State, the districts through which we sped
+on the wings of the winter morning being variously noted for their
+production of hay, walnuts, olives, beets, and beans. Ventura is the
+railroad brakeman’s contraction of San Buenaventura—it is obvious that
+a trainman could not spare the time to enunciate so long a name—the
+picturesque coast town and county-seat owing its origin to the mission
+which the Franciscan _padres_ founded here a year after the Battle of
+Yorktown and which is still in daily use. From Ventura we made a detour
+of fifteen miles or so for the purpose of visiting the Ojai Valley (it
+is pronounced “O-hi” if you please), a little place of surpassing beauty
+which not many people know about, like Thun in the Bernese Oberland, or
+Annecy, near Aix-les-Bains. The road to the Ojai strikes directly inland
+from the coast, following the devious course of the Matilija, climbing
+up and up and up, through forests of live-oaks and mountain meadows
+carpeted with wild flowers, until it suddenly debouches into the valley
+itself. Because the Ojai is so very beautiful, and is at the same time so
+simple and sylvan and unpretending, it is a little difficult to give an
+accurate idea of it in words. Though Mount Topotopo, the highest of the
+peaks which hem it in, is not much over six thousand feet, it can best
+be compared, I think, to some of the Alpine valleys, such as Andermatt,
+for example, or the one below Grindelwald. I do not particularly like
+the idea of continually dragging in Europe as a standard of comparison
+for things American, but so many of our people have come to know Europe
+better than they do their own country that it is the only means I have of
+making them realise the beauties and wonders on which, with the coming of
+each summer, they habitually turn their backs.
+
+To visualise the Ojai you must imagine a boat-shaped valley, ten miles
+long perhaps and a fifth of that in width, entirely surrounded by a
+wall of purple mountains. The floor of the valley is covered with lush
+green grass and dotted with thousands of gnarled and hoary live-oaks
+with venerable grey beards of Spanish moss. Through the trees peep the
+shingled, weather-beaten cottages of Nordhoff, which, with its leafy
+lanes, its shady blacksmith shop, its cosy inn, and its collection of
+country stores with the inevitable group of loungers chewing tobacco
+and whittling and settling the affairs of the nation in the shade of
+their wooden awnings, is as quaint and sleepy and unspoiled a hamlet
+as you can find west of Cape Cod. The annual tournaments of the Ojai
+Valley Tennis Club, which for nearly twenty years have been held each
+spring on the pretty oak-fringed courts behind the inn, attract the crack
+players of the coast, and here have been developed no less than six
+national champions. As you ascend the mountain slopes the character of
+the vegetation abruptly changes, the oak groves giving way to orchards
+of orange, lemon, fig, and olive, which, taken in conjunction with the
+palms and the veritable riot of flowers, give to the sides of the valley
+an almost tropical appearance. The Ojai is said to have more varieties
+of birds and flowers than any place in the United States, and I think
+that the statement is doubtless true. It is like an aviary in a botanical
+garden. Snuggled away in the mountains at the back of the Ojai are two
+equally enchanting but much less frequented valleys: the Matilija and the
+Sespe—the latter accessible only on a sure-footed horse along a mountain
+trail which is precipitous in places and nowhere overwide. In the spring
+and summer the streams which tumble through these mountain valleys are
+alive with trout jumping-hungry for the fly. If you can accommodate
+yourself to simple accommodations and plain but wholesome fare you can
+eat and sleep and fish a very delightful vacation away at the rate of two
+dollars a day or ten a week.
+
+High on the slopes of the Ojai, its brown shingles almost hidden by the
+Gold of Ophir roses which clamber over it, is a little hotel called The
+Foot-hills. It is an unpretending little inn with perhaps forty rooms at
+most. But, shades of Lucullus and Mrs. Rorer, what meals they set before
+you! Brook-trout which that very morning were leaping in the Matilija,
+hot biscuits with honey from the Sespe, huge purple figs, grapefruit
+fresh-picked from the adjacent orchard, strawberries with lashings of
+thick yellow cream. I’ve never been able to decide which I like best
+about the Ojai, its scenery or its food. But as it becomes better
+known and more people begin to go there, I suppose the same thing will
+happen to it which happened to a dear little _albergo_ in Venice which
+I once knew and loved. For many years it stood on the Guidecca, quite
+undiscovered by the tourist, and in their day had sheltered the Brownings
+and Carlyle. It was a sure refuge from the bustle and turmoil of the big
+hotels, and not infrequently I used to go there for a lunch of omelet and
+strawberries and Chianti served under a vine-clad pergola on the edge of
+the canal. The first time that I took Her to Venice, I said, as we were
+leaving the great caravansary where we were stopping:
+
+“I know a place where we will lunch. I haven’t been there for years and I
+don’t remember its name, but I think that I can find it,” and I described
+it in detail to Angelo, our gondolier.
+
+“_Si, si, signor_,” he assured me, and shoved off with his long oar.
+
+Four times we rowed up and down the Guidecca without my being able to
+locate my beloved little hotel.
+
+“This must have been the place you meant, signor,” Angelo said finally,
+pointing to a building which was rapidly being demolished and to a
+staring sign which read: “A new five-story hotel with hot and cold
+running water, electric lights, and all modern conveniences will shortly
+be erected on this site. Meals _prix fixe_ or _à la carte_. Music every
+evening.”
+
+And that, I suppose, is what will happen to my little hotel in the Ojai
+when the world comes to learn about it. So I beg you who read this not to
+mention it to any one.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Until quite recently the route from the Ojai to Santa Barbara led over
+the Casitas Pass by a precipice-bordered road so narrow and dangerous
+that the fear of it kept many motorists away. But now the Casitas is a
+thing of the past, for a highway has been built along the edge of the
+sea by what is known as the Rincon route, several miles of it lying over
+wooden causeways not unlike the viaducts for Mr. Flagler’s seagoing
+railway on the Florida keys. This portion of the coast is one long
+succession of _barrancas_, each with a rocky creek bed worn by the winter
+torrent at its bottom, so that the road builders had many obstacles with
+which to contend. It is a very beautiful highway, however, and reminds
+one at every turn of the Corniche Road along the Riviera, with the same
+lazy ocean on the one side and the same blue serrated mountains on the
+other. Through Carpinteria we ran, pausing in our flight just long enough
+to take a look at a grape-vine with a trunk eight feet in circumference,
+which has borne in a single season, so its guardian assured us, upward
+of ten tons of grapes; through Summerland, where the forest of derricks
+and the reek of petroleum suggest the hand of Rockefeller; past Miramar,
+as smothered in flowers as the heroine of d’Annunzio’s play; through
+Montecito, with its marble villas and red-roofed mansions rising above
+the groves of cypress and cedar; down the splendid Ocean Drive, where the
+great rollers from the Pacific come booming in to break in iridescent
+splendour on the silver strand; and so into Santa Barbara, the Newport
+of the West, where buildings of stone and concrete jostle elbows with
+picturesque hovels of adobe.
+
+Santa Barbara presents more curious contrasts, I suppose, than any place
+between the oceans. Drawn up beside the curb you will see a magnificent
+limousine, the very latest product of the automobile builder’s art,
+with the strength of fourscore horses beneath its sloping hood and as
+luxuriously fitted as a lady’s boudoir; a Mexican vaquero, sombreroed,
+flannel-shirted, his legs encased in high-heeled boots and fleecy chaps,
+fresh from the cattle-ranges on the other side of the mountains, will
+rein up his wiry mustang and dexterously roll a cigarette and ask the
+liveried chauffeur for a match—_Muchas gracias, Señor_. On State Street
+stands a huge concrete office-building, the very last word in urban
+architecture, with hydraulic elevators and cork-paved corridors and
+up-to-the-minute ventilating devices, and all the rest. A man can stand
+in front of that building and toss an orange into the _patio_ of a long,
+low, deep-verandaed dwelling whose walls of crumbling adobe show that it
+dates from the period when this land was ruled from Madrid instead of
+Washington. Though there are plenty of buildings dating from the Spanish
+era left, the observing stranger will note that few if any of them retain
+their original roofs of hand-made, moss-grown tiles. Why? Because the old
+Spanish tiles will bring almost any price that is asked for them, being
+in great demand for roofing the houses of the rich. In fact, I know of
+one Santa Barbara mansion which is roofed with tiles brought from the old
+cathedral at Panama. Nor have I the least doubt in the world that these
+plutocratic philistines would strip the historic mission which is Santa
+Barbara’s chiefest asset of its tiles and bells and crosses if the monks
+could be induced to sell them.
+
+Over in the section known as the Old Town all the houses are Mexican
+in character, their walls tinted yellow, pink, bright blue. This, with
+the palm-trees and the cactus in the dusty, unkempt dooryards, the
+groups of brown-faced, black-eyed youngsters by the gates, and the
+Spanish names—Garcias, Ortegas, Oteros, Espinosas, De la Guerras—which
+one sees everywhere, makes one realise that Santa Barbara is still
+Latin in everything save cleanliness. Merely to read the street
+names—Cañon Perdido, Anapamu, Arellaga, Micheltorena, Pedragoso, Chapala,
+Salsipuedes—makes you feel that you are in some Castilian town and not in
+the United States of the twentieth century at all. Why on earth, while
+they were about it, they didn’t call the town’s main thoroughfare La
+Calle del Estado instead of prosaic State Street, I fail to understand.
+This glaring inconsistency in nomenclature is almost compensated for,
+however, by the little square down on the ocean front which is called the
+Plaza del Mar. Here barelegged youngsters, guarded by anxious nurses,
+gambol upon the sands; here the old folks doze contentedly upon the green
+benches and look out to sea and listen to the music of La Monica’s band;
+here lovers sit silently, clasping hands beneath the palms, just as other
+children, other old folk, other lovers are doing in other plazas in Old
+Spain.
+
+[Illustration: “Even the imposing façade of the Arlington, with its
+arches, cloisters, terraces, and _campanarios_, suggests a Spanish
+monastery.”
+
+“A long, low, deep-verandaed dwelling whose pottery roof and walls of
+adobe show that it dates from the period when this land was ruled from
+Madrid instead of Washington.”
+
+SANTA BARBARA. A CITY OF CONTRASTS.]
+
+To understand the charm of Santa Barbara as a place of residence, you
+should stroll down State Street on a winter’s morning. Like Bellevue
+Avenue in Newport, it is the meeting-place for all the town. Youths in
+tweed jackets and flannel trousers stand beside the curbs chatting with
+pretty girls in rakish, vivid-coloured motor-cars. Dowagers descend from
+stately limousines and enter the shops to order sweetbreads and cotillion
+favours and the latest novels. Young men astride of mettlesome ponies
+trot by on their way to polo practice. Prosperous-looking, well-groomed
+men of years, who look as though they might be bank presidents and
+railway directors and financiers and probably are, pause to discuss the
+wretched weather prevailing in the East and to thank their lucky stars
+that they are out of it and to challenge each other to a game of golf.
+Slim young girls in riding-boots and beautifully cut breeches patronise
+the soda-fountains and hang over the fiction counters in the bookstore
+and chatter volubly about tennis and theatres and tango teas. It is one
+big reception, at which every one knows every one else and every one
+else’s business. Though there is a great deal of wealth and fashion in
+Santa Barbara, there is likewise a great deal of informality, which makes
+it a pleasant contrast to Pasadena, which is so painfully conscious of
+its millionaires that life there possesses about as much informality as a
+court ball.
+
+The ancient mission, which with the climate is Santa Barbara’s chief
+attraction, provides the _motif_ for the city’s architecture, and the
+citizens have made a very commendable effort to live up to it, or
+rather to build up to it, even the imposing façade of the Arlington,
+with its arches, cloisters, terraces and _campanarios_, suggesting a
+Spanish monastery far more than a great tourist hotel. It is the monks
+themselves, however, who have been the most flagrant offenders against
+the canons of architectural good taste, for within a stone’s throw of
+their beautiful old mission they have erected a college which looks for
+all the world like a shoe factory surmounted by a cupola and a cross. No
+matter from what point upon the encircling hills you look down upon the
+city, that atrocious college, as angular, uncompromising, and out of the
+picture as a New England schoolmarm at a _thé dansant_, comes up and hits
+you in the eye.
+
+[Illustration: THE MISSION OF SANTA BARBARA.
+
+“The sunlight, sifted and softened by the interlacing branches of the
+ancient sycamores, cast a veil of yellow radiance upon the crumbling,
+weather-worn façade.”]
+
+Perhaps you were not aware that about one out of every ten plays which
+flicker before your fascinated eyes on the motion-picture screen were
+taken in or near Santa Barbara, for the country round about the town is
+a moving-picture producer’s paradise and several companies have built
+their studios there and make it their permanent headquarters. Within
+a five-mile radius of the Plaza del Mar are settings in which can be
+enacted scenes laid anywhere between Cancer and Capricorn. There are
+sandy beaches which might have been made expressly for shipwrecks and
+buccaneering exploits and similar “water stuff”; there are Greek and
+Spanish villas hidden away in subtropical gardens which would provide
+backgrounds for anything from the “Odyssey” to “The Orchid-Hunter”; and
+back of them are tawny foot-hill ranges where bands of cow-punchers,
+spectacularly garbed, pursue horse thieves or valorously defend
+wagon-trains attacked by Indians, taking good care, however, to keep
+within the focal radius of the camera.
+
+Of the many things in and about Santa Barbara which appeal to the
+imagination, I think that I liked best the miniature caravels which
+surmount the massive gate-posts at the entrance to the Arlington. To most
+visitors I suppose that they are only puppet vessels, quaintly rigged
+and strangely shaped, to be sure, but nothing more. But to me they stand
+for something very definite indeed, do those little carven craft. They
+represent the _San Salvador_ and the _Vittoria_, the little caravels in
+which Juan Rodrigues Cabrillo, the intrepid Portuguese sea adventurer
+who hired his sword and services to Spain, sailed up this storied
+coast upward of three centuries ago and whose anchors rumbled down off
+these very shores. From out the mist of fiction, romance, legend, and
+fairy-tale which beclouds the early history of California, the certain
+and authenticated voyage of this Portuguese sailor of fortune stands out
+sharp and clear as the one fact upon which we can rely. Though he never
+returned from the land which he discovered, though he has been overlooked
+by History and forgotten by Fame, his adventure has become immortal, for
+he put California on the map.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Were you to turn your back on the Pacific at some point between Santa
+Barbara and San Luis Obispo and strike due eastward, you would find
+athwart your path, shortly before reaching the Nevada line, the crudest
+and most forbidding of the earth’s waste places—Death Valley. At the very
+back of California, paralleling the eastern boundary of Inyo County,
+sandwiched between the great wall formed by the High Sierras and the
+burning sands of the Colorado Desert, this seventy-five-mile-long gash
+in the earth’s surface—the floor of the valley is two hundred and ten
+feet below the level of the sea—is one of the most extraordinary regions
+in the world. It is a place of contrasts and contradictions. Though in
+summer it is probably the hottest place on earth, in winter the cold
+becomes so great that the thermometer cannot record it. Its aridity is
+so extreme that men have died from lack of moisture with water at their
+lips. Though rain is virtually unknown, the lives of the inhabitants
+are frequently menaced by the floods which result from cloudbursts. A
+mountain range, whose rocks are of such incredibly vivid colours that
+even a scene-painter would hesitate to depict them as they are, is
+called the Funeral Range. Though nearly a score of lives were lost when
+the valley was christened, and though its history from that day to this
+has been one of hardship, peril, and death, with little to relieve its
+harshness, for fully half the year Death Valley is as healthy a spot as
+any on the continent. During the other half, however, it is a sample
+package of that fire-and-brimstone hell of which the old-time preachers
+were wont to warn us. Indeed, the hereafter could hold no terrors for a
+man who was able to survive a summer in Death Valley.
+
+The valley first became known by the tragedy which gave it its name. The
+year following the discovery of gold in California a party of thirty
+emigrants, losing their heads in their mad lust for the yellow metal,
+left the well-travelled Overland Trail and struck south through this
+region in the hope of finding a short cut to the gold-fields. But they
+found a short cut to death instead, for they lost their way in the valley
+and eighteen of them perished horribly from thirst. The valley, which
+runs almost due north and south, is about seventy-five miles long, and at
+its lowest point, where the climate is the worst, it is not over eight
+miles in width. To the west the Panamints reach their greatest altitude,
+while on the east the Funeral Range is practically one huge ridge, with
+almost a vertical precipice on the side next the valley. To the south
+another range, running east and west, shuts in the foot of the valley
+and turns it into a _cul-de-sac_. Seen from the summit of the Panamint
+Range, the valley looks for all the world like a huge grey snake marked
+with narrow bands of dirty white, which are the borax deposits. Far to
+the north, gleaming in the sunlight like a slender blade of steel, is
+the Amargosa River, while on either side of the valley the ranges rear
+themselves skyward in strata of such gorgeous colours that beside them
+the walls of the Grand Cañon would look cold and drab. The vegetation is
+scant, stunted, and unhappy; the thorny mesquite shrub takes on a sickly
+yellowish tinge; the sage-brush is the colour of ashes; even the cactus,
+which flourishes on the inhospitable steppes of the adjacent Mohave
+Desert, has given up the struggle to exist in Death Valley in despair.
+But, arid as the valley is, it has two streams running through it. One,
+the Amargosa, comes in at the north end, where it forms a wash that gives
+out volumes of sulphuretted hydrogen which poisons the air for miles
+around. The other is Furnace Creek, whose waters are drinkable though
+hot. Everything considered, it is not exactly a cheerful place, is Death
+Valley.
+
+Weather Bureau officials would tell you, should you ask them, that
+when there is ninety per cent of humidity in the air the weather is
+insufferably oppressive; that air with seventy per cent of humidity is
+about right; that sixty or fifty per cent, as when a room is overheated
+by a stove or furnace, will produce headaches; while, should the
+percentage be reduced to thirty, or even forty, the air would become
+positively dangerous to health. Imagine, then, what existence must be
+like in Death Valley in midsummer, when the air, raised to furnace heat
+by its passage over the deserts, is kiln-dried in the pit below sea-level
+until its percentage of moisture is _less than one half of one per
+cent_! Effects of this ultrararefied air are observed on every hand. Men
+employed in ditch digging on the borax company’s ranch were compelled
+to sleep in the running water with their heads on stones to keep their
+faces above the surface—and this was not in the hottest weather, either.
+Furniture built elsewhere is quickly and utterly ruined. Tables warp into
+fantastic shapes. Chairs split and fall apart. Water barrels incautiously
+left empty lose their hoops in an hour. Eggs are boiled hard in the
+sand. A handkerchief taken from the tub and held up in the sun will dry
+more quickly than it would before a red-hot stove. One end of a blanket
+that is being washed will dry while the other is still in the tub. Meat
+killed at night and cooked at six in the morning is spoiled by nine.
+A man cannot go without water for an hour without becoming insane. A
+thermometer, hung in the coolest place available, for forty-eight hours
+never dropped below 104, repeatedly registered 130, and occasionally
+climbed to 137. A borax driver died, canteen in hand, atop his wagon.
+“He was that parched that his head cracked open over the top,” said a man
+who saw the body.
+
+But in October, strange as it may seem, Death Valley becomes a dreamy,
+balmy, _dolce far niente_ land, the home of the Indian summer. Later
+in the season snow falls in the mountains to the west to a depth of
+three feet or more. At the Teels Marsh borax works the thermometer has
+registered 120 in the shade of the house in August and yet before the
+winter was over the mercury froze and the temperature dropped to 50
+below zero! There is no place on earth, so far as I am aware, where so
+wide a variation has been recorded. Though it rarely if ever rains in
+the valley, cloudbursts frequently occur amid the adjacent mountain
+tops—usually in the hottest weather and when least expected—and in the
+face of the roaring floods which follow the people in the valley fly to
+the foot-hills for their lives. More appalling than the floods, however,
+are the sand-storms which are a recognised feature of life (existence
+would be a better term) in Death Valley. A sand-storm sweeping down that
+vale of desolation is a never-to-be-forgotten sight. The wind shrieks by
+with the speed of an express train. A dense brown fog completely blots
+the landscape out. Sand augers rise like slender stems joining sand and
+sky, whirling madly hither and thither through the burning atmosphere
+like genii suddenly gone mad. The air is filled with flying pebbles,
+sand, and dust. It is like a Dakota blizzard with the grit of broken
+volcanic rock in place of snow. These sand-storms commonly last for
+three days; then they end as suddenly as they began, leaving the desert
+swooning amid its shifting waves of heat. Mirages raise up spectral
+cities, groves, tree-bordered rivers, lush, green fields as though by the
+sweep of a magician’s wand. In the rarefied air the ruins of an adobe hut
+are magnified into a sky-scraper; arrow weeds become stately palms; a
+crow walking on the ground appears to be a man on horseback.
+
+The borax deposits for which the valley is famous are exactly alike in
+their general appearance: a bowl-shaped depression hemmed in by barren
+hills and at the bottom of this bowl an expanse that looks like water
+or salt or dirty snow or chalk, according to the distance, but which
+is really the boracic efflorescence on the bed of a dried-up lake.
+Walking out upon the marsh, one finds it covered with a sandy-looking
+crust through which the feet generally break, clay or slime being found
+beneath. To reach the railway the borax has to be hauled half a hundred
+miles by wagon under a deadly sun. The wagons used are huge affairs with
+wheels seven feet in diameter and tires eight inches wide, each carrying
+ten tons. Two tremendous Percherons are harnessed to the pole and ahead
+of them, fastened by double-trees to a steel chain that stretches from
+the forward axle, are nine pairs of mules, the driver from his lofty seat
+controlling his twenty animals by means of a one-hundred-and-twenty-foot
+jerk line, a bucket of stones, and a complete assortment of
+objurgations. The next time, therefore, that you chance to see a package
+of borax, stop and think what it has cost—insufferable heat, bitter cold,
+sand-storms, agonizing thirst, sunstroke—yes, sometimes even death.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+From Santa Barbara, El Camino Real, ever glowing, ever luring, bids
+_adios_ to the sea for a time and sweeps inland again through a land
+of oak groves and olive orchards and frequent outcroppings of rock,
+which, with the bleak purple mountains rising up behind it, bears so
+startling a resemblance to Andalusia that the homesick Spanish friars
+must have rubbed their eyes and wondered whether they were really in
+the New World after all. Our road, winding steadily upward under the
+shadow of giant oaks and sycamores, crossed the Santa Ynez Range by the
+Gaviota Pass (_gaviota_, I might note in passing, meaning sea-gull in the
+Spanish tongue), the car, its engines humming the monotone which is the
+motorist’s lullaby, taking the long, steep grades like a hunted cat on
+the top of a back-yard fence.
+
+From the summit of the pass we dropped down the brush-clothed flanks of
+the mountains by a zigzag road into a secluded river valley whose peace
+and pastoral loveliness were as grateful, after the stirring grandeur of
+the Gaviota, as is the five-o’clock whistle to the workman after a busy
+day. By this same pass the trail of the _padres_ ran when, a century
+ago, they walked between the missions, so that it was with peculiar
+appropriateness that there rose before us, as we swung around a shoulder
+of the mountain, the Mission of Santa Ynez, its white colonnades gleaming
+like ivory in the morning sunlight, its pottery roof forming a splendid
+note of colour against the lush, green fields, its cross-surmounted
+campanile pointing heavenward, just as the fingers of its cassocked
+builders were wont to do. Thanks to the patience and perseverance of
+Padre Alejandro, the priest in charge, the famous mission, which was
+in a deplorable state of neglect when he came there a dozen years ago,
+has been reroofed and in a large measure restored, the south corridor,
+which runs the length of the _convento’s_ front, where the brown-robed
+monks were wont to pace up and down in silent meditation, having been
+transformed into a sort of loggia, bright with sunshine and fragrant with
+flowers. It is a pleasing survival of the spirit of the old monastic days
+that no one, derelict, hobo, or tramp, who applies at the Mission Santa
+Ynez for food or shelter is ever turned away. I think the thing that
+brought home to me most vividly the hardships endured by the cowled and
+sandalled founders of these missions was a great umbrella of yellow silk,
+bordered with faded blue, which caught my attention in the sacristy.
+
+“What was this umbrella used for, father?” I inquired.
+
+“That, my son,” said Padre Alejandro, “was used by the _padres_ to shield
+themselves from the sun on their journeys between the missions, for they
+were not permitted to ride but were compelled by their vows to go always
+afoot. Though Father Serra was lame, and every step that he took caused
+him the extremest anguish, he not once but many times walked the six
+hundred miles which lay between San Diego and his northernmost mission at
+Sonoma.”
+
+One would naturally suppose that the people of California would be
+inordinately proud of these crumbling missions which have played so
+great a part in the history of their State and would take steps to have
+them preserved as national monuments, just as the French Government
+preserves its historic châteaux. But, for some unexplainable reason, just
+the opposite is true, the priests in charge of several of the missions
+assuring me that they had the greatest difficulty in obtaining funds to
+effect even the most imperative repairs, depending very largely on the
+contributions of Eastern visitors. We Americans excuse ourselves for this
+unpardonable neglect by explaining that we are still a young people,
+which, of course, is true. It is equally true, however, that by the time
+we are old enough to appreciate their historic significance and value,
+there will be no missions left to preserve.
+
+Should you who read this follow in our tire tracks, you should not fail
+to stop for luncheon at a hamlet, not far from Santa Ynez, called, from
+the olive orchards which surround it, Los Olivos. There is a little inn
+there kept by a Frenchman named Mattei—a Basque he is, if I remember
+rightly—who will serve you just such a meal as you can get at one of
+those wayside _fondas_ in the Pyrenees. The country adjacent to Los
+Olivos is noted for its fishing and shooting, so that instead of the
+roast-beef-mashed-potatoes-pie-and-coffee luncheon which the motorist
+learns to expect, we had set before us brook-trout fried in flour and
+bread-crumbs, ripe brown olives which had been soaked in garlic and oil,
+roast quail as plump as young chickens, an omelet _à la Espagnole_, and
+heaping bowls of wild strawberries, the whole washed down with a wine
+rarely seen in America—real white Chianti. It is the very unexpectedness
+of such meals which makes them stand out like white milestones along the
+gastronomical highway.
+
+More Spanish in character and atmosphere even than Santa Barbara is
+Monterey, three hundred miles farther up this enchanted coast. Careless
+of the changes which are being wrought about it, it lazes on its
+sun-kissed hillside, its head shaded by groves of palm and live-oak,
+its feet laved by the tepid waters of the bay. The town is built on the
+slopes of a natural amphitheatre, looking down upon a U-shaped harbour
+containing the bluest water you ever saw. Rising steeply behind the town
+is the hill where the Spanish _castillo_ used to stand, which is now
+surmounted by grim, black coast-defence guns and by the yellow barracks
+which house the garrison. At the foot of Presidio Hill is the sheltered
+cove where Vizcaino landed to take possession of this region in the
+name of his Most Catholic Majesty of Spain, and where, years later,
+Padre Serra also landed to take possession of it in the name of a far
+mightier King. Here, on clear days, you can see on the harbour bottom
+the bleached and whitened bones of the frigate _Natalia_, on which
+Napoleon escaped from Elba. Down by the water-front, where the soiled
+and smelly fishing-boats with their queer lateen sails rub shoulders
+with the spotless, white-hulled yachts, the old custom-house stands in
+the shadow of a patriarchal cypress. It has looked on many strange and
+thrilling scenes, has this balconied building of whitewashed adobe; it
+has seen the high-prowed caravels swinging at anchor in this bay with
+the red-and-yellow flag of Spain drooping from their carven sterns; it
+has seen the swarthy Spanish governors reviewing their steel-capped and
+cuirassed soldiery in the sun-swept plaza; it has seen the _fiestas_ and
+other merrymakings which marked the careless Mexican régime; and on that
+July day in 1846 it saw the marines in their leather chacoes and the
+blue-jackets in their jaunty hats land from the American frigates, saw
+them form in hollow square upon the plaza, saw their weapons held rigid
+in burnished lines of steel as a ball of bunting crept up the flagstaff,
+and heard the roar of cheers as it broke out into a flag of stripes and
+stars.
+
+In historic interest and significance this little town of Monterey is
+to the West what Boston is to the East. Here was planned the conquest
+of California; here the first American flag was raised upon the shores
+of the Pacific; here was the first capital and here was held the first
+constitutional convention of California. Follow Alvardo Street up the
+hill, between rows of adobe houses with pottery roofs and whitewashed
+walls set in gardens aglow with roses, fuchsias, and geraniums, to the
+group of historic buildings at the top. Here you will be shown the Larkin
+house, where dwelt the last American consul in California and in which
+were hatched the plots which led up to the American occupation; the
+picturesque home of the last Spanish governor of the Californias; Colton
+Hall, in which the first constitutional convention assembled on the day
+of California’s admission to the Union; the little one-roomed dwelling
+that Sherman and Halleck occupied when they were stationed here as young
+lieutenants and the other house where dwelt the beautiful señorita
+whom Sherman loved long years before he won imperishable fame beneath
+the eagles at Shiloh; and, by no means least in interest, the wretched
+dwelling where that immortal genius Robert Louis Stevenson lodged for a
+year or more, and the little restaurant where he took his meals, and the
+green pathways which he wandered.
+
+In the edge of the town stands the church of San Carlos, one of the
+best preserved mission churches of California, whose sacristy contains
+the most precious religious relics in the State; for here the priest in
+charge will reverently show you Father Serra’s own chasuble, cope, and
+dalmatics and the altar service of beaten silver which was brought out
+for him from Spain. The _padre-presidente_ preferred Carmel over the
+hill to all his other missions, however, and it was there, where the
+Carmel River ripples down between the silent willows to its mother, the
+sea, that he came back to die. There, beneath the altar of the ancient
+mission, his ashes lie buried in the land which his labours transformed
+from a savage wilderness to a vineyard of the Lord.
+
+From Monterey you may motor or drive or street-car or foot it to Del
+Monte, which is only a mile away. Whichever method you choose, I should
+take the longest way around if I were you, so as to approach the hotel
+through the glorious wild-wood by which it is enveloped. And after you
+have twisted and turned for a mile or more through a wilderness of
+bloom and foliage, like the children in the story-book in search of
+the enchanted castle, and after you have concluded that you have lost
+your way and are ready to abandon the quest, all unexpectedly you catch
+a glimpse of its red-roofed towers and spires and gables rising above
+the tree tops. Built in the Queen Anne style of thirty years ago, huge
+and rambling and not unpicturesque, surrounded by acres of lawn and the
+finest live-oaks I have ever seen, it bears a quite striking resemblance
+to the Gezireh Palace—now a hostelry for tourists—which the Khedive
+Ismail built on an island in the Nile. Del Monte suggests not one, but
+many places, however. Its lawns and live-oaks, the perfection of which is
+the result of more than a third of a century of care, in many respects
+recall the famous country-seats of England, though the vegetation, of
+course, is very different; the gardens, which offer a continual feast
+of colour, remind one of Cintra, outside of Lisbon, while the cypress
+maze is a duplicate of that at Hampton Court. The artificial lake,
+surrounded by subtropical vegetation and approached by a palm-bordered
+esplanade, has about it a suggestion of a Damascus garden that I know,
+while from the golf-links—than which there are none better in the
+West—looking across the tree tops to where the white houses of Monterey
+overhang the bay, it is difficult to believe that you are not on the
+hill behind Mustapha Superieur, looking down upon the white buildings
+of Algiers. Although Del Monte is an enchanted garden at any time of
+the year, the “high season” is in July and August, when the golfing,
+polo-playing set flock down from Burlingame and San Mateo exactly as
+the corresponding section of society on the other side of the continent
+flocks to Newport and Bar Harbour. During these two months the polo field
+resounds to the thunder of galloping hoofs and the click of mallet and
+ball; the golf-links on the rolling downs above the sea are alive with
+players taking part in the great midsummer tournament which is the most
+important golfing fixture on the Pacific Coast; and in the evenings
+white-shouldered women and white-shirted men dip and whirl and glide to
+fervid music upon a glassy floor or stroll amid the gardens which the
+light of the summer moon and the fragrance of the flowers transform into
+a fairyland.
+
+The logical way to follow El Camino Real is from south to north, as we
+did, for that was the way of the _padres_; so it was quite natural that
+our next stop after leaving Monterey and its Mission of Carmel should be
+at the secluded and almost forgotten Mission of San Juan Bautista. San
+Juan Bautista—Saint John the Baptist—is just such a lazy, sleepy, pretty
+little hamlet as you can find at almost every turning of a Catalonian
+road. Along its lanes—they are too narrow and straggling to be dignified
+with the name of streets—stand quaint adobe houses smothered in jasmine
+and passion-vine, hedged in by fences of prickly pear, and shaded by
+cypress and untidy eucalyptus trees. Though the plaza up the hill, where
+the Spanish soldiery, and after them the Mexican, used to parade and
+where the _fiestas_ used to be held, is weed-grown and lonely, it is not
+deserted, for the townsfolk still go flocking to mass in obedience to the
+summons of the mission bells, and, thanks to the renaissance of the rural
+districts caused by the ubiquitous motor-car, the dining-room of the
+hotel, once the barracks of the Mexican garrison, is nearly always filled
+with guests. Close by the hotel is the old adobe building which served as
+the headquarters of General Castro, the Mexican commander, and back of
+the town rises the hill known as the Hawk’s Nest, where Frémont and his
+handful of American frontiersmen fortified themselves and defied Castro
+and his soldiers to come and take them. San Juan Bautista is a place
+where I could have loitered for a week instead of a day, for who, with a
+spark of romance in his soul, could resist the appeal at the top of the
+hotel note-paper: “A relic of the distant past, when men played billiards
+on horseback and the trees bore human fruit”?
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+THE VALLEY OF HEART’S DELIGHT
+
+  “He touched my eyes with gladness, with balm of morning dews,
+  On the topmost rim He set me, ’mong the hills of Santa Cruz,
+  And I saw the sunlit ocean sweep, I saw the vale below—
+  The Vale of Santa Clara in a sea of blossomed snow.”
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+THE VALLEY OF HEART’S DELIGHT
+
+
+I first heard about the place from the captain of a little coasting
+steamer in the Indian Ocean. It was moonlight, I remember, and we were
+leaning over the rail, watching the phosphorescent waves curl away from
+the vessel’s bow. We had both seen more than our shares of the world
+and we were exchanging opinions of what we had seen over the captain’s
+Trichinopoli cheroots. Perhaps it was the effect of the moonlight on the
+silent waters, but I am more inclined to think it was the brandy which
+his silent-footed Swahili steward had just served us, which caused him to
+grow confidential.
+
+“A few more voyages and I’m going to quit the sea,” he remarked.
+
+“Yes?” said I interrogatively. “And what will you do then? Get a berth as
+harbour master at Shanghai or port captain at Suez or somewhere?”
+
+“No,” said he, “I’m going to build a house for myself and the missis in
+a valley that I know; a house painted white with green blinds and with a
+porch as broad as a ship’s deck, and I’m going to have a fruit orchard
+and a flower garden with red geraniums in it, and I’m going to raise
+chickens—white Wyandottes, I think, but I’m not quite certain.”
+
+“Of all things!” I ejaculated. “My imagination isn’t elastic enough for
+me to picture an old sea-dog like you settled down in a white farmhouse
+raising fruit and chickens. Where is all this going to be?”
+
+“In the Santa Clara,” said he.
+
+“It sounds like the name of a Pullman car or a tune in the hymn-book,”
+said I.
+
+“It’s neither,” said he; “it’s a valley in California.”
+
+“Tell me about it,” I suggested.
+
+“I can’t,” said he. “It’s too beautiful—in the spring the whole valley
+is a sea of blossoms, like cherry season in Japan; and beyond are green
+hillsides that might be those of Devonshire; and looming up back of the
+hills are great brown-and-purple mountains that look like those at the
+back of Cintra, in Portugal (that’s some place, too, believe _me_); and
+there is always the smell of flowers in the air, such as you get in
+Bulgaria in the attar-of-rose season; and I’ve never seen a sky as blue
+anywhere else except in the Ægean; and——”
+
+“That’s enough,” I interrupted. “That’s where I’m going next. Any place
+that will make a hardened old sea captain become poetical must be worth
+seeing.”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Months later, in Algiers, I found myself sitting at a small iron table on
+a sun-bathed terrace overlooking the orange-and-olive-and-palm-fringed
+shores of the Mediterranean. There are only five views to equal it in all
+the world. As I sat gazing out across the waters toward France a fellow
+countryman strolled up and dropped into the seat beside me. I knew that
+he was an American by the width of his hat brim and because he didn’t
+wait for an introduction.
+
+“Fine morning,” I remarked pleasantly. “Wonderful view from this terrace,
+isn’t it? And the sunshine is very warm and cheering.”
+
+“Pretty fair,” he assented gloomily; “pretty fair for this place. But in
+the part of the world I come from fine mornings and wonderful views and
+sunshine are so darned common that it never occurs to us to mention them.”
+
+“Where is your home, may I ask?” I inquired, for want of anything better
+to say.
+
+“In the Santa Clara Valley of California,” he answered proudly. “God’s
+favourite country, sir! He took more pains with it than any place he ever
+made, not even barring the original Eden. This is a very pleasing little
+view, I admit; a very pleasing one, but I wish I could take you up on the
+slopes of Mount Hamilton just before sunset and let you look across the
+valley to Los Gatos when the prune orchards are in blossom. As for the
+climate, why, say, my friend——”
+
+“Yes, yes, I know,” I said soothingly, for when a man gets a lump in his
+throat while talking about his native land it’s time to change the topic
+of conversation. “I know; I’ve heard all about it before. Fact is, I’m on
+my way there now.”
+
+“You _are_?” he exclaimed incredulously, and, leaning back in his chair,
+he clapped his hands until the Arab waiter came running. “Garsong,” said
+he, “bring us a bottle of the best wine you’ve got.” When the amber
+fluid was level with the rims we touched our glasses:
+
+“It’s poor stuff compared with the wine we make in California,” he said,
+“but it’ll do to drink a toast in.” He stood up, bareheaded and very
+straight, as British officers do when they drink to the king.
+
+“Friend,” said he, and his voice was husky, “here’s to God’s favourite
+valley—here’s to the Santa Clara.”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+If you go to the Santa Clara when I did, which was in March, when the
+unfortunates who live beyond the Sierra Nevada are still waking up to
+find ice in their water-pitchers, you will find that the people of the
+valley are celebrating the Feast of the Blossoms. It is a very beautiful
+festival, in which every man, woman, and child in this fifty-mile-long
+garden of fruit and flowers takes part, but you cannot appreciate its
+true significance until you have climbed to a point on the slopes of
+the mountains which form the garden wall, where the whole enchanting
+panorama lies before you. Did you ever see one hundred and twenty-five
+square miles of trees in snow-white blossom at one time? No, of course
+not, for nowhere else in all the world can such a sight be seen. I, who
+have listened to the voice of spring on five continents and in more than
+five-score countries, assure you that it is worth the seeing.
+
+Personally, I shall always think of the Santa Clara as a sleeping maiden,
+fragrant with perfume and intoxicatingly beautiful, lying in a carven
+bed formed by the mountains of Santa Cruz, curtained by fleecy clouds,
+her coverlet of eiderdown tinted with rose, quilted with green, edged
+with yellow; her pillow the sun-kissed waters of San Francisco Bay. When
+you come closer, however, you find that the coverlet which conceals her
+gracious form is in reality an expanse of fragrant blossoms; that the
+green tufts are the live-oaks which rise at intervals above the orchards
+of cherry, peach, and prune; and that the yellow edging is the California
+poppies which clothe the encircling hills.
+
+Sentimentally and commercially it is fitting that the people of the
+Santa Clara Valley should celebrate the coming of the blossoms, for they
+are at once its chief beauty and its chief wealth. In a single season
+these white and fragrant blossoms have provided the breakfast tables of
+the world with one hundred and thirty million pounds of prunes, to say
+nothing of those luscious pears, peaches, cherries, and apricots which
+beckon temptingly from grocers’ windows and hotel buffets from Salt Lake
+City around to Shanghai. No other single fruit of any region, not even
+the fig of Smyrna, the date of Tunis, the olive of Spain, or the currant
+of Greece, is so widely distributed as the prune of the Santa Clara
+Valley. The people of the valley will assure you very earnestly that the
+reason their wives and daughters have such lovely complexions is because
+they make it a point to eat prunes every morning for breakfast. Whether
+due to the prunes or not, I can vouch for the complexions.
+
+Barring the coast of Tripolitania, where it is harvest time all the year
+round, but where the Arabs are offering no inducements to settlers, and
+the Imperial Valley, whose summer heat makes it undesirable as a place
+of permanent residence, the Santa Clara Valley has more crops, through
+more months of the year, than any place I know. Ceres makes her annual
+appearance in February with artichokes—the ones that are priced at a
+dollar a portion on the menus of New York’s fashionable hotels; in March
+the people of the valley are having spring peas with their lamb chops;
+April brings strawberries, although, as a matter of fact, they are to
+be had almost every month of the year; in May the cherry pickers are at
+work; the local churches hold peaches-and-cream sociables in June; by
+the ides of July the valley roads are alive with teams hauling cases
+of pears, plums, and apricots to the railway stations; August, being
+the month of prunes, is marked with red on the Santa Clara calendars;
+September finds the presses working overtime turning grapes into wine,
+and the prohibitionists likewise working overtime trying to turn “wet”
+communities into “dry” ones; in October the men are at work in the
+orchards picking apples and the women are at work in the kitchens baking
+apple pies; the huge English walnuts which wind up dinners half the
+world around are harvested in November; while in December and January
+the prodigal goddess interrupts her bounty just long enough to let the
+fortunate worshippers at her shrine observe the midwinter holidays. After
+such a recital it is almost needless to add that the valley boasts both
+the largest fruit-drying houses and the largest fruit canneries in the
+world, for in the Santa Clara they dry what they can and can what they
+can’t.
+
+The _chef-lieu_ of the valley is San José. It may interest Easterners to
+know that Don Caspar de Portola and his men, marching up from the south
+in their search for the lost Bay of Monterey, had looked down from the
+valley’s mountain rim upon the spot where the city now stands four years
+before the Boston Tea Party; while that indomitable Franciscan, Father
+Junipero Serra, had established the great Mission San José, and was hard
+at work Christianising and teaching the Indians of this region before
+the ink was fairly dry on the Declaration of Independence and while the
+three thousand miles of country which lies between the valley of the
+Santa Clara and the valley of the Connecticut was still an unexplored
+wilderness. The last time that the gentlemen with the census books
+knocked at San José’s front doors they reported that the city had forty
+thousand people, and it keeps agrowing and agrowing. It has about four
+times as many stores as any place of its size that I can recall, but that
+is because the local merchants depend on the trade of the rural rather
+than the urban population, for the hardy frontiersmen who rough it in
+this portion of the West run in to do their shopping by automobile or
+trolley-car or else give their orders over the telephone. There are two
+things about the city which I shall remember. One is the street-cars,
+which have open decks forward and aft, with seats running along them
+lengthwise, on which the passengers sit with their feet hanging over
+the side, as though on an Irish jaunting-car. In pleasant weather the
+display of ankles on the street-car makes them look, from the sidewalks,
+like moving hosiery advertisements. The other municipal feature which
+riveted my attention was a sort of attenuated Eiffel Tower, sliced off
+about half-way up, which straddles the two main streets of the city at
+their intersection, and from the top of which a powerful search-light
+signals to the traveller on the valley highroads, to the shepherd on the
+mountains, to the fisherman on San Francisco Bay: “Here is San José.”
+
+If there is anywhere a royal road to learning, it is the fifty-mile-long
+one which meanders up the Santa Clara Valley, for there are more
+schoolhouses scattered along it than there are milestones, and they’re
+not the little red schoolhouses of which our grandfathers brag, either.
+Every time our motor-car swung around the corner of a prune orchard we
+were pretty certain to find a schoolhouse of concrete, usually in the
+overworked mission style of architecture, with roses and honeysuckle and
+wistaria clambering over the door. The youngster who wants to travel the
+royal road to knowledge can commence his journey in one of the concrete
+schoolhouses at Gilroy, which is at the southern portal of the valley;
+the second stage will take him up to the great high school at San José,
+which is so extensive and handsome and completely equipped that it would
+make certain famous Eastern colleges feel shamefaced and embarrassed; the
+final stage along this intellectual highway is only eighteen miles in
+length and ends at Palo Alto, amid whose live-oaks rise the yellow towers
+and red-tiled roofs of that great university which Leland Stanford,
+statesman and railway builder, founded in memory of the son he lost,
+and which he endowed with the whole of his enormous fortune. He gave
+the eight thousand acres of his famous stock-farm for the purpose, and
+to-day white-gowned “co-eds” wander, book in hand, where the paddocks
+once stood, and spike-shod sprinters dash down the track, where the great
+mare Sunol used to put close on half a mile a minute behind her spinning
+sulky wheels. It is one of the great universities of the world, is Leland
+Stanford, Jr., and, with its cloistered quadrangles, its wonderful mosaic
+façades, and its semitropical surroundings, certainly one of the most
+beautiful. It stands, fittingly enough, at the valley’s northern gateway
+and at the end, both literally and metaphorically, of the royal road to
+learning; so that the valley-bred youth who passes through its doors with
+his sheepskin in his pocket finds himself on the threshold of that great
+outside world for which, without leaving his native valley, he has been
+admirably prepared.
+
+Speaking of roads, they have built one running the length of the State
+and, therefore, of the Santa Clara Valley, which would cause Mr. John
+MacAdam, were he still in the land of the living, to lift his hat in
+admiration. It is really a restoration of El Camino Real, that historic
+highway which the Spanish conquistadores built, close on a century and
+a half ago, for the purpose of linking up the one-and-twenty missions
+which the indefatigable Padre Serra flung the length of California as
+outposts of the church, and which did more to open up the Pacific Coast
+to civilisation and colonisation and commerce than any undertaking save
+the construction of the Southern Pacific. Were this highway in the East I
+am perfectly sure that they would cheapen it by calling it the Shore Road
+or the State Pike, but it speaks well for California’s appreciation of
+the picturesque and the appropriate that she has decided to cling to the
+historic name of El Camino Real—the Royal Road—the King’s Highway.
+
+Although the Santa Clara Valley, properly speaking, ends at Palo Alto,
+the ultrafashionable colonies of Burlingame, San Mateo, and Hillsboro
+may, for the purposes of this chapter, at least, be considered as within
+its compass. These are to the Pacific Coast what Lenox and Tuxedo are
+to the Eastern world of fashion: places where the rich dwell in great
+country houses set far back in splendid parks, with none but their fellow
+millionaires for neighbours and with every convenience for sport close at
+hand. Full of colour and animation are the scenes at their ivy-covered
+stations when the afternoon trains from San Francisco pull in; for here,
+at least, the motor-car has not ousted the horse from his old-time
+popularity, and the gravelled driveways are alive with tandem carts and
+runabouts and spider phaetons, with smart grooms in whipcord liveries and
+leather gaiters standing rigidly at the heads of the horses. Probably
+the finest examples of architecture in California are to be seen in the
+neighbourhood of Burlingame and San Mateo, the only other communities
+which can rival them in this respect being Montecito, near Santa Barbara,
+Oak Knoll, outside of Pasadena, and Hollywood, a suburb of Los Angeles.
+
+The East and, for that matter, all of the rest of America owe
+California a debt of gratitude for her development of a native domestic
+architecture. The first true homes for folk of real culture but moderate
+incomes were produced on the Pacific Coast. In the type of house that
+abounds to-day in California comfort, tradition, and art have been
+skilfully and interestingly combined. Based on the old missions, which
+in their turn drew inspiration from the ideals of the Spaniard and the
+Moor, modern Californian architecture has nevertheless made servants, not
+masters, of those traditions. Though drawing from the romantic background
+of the conquistadores and the _padres_ the sturdy spirit, the simple
+lines, and the practical details of the old frontier buildings, the
+main virtue of these Californian homes is that they possess a definite
+relation to the soil and climate and the habits of the people. But,
+though back of each design lurks the motive of the Spanish missions,
+there is no monotony, no sameness; but, on the contrary, a remarkable
+variety of design. Each possesses the characteristic features of the
+Californian home: the low, wide-spreading roof lines, the solid walls,
+generally of concrete or plaster, the frank use of structural beams,
+the luxurious spaces of veranda and balcony, the tiled terraces and
+pottery roofs, the cool, inviting patios, and the quiet loveliness of
+the interiors. It is true, of course, that many house-builders have been
+unable to resist the temptation of Colonial, Norman, Dutch, and Tudor,
+but, as their culture increases, Californians are fast realising that an
+architecture designed for inhospitable climates is utterly incongruous in
+California’s semitropical surroundings.
+
+It rained one of the days that I spent in San José, and my genial host
+was so apologetic about it that I actually felt sorry for him. Though
+rain is seldom unwelcome in a horticultural country, the residents
+don’t like to have it come down in bucketfuls when visitors whom they
+are anxious to impress with the perfection of their climate are around.
+They are as proud of their climate in the Santa Clara Valley as a boy
+is of “his first long pants,” and to back up their boasts the residents
+carry in their pockets the blue slips of the Government Weather Bureau’s
+monthly reports to show the stranger. I’m not fond of figures, unless
+they happen to be on cheques drawn in my favour, but I was impressed by
+the fact, nevertheless, that in 1913 the valley had only fifty-eight
+cloudy days, sixty-four which were overcast, and two hundred and
+thirty-four in which there was not a cloud to dim the turquoise of the
+sky. Carrying my investigations a little further, I found that during the
+greater part of February, which is the coldest month of the year, the
+mercury remained above 55, only four times dropping as low as 33, while
+there were only four days in August when the thermometer needle crept up
+to 79, and once in the same month it fell as low as 42, thus giving a
+solar-plexus blow to the idea stubbornly held by most Easterners that in
+summer California is an anteroom to Hades.
+
+To this unvarying geniality of the climate and to the careless,
+happy-go-lucky, pleasure-loving strain handed down from the Spanish and
+Argonaut pioneers are due the invincible gaiety and the passionate love
+for the out-of-doors which are among the most likeable characteristics
+of the Californians. One of the first things that strikes an Eastern
+visitor is the fact that the Californians can always find time for
+amusement, and they enter into those amusements with the enthusiasm and
+the whole-souled gaiety of children. On the Pacific Coast recreation is
+considered quite as important as business—and business does not suffer,
+either. There is about these Californian merrymakings an abandon, a
+joyousness, a childlike freedom from restraint which is in striking
+contrast to the restrained, self-conscious pleasures of the older, colder
+East. To the colourful _fiestas_ of the Spanish and Mexican eras may be
+traced the out-of-door festivities which play so large a part in the life
+of the people on the Pacific Coast, such as the midwinter Tournament of
+Roses at Pasadena, the Portola Festival with which the San Franciscans
+celebrate the discovery of San Francisco Bay, the Feast of the Blossoms
+held each spring in the Santa Clara Valley, the Battle of Flowers which,
+until very recently, was a feature of life at Santa Barbara, but which,
+for some unexplainable reason, has been abandoned, the Rose Festival at
+Portland, the Potlatch at Seattle. Under much the same category are the
+classic plays given in the wonderful Greek Theatre at the University
+of California, the sylvan masks produced by the colony of authors and
+artists at Carmel-by-the-Sea, and the Bohemian Club’s celebrated Grove
+Play.
+
+No account of Californian festivals is in any way complete without at
+least a brief description of the last named, which is characterised
+by a beauty of production and a dignity of treatment that make it in
+many respects an American Bayreuth. For forty years the Bohemian Club
+of San Francisco has gone into the California redwoods each summer for
+a fortnight’s outing. This famous club, founded in 1872 by a coterie
+of actors, newspaper men, and artists, now has a membership of upward
+of thirteen hundred, representing all that is best in the art, music,
+literature, drama, and science of the West. No one may become a member
+who has not achieved a distinction of sorts in one of these fields, the
+anticommercial spirit which animates the club being aptly expressed by
+the quotation at the top of its note-paper: “Weaving spiders come not
+here.” The Bohemian Grove, which consists of about three hundred acres
+of forest and contains some of the finest redwood giants in California,
+stands on the banks of the Russian River, ninety miles to the north of
+San Francisco. The stately redwoods stand in a gentle ravine whose
+floor and slopes in the rainless midsummer are bright with the canvas
+of the club encampment, which resembles a sort of sylvan Durbar; for
+the camps, many of which are elaborately arranged and furnished, are
+made of canvas in the gayest colours—scarlet and white, green and white,
+blue and yellow—with flags and banners and gorgeous Oriental lanterns
+everywhere. Here, during the first two weeks in every August, congregate
+close on a thousand men who have done things—authors of “best sellers,”
+builders of bridges and dams and lighthouses and aqueducts, painters
+whose pictures hang on the line at the Paris Salon or on the walls of
+the Luxembourg, composers of famous operas, writers of plays which have
+made a hit on Broadway, presidents of transcontinental railway systems,
+celebrated singers, men who have penetrated to the remotest corners of
+the earth—wearing the dress of the woods, calling each other “Bill” or
+“Jim” or “Harry” as the case may be, and becoming, for the time being,
+boys once more. A steep side of the ravine forms the “back-drop” of the
+forest stage, the spectators—no woman has ever taken part in the play
+or witnessed an original performance—sitting on redwood logs under the
+stars. The Grove Play is an evolution from a simpler programme, which was
+originally known as “High Jinks.” It is now a serious composition, with
+music, largely symbolical in character, created entirely by members of
+the club, in which many artists of international fame have taken part,
+always in the amateur spirit.
+
+But to return to our Valley of the Santa Clara. In the Panhandle of
+Texas a ranch usually means anywhere from five thousand acres upward
+of uncultivated land; in the Santa Clara a ranch means anywhere from
+five acres upward of the most highly cultivated soil in the world. East
+of the Sierra Nevada, where scientific fertilisation and intensive
+cultivation are still wearing short dresses, five acres are scarcely
+worth considering, but five acres in California, properly planted and
+cared for, ofttimes supports a family in something akin to luxury. I had
+pointed out to me in the Santa Clara Valley at least a score of small
+holdings which yield their owners annually in the neighbourhood of five
+hundred dollars an acre. All of these hardy pioneers have telephones and
+electric lights and electric power for pumping and daily newspaper and
+mail deliveries. When they have any business in town, instead of going
+down to the corral and roping a bronco, they either stroll through the
+orchard and hail an electric car or they crank up the family automobile.
+
+While I was in the Santa Clara Valley I asked a number of those questions
+to which every prospective home seeker wants to know the answers. I
+found that improved land, planted to prune, apricot, or peach trees old
+enough to bear, can be had all the way from four hundred to seven hundred
+dollars an acre, according to its location. At a conservative estimate
+this land, so I was told by a banker whose business it is to lend
+money on it (and you can trust a banker for never being oversanguine),
+can be depended upon to yield an income of from one hundred to three
+hundred dollars an acre, it being by no means an unusual thing for a
+well-managed ranch to pay for itself in two or three years. I found
+that a ten-acre orchard—which is quite large enough for one man to
+handle—could be had for five thousand dollars, the purchaser paying,
+say, two thousand dollars down and carrying the balance on a mortgage
+at seven per cent, which is the legal rate of interest in California.
+The local building and loan associations would lend him two thousand
+dollars to build with, which he could repay, at the rate of twenty-four
+dollars a month, in ten years. Two thousand dollars, I might add, will
+build an extremely attractive and comfortable six-room bungalow, for the
+two chief sources of expense to the Eastern home builder—cellars and
+furnaces—are not necessary in California. Such a place, provided its
+owner has horse sense, is not afraid of work, and knows good advice when
+he hears it, should yield from fifteen hundred to two thousand dollars a
+year, in addition to which the whole family can find ready employment,
+at excellent wages, in the orchards or packing-houses during the fruit
+season. For this work a man receives from two dollars to two dollars and
+a half a day and can count on fairly steady employment through at least
+eight months of the year, while many women and girls, whose deft fingers
+make them particularly valuable in the work of wrapping and packing
+the finer grades of fruit, can earn as high as twenty dollars a week
+during the busy season. This work, I might add, attracts an altogether
+exceptional class of people, for university and high-school students and
+the wives and daughters of small ranchers eagerly avail themselves of
+this opportunity to add to their incomes, the fruit orchards, during the
+picking season, looking less like a hive of workers than like a gigantic
+picnic among the shaded orchard rows, in which the whole countryside is
+taking part.
+
+The air in the Santa Clara Valley is said to be the clearest in the
+world, though they tell you exactly the same thing at Colorado Springs,
+and in the Grand Cañon of Arizona, and at Las Vegas, N. Mex. The Santa
+Clara air is clear enough, however, for all practical purposes. In fact,
+its extraordinary clarity sometimes lends itself to extraordinary uses. I
+have a friend whose residence is set on a hillside high on the valley’s
+eastern rim. One day, idly scanning the distant landscape through his
+field-glasses, he noted that the field hands employed on the ranch of a
+neighbour on the opposite hillside, twenty odd miles away, knowing that
+they could not be observed by their employer, were loafing in the shade
+instead of working. My friend called up his neighbour by telephone and
+told him that his men were soldiering, whereupon that gentleman rode up
+the hillside and gave his astonished employees such a tongue-lashing that
+when the six-o’clock whistle blew that night they had blisters on their
+hands.
+
+Lack of labour is one of the most serious problems with which the
+fruit-growers of California have had to contend, though it is believed
+that this will be remedied, in some measure at least, by the flood of
+European immigration which will pour through the Panama Canal. Twenty
+years ago the labour problem was solved by the Chinaman, who was the most
+industrious and dependable labourer California has ever had, but with the
+agitation which resulted in closing our doors to the Celestial most of
+the Chinese in California entered domestic service and now command such
+high wages—fifty dollars a month is the average wage of a Chinese house
+boy or cook—that only the well-to-do can afford to employ them. Time
+and again I have heard clear-headed Californians of all classes assert
+that the admission, under certain restrictions, of a hundred thousand
+selected Chinese would prove an unqualified blessing for California. The
+relentless war waged by California—or, rather, by the labour element
+of California—against the admission of Chinese immigrants was based on
+the difference in the standard of living. The yellow man could live in
+something very akin to luxury on about a tenth of the ration required for
+a white man’s support. In other words, the Chinaman could outstarve the
+white man; therefore the Chinaman must go. And there has never been any
+one to take his place.
+
+Outside of the Pacific Coast the impression seems to prevail that the
+Chinaman’s place has been taken by the Japanese. This is not so. To
+begin with, Japanese labour is not cheap labour. The Japanese do not
+work for less pay than white men, unless it be temporarily, so as
+to obtain the white man’s job. Japanese house cleaners and gardeners
+demand and receive a minimum wage of thirty-five cents an hour, and
+in California, where most people of modest means are compelled to do
+their own housework because of the scarcity of and exorbitant wages
+demanded by domestic servants, housewives are thankful to get Japanese
+by the day at any price. Their standard of living is as high as that of
+other nationalities; much higher, in fact, than that of peoples from
+southern Europe. There is no pauperism among them and astonishingly
+little crime. They dress well, eat well, spend money lavishly for
+entertainment. But the Jap, unlike the Chinaman, “talks back.” He is not
+in the least impressed by the American’s claim of racial superiority.
+In fact, he considers himself very much better than the white man and,
+if the opportunity presents itself, does not hesitate to say so. He is
+patronising instead of patronised. He has proved that he is the white
+man’s equal in every line of industry and in some his superior. Three
+times in succession a Japanese grower has virtually cornered the potato
+crop of the Pacific Coast. The Japanese has driven the Greek and the
+Portuguese out of the fishing industry, in which they believed that they
+were impregnably intrenched. As a result of these things he steps off the
+sidewalk for no one. He knows that back of him stands a great empire,
+with a powerful fleet and one of the most efficient armies in existence,
+and he takes no pains to disguise this knowledge in his relations with
+the white man.
+
+To tell the truth, the prohibition of land ownership, the segregation of
+school children are but pretexts put forward by a jealous and resentful
+white population to teach the yellow man his place. The assertion that
+Japanese ownership of land is a menace to white domination is the veriest
+nonsense, and every Californian knows it. There are ninety-nine million
+acres in California and of this area the Japanese own or lease barely
+thirty thousand acres, or _twelve hundredths of one per cent_. The
+fifty-eight thousand Japanese in California form but two and one half per
+cent of the total population. These figures, which are authoritative,
+are not very menacing, are they? The bulk of the Japanese reside in
+Los Angeles County and in the delta of the Sacramento and San Joaquin
+Rivers, where they work gigantic potato fields and truck-gardens and
+asparagus beds. Now, Los Angeles, mind you, has never demanded Japanese
+exclusion. Protests poured into Sacramento from the white settlers of
+the delta country against the passage of the anti-alien land laws. Why,
+then, you ask, does the entire Pacific Coast, including British Columbia,
+exhibit such intense dislike for the Jap? Because, as I have said, he
+has shown that he can beat the white man at his own game; because he is
+not in the least meek and humble as befits an alien and “inferior” race;
+because he believes in his heart that in an armed conflict Nippon could
+whip the United States as thoroughly as she whipped China and Russia;
+because, as a result of this belief, he perpetually swaggers about
+with his hat cocked on one side and a chip perched invitingly on his
+shoulder; because, in short, his very manner is a constant irritation to
+the Californians. And until the status of the Japanese upon the Pacific
+Coast is definitely and finally established by international treaty this
+irritation may be expected to continue and to increase.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I wonder if sometimes, at that sunset hour when the lengthening shadows
+of the hills fall athwart the blossoming orchards, there do not
+wander through the Santa Clara those whom the eyes of mortals cannot
+see—Portola, swart of face under his steel cap, come back to feast his
+eyes once more, from the top of yonder hill, on that fertile valley
+which he was the first white man to see; Father Serra, mild-mannered
+and gentle-voiced, trudging the dusty highroad in his sandals and
+woollen robe, pausing to kneel in prayer as the bells boom out the
+Angelus from that mission which he founded; Captain Jedediah Smith, the
+first of the pathfinders, a strange and romantic figure in his garb of
+fringed buckskin, leaning on his long rifle as he looks down on the
+homesteads of the thousands who followed by the trail he blazed across
+the ranges; Stanford, who linked the oceans with twin lines of steel,
+pacing the campus of that great seat of learning which he conceived and
+built—guardian spirits, all, of that valley for which they did so much
+and which they loved so well.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+THE MODERN ARGONAUTS
+
+  “For once you’ve panned the speckled sand and seen the bonny dust,
+    Its peerless brightness blinds you like a spell;
+  It’s little else you care about; you go because you must,
+    And you feel that you could follow it to hell.
+  You’d follow it in hunger, and you’d follow it in cold;
+    You’d follow it in solitude and pain;
+  And when you’re stiff and battened down let some one whisper ‘Gold,’
+    You’re lief to rise and follow it again.”
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+THE MODERN ARGONAUTS
+
+
+I once knew an Englishman and his wife who were possessed with a mania
+for things Egyptian. Some people were unkind enough to say that they
+were “dotty” on the subject, but that was an exaggeration. They knew all
+there was to know about Egyptian customs from the days of Amenhotep to
+those of Abbas Hilmi; they had delved in the sand-smothered ruins across
+the river from Luxor; they could converse as fluently in the degraded
+patois of the native coffee-houses as in the classic Arabic spoken at the
+University of El Azhar. Their chief regret in life was that they had not
+been born Egyptians. Their names were—but never mind; it is enough to say
+that they had coronets on their visiting cards and owned more fertile
+acres in Devonshire than an absentee landlord has any right to possess.
+Whenever they came to Cairo, which they did regularly at the beginning
+of the cold weather, they could never be induced to take the comfortable
+motor-bus which the management of Shepheard’s Hotel thoughtfully provides
+for its guests—at ten piastres the trip. Instead, they would wire ahead
+to have a couple of camels meet them at the station, and, perched atop
+of these ungainly and uncomfortable beasts, would amble down the Sharia
+Kamel, which is the Fifth Avenue of Cairo, and dismount with great pomp
+and ceremony in front of their hotel to the delectation of the tourists
+assembled upon its terrace. I once asked them why they chose this
+outlandish mode of conveyance when there were a score or so of perfectly
+good taxicabs whose vociferously importunate drivers were only awaiting
+a signal to push down their little red flags and set their taximeters
+whirring.
+
+“Well, it’s this way,” was the answer. “We’re jolly fond of everything
+Egyptian, y’ know. Sort of steeped ourselves, as you might say, in the
+country’s history and politics and customs and language and all that sort
+of thing. This city is so romantic and picturesque that a motor-car seems
+to be inappropriate and unfitting—like wearing a top hat in the country,
+y’ know. So we always have the camels meet us—yes. All bally nonsense, I
+suppose, but it sort of keeps us in the spirit of the place—makes us feel
+as though we were living in the good old days before the tourist Johnnies
+came and spoiled it all. Same idea that Vanderbilt has in driving his
+coach from London down to Brighton. You can make the trip by train in
+half the time and for half the money and much more comfortably, but you
+lose the spirit of the old coaching days—the atmosphere, as the painter
+fellows call it. Rum sort of an idea to use camels instead of taxis,
+perhaps, but we like it and that’s the chief thing after all, isn’t it?
+What?”
+
+That was precisely the frame of mind which caused us to disregard the
+one hundred and twenty-five miles of oiled highway which reaches, like a
+strip of hotel linoleum, from San Francisco to the Californian capital,
+and load ourselves, together with our six-cylindered Pegasus, aboard
+the stern-wheel river boat which leaves the Pacific Street wharf for
+Sacramento at half past eight on every week-day morning. That section of
+our Mexico-to-Alaska journey which lay immediately before us, you must
+understand, led through a region which is indelibly associated with “the
+days of old, the days of gold, the days of ’Forty-Nine,” and to storm
+through it in a prosaic, panting motor-car seemed to us as incompatible
+with the spirit of romance which enshrouds it as it would to race through
+the canals of Venice in a gasoline launch. Feeling as we did about it,
+the consistent thing, I suppose, would have been to have hired a creaking
+prairie-schooner and plodded overland to the mines in true emigrant
+fashion, but as the few prairie-schooners still extant in California
+have fallen into the hands of the moving-picture concerns, who work them
+overtime, we compromised by journeying up to the gold country by river
+boat, just as the Argonauts who came round the Horn to San Francisco were
+wont to do.
+
+Whoever was responsible for dubbing the Sacramento River trip “the
+Netherlands Route” could have had but a bowing acquaintance with Holland.
+I don’t like to shatter illusions, but, to be quite truthful, the banks
+of the Sacramento are as unlike the Low Countries as anything well could
+be. The only thing they have in common are the dikes or levees which
+border the streams and the truck-gardens which form a patchwork quilt
+of vegetation behind them. The Dutch waterways are, for the most part,
+small, insignificant affairs, third or fourth cousins to the Erie Canal,
+and so narrow that you can sling your hat across them. The Sacramento
+River, on the contrary, is a great maritime thoroughfare four hundred
+miles in length and navigable for three quarters of that distance, being
+fourth among the rivers of the United States in tonnage carried. From
+the deck of a Dutch canal-boat you cannot see a mountain, or anything
+which could be called a mountain by courtesy, with a telescope. Look
+in whichever direction you will from a Sacramento River boat and you
+cannot escape them. Even at night you can descry the great walls of the
+Coast and Sierra Nevada Ranges looming black against a purple-velvet
+sky. And the racing windmills with their weather-beaten sails—the
+most characteristic note in a Dutch landscape—are not there at all.
+It’s rather a pity, it seems to me, that Californians persist in this
+slap-dash custom of labelling the natural beauties for which their State
+is famous with European tags. Why, in the name of heaven, should that
+enchanted littoral which stretches from Coronado to Monterey be called
+“Our Italy”? Why should the seaward slopes of the Santa Ynez Range, at
+the back of Santa Barbara—a region which is Spanish in history, language,
+and tradition—be dubbed “the Riviera”? Why should Santa Barbara itself,
+for that matter, be called “the American Mentone”? Is there a single
+sound reason why the majestic grandeur of the Sierra Nevada should be
+cheapened by labelling it “the American Alps”? No, not one. And it seems
+to me, as a visitor, a travesty to nickname the Sacramento, a river as
+long and as commercially important as the Seine and draining the greatest
+agricultural valley in the world, “the Netherlands Route”—because,
+forsooth portions of its banks are protected against overflow by levees.
+Compare the wonders of California to those of Europe by all means, if
+you will, and nine times out of ten they will emerge victorious from the
+comparison; but for goodness’ sake don’t saddle them with names which in
+themselves imply secondariness.
+
+The Sacramento is a river of romance. To those conversant with the
+stirring story of early California, its every bend and reach and
+landing-place recalls some episode of those mad days when the news that
+a man had discovered yellow gravel in a Sierran mill-race spread like
+a forest-fire across the land, and the needy, the desperate, and the
+adventurous came pouring into California by boat and wagon-train. About
+it still hover memories of the days when this river of dikes ran between
+high banks; when the great valley to which it gives its name was as
+unsettled and unknown as the basin of the Upper Congo; when Sacramento,
+then but a cluster of tents about a log stockade, was an outpost on the
+firing-line of civilisation. This winding stream was the last stage in
+the long journey of those gold hunters who came round the Horn in their
+stampede to the mines. The river voyage was one of dreams and doubts,
+of hopes and fears. At every landing where the steamer touched were
+heard reports of new bonanzas found in the Sierran gulches, of gold
+strikes on the river bars, of mountain brooks whose beds were aglitter
+with the precious ore. Returning down this same river, as time went on,
+were the booted, bearded, brown-faced men who were going home—ah, happy
+word!—after having “made their pile” and those others who had staked and
+lost their all.
+
+The river trip of to-day gives graphic proof of the changes which
+threescore years have wrought; it shows that agriculture, not mining,
+is now the basis of the State’s prosperity, just as it must be the
+basis of every civilisation which is to endure. The interest commenced
+at the journey’s very start. Swinging out from the unending procession
+of ferries which form, as it were, a Brooklyn Bridge between Oakland
+and San Francisco, we churned our way under the cliffs of Alcatraz, the
+white-walled prison perched upon its summit looking for all the world
+like the sea-fowl for which this penal isle is named. Though Alcatraz
+may lack the legendary interest which attaches to the Château d’If, that
+rocky islet in the harbour of Marseilles where the Count of Monte Cristo
+was imprisoned, it is no less picturesque, particularly at sunset, when
+the expiring rays of the drowning sun, striking through the portals
+of the Golden Gate, transform it into a lump of rosy coral rising from
+a peacock sea. Off our port bow Tamalpais, a weary colossus wrapped
+in a cape of shaggy green, looked meditatively down upon the heedless
+city as, seated upon the hills, he laved his feet—the Marin and Tiburon
+Peninsulas—in the cooling waters of the bay. Keeping well to the eastern
+shore, where the lead shows seven fathoms clear, we skirted the city’s
+shipping front, where fishing-boats, their hulls painted the bright hues
+the Latins love, and some—the Greek-owned ones—with great goggle eyes
+at their bows (the better to detect the fish, of course), were slipping
+seaward like mallards on the wing. To starboard lay the shores of Contra
+Costa County (meaning, as you doubtless surmise, “the opposite coast”),
+the long brown fingers of its innumerable wharfs reaching out into the
+bay as though beckoning to the merchantmen to come alongside and take
+aboard the cargoes—oil, wine, lumber, grain, cheese, fruit—which had been
+produced in the chimneyed factories that fringe this coast or raised
+in the fertile valleys which form its hinterland. Crossing over to the
+port rail as our steamer poked its stubby nose into the narrow Straits
+of Carquinez, we could make out Mare Island Navy Yard with the fighting
+craft in their coats of elephant grey riding lazily at anchor in front
+of it, while against the hill slopes at the back snuggled the white
+houses of Vallejo, the former capital. Our first stop was at Benicia,
+on the right bank of the Carquinez Straits, which lie directly athwart
+the Overland Route to the East and are familiar to transcontinental
+travellers as the place where their entire train, from engine to
+observation-car, is loaded on a titanic ferry. This was the home of
+Heenan, the “Benicia Boy,” the blacksmith who fought his way upward to
+the heavyweight championship of the world, and the forge hammer he used
+is still proudly preserved here as a memento of the brawny youngster
+who linked the drowsy village with a certain brand of fame. Benicia
+succeeded Vallejo as the capital of California, and the old State House
+where the Argonaut lawmakers held their uproarious sessions still stands
+as a monument to the town’s one-time importance, which departed when its
+parvenu neighbour, Sacramento, offered the State a cool million in gold
+for the honour of being its capital.
+
+Leaving sleepy Benicia, with its memories of prize-fighters and
+lawmakers, in our wake, we debouched quite suddenly into Suisun Bay
+(suggestive of Japan and the geisha girls, isn’t it?) with the Suisun
+marshes just beyond. You will have to journey north to Great Central
+Lake, in the heart of Vancouver Island, or south to Lake Chapala, in the
+Mexican State of Jalisco, to get wild-fowl shooting to equal that on
+these grey marshes, for here, in what Easterners call winter-time but
+which Californians designate duck time, or the season of the rains, come
+mallard, teal, sprig, and canvasback, plover, snipe, and brant, in flocks
+which literally darken the sky. In the waters hereabouts is centred the
+fishing industry of the Sacramento River, which has been monopolised by
+swarthy, red-sashed fellows who speak the patois of Sicily or Calabria
+or the Greek of the Ægean Isles. No wonder that these sons of the south
+look on California as a land of gold, for an industrious fisherman,
+who will attend to his nets and leave alone the brandy and red wine of
+which they are all so fond, can earn twenty-five dollars a week without
+any danger of contracting heart disease; his brother in Palermo or the
+Piræus would consider himself an Andrew Carnegie if his weekly earnings
+amounted to that many _lire_ or _drachmæ_. If one is in quest of colour
+and picturesqueness he can steep himself in them both by taking up his
+residence for a time among these fisherfolk of Suisun Bay, but if he does
+so he had better take the precaution of keeping a serviceable revolver in
+his coat pocket and leaving his address with the river police.
+
+The delta formed by the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers, which, after
+paying toll to the fruitful valleys through which they pass, clasp hands
+near Suisun Bay and wander together toward the sea, bears a striking
+resemblance to the maze of islands and lagoons and weed-grown waterways
+at the mouth of the Nile. Some of these low-lying islands are but camping
+grounds for migrating armies of wild fowl; on others, whose rich fields
+are guarded by high dikes such as you see along the Scheldt, are the
+truck-gardens, tended with the painstaking care that makes the Oriental
+so dangerous a competitor of the Caucasian. It is these river gardens
+which make it possible for the San Franciscan to have asparagus, peas,
+artichokes, alligator pears, and strawberries on his table from Christmas
+eve around to Christmas morning, and more cheaply than the New Yorker can
+get the same things in cans. Indeed, a quarter of the asparagus crop of
+the United States comes from these levee-shielded tule lands along the
+Sacramento. That, I suppose, is why it is so hard for an Eastern _bon
+vivant_ to impress a Californian. The New Yorker, thinking to give his
+San Franciscan friend a real treat, takes him to Sherry’s or the Plaza
+and, shutting his eyes to the prices on the menu, orders a meal in which
+such out-of-the-season delicacies as asparagus figure largely.
+
+“Quite like home,” remarks the Californian carelessly. “My wife writes
+that she is getting asparagus from our own garden every day now and
+that strawberries are selling in the market for fifteen cents a box.
+Alligator-pear salad? Not any, thanks. The chef at the club insists on
+giving it to us about four times a week, so I’m rather tired of it. If
+it’s all the same to you I think I’d like some pumpkin pie and milk.”
+
+Hanging over the rail, I took huge delight in watching the stream of
+traffic which turned the river into a maritime Broadway: stern-wheel
+passenger steamers, ploughing straight ahead, with never a glance to
+right or left, like a preoccupied business man going to his office; busy
+little launches, teuf-teuffing here and there as importantly as district
+messenger boys; panting freighters with strings of grain-laden barges
+in tow; ugly, ill-smelling tank-steamers carrying Mr. Rockefeller’s
+petroleum to far-off, outlandish ports; scow-schooners, full sisters
+of those broad-beamed, huge-sailed lumbering craft which bring the
+products of the Seine banks down to the Paris markets; big black
+dredgers, mud-stained and grimy, like the labourers they are, hard at
+work reinforcing the dikes against the winter floods; tide-working
+ferries, lazy, ingenious, resourceful craft which swing across the river,
+up-stream or down, making the current or the tide or both do their work
+for them.
+
+After Isleton is passed the river settles down to an even width of
+sixscore yards, flowing contentedly between banks festooned with wild
+grape-vines and shaded by oaks and walnuts, sycamore and willows, between
+which we caught fleeting glimpses of prosperous homes whose splendid
+trees and ordered gardens reminded us of country places we knew along
+the Thames. This is the most beautiful part of the river by far. Every
+now and again we glimpsed the mouth of a leafy bayou which seemed to
+invite us to explore its alluring recesses in a canoe. A moment later a
+little bay would disclose a fine old house with stately white columns
+and a mansard roof—the result, most probably, of the owner’s success in
+the gold-fields sixty years ago. These homes along the Sacramento have
+none of the _nouveau riche_ magnificence of the mansions at Pasadena and
+Montecito, but they are for the most part dignified and characteristic of
+that formative and romantic period in which they were built. Clarksburg,
+one hundred and ten miles from San Francisco, is the last stop before
+Sacramento, ten miles farther on. Here the river banks become more
+busy. Steam, motor, and electric lines focalise upon the capital. We
+passed a colony of house-boats, not the floating mansions one sees at
+Henley, but simple, unpretentious craft which admirably answer their
+purpose of passing a summer holiday. Wharfs began to appear. A great
+black drawbridge, thrusting its unlovely length across the river,
+parted sullenly for us to pass. Above a cluster of palms and blossoming
+magnolias the dome of the capitol appeared, the last rays of the setting
+sun striking upon its gilded surface and turning it into a flaming orb.
+The air was heavy with the fragrance of camellias. A bell tinkled sharply
+in the engine room, the great stern wheel churned the water frantically
+for a moment and then stopped, the boat glided deftly alongside the
+wharf, the gang-plank rumbled out. “All ashore!” bawled some one. “All
+ashore! Sacramento!”
+
+In the gold-rush days Sacramento was to the mining region what
+Johannesburg is to the Rand—a base of supplies, a place of amusement,
+where the miners were wont to come to squander their gold-dust over the
+polished bars of the saloons and dance halls or on the green tables of
+the gambling-houses. Those were the free-and-easy days when anything
+costing less than a dollar was priced in “bits,” a bit having no
+arbitrary value but being equivalent to the amount of gold-dust which
+could be held between the thumb and forefinger. In the days when placer
+mining was in its glory, debts were discharged in gold-dust instead of
+coin, and it often happened when a man was paying a small grocery bill,
+or more particularly when he was buying a drink, the bartender, instead
+of taking the trouble to weigh the dust, would insert his thumb and
+forefinger in the miner’s buckskin “poke” and lift a pinch of gold-dust.
+So it came to pass that when a man applied for a job as bartender his
+ability to fill the position would be tested by the proprietor asking,
+“How much can you raise at a pinch?” whence the familiar colloquialism
+of the present day. The more that he could raise, of course, the more
+valuable he would be as an employee, the chief requisite for a successful
+bartender being, therefore, that he should have splay fingers. In
+gold-rush times steamers ran daily from San Francisco to Sacramento, just
+as they do to-day, for the river provided the quickest and easiest means
+of reaching the mines from the coast, while six-horsed Concord coaches,
+the names of whose drivers were synonyms for reckless daring, tore along
+the roads to Marysville, Stockton, and Nevada City as fast as the horses
+could lay foot to ground.
+
+To fully appreciate the miracle of reclamation, whereby the banks of
+the Sacramento have been transformed from worthless drowned lands into
+the richest gardens in the world, you should motor down the splendid
+boulevard which for a dozen miles or more parallels the river. The
+miners along the Sacramento early found that the easiest and cheapest
+method of getting gold was to direct a powerful stream of water against
+the hillsides, washing the hills away and diverting the resultant mud
+into long sluice-boxes, in which the gold was collected. The residue
+of mud and water was then turned back into the streams again and was
+carried down and deposited in the bed of the Sacramento River, gradually
+decreasing its capacity for carrying off flood waters and making its
+navigation impossible for large boats. Hence, when the spring freshets
+came the swollen river overflowed and devastated the farms and orchards
+along its banks. For forty years this sort of thing continued, the
+protests of the farmers and fruit growers being ignored, for in those
+days the miners virtually ruled the land. But as time wore on, mining
+gradually decreased in importance and agriculture grew, until, in 1893,
+the farming interests became powerful enough to induce Congress to stop
+all hydraulic mining and to put all mining operations on streams in the
+San Joaquin and Sacramento Valleys under the control of the California
+Debris Commission. Once rid of the bugaboo of the hydraulic nozzle and
+its resultant obstruction of the river channels, the farmers along the
+Sacramento got together and purchased a number of clam-shell dredgers
+and set to work to build new levees and to repair the old ones. If you
+will follow the course of the Sacramento for a few miles outside the
+capital, either by road or river, you will see them at work. It is very
+interesting. A great arm, ending in a sort of hand like two clam-shells,
+reaches out over the river and the hand plunges into the stream. When the
+hand, which is in reality a huge steel scoop with hinged jaws, emerges
+from its gropings at the river-bottom it is filled with sand, whereupon
+the arm carries it over and empties it upon the bank. This is the way
+in which the dikes which border the Sacramento are constructed, one
+clam-shell dredger doing as much work in a day as five hundred men. As a
+result of this ingenious contrivance you can make the circuit of Grand
+Island on an oiled road, forty feet wide, which has been built on top of
+the dikes. Below you on one side is the river; on the other orchards and
+gardens from which come annually a quarter of the world’s asparagus crop,
+the earliest cherries in the United States, and a million boxes of pears.
+
+I think that the most significant thing that I saw in Sacramento was
+Sutter’s Fort, or, to be quite accurate, the restored remnants of it.
+Three quarters of a century ago this little rectangular fortification
+was the westernmost outpost of American civilisation. In 1839 a Swiss
+soldier of fortune named John Augustus Sutter obtained from the Mexican
+Government a grant of eleven square leagues of land on the banks of the
+Sacramento River and permission to erect a stockade as a protection
+against the encroachments of the Indians. The stockade, however, quickly
+grew into something closely resembling a fort, with walls loopholed for
+musketry and capable of resisting any attack unsupported by artillery.
+Sutter’s Fort, or “New Helvetia,” as the owner called his little kingdom,
+was on the direct line of overland immigration from the East, and as a
+result of the strategic position he occupied and of his influence with
+the Mexican authorities, Sutter soon became the virtual ruler of all
+this Sierran region. During those stirring days when Frémont and his
+frontiersmen came riding down from the passes, it was this Swiss-American
+adventurer who held the balance of power on the Pacific Coast, and it
+was in no small measure due to the encouragement and aid he gave the
+American settlers that California became American. The old frontiersman
+died in poverty, the great domain of which he was the owner having been
+wrested from him, on one pretext and another, each flimsier than the one
+preceding, during the turmoil and lawlessness which marked the gold-rush
+days. To-day the old fort is the centre of a highly landscaped city
+park; the muzzles of its brass field-guns frown from their embrasures
+down paved and shaded avenues; street-cars clang their noisy way past
+the gates which were double-barred at night against the attacks of
+marauding bands of Mexicans and Indians; and at night spluttering
+arc-lamps illuminate its loopholed, vine-clad walls. Sacramento has
+acknowledged the great debt she owes to Sutter by giving his destitute
+grandson employment as a day labourer on the grounds of the fort which
+his grandfather built and to which the capital city of California owes
+its being.
+
+There are two routes open to the automobilist between Sacramento and
+Lake Tahoe and, historically as well as scenically, there is little to
+choose between them. The Placerville route, though considerably the
+longer, traverses the country immortalised by Bret Harte and inseparably
+associated with the “Forty-Niners.” From Sacramento to Folsom the
+highway follows the route of the first railroad built in California,
+this jerk-water line, constructed in 1854 to take the miners in and
+the gold-dust out, being the grandfather of those great systems which
+now cover the State with a cobweb of steel. At Folsom, built on the
+edge of a sheer cliff high above the waters of the American River, is
+the stone-walled château where a thousand or more gentlemen who have
+emerged second best from arguments with the law are dwelling in enforced
+seclusion at the expense of the State. Placerville is the historic
+“Hangtown” of early days, having gained its original name from the fact
+that the sacredness of law and order was emphasised there in the good old
+days by means of frequent entertainments known as “necktie parties,” the
+hosts at these informal affairs being committees of indignant citizens.
+At them the guest of honour made his positively last appearance. It
+was here that “Wheelbarrow John” Studebaker, by sticking to his trade
+of wheelwright instead of joining in the mad stampede to the diggings,
+laid the foundation for that great concern whose vehicles are known
+wherever there are roads for wheels to run on. At Coloma, not far from
+Placerville, a heroic statue does honour to the memory of John Marshall,
+the news of whose discovery of yellow sand in a mill-race brought fortune
+seekers flocking Californiaward from every quarter of the globe. Though
+fruit growing has long since succeeded mining as the chief industry of
+this region, and though the buildings mentioned in the stories of Bret
+Harte and Mark Twain have for the most part gone to wrack and ruin,
+these towns of the “Mother Lode” still retain enough of their old-time
+interest and picturesqueness so that it does not require a Bausch &
+Lomb imagination to picture them as they were in the heyday of their
+existence, when their streets and barrooms and dance halls were filled
+with the flotsam and jetsam of all the earth: wanderers from dim and
+distant ports, adventurers, seafarers, soldiers of misfortune, gamblers,
+absconding bank clerks, farmers, unsuccessful merchants, out-at-elbows
+professional men, men of uneasy conscience and women of easy virtue,
+world without end.
+
+When Congress put an end to hydraulic mining the mining men made an
+outcry that rose to heaven. The prosperity of California was ended.
+The State was going to the bow-wows. There was nothing but gloom and
+disaster ahead. The companies that owned the water-rights along the
+American River planted their properties to grape-vines and used their
+hydraulic apparatus to water them with. But always they were tormented
+with the knowledge that under the roots of the vines was gold, gold,
+gold. Spurred on by this knowledge, there was devised a new process of
+gold extraction; a process that not only did not deposit any débris in
+the rivers but which proved to be far more profitable than the old.
+Ground that had not yielded enough gold to pay for its being worked
+was turned into “pay dirt” through the agency of the giant gold dredger
+invented in New Zealand and later developed to its highest efficiency in
+California. Picture to yourself a boulder-strewn field, covered with the
+tailings of old mining operations, with here and there a pit as large
+as the foundation for a sky-scraper made by the hydraulic miners. Each
+successive layer of gravel in this field, straight down to bed-rock,
+bears gold in small quantities—gold brought there ages ago by the waters
+of the river. To extract this gold by the old methods was obviously as
+unprofitable as it was illegal. So they tried the new method imported
+from the gold-fields of New Zealand. It is not easy to explain the
+workings of a modern gold dredger unless you have seen one. Go out into
+the middle of a field and dig a pit—a pit large enough to contain a city
+office-building. Run water into the pit until it becomes a mud-hole. Then
+build in that mud-hole a great steel caisson of several thousand cubic
+tons displacement. There you have the basis of the mammoth contrivances
+which have supplanted the ’Forty-Niner’s pick and pan. Each of these
+dredgers costs a quarter of a million dollars to build and labours night
+and day. The business end of the dredger consists of an endless chain
+of buckets, each of which weighs two tons when empty, which burrow down
+into the mud-hole until they strike bed-rock. The gravel which they
+bring up, after being saturated with water, is passed over quicksilver
+tables which collect the gold, and runs out again at the bottom of the
+pit, thus reversing the natural arrangement of the soil, the dirt
+being left on the bottom and the gravel and cobbles on top. It costs
+in the neighbourhood of seven thousand dollars a month to operate one
+of these dredgers, but the resultant “clean-up” pays for this several
+times over. Not only is the gold extracted from the earth as effectually
+as a bartender squeezes the juice out of a lemon, but rock crushers
+convert the mountains of cobbles into material for building highways
+all over the surrounding region, and on the aerated and renovated soil
+which the dredgers leave behind them any crop on earth will thrive. Thus
+has mechanical genius succeeded in turning those hereditary enemies,
+Agriculture and Mining, into coworkers and friends.
+
+[Illustration: LAKE TAHOE FROM THE SLOPES OF THE HIGH SIERRAS.]
+
+Because we wished to follow the route which the overland emigrants
+had taken in their epoch-making march, we did not go to Tahoe through
+Placerville, which is connected with Tallac, at the southern end of the
+lake, by one of the finest motor highways in California, but chose the
+more direct and equally good road which climbs over the Sierras by way
+of Colfax, Dutch Flat, and Emigrant Gap. Upward and upward wound our
+road, like a spiral stairway to the skies. One of the most characteristic
+features of this Sierra region is that the traveller can see at a glance
+the lay of the whole land. Nowhere else, so far as I am aware, not from
+the Saint Bernard, or Ararat, or even from Darjeeling, can one command
+such comprehensive views as are to be had from the rocky promontory
+known as Cape Horn, or from Summit, which, as its name implies, is at
+the top of the pass. At our feet, like a map spread out upon the ground
+for our inspection, lay California. The dense forests which clothed the
+upper slopes of the Sierras gave way to orchards of pear and apple, and
+these changed to the citrus groves which flourish on the lower, balmier
+levels, and the green of the orange zone ended abruptly in the yellow
+of the grain-fields, and this merged into the checker-board of the
+truck-gardens, and through these we could dimly descry the blue ribbon of
+the Sacramento turning and twisting and doubling on its tortuous way to
+the sea.
+
+The summit of the pass is one hundred and five miles from Sacramento,
+and in that distance we had ascended just seven thousand feet, or seven
+hundred feet higher than Mount Washington, the highest peak east of the
+Rockies. From Summit to Truckee is fourteen miles and we coasted all
+the way, the rush of mountain air in our faces as we swept silently and
+smoothly down the long diagonals recalling the sensation on the Cresta
+Run at Saint Moritz. Swinging suddenly around a shoulder of the mountain
+at the “Three Miles to Truckee” sign, we found ourselves looking down
+upon a lake, a very gem of a lake, so scintillatingly blue amid the
+encircling forest that it looked like a sapphire set in jade. So smiling
+and pure and beautiful it was that it seemed impossible to associate it
+with the ghastliest and most revolting incident in Californian history.
+Yet this was Donner Lake and those who have heard the terrible tale of
+the Donner party, for whom it was named, are not likely to forget it.
+A party of some eighty emigrants—men, women, and children—making their
+way to California by the Overland route, and delayed by an ill-advised
+detour, reached the site of the present town of Truckee late in the
+autumn of 1846. While attempting to cross the pass a blinding snow-storm
+drove in upon them. The story of how the less robust members of the party
+died, one by one, from starvation, and of how the survivors were forced
+to eat the bodies of their dead comrades—Donner himself, it is claimed,
+subsisted on the remains of his grandmother; of the “Forlorn Hope” and of
+its desperate efforts to reach the settlements in the Sacramento Valley,
+in which only seven out of the twenty-two who composed it succeeded; of
+the successive relief expeditions sent out from Sutter’s Fort; and of the
+final rescue in the spring of 1847 of the pitiful handful of survivors,
+illustrates as nothing else can the incredible hardships and perils
+encountered by the American pioneers in their winning of the West. A grim
+touch of humour is lent to the tragedy by the fact that two Indians in
+charge of some cattle which Sutter had sent to them were killed and eaten
+by the starving emigrants, on the theory of the frontiersman, no doubt,
+that the only good Indian is a dead one. The hospitable Sutter, in a
+statement published some months later, complained most bitterly of this
+ungrateful act, saying that they were welcome to the cattle but that they
+were unjustified in depriving him of two perfectly good Indians.
+
+Truckee still bears all the earmarks of a frontier town, for miners,
+cow-punchers, and lumbermen, bearded to the eyes, booted to the knees,
+and in several cases quite evidently loaded to the neck, lounged in the
+shade of the wooden awnings and swapped stories and spat tobacco juice
+as they waited for the train bringing the San Francisco papers to come
+in; while rows of saddle ponies, heads drooping and reins trailing in
+the dust, waited dejectedly at the edge of the raised wooden sidewalks
+for their masters. From Truckee to Tahoe our way led through the Truckee
+cañon, running for a dozen miles or more so close to the banks of the
+sparkling, tumbling mountain river that we could have cast for the
+rainbow-trout we saw in it without having to leave the car. Dusk fell,
+and hard on its heels came its mother, the Dark, but still the yellow
+road, turned by the twin beams of the headlights to silver now, wound
+and turned and twisted interminably on, now swerving sharply as though
+frightened by the ghostliness of a thicket of white birches, then
+plunging confidently into the eerie darkness of a grove of fir-trees and
+emerging, all unexpectedly, before a great, low, wide-spread building,
+its many windows ablaze with lights and its long verandas outlined by
+hundreds and hundreds of scarlet paper lanterns. A wave of fragrance and
+music intermingled was wafted to us from where an orchestra was playing
+dreamy music in the rose gardens above the lake, whose silent, sombre
+waters reflected a luminous summer moon. Music and moonlight I have known
+in many places—beneath the cypresses of Lago Maggiore, along the Canale
+Grande, off the coasts of Africa, in the gardens of the Taj Mahal—but I
+have never seen, nor do I ever expect to see, anything quite as beautiful
+as that first night on Tahoe, when the paper lanterns quivered in the
+night breeze, and the violins throbbed, oh, so softly, and the pale moon
+shone down upon the snow-capped mountains and they in turn were reflected
+dimly in the darkened waters of the lake.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+THE INLAND EMPIRE
+
+  “I watched the sun sink from the west,
+    I watched the sweet day die;
+  Above the dim Coast Range’s crest
+    I saw the red clouds lie;
+  I saw them lying golden deep,
+    By lingering sunbeams kissed,
+  Like isles of fairyland that sleep
+    In seas of amethyst.
+
+  ...
+
+  “Then through the long night hours I lay
+    In baffled sleep’s travail,
+  And heard the outcast thieves in grey—
+    The gaunt coyotes—wail.
+  With seaward winds that wandering blew
+    I heard the wild geese cry,
+  I heard their grey wings beating through
+    The star-dust of the sky.
+
+  ...
+
+  “Yet, with the last grim, solemn hour,
+    Stilled were the voices all,
+  And then, from poppied fields aflower,
+    Rang out the wild bird’s call;
+  The glad dawn, deep in white mists steeped,
+    Breathed on the day’s hushed lyre,
+  And far the dim Sierras leaped
+    In living waves of fire.”
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+THE INLAND EMPIRE
+
+
+Along in January, after the holiday festivities are over, and the
+youngsters have gone back to school or college, and the Christmas
+presents have been paid for, Mr. American Business Man and his wife, to
+the number of many thousands, escape from the inclemency of an Eastern
+winter by “taking a run out to the coast.” They usually choose one of the
+southern routes—the trip being prefaced by an animated family discussion
+as to whether they shall go via the Grand Cañon or New Orleans—getting
+their first glimpse of the Golden State at San Diego. After taking
+a shivery dip in the breakers at Coronado so as to be able to write
+the folks back home that they have gone in bathing in midwinter, they
+continue their leisurely progress northward by the _table-d’hôte_ route,
+picking oranges at Riverside, taking the mountain railway up Mount Lowe
+from Pasadena, stopping off at Santa Barbara to see the mission and the
+homes of the millionaires at Montecito, playing golf and whirling round
+the Seventeen Mile Drive at Del Monte, visiting Chinatown, the Cliff
+House, and the Barbary Coast in San Francisco, and returning to the East
+in the early spring via Salt Lake City or the “C. P. R.,” having, as
+they fondly believe, seen pretty much everything in California worth the
+seeing.
+
+They turn their faces homeward utterly unconscious of the fact that
+they have only skirted along the fringe of the State; that of the great
+country at the back, which constitutes the real California, they have
+seen absolutely nothing. To them Sacramento, Stockton, Merced, Fresno,
+Bakersfield, Lake Tahoe, the San Joaquin, the Big Trees, the Yosemite,
+the High Sierras are but names. They do not seem to appreciate, or it may
+be that they do not care, that the narrow coast zone dedicated to the
+amusement of the winter tourist is no more typical of California than
+the Riviera is typical of France. Though it is true that the Californian
+hinterland has no million-dollar “show places” and no huge hotels with
+tourists in white shoes and straw hats taking tea upon their terraces,
+it has other things which are more significant and more worth seeing.
+The visitor to the back country can see the orchards which supply the
+breakfast-tables of half the world with fruit and the vineyards which
+supply the dinner-tables of the other half with grapes and wine and
+raisins; he can see flocks of sheep so large that the hills on which they
+are grazing seem to be covered with snow; he can see oil-fields which
+produce enough petroleum to keep all the lamps in the world alight until
+the crack of doom. And, if this is not sufficient inducement, he can
+motor along the foot of the highest mountain range in America, he can
+visit the most beautiful valley in all the world, he can picnic under
+the biggest trees in existence. A country of big things: big distances,
+big mountains, big trees, big ranches, big orchards, big crops, big pay,
+big problems—that’s the hinterland of California.
+
+Now, that you may the more easily follow me in what I have to say, I
+will, with your permission, refer you to the map of the regions described
+in this volume. (See end of book.)
+
+The mountain systems, as you see, form a gigantic basin which comprises
+about three fifths of the total area of the State. The eastern rim
+of this basin is formed by the Sierra Nevada and the western rim by
+the Coast Range, these two coming together at the northern end of
+the basin in the great mountain wall which separates California from
+Oregon, while to the south they sweep inward in the form of a gigantic
+amphitheatre, being joined by a minor range known as the Tehachapis.
+Reaching Mexicoward is the continuation of the Coast system known as
+the San Bernardino Range, forming, as it were, a sort of handle to the
+basin. The only natural entrance to the basin is the Golden Gate, through
+which the two great river systems—the San Joaquin and Sacramento—reach
+the sea. Lying between the Coast Range and the Pacific is that narrow
+strip of pleasure land, with its orange groves, its silver beaches, its
+great hotels and splendid country houses, which is the beginning and
+end of California so far as the tourist is concerned. The northern part
+of the great basin, which is drained by the Sacramento River, is called
+the Sacramento Valley, while its southern two thirds, whose streams
+run into the San Joaquin River, is commonly known as “the San Joaquin,”
+the whole forming the Great Valley of California. “Valley” is, however,
+a misnomer. One might as fittingly call Mount McKinley a hill, or Lake
+Superior a pond. It is a plain rather than a valley; a plain upon whose
+level reaches Belgium would be lost and Holland could be tucked away in
+the corners. From the rampart of the Sierra Nevada on the east to the
+wall of the Coast Range on the west the rich brown loam has an average
+width of half a hundred miles. North and south it extends upward of
+four hundred miles—as far as from Pittsburg to Chicago. What Rhodesia
+is to South Africa, what its prairie provinces are to Canada, the Great
+Valley, with its millions of incredibly fertile acres, level as a floor
+and checker-boarded with alfalfa, fruit, and vine, is to California—the
+storehouse of the State.
+
+Before the railway builders came the Great Valley was one of the most
+important cattle-ranges in the West, and hundreds of thousands of
+longhorns grazed knee-deep in its lush grass. With the railway came the
+homesteaders, who, despite the threats of the cattlemen, drove their
+stakes and built their cabins and started to raise wheat. Then a dry
+year came, and on top of that another, a heart-breaking succession of
+them, and the ruined wheat growers sold out to the cattle barons. In
+such manner grew up the big ranches—holdings ranging all the way from
+ten thousand to half a million acres or more—a few of which still remain
+intact. But a drought that will kill wheat will kill cattle, too, and
+after one terrible year a hundred thousand horned skeletons lay bleaching
+on the ranges. And so the cattlemen evacuated the valley in their turn
+and their places were taken by the diggers of ditches. Now the Lord
+evidently built the Great Valley to encourage irrigation. He filled it
+with rich, alluvial loam, tilted it ever so slightly toward the centre,
+brought innumerable streams from the mountains and glaciers down to the
+edge of the plain, ordered the rain and the blizzard to stay away and
+the sun to work overtime. All this he did for the Great Valley, and
+the ditch did the rest—or, rather, the ditch allied to hard work, for
+without sweat-beaded brows, calloused hands, aching backs, the ditch is
+worthless. A social as well as an agricultural miracle was performed
+by the watering of the thirsty land. The great ranches were subdivided
+into farms and orchards. Settlers came pouring in. Communities of hardy,
+industrious, energetic folk sprang up everywhere and these grew into
+villages and the villages became towns and the towns expanded into
+cities. School bells clanged their insistent summons to the youth of the
+countryside, church spires pointed their slender fingers toward the sky,
+highways stretched their length across the plain, and before this onset
+of civilisation the moral code of the frontier crumbled and gave way. The
+gun-fighter took French leave, the gambler silently decamped between two
+days, and in many communities the saloon-keeper tacked a “For Sale” sign
+on his door and took the north-bound train. Civilisation had come to the
+Great Valley, not with the dust of hoofs or beat of train, but with the
+gurgle of water in an irrigating ditch—and it had come to stay.
+
+Of the effect produced by this spreading of the waters we saw many
+evidences as we fled southward from Sacramento across the oak-studded
+plain. Throwing wide the throttle, the car leaped forward like a live
+thing. The oiled road slipped away from our wheels like an unwinding
+bolt of grey silk ribbon. The grain-fields were wide, the houses few.
+Constables there were none. Vineyards and orchards, trim rows of
+vegetables, neatly fenced farms alternated with seas of barley undulating
+in the wind. Such a country, however prosperous, offers little to detain
+a motorist, and we went booming southward at a gait that made the
+telegraph poles resemble the palings in a picket fence. Occasionally a
+torpedo-shaped electric car, a monstrous thing in a dull, hot red, the
+faces of its passengers grotesquely framed by the circular port-holes
+which serve as windows, tore past us with the wail of a lost soul. Whence
+it came or whither it went was a matter of small moment.
+
+The factory whistles were raucously reminding the workers that it was
+time to take the covers off their dinner pails when we swung into the
+plaza of the city whose name perpetuates the memory of the admiral who
+added California to the Union and drew up before the entrance of the
+Hotel Stockton. If you should chance to go there, don’t let them persuade
+you into lunching in the restaurant with its fumed oak wainscotting
+and the Clydesdale furniture which appears to be inseparable from the
+mission style of decoration, but insist on having a table set on the
+roof-garden with its vine-hung pergola and its ramparts of red geraniums.
+That was what we did, and the meal we had there, high above the city’s
+bustle, became a white milestone on our highway of memories. Had it
+not been for the advertisements of chewing-gum and plug tobacco which
+stared at us from near-by hoardings, I would not have believed that we
+were in the United States at all, so different was the scene from my
+preconceived notions of the San Joaquin Valley. We might have been on the
+terrace of that quaint old hotel—I forget the name of it—that overlooks
+the Dam in Rotterdam. Stockton, you see, is at the head of navigation
+on the San Joaquin River, and the hotel stands at the head of one of
+the canal-like channels which permit of vessels tying up in the very
+heart of the city, so that from the terrace on its roof you look down
+on as animated and interesting a water scene as you will find anywhere:
+pompous, self-important tugs, launches with engines spluttering like
+angry washerwomen, stern-wheel passenger steamers, little sisters of
+those upon the Mississippi, and cumbersome, slow-moving barges, their
+flat decks piled high with bagged or barrelled products of the valley on
+their way to San Francisco Harbour, there to be transshipped for strange
+and far-off ports.
+
+As a result of the Powers That Be at Washington having recently had a
+change of heart in respect to motor-cars entering the Yosemite, every
+valley town between Stockton and Visalia has announced itself as the one
+and only “official gateway to the valley,” and has backed up its claims
+with tons of maps and literature. As a matter of fact, the Department of
+the Interior has announced that motorists desiring to visit the Yosemite
+must enter and leave it by the Coulterville road, and this road can be
+reached from any one of half a dozen valley towns with equal facility.
+Coming, as we did, from the north, the most convenient route led through
+Modesto. As a result of the sudden prosperity produced by a modern
+version of the Miracle of Moses, water having been brought forth where
+there was no water before by a prophet’s rod in the form of an irrigating
+ditch, the little town is as up to date as a girl just back from Paris.
+Its lawns and gardens have been Peter-Hendersonised until they look like
+the illustrations in a seedsman’s catalogue; the architecture of its
+schools and public buildings is so faithful an adaptation of the Spanish
+mission style that they would deceive old Padre Serra himself; and its
+roads would do credit to the genius of J. MacAdam.
+
+If you will set your travelling clock to awake you at the hour at which
+the servant-girl gets up to go to early mass you should, even allowing
+for the five-thousand-foot climb, reach Crocker’s Sierra Resort, which
+is the nearest stopping place to that entrance of the Yosemite assigned
+to motorists, before the supper table is cleared off. It is necessary to
+spend the night at Crocker’s, as the government regulations, which are
+far more inflexible than the Ten Commandments, permit motorists to enter
+the valley only between the hours of ten and one. Leaving Crocker’s at
+a much more respectable hour than we did Modesto, we reached the first
+military outpost at Merced Big Tree Grove shortly before ten, where a
+very businesslike young cavalry officer put me through a catechism which
+made me feel like an immigrant applying for admission at Ellis Island.
+If your answers to the lieutenant’s questions correspond to those in the
+back of the book and your car is able to do the tricks required of it—to
+test the holding power of its brakes you are ordered to take a running
+start and then throw the brakes on so suddenly that the wheels skid—you
+are permitted the pleasure of paying five dollars for the privilege of
+entering the jealously guarded portals. They stamp your permit with the
+hour and minute at which you leave the big trees, and if you arrive at
+the next military post, which is nine miles distant, at the foot of
+the Merced River Cañon, in a single second under an hour and seventeen
+minutes you are fined so heavily that you won’t enjoy your visit. I
+remember that we sneered at these regulations as being unnecessary and
+absurd—but that was before we had seen the Merced Cañon grade. As my
+chauffeur remarked, it is a real hum-dinger. It is nothing more or less
+than a narrow shelf chopped out of the face of the cliff.
+
+“I wonder if those soldiers were quite as careful in examining our brakes
+as they should have been?” anxiously remarked one of my companions,
+glancing over the side of the car into the dizzy gorge below and then
+looking hurriedly away again.
+
+“Oh, there are some perfectly lovely wild flowers!” suddenly exclaimed
+the Lady, who had been choking the life out of the cushions. “If you
+don’t mind I’ll get out and pick them ... and please don’t wait for
+me, I’ll walk the rest of the way down. Yes, indeed, I’m very fond of
+walking.”
+
+It is only fair to warn those who propose to follow in our tire
+tracks that, entering the Yosemite by automobile, you do not get one
+of those sudden and overwhelming views which cause the beholder to
+“O-o-o-oh-h-h-h-h!” and “A-a-a-ah-h-h-h-h!” like the exhaust of a
+steam-engine. On the contrary, you sneak into the famous valley very
+unostentatiously indeed, along a winding wood road which might be in New
+England. Nor are you permitted to tear about the floor of the valley
+whither you list, for no sooner do you reach the Sentinel Hotel than a
+khaki-clad trooper steps up and orders you to put your car in the garage
+and keep it there until you are ready to leave.
+
+The Yosemite is not, properly speaking, a valley. That word suggests a
+gentle depression with sloping sides, a sort of hollow in the hills,
+which have been moulded by the fingers of ages into flowing and
+complaisant lines. The Yosemite is nothing of the sort. It is a great
+cleft or chasm, hemmed in by rocky walls as steep as the prices at a
+summer hotel and as smooth as the manners of a confidence man. It is
+the exact reverse of that formation so characteristic of the Southwest
+known as a mesa: it is a precipice-walled plain. One might imagine it
+to be the work of some exasperated Titan who, peeved at finding the
+barrier of the Sierras in his path, had driven his spade deep into the
+ridge of the range and then moved it back and forth, as a gardener does
+in setting out a plant, leaving a gash in the mountains eight miles
+long and a mile deep. When flocks of wild geese light in the Yosemite,
+so John Muir tells us, they have hard work to find their way out again,
+for, no matter in which direction they turn, they are soon stopped by the
+wall, the height of which they seem to have an insuperable difficulty in
+gauging. They must feel very much like a fish in an aquarium which is for
+ever battering its nose against the glass walls of its tank. The wall
+looks to be only about so high, but when they should be far over its top,
+northward or southward according to the season, back they find themselves
+once more, beating against its stony face, and it is only when, in their
+bewilderment, they chance to follow the downward course of the river,
+that they hit upon an exit.
+
+Standing in the centre of the valley floor, on the banks of the winding
+Merced, is the Sentinel Hotel, which, barring several camps, is the only
+hostelry in the valley. It is a cosy, homelike, old-fashioned place,
+the fashion in which the rooms open onto the broad verandas which run
+entirely around both the lower and the upper stories recalling the
+old-time taverns of the South. As there are neither dance pavilions
+nor moving-picture houses in the Yosemite, the young women employed as
+waitresses at the Sentinel Hotel frequently find their unoccupied time
+hanging heavy on their hands, this tedium occasionally leading them
+into exploits calculated to make the hair of the observer permanently
+pompadour. One of these girls, a slender, willowy creature, anxious to
+outdare her companions, climbed to Glacier Point and on the insecure
+and scanty foothold afforded by the Overhanging Rock, which juts from
+the face of the sheer cliff, three thousand two hundred feet above the
+valley floor, proceeded to dance the tango! Evidently feeling that this
+exhibition, which had sent chills of apprehension up the spines of the
+beholders, was too tame, she balanced herself on one foot on the ledge’s
+very brink and extended the other, like a _première danseuse_, over three
+fifths of a mile of emptiness.
+
+An unobtrusive but interesting feature of the Yosemite which may well
+escape the notice of the casual tourist is the little settlement of
+Indians, who dwell in a collection of wretched shacks at the base of the
+valley’s northern wall. Like all the California Indians, this remnant
+of the Yosemite tribe are entirely lacking in the picturesqueness of
+dress and bearing which characterises their kinsmen of the Southwest.
+Their presence in the Yosemite possesses, however, a certain romantic
+interest, for, had it not been for them, it may well be that the famous
+valley would still remain unfound. Their story is an interesting and
+pathetic one. As a result of the injustices and outrages committed
+upon the peaceful Californian Indians by the settlers who came flocking
+into the State upon the discovery of gold, the tribes were driven to
+revolt, and in 1851 the government found itself with a “little war” upon
+its hands. The trouble ended, of course, by the complete subjugation
+of the Indians, who were transferred from their hereditary homes to a
+reservation near Fresno. The Yosemites proved less tractable than the
+other tribes, however, and, instead of coming in and surrendering to
+the palefaces, they retreated to their fastnesses in the High Sierras,
+and it was while pursuing them that a troop of cavalry discovered the
+enchanted valley which bears their name. They were captured and carried
+to Fresno, but the humid climate of the lowlands wrought such havoc among
+these mountain-bred folk that the survivors petitioned the government for
+permission to return to their old home. Their petition was granted, and
+during the half century which has passed since their return to the valley
+which was the cradle of their race they have never molested the white man
+and have supported themselves by such work as the valley affords and by
+basket weaving.
+
+[Illustration: THE YOSEMITE—AND A LADY WHO DIDN’T KNOW FEAR.
+
+“She balanced herself on one foot on the ledge’s very brink and extended
+the other, like a _première danseuse_, over three fifths of a mile of
+emptiness.”]
+
+It was quite by chance that I stumbled upon these copper-coloured
+stragglers from another era. While riding one afternoon along the foot
+of the sheer precipice which hems the valley in, my eye was caught by
+three strange objects standing in a row. They resembled—as much as they
+resembled anything—West African voodoo priests in the thatched garments
+which they wear on ceremonial occasions. Upon questioning the Indian
+woman who appeared, however, I elicited the information that they were
+_chuck-ahs_, and were built to store acorns in. The Yosemite _chuck-ah_
+looks like a huge edition of the hampers they use in the lavatories
+of hotels to throw soiled towels in, thatched with fir branches and
+twigs, covered with a square of canvas to shed the rain, and mounted on
+stilts so as to place its contents beyond the reach of rodents. As the
+Yosemites, who are bitterly poor, largely subsist upon a coarse bread
+made from meal produced by pounding the bitter acorn, the _chuck-ah_ is
+as essential to their scheme of household economy as a flour barrel is to
+ours. The copper-coloured lady who painstakingly explained all this to
+me in very disconnected English told me that her name was Wilson’s Lucy.
+Whether she was married to Wilson or whether she was merely attached,
+like her name, I did not inquire. Flattered by my obvious interest in her
+domestic affairs, she disappeared into the miserable hut which served as
+home, to reappear an instant later carrying what at first glance I took
+for a small-sized mummy, but which, upon closer inspection, proved to be
+a very black-haired, very bright-eyed, very lusty youngster, bound to
+a board from chin to ankle with linen bandages which served the double
+purpose of making him straight of body and keeping him out of mischief.
+
+“What’s his name?” I inquired, proffering a piece of silver.
+
+“My name Wilson’s Lucy,” the mother giggled proudly. “He name Woodrow
+Wilson.”
+
+So, should the President see fit to present a silver spoon to his
+copper-coloured namesake, he can address it care of Yosemite Valley
+Post-Office, California.
+
+[Illustration: In midwinter, when the Yosemite is deep in snow, skis
+and sledges provide the only means of giving the baby an airing.
+
+“What’s his name?” I inquired. The mother giggled proudly: “He name
+Woodrow Wilson.”
+
+YOSEMITE YOUNGSTERS, WHITE AND RED.]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Of the Yosemite, Herr Karl Baedeker, to whose red guide-books every
+travelling American clings as tenaciously as to his letter of credit,
+and whose opinions he accepts as unreservedly as a Mohammedan accepts
+the Koran, has said: “No single valley in Switzerland combines in so
+limited a space such a wonderful variety of grand and romantic scenery.”
+Aside from its unique scenic beauties, the chief attraction of the
+Yosemite, to my way of thinking, is the altogether unusual variety of
+recreation which it affords. Excursions afoot, ahorseback, or acarriage
+to a dozen points of charm in the valley and its environs; trail rides
+along the dizzy paths which the government has built to skirt the cañon’s
+rim; fishing in the icy mountain streams, in whose shaded pools half a
+dozen varieties of trout—Steelheads, Speckled, Brook, Rainbow, Dolly
+Varden, and others—await the fly; _al fresco_ luncheons in the leafy
+recesses of the Happy Isles, with the pine-carpeted earth for a seat, a
+moss-covered boulder for a table, and the mingled murmur of waterfalls
+and wind-stirred tree tops for music; it is days spent in such fashion
+which makes of a visit to the Yosemite an unforgettable memory.
+
+A half-day’s journey south by stage from the Yosemite brings one to
+the lovely Sierran meadow of Wawona, above which are marshalled that
+glorious company of Sequoias known as the Mariposa Big Tree Grove. Just
+as Ireland has its lakes, and Switzerland its mountains, and Norway its
+fiords, so California has its Sequoias, and in many respects they are
+the most wonderful of all. The Big Trees, as they are called, are of
+two _genera_: the _Sequoia gigantea_, found only in the lower ranges of
+the high Sierras, and the _Sequoia sempervirens_, which are peculiar to
+the region lying between the Coast Range and the sea. There is no more
+fascinating trip on the continent than that from the Yosemite to the Big
+Trees of Mariposa, the road, which in the course of a few miles attains
+an elevation of six thousand five hundred feet, commanding magnificent
+retrospects of the Bridal Veil Falls, El Capitan, Cathedral Spires, and
+Half Dome, then plunging into the depths of a forest of cedar, fir,
+and pine, crossing the south fork of the brawling Merced, passing the
+hospitable verandas of the Wawona Hotel, and ending under the shadow of
+the redwood giants, traversing, en route, a tunnel cut through the heart
+of a living Sequoia. In their exploitation of the Big Tree groves, the
+railway companies have had the rather questionable taste to advertise
+these monarchs of the forest by means of pictures showing six-horse
+coaches being driven through them, or troops of cavalry aligned upon
+their prostrate trunks, or good-looking young women on horseback giving
+equestrian exhibitions upon their stumps. To me this sort of thing
+smacks too much of the professional showman; it is like making a Bengal
+tiger jump through a paper hoop or a lion sit up on his hind legs and
+beg like a trick dog. The Sequoias are too magnificent, too awesome to
+thus cheapen. When once you have stood in their solemn presence and have
+attempted to follow with your eye the course of the great trunks soaring
+skyward, higher than the Flatiron Building in New York, half again the
+height of the shaft on Bunker Hill; when you have made the circuit of
+their massive trunks, equal in circumference to the spires of Notre
+Dame; when you have examined their bark, thicker than the armour of the
+dreadnought _Texas_; you will agree with me, I think, that the Big Trees
+of California need no circus performances to emphasise their proportions
+and their majesty.
+
+According to the rules promulgated by the government, motorists are
+permitted to leave the Yosemite only between the hours of six and
+seven-thirty in the morning. After I had crawled out of a warm bed into
+the shiveryness of a Sierran dawn—for the early mornings are bitterly
+cold in the High Sierras—I felt inclined to agree with Madame de
+Pompadour that “travelling is the saddest of all pleasures.” But when we
+were sandwiched in the tonneau of the car again, with the long and trying
+grade by which we had entered the valley safely behind us and the river
+road to Merced stretching out in long diagonals in front, we soon forgot
+the discomforts of the early rising, for the big car leaped forward like
+a spirited horse turned loose upon the countryside, and the crisp, clear
+air dashed itself into our faces until we felt as buoyant and exhilarated
+as though we had been drinking champagne. After “checking out” at the
+Big Tree military outpost, we turned down the road which leads through
+Coulterville to Merced, the walls of the cañon gradually becoming less
+precipitous and the rugged character of the country merging into orchards
+and these in turn to farms and vineyards as we debouched into the San
+Joaquin again.
+
+Leaving Merced in the golden haze behind us, we swung southward, through
+the land of port wine and sherry, to Madera, the birthplace of the
+American raisin, and so down the splendid Kearney Boulevard—fifteen miles
+of oiled delight running between hedges of palms and oleanders—to Fresno,
+the geographical centre of California and the home of the American raisin
+and sweet-wine industry, which in little more than a dozen years has
+elbowed Spain out of first place among the raisin growers of the world
+and has caused ten thousand homes to spring up out on the sandy plain.
+Unleashing the power beneath the throbbing bonnet, we tore southward and
+ever southward, at first through growing grain-fields and then across
+vast barren stretches, waiting patiently for reclamation. Draped along
+the scalloped base of the moleskin-coloured foot-hills, where they rise
+abruptly from the plain, was a bright green ribbon—the citrus belt of the
+San Joaquin, where the orange groves nestle in the sheltered coves formed
+by the Sierras’ projecting spurs. In the region lying between Visalia
+and Porterville frost is an almost negligible quantity and, as a result,
+it is threatening the supremacy of the Riverside-Pasadena district as a
+producer of the golden fruit.
+
+Visalia is the starting-point for the Sequoia and General Grant Big Tree
+Groves, which have recently been opened to automobilists. The route to
+the Sequoia Park lies through Lemon Cove and then over a moderately good
+road, extremely dusty in summer, to Rocky Gulch, on the Giant Forest
+Road, where the motorist is halted by a cavalry patrol and the customary
+five-dollar admittance fee to national parks exacted. From Visalia to
+Camp Sierra, in the heart of the Sequoia, is fifty-five miles, to cover
+which, allowing for the mountain grades, the indifferent condition of
+the roads, and the delay at the park boundary, will require a full
+half day. The monarch of the Sequoia Grove is the redwood known as
+“General Sherman,” two hundred and eighty feet in height and ninety-five
+feet in circumference. Taking height and girth together, the “General
+Sherman” is, I believe, the largest tree in the world, though in the
+little-visited Calaveras Grove, the northernmost of the Californian
+groups of big trees, the “Mother of the Forest” is three hundred and
+fifteen feet high and the prostrate “Father of the Forest” is one hundred
+and twelve feet in circumference. If, however, the size of a tree is
+gauged by its girth only, there are several trees larger than any of the
+Californian Sequoias—the gigantic cypress near Oaxaca, in Mexico, known
+as the “Great Tree of Tule,” whose trunk measures one hundred and sixty
+feet in circumference but whose height is barely more; the great banyan
+in the botanical garden at Calcutta, and the “Chestnut Tree of a Hundred
+Horses”—said to be the largest tree in the world—at the foot of Mount
+Etna. I do not know whether these bald figures convey anything to you,
+but they certainly do not to me and I am not going to burden you with
+more of them. I have done my duty in giving you the dimensions of the
+largest of the Sequoias, which, I might add, is almost the exact height
+of the Flatiron Building. A vast deal of nonsense has been written about
+the age and other features of the Californian redwoods. It is not enough
+for the visitor to learn that the oldest Sequoia was probably a sapling
+when Rameses drove the Israelites out of Egypt, but the guide must needs
+draw upon his imagination and add another six or seven thousand years on
+top of that. The Sequoia, the noblest living thing upon our continent
+to-day, would appear, even at the age of five-and-twenty centuries, to
+be capable of much added lustre, for I was gravely assured that it was
+probably from these very groves that Solomon obtained the pillars for his
+temple.
+
+It is in the neighbourhood of fourscore miles from Visalia to the delta
+of the Kern, most southerly of the Sierra’s golden streams, along whose
+banks rise the gaunt, black skeletons of the oil-derricks. So vast is
+the extent of the Great Valley of California that, though it contains
+the greatest petroleum fields in all the world, the traveller may
+zigzag through it for many days without seeing a sign of the industry
+which lights the lamps and provides the motive power for trains, boats,
+and motor-cars from the Straits of Behring to the Straits of Magellan.
+It is not an attractive region. Hungry and bare are the tawny hills,
+viscous the waters of the stream that meanders between them, weird and
+gibbet-like the forest of derricks which crowns them. There is a smell
+of coal-oil in the air, and the few habitations we passed were, by their
+very ugliness, obviously connected with this, the unloveliest of the
+earth’s products.
+
+Bakersfield marks the virtual end of the Great Valley, a few miles south
+of it the converging ranges of fawn-coloured plush being linked by the
+Tehachapi, which is the recognised boundary between central and southern
+California. Bakersfield owes its abounding prosperity to the adjacent
+oil-fields, its streets being lined by the florid residences and its
+highways resounding to the arrogant _honk honk_ of the high-powered
+motor-cars of the “oil barons,” as the men who have “struck oil” are
+termed. I like these oil barons because with their loud voices and their
+boisterous manners and the picturesqueness of their dress they typify a
+phase of life in the “Last West” which is rapidly disappearing. There
+is something rough-and-ready and romantic about them; something which
+recalls their get-rich-quick fellows in Dawson and Johannesburg and Baku.
+Most of them have acquired their wealth suddenly; most of them have
+worked up from the humblest beginnings; and most of them believe in the
+good old proverb of “Easy come, easy go—for there’s more where this came
+from.” Red-faced, loud-voiced, with a predilection for broad-brimmed hats
+and gaudy ties, you can see them playing poker for high stakes in the
+back rooms of the saloons or leaning over the hotel bars in boisterous
+conversation. After I had watched them for a time I no longer doubted
+the assertion that Bakersfield buys more spittoons than any city in the
+country.
+
+Although from the gilded cupola of Bakersfield’s truly beautiful
+court-house you can look out across a quarter of a million irrigated
+acres, though you can see a solid block of alfalfa covering forty squares
+miles and fattening twenty-five thousand head of steers a year, these
+form but a patch of green on the yellow floor of the valley’s gigantic
+amphitheatre. As a matter of fact, the development of the country around
+Bakersfield has been seriously retarded by the enormous holdings of two
+or three great landowners who neither improve their properties nor sell
+them. One of these great landlords, who numbers his Californian acres
+alone in the millions and who boasts that his cow-punchers can drive
+a herd of his steers from the Mexican frontier to the Oregon line and
+camp on his own land every night, obtained his enormous holdings near
+Bakersfield long years ago under the terms of the Swamp and Drowned Lands
+Act, which provided that any one who applied could obtain title to any
+land which he had gone over in a boat. So he put a boat on a wagon and
+had it hauled over hundreds of thousands of acres which he has since
+reclaimed. He was an ingenious fellow.
+
+[Illustration: A “gusher” near Bakersfield spouting two and a half
+million gallons of oil a day.
+
+The Kern River oil fields, near Bakersfield, Cal.
+
+THE GREATEST OIL FIELDS IN THE WORLD.]
+
+You will need to journey far to find a region more desolate and
+forbidding than that lying between Bakersfield and the summit of the
+Tehachapi. Never shall I forget the deadly monotony of that long,
+straight road along which we pushed in the teeth of a buffeting wind,
+with its whistling telegraph-poles, its creaking iron windmills at
+regular intervals, and its barbed-wire fences all converging to a
+vanishing-point which looked to be perhaps five miles ahead but at which
+we never seemed to arrive. There are no trees to obstruct the view of
+the barren hills which rim the distance, and for many miles there is not
+enough cover to hide a grasshopper, for the soil is poisoned by alkalis
+and the poor, thin grass dies of a broken heart. But as the car panted
+its tortuous way from the floor of the valley up the face of the mountain
+wall which hems it in, the scenery became more varied and interesting.
+Great patches of the mountainside were clothed with masses of lupin of
+the coldest, brightest blue you ever saw. Once we ran through a forest
+of tree yuccas whose spiked, fantastic branches looked as though they
+were laden with hedgehogs. Sometimes the road would dip quite suddenly
+into a charming little hollow in the hills, shaded by venerable live-oaks
+and with a purling brook running through it, only to emerge again and
+zigzag along the face of the mountain, clinging to the bare rock as a
+fly clings to the ceiling. Several times we had to stop for flocks of
+sheep—thousands and thousands of them—moving to pastures new, driven
+by shaggy, bright-eyed sheep-dogs which hung upon the flanks of the
+flock and seemed to anticipate every order of the Basque shepherds. I
+noticed that all these herdsmen wore heavy revolvers at their hips and
+had Winchesters slung at the pommels of their saddles, for the ancient
+feud between cattlemen and sheepmen still exists upon these Sierran
+ranges, and there is many a pitched battle between them of which no news
+creeps into the columns of the papers. The frequency of these flocks
+considerably delayed our progress, for the road is narrow and to have
+driven through the woolly wave which at times engulfed the car would have
+meant driving scores of sheep over the precipice to death on the rocks
+below.
+
+[Illustration: “We ran through a forest of tree-yuccas whose spiked,
+fantastic branches looked as though they were laden with hedgehogs.”
+
+“Our progress was frequently delayed by woolly waves which at times
+engulfed the car.”
+
+OVER THE TEHACHAPIS.]
+
+The change in scenery as we emerged from the mouth of the pass at Saugus
+was almost startling in its suddenness. Gone were the dreary, wind-swept
+plains; gone was the endless vista of telegraph-poles; gone the dun and
+desolate hills. We found ourselves, instead, at the entrance to a valley
+which might well have been the place of exile of Persephone. Symmetrical
+squares of bay-green oranges, of soft gray olives and of yellowing vines
+turned its slopes into chessboards of striking verdure. Rows of tall,
+straight eucalyptus trees made of the highway a tunnel of blue-green
+foliage. The mountains, from foot to summit, were clothed with lupins of
+a blue that dulled the blue of heaven. The oleanders and magnolias and
+palms and clumps of bamboo about the ranches gave to the scene an almost
+tropical luxuriance. This was the vale of Santa Clara—not to be confused
+with the valley of the same name farther north—perhaps the richest and
+most prosperous agricultural region for its size between the oceans and
+certainly the least advertised and the least known. Unlike the residents
+of other parts of California, its residents issue no enticing literature
+depicting the surpassing beauties and attractions of their valley as
+a place of residence, for the very good reason that they do not care
+to sell, unless at prohibitive prices. They have a good thing and they
+intend to keep it. Less than twoscore miles in length, the Santa Clara
+Valley, which begins at Saugus and runs westward to Ventura-by-the-Sea,
+comes nearer to being frostless than any region in the State, save only
+the Imperial Valley. But its industries are by no means restricted to
+the cultivation of citrus fruits, for the walnuts it produces are finer
+than those of England, its figs are larger than those of Smyrna, and its
+olives more succulent than those grown on the hills of Greece.
+
+As with engines droning like giant bumblebees we sped down the
+eucalyptus-bordered highway which leads to Santa Paula, the valley was
+flooded with the rare beauty of the fleeting twilight of the West. The
+sky, a moment before a dome of lapis lazuli, merged into that exquisite
+ashes-of-roses tint which is the foremost precursor of the dark, and
+then burst, all unexpectedly, into a splendid fiery glow which turned
+the western heavens into a sheet of rosy coral. But, like most really
+beautiful things, the Californian sunsets are quick to perish. A few
+moments only and the rose had dulled to palest lavender and this to
+amethyst and this in turn to purple and then, at one bound, came the
+night, and our head lamps were boring twin holes in the velvety,
+flower-scented darkness. Before us the street lights of Santa Paula burst
+into flame like a diamond necklace clasped about the neck of a lovely
+woman.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The region of which Lake Tahoe is the centre is difficult to describe;
+one is drawn illusively into over-praising it. Yet everything about
+it—the height of the surrounding mountains, the vastness of the forests,
+the size of the trees, the beauty of the wild flowers, the grandeur of
+the scenery, the colourings of the lake itself—is so superlative that,
+to describe it as it really is, one must, perforce, lay himself open to
+the charge of exaggeration. There is no lake in Switzerland or, for that
+matter, anywhere else in Europe which is Tahoe’s equal. To find its peer
+you will need to go to Lake Louise, in the Canadian Rockies, or, better
+still, to some of the mountain lakes of Kashmir. Here, set down on the
+very ridge-pole of the High Sierras, is a lake twenty-two miles long by
+ten in width, the innumerable pleasure craft whose propellers churn its
+translucent waters into opaline and amaranthine hues being nearly a mile
+and a quarter above the surface of the Pacific. To attempt to describe
+its ever-changing and elusive colourings is as futile as to describe
+the colours of a sunset sky, of a peacock’s tail, of an opal. Looked at
+from one point, it is blue—the blue of an Ægean sky, of a baby’s eyes,
+of a turquoise or of a sapphire—but an hour later, or from another
+angle, it will be green: a gorgeous, glorious, dazzling green, sometimes
+scintillating like an emerald of incredible size, sometimes lustreless
+as a piece of jade. In the bays and coves and inlets which corrugate its
+shores its waters become even more diverse in colouring: smoke grey,
+pearl grey, bottle green, Nile green, yes, even apple green, lavender,
+amethyst, violet, purple, indigo, and—believe me or not, as you choose—I
+have more than once seen Tahoe so rosy in the reflected _alpenglow_ of
+twilight that it looked for all the world like a sheet of pinkest coral.
+Its shores are as diverse as its colourings, pebbly beaches alternating
+with emerald bays; pine-crowned promontories; snug coves on whose silver
+beaches bathers disport themselves and children gambol; moss-carpeted
+banks shaded by centenarian trees; cliffs, smooth as the side of a house,
+rising a thousand feet sheer above the water; and, here and there, deep
+and narrow inlets so hemmed in by vertical precipices of rock that to
+find their like you would have to go to the Norwegian fiords. Completely
+encircling the lake, like watchful sentinels, rise the snow peaks—not
+the domesticated mountains of the Adirondacks or the Alleghenies, but
+towering monsters, ten, twelve, fifteen, thousand feet in height and
+white-mantled throughout the year—the monarchs of the High Sierras.
+From the snow-line, which is generally about two thousand feet above the
+surface of the lake and ten thousand feet above the level of the sea,
+the coniferous Sierran forests—the grandest and most beautiful in the
+world—clothe the lower slopes of the mountains in mantles of shaggy green
+which sweep downward until their hems are wet in the waters of the lake.
+
+One of the most distinguishing and pleasing characteristics of these
+Sierran forests is their inviting openness. The trees of all the species
+stand more or less apart in groves or in small, irregular groups,
+enabling a rider to make his way almost anywhere, along sun-bathed
+colonnades and through lush, green glades, sprinkled with wild flowers
+and as smooth as the lawns of a city park. Now you cross a forest garden
+ariot with wild flowers, now a mountain meadow, now a fern-banked,
+willow-shaded stream, and ever and anon emerge upon some granite pavement
+or high, bare ridge commanding superb views of majestic snow-peaks rising
+grandly above the intervening sea of evergreen. Every now and then you
+stumble upon mountain lakes tucked away in the most unexpected places,
+gleaming amid the surrounding forest like sapphires which a jeweller
+has laid out for inspection upon a green plush cloth. The whole number
+of lakes in the Sierras is said to be upward of fifteen hundred, not
+counting the innumerable smaller pools and tarns. Another feature of the
+High Sierras are the glacier meadows: smooth, level, silky lawns, lying
+embedded in the upper forests, on the floors of the valleys, and along
+the broad backs of the ridges at a height of from eight to ten thousand
+feet above the sea. These mountain meadows are nearly as level as the
+lakes whose places they have taken and present a dry, even surface, free
+from boulders, bogs, and weeds. As one suddenly emerges from the solemn
+twilight of the forest into one of these dreamy, sunlit glades, he looks
+instinctively for the dainty figures of Watteau shepherdesses or for the
+slender forms of sportive nymphs. The close, fine sod is so brightly
+enamelled with flowers and butterflies that it may well be called a
+meadow garden, for in many places the plushy turf is so thickly strewn
+with gentians, daisies, ivesias, forget-me-nots, wild honeysuckle, and
+paint-brush that the grass can scarcely be seen.
+
+In certain of these mountain meadows I noticed a phenomenon which I
+have observed nowhere else save in Morocco: the flowers, instead of
+being mixed and mingled in a huge bouquet, grew in distinct but adjacent
+patches—a square of blue forget-me-nots here, a blanket of white daisies
+there, a strip of Indian paint-brush over there, and beyond a dense clump
+of wild lilac—so that from a little distance the meadow looked exactly
+like a great floral mosaic. It was very beautiful. On the higher slopes
+the scarlet shoots of the snow-plant dart from the soil like tongues
+of flame. Around it hangs a pretty native legend. Two young braves,
+so the legend runs, made desperate love to an Indian princess, who at
+length chose the one and turned away the other. On the marriage day
+the rejected lover ambushed himself in the forest, and, as his rival
+went riding past to claim his bride, sent an arrow twanging into his
+breast. But, though wounded unto death, the lover clung to his horse and
+raced through the forest to die in the arms of his bride. As he sped his
+heart’s blood, welling forth, left a trail of crimson splotches on the
+ground behind him. And wherever a drop of blood fell, there a blood-red
+flower sprang into bloom. If you doubt the story you can see and pick
+them for yourself.
+
+Set high on the western shore of Tahoe, and so appropriately designed
+that it seems to be a part of the forest which encircles it, is Tahoe
+Tavern—a long, low hostelry of shingles, stone, and logs, its deep
+verandas commanding an entrancing view of the lake and of the mountainous
+Nevada shore, for the California-Nevada boundary runs down the middle
+of the lake. Just as the smart set along the Atlantic seaboard flock
+to Newport, Narragansett, and Bar Harbour in the summer, so the
+corresponding section of society upon the Pacific Coast may be found at
+Tahoe from July to September. A narrow-gauge railway, leaving the main
+line of the Southern Pacific at Truckee, two hundred miles or so east of
+San Francisco, hugs the brawling Truckee to the Tavern, a distance of a
+dozen miles, whence steamers convey the visitor to the numerous hotels,
+camps, and cottages which dot the shores of the lake. The summers are
+never warm on Tahoe, nor, for that matter, ever uncomfortably cool,
+while the air is as crisp and invigorating as extra-dry champagne. From
+the first of July to the first of October it almost never rains. And yet
+ninety-nine Easterners out of a hundred pity the poor Californians who,
+they imagine, are sweltering in semitropic heat.
+
+One never lacks for amusement at Tahoe. Lean power-boats tear madly from
+shore to shore, their knife-like prows ploughing the lake into a creamy
+furrow. Hydroplanes hurtle by like leaping tunas. There is angling both
+in Tahoe and the maze of adjacent lakes and lakelets for every variety
+of trout that swims. There is bathing—if one doesn’t mind cold water.
+At night white-shouldered women and white-shirted men dip and hesitate
+and glide on the casino’s glassy floor to the impassioned strains of
+“Get Out and Get Under” and “Too Much Mustard.” But trail riding is the
+most characteristic as it is the most exciting, diversion of them all.
+It is really mountaineering on horseback—up the forested slopes, across
+the gaunt, bare ridges, and so to the icy summits, on wiry ponies which
+are as sure-footed as mountain-goats and as active as back-yard cats.
+The narrowness of many of the trails, the slipperiness of ice and snow,
+the giddiness of the sheer cliffs, the thought of what would happen if
+your horse _should_ stumble, combine to make it an exciting amusement.
+You can leave the shores of the lake, basking in a summer climate, with
+flowers blooming everywhere, and in a two hours’ ride find yourself amid
+perpetual snow. It is a novel experience, this sudden transition from
+July to January, and not to be obtained so readily anywhere else that I
+know, unless it be in a cold-storage plant. On the Fourth of July, for
+example, after a late breakfast, the Lady and I waved _au revoir_ to our
+white-flannelled friends on the Tavern’s veranda and before noon were
+pelting each other with snowballs on a snow-drift forty feet deep, with
+Lake Tahoe, gleaming beneath the sun like a gigantic opal, three thousand
+feet below us. There may, of course, be more enchanting vacation places
+than this Tahoe country—higher mountains, grander forests, more beautiful
+lakes, a better climate—but I do not know where to find them.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+“WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON”
+
+  “I hear the far-off voyager’s horn;
+    I see the Yankee’s trail—
+  His foot on every mountain pass,
+    On every stream his sail.
+
+  ...
+
+  “I hear the mattock in the mine,
+    The axe stroke in the dell,
+  The clamour from the Indian lodge,
+    The Jesuit chapel bell!
+
+  “I see the swarthy trappers come
+    From Mississippi’s springs;
+  And war-chiefs with their painted brows
+    And crests of eagle wings.
+
+  “Behind the scared squaw’s birch canoe
+    The steamer smokes and raves;
+  And city lots are staked for sale
+    Above old Indian graves.
+
+  ...
+
+  “Each rude and jostling fragment soon
+    Its fitting place shall find—
+  The raw material of a State,
+    Its muscle and its mind.”
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+“WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON”
+
+
+With a rattle of wheels and a clickety-clack of hoofs the coach bore down
+upon us, its yellow body swaying drunkenly upon its leathern springs.
+It was a welcome sight, for since early morning we had been journeying
+through a region sans sign-posts, sans houses, sans people, sans
+everything. I threw up my hand, palm outward, which is the recognised
+halt sign of the plains, and in obedience to the signal the sombreroed
+driver pulled his wheelers back on their haunches and jammed his brakes
+on hard. Half a dozen bearded faces peered from the dim interior of the
+vehicle to ascertain the reason for the sudden stop.
+
+“Are we right for the Columbia?” I asked.
+
+“You betcha, friend,” said the driver, squirting a jet of tobacco juice
+with great dexterity between the portals of his drooping moustache. “All
+ye’ve got to do is keep ’er headed north an’ keep agoin’. You’re not more
+nor sixty mile from the river now. How fur’ve ye come with that there
+machine, anyway?”
+
+“From Mexico,” I replied a trifle proudly.
+
+“The hell you say!” he responded with open admiration. “An’ where ye
+bound fur, ef I might make so bold’s to ask?”
+
+“As far north as we can get,” I answered. “To Alaska, if the roads hold
+out.”
+
+“Waal, don’t it beat the Dutch what things is acomin’ to anyway,” he
+ejaculated, “when ye kin git into a waggin like that there an’ scoot
+acrost the country same’s ye would on a railroad train? I’ve druv this
+old stage forty year come next December, but the next thing ye know
+they’ll be wantin’ an autermobile, an’ me an’ the critters’ll be lookin’
+fer another job. But that’s progress, an’ ’tain’t no manner o’ use tryin’
+to buck it. These old Concords hev done a heap toward civilisin’ the
+West, but their day’s about over, I reckon, an’ the autermobile will come
+along an’ take up the job where they left off. Come to think on it, it’s
+sorter ’s if the old style was shakin’ hands an’ sayin’, ‘Glad tew meet
+you’ to the new. But I’ve got your Uncle Sam’l’s mail to deliver an’ I
+can’t be hangin’ ’round here gossipin’ all day.”
+
+He kicked off his brake, and his long whip-lash, leaping forward like a
+rattlesnake, cracked between the ears of his leaders. “Get to work there,
+ye lazy, good-fer-nothin’ sons o’ sea-cooks, you!” he bellowed.
+
+“S’long, friend, an’ good luck to ye,” he called over his shoulder. The
+whip-lash cracked angrily once more, wheelers and leaders settled into
+their collars, and the coach tore on amid a rolling cloud of dust.
+
+[Illustration: THE OVERLAND MAIL.
+
+“With a rattle of wheels and a clickety-clack of hoofs the coach bore
+down upon us.”]
+
+“That was perfectly wonderful,” said the Lady, with a little gasp of
+satisfaction. “That was quite the nicest thing we’ve seen since we left
+Mexico. I didn’t know that that sort of thing existed any more outside of
+Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.”
+
+“It won’t exist much longer,” said I. “This Oregon hinterland is the last
+American frontier, but the railway is coming and in a few more years the
+only place you will be able to see a Concord coach like the one we just
+met will be in a museum or on a moving-picture screen. The old fellow was
+perfectly right when he said that our meeting typified the passing of the
+old and the coming of the new.”
+
+“I’m awfully sorry for them,” remarked the Lady abstractedly.
+
+“Sorry for whom?” I asked.
+
+“Why,” she answered, “for the people who can only see this wonderful West
+on moving-picture screens.”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We took the back-stairs route to Oregon. When we turned the bonnet of
+the car northward from Lake Tahoe, we had the choice of two routes to
+the Columbia. One of these, which we would have taken had we followed
+the advice of every one with whom we talked, would have necessitated our
+retracing our steps across the High Sierras to Sacramento, where we would
+have struck the orthodox and much-travelled highway that runs northward
+through the Sacramento Valley, via Marysville and Red Bluff and Redding,
+enters the Siskiyous at Shasta and leaves them again at Grant’s Pass, and
+keeps on through the fertile and thickly settled valleys of the Rogue,
+the Umpqua, and the Willamette, to Portland and its rose gardens. The
+other route, which is ignored by the road-books and of which those human
+road-books who run the garages seemed to be in total ignorance, strikes
+boldly into the primeval wilderness that lies to the north of Tahoe,
+parallels for close on two hundred miles the western boundary of Nevada,
+crosses the Oregon border at Lower Klamath Lake, and then, hugging the
+one hundred and twenty-second parallel like a long-lost brother, climbs
+up and up and up over the savage lava beds, through the country of the
+Warm Springs Indians, across the fertile farm lands of the Inland Empire,
+and so down the Cañon of the Deschutes to where the rocky barrier of The
+Dalles says to the boats upon the Columbia: “You can go no further.”
+This is the famous Oregon Trail, which lies like a long rope thrown idly
+on the ground, abandoned by the hand that used it. Though the people
+with whom we talked urged us not to take it, prophesying long-neglected
+and impassable roads and total lack of accommodation and all manner of
+disaster, we stubbornly persisted in our choice, lured by the romantic
+and historic memories that hover round it; for was it not, in its day,
+one of the most famous of all the routes followed by mankind in its
+migrations; was it not the trail taken by those resolute frontiersmen who
+won for us the West?
+
+We were warned repeatedly, by people who professed to know whereof
+they spoke, that, if we persisted in taking this unconventional and
+therefore perfectly ridiculous route, we would experience great
+difficulty in crossing the mountains, and, as some of our informants
+cheeringly observed, it was dollars to doughnuts that we wouldn’t be
+able to cross them at all. But as we had had experiences with these
+brethren of calamity howlers while motoring in Rhodesia and in Grande
+Kabylie and in the Anti-Lebanon, their mournful prognostications did not
+trouble us in the least. In fact, they but served to whet our appetites
+for the anticipated adventures. As a matter of fact, throughout the
+entire thousand miles that our speedometer recorded between Tahoe and
+The Dalles, not once did we cross any mountains worthy of the name, for
+our route, which had been carefully selected for its easy gradients
+long years before our time by men who traversed it in prairie-schooners
+instead of motor-cars and whose motive power was oxen instead of engines,
+lay along the gently rolling surface of that great mile-high plateau
+which parallels the eastern face of the Cascade Range and comes to a
+sudden termination in the precipitous cliffs which turn the upper reaches
+of the Columbia into a mighty gorge.
+
+Turning our tonneau upon Truckee and its brawling trout-stream, we
+struck into the forest as the compass needle points, with Susanville
+one hundred and fifty miles away, as our day’s objective. (Who Susan
+was I haven’t the remotest idea, unless she was the lady that they
+named the black-eyed daisies after.) For hour after hour the road wound
+and turned and twisted through the grandest forest scenery that can
+be found between the oceans. To our left, through occasional breaks in
+the giant hedge of fir and spruce and jack-pine, we caught fleeting
+glimpses of Pilot Peak, whose purple summit has doubtless served as a
+sign-post for many an Oregon-bound band of pioneers. To us, who had seen
+only the tourist California and the highly cultivated valleys of the
+interior, these Californian highlands proved a constant source of joy
+and self-congratulation. We felt as though we were explorers and, so far
+as motoring for pleasure in that region is concerned, we were. But the
+greatest revelation was the road. We had expected to need the services
+of an osteopath to rejoint our dislocated vertebræ and, to modify the
+anticipated jolts, I had had the car equipped with shock-absorbers and
+had taped the springs. We could, however, have gone over that road
+with no great discomfort in a springless wagon, for, upon a roadbed
+undisturbed for close on half a century by any traffic worthy of the
+name, had fallen so thick and resilient a blanket of pine-needles that we
+felt as though a strip of Brussels carpet had been laid for our benefit,
+as they do in Europe when royalty has occasion to set foot upon the
+ground. The sunbeams, slanting through the lofty tree tops, dappled the
+tawny surface of the road with golden splotches and fleckings, squirrels
+chattered at us from the over-arching boughs; coveys of grouse, taken
+unaware by the stealth of our approach, rocketed into the air, wings
+whirring like machine guns, only to settle unconcernedly as soon as we
+had passed; an antlered stag bounded suddenly into the road, stood for
+an instant motionless as though cast from iron, with wide-open, startled
+eyes, and disappeared in panic-stricken flight; once, swinging silently
+around a turning, we came upon a black bear gorging himself at the
+free-lunch counter that the wild blackberries provide along the road;
+but before we could get our rifles out of their cases he had crashed
+his way into underbrush too dense for us to follow. Nor did we have any
+great desire to follow. The smoothness and silence of the road were too
+enchanting. Hour after hour we sped noiselessly along without a glimpse
+of a human being or a human habitation. There were no sign-posts to point
+the way and we wanted none.
+
+But all good things must end in time, and our pine-carpeted road
+debouched quite unexpectedly into the loveliest valley that you ever saw.
+Perhaps it is because its sylvan serenity is undisturbed as yet by the
+jeering screech of the locomotive, but you will need to use much gasoline
+and wear out many tires before you will happen upon anything more idyllic
+than those cloistered and incredibly fertile acres that sweep down from
+the summit of the Iron Hills to the margin of Honey Lake. The trim white
+farmhouses that peep coquettishly, like bashful village maidens, from
+amid the fragrant orchards at the passer-by; the fields green-carpeted
+with sprouting grain; the barns whose queer hip-roofs made them look as
+though they were aburst with stored-up produce, as, indeed, they are;
+the sleek cattle, standing knee-deep in a lake as clear as Circe’s
+mirror—all these things spell p-r-o-s-p-e-r-i-t-y so plainly that even
+those who whirl by, as we did at forty miles an hour, may read.
+
+Susanville, which is built on a hill at the end of Honey Lake Valley,
+very much as the Italian hill towns command the tributary countryside,
+is a quiet rural community that has been stung by the bee of progress
+and is running around in circles in consequence. When we were there a
+railroad was in course of construction for the purpose of tapping the
+wealth of this rich but hitherto unexploited region, and the main street
+of the town, which we reached on a Saturday evening, was alive with
+farmers who had come in to do their week-end shopping, cow-punchers in
+gaudy neckerchiefs and Angora chaps, fresh from the ranges, engineers in
+high-laced boots and corduroy trousers, sun-tanned labourers from all
+four corners of Europe and the places in between. As a result of this
+week-end influx, the only hotel that Susanville possessed was filled to
+the doors.
+
+“I can’t even fix you up with a pool-table, gents,” said the
+shirt-sleeved proprietor, mopping the perspiration from his forehead with
+a violent-hued bandana; “and what’s more, every blame boardin’-house in
+town’s just as full up as we are.”
+
+“But we _must_ find some place to sleep,” I asserted positively. “We’ve a
+lady with us, you see, and she can’t very well sleep in the open—or on a
+pool-table either, can she?”
+
+“A lady? God bless my soul! Why didn’t you say so? Well, now, that’s too
+durned bad. But hold on a minute, friends. I wouldn’t be s’prised if Bill
+Dooling, the barber, could fix you up. He’s got a cottage down the road a
+piece and I’ll send a boy along with you to show you where he lives.”
+
+Bill the barber and his family, which consisted of his wife, his
+mother—known as granmaw—nine children who had reached the age of
+indiscretion, and a baby, dwelt in a vine-clad cottage as neat as the
+proverbial beeswax and about as roomy as a limousine.
+
+“Sure,” said he cordially, when I had explained our predicament, “we’ve
+got slathers of room. We’ll fix you up and welcome. You and the lady can
+have Rosamond Clarissa’s room, and your friend here can have the boys’
+room across the hall, and your showfer can sleep in Ebenezer’s bed. Me
+and the wife’ll fix ourselves up on the porch, and granmaw she’ll go
+acrost the street to a neighbour’s, and Abel and Absalom and David and
+Rosamond Clarissa and Ebenezer and Elisha and Gwendoline Hortensia and
+Hiram and Isaiah’ll sleep in the tent. Sure, we’ve got all the room you
+want.”
+
+“You must have almost as much trouble in finding names for your
+children,” the Lady remarked, “as the Pullman Company does in naming its
+sleeping-cars.”
+
+“Well, it’s this way, ma’am,” he explained. “Me and maw have a sort of an
+agreement. She names the girls and gets the names out of the magazines.
+I name the boys and get the names out of the Bible. She hoped that the
+baby’d be a girl so’s she could name her Patricia Penelope, but seeing as
+it’s a boy it’s up to me, and I haven’t been able to make up my mind yet
+between Jabez, Josiah, and Jeremiah.”
+
+Barring the fact that we were awakened at a somewhat unseasonable hour
+by a high-voiced discussion between Rosamond Clarissa and Gwendoline
+Hortensia as to which should have the privilege of washing the baby, we
+were very comfortable indeed—very much more so, I expect, than if we
+had been able to obtain quarters at the hotel—and, after a breakfast
+of berries with cream that was not milk incognito, and coffee, and hot
+cakes, and eggs that tasted as though they might have originated with a
+hen instead of a cold-storage vault, we rolled away with the hospitable
+barber and his brood waving us Godspeed from the doorstep.
+
+It is in the neighbourhood of two hundred and fifty miles from Susanville
+to the Oregon line, the earlier portion of the journey taking us through
+a forest that had evidently never known the woodsman’s axe. North of
+Dry Lake Ranch, which is the only place in between where a motorist can
+count on finding a bed to sleep in or a bite to eat, a grazing country of
+remarkable fertility begins, much of it having been taken up by Czechs
+from Bohemia: a stolid, sturdy, industrious folk who work themselves and
+their patient families and the ground unremittingly and whose prosperity,
+therefore, passes that of their more shiftless neighbours at a gallop.
+This fringe of farming communities, although in California, really mark
+the beginning of that great, rich agricultural region comprising the back
+country of Oregon which, because of its prosperity, its extent, and its
+wealth of resources, is known as the Inland Empire.
+
+A few miles beyond these Bohemian settlements we caught our first glimpse
+of Lower Klamath Lake, whose low and marshy shores, which lie squarely
+athwart the boundary between California and Oregon, forming a spring
+and autumn rendezvous for untold thousands of wild fowl, the government
+having set it aside as a sort of natural aviarium.
+
+“Look!” suddenly exclaimed the Lady, pointing. “The shores of the lake
+are covered with snow!”
+
+But what looked for all the world like an expanse of snow suddenly
+transformed itself, as we drew near, into a cloud of huge, ungainly
+birds with perfectly enormous bills, creating a racket like a thousand
+motor-cars with the beating of their wings.
+
+“Pelicans, by Jove!” exclaimed my friend, and that is what they
+were—thousands, yes, tens of thousands of them. The pelican, as we
+learned later, is the symbol, as it were, of all this Klamath country,
+the really beautiful hotel at Klamath Falls being named The White
+Pelican, “perhaps,” as the Lady observed, “because of the size of its
+bill.” However this may be, it is a very excellent hotel, indeed, and
+if you ever chance to find yourself in that part of the country I would
+advise you to spend a night there, if for no other reason than to enjoy
+the novel experience of staying in a hostelry which would do credit to
+Fifth Avenue and looking out of your window on a frontier town. This,
+mind you, is casting no aspersions on Klamath Falls, which is a very
+prosperous and wide-awake little place indeed, although ten years ago you
+would have had some difficulty in finding it on the map, its mushroom
+growth being due to the development of the immense lumber territory of
+which, since the completion of the railway, it has become the centre. As
+a matter of fact, the hotel was not built so much for the convenience
+of the traveller as it was for the comfort of the handful of Eastern
+capitalists whose great lumber interests necessitate their spending a
+considerable portion of the year in Klamath Falls and who demanded the
+same luxuries and conveniences in this backwoods town that they would
+have on Broadway. That explains why it is that in this remote settlement
+in the wilderness you can get a room furnished in cretonne and Circassian
+walnut, with a white porcelain bathroom opening from it, and can sit down
+to dinner at a red-shaded table in a gold-and-ivory dining-room. I know a
+man who keeps a private orchestra of thirty pieces, year in and year out,
+for his own amusement, but these Oregon lumber kings are the only men I
+have ever heard of who have built a great city hotel purely for their
+personal convenience.
+
+[Illustration: Crater Lake: “It looks like a gigantic wash-tub filled
+with blueing.”
+
+A flock of young pelicans on the shores of Lower Klamath Lake.
+
+IN THE OREGON HINTERLAND.]
+
+The late E. H. Harriman, knowing the continent and having the continent
+to choose from, built a shooting lodge on the shores of Upper Klamath
+Lake, to which he was wont to retreat, after the periodical strikes and
+railroad mergers and congressional investigations which punctuated his
+career, for rest and recreation. After the death of the great railway
+builder the lodge was purchased by the same group of men who built The
+White Pelican Hotel and has been converted into a sort of sporting resort
+_de luxe_. They call it Pelican Bay Lodge, and I know of nothing quite
+like it anywhere. It consists of perhaps a dozen log cabins, externally
+as rough as any frontiersman’s dwelling, but steam-heated, luxuriously
+furnished, and liberally bathtubised.
+
+Pelican Bay Lodge is the most convenient starting-point for that mountain
+mystery known as Crater Lake, which lies forty miles to the north of it
+and six thousand feet above it, in the heart of the Cascade Range. It
+took us five hours of steady running to cover those forty miles, and we
+didn’t stop to pick wild flowers either. The road is a very beautiful
+one, winding steadily upward through one of the finest pine forests on
+the continent. The last mile is more like mountaineering than motoring,
+however, for the road, in order to attain the rim of the lake, suddenly
+shoots upward at a perfectly appalling angle—I think they told me that at
+one place it had a grade of thirty-eight per cent—and more than once it
+seemed to us who were sitting in the tonneau that the car would tip over
+backward, like a horse that rears until it overbalances itself. Crater
+Lake is one of those places where the most calloused globe-trotter, from,
+whom neither the Pyramids nor the Taj Mahal would wring an exclamation
+of approval, gives, perforce, a gasp of real astonishment and admiration.
+Part of this is due, no doubt, to the startling suddenness with which you
+come upon it and to its dramatic situation; the rest to its surpassing
+beauty and its extraordinary colour. The lake, which occupies the crater
+of an extinct volcano the size and height of Mount Shasta, is almost
+circular, half a mile deep, five miles in circumference, and nearly a
+mile and a half above sea-level, the rocky walls which surround it being
+in places two thousand feet high and as sheer and smooth as the side of
+an upright piano. But its outstanding feature is its colour, for it is
+the bluest blue you ever saw or dreamed of: as blue as lapis lazuli,
+as a forget-me-not, as an Italian sky, as a baby’s eyes (provided, of
+course, that it is a blue-eyed baby), or as a Monday morning. It looks,
+indeed, like a gigantic wash-tub, filled with bluing, in which some weary
+colossus has been condemned to wash the clothing of the world.
+
+Nothing that we had seen since leaving Mexico so profoundly stirred my
+imagination as that portion of our road which stretched northward from
+Crater Lake, through Crescent and Shaniko, to The Dalles. Every few miles
+we passed groups of dilapidated and decaying buildings, with sunken roofs
+and boarded windows, which must once have been busy road-houses and stage
+stations, for near them were the remains of great barns and tumble-down
+corrals, now long since disused—melancholy reminders of those days, half
+a century agone, when down this lonely road that we were following
+plodded mile-long wagon-trains, the heads of women and children at
+every rent and loophole of the canvas tops, the men, rifle on shoulder,
+marching in the dust on either hand. Few, indeed, of these pioneers were
+rich in anything save children, affluent except in expectations; yet
+weather, roads, fare, mishaps—nothing daunted them, for they were “going
+West.”
+
+Roughly speaking, it is a hundred miles from Shaniko to The Dalles, over
+a road most of which is back-breakingly rough and all of which is so
+intolerably dusty that we felt as though we were covered with sandpaper
+instead of skin. But the scenery of the last half dozen miles caused us
+to forgive, if not to forget, the discomforts and the monotony of those
+preceding, for in them we dropped down through the wild and winding
+gorge which the Deschutes follows on its way to join hands with its big
+sister, the Columbia. The nearer we drew to the mighty river the higher
+our expectations grew, and every time we topped a rise or swung around
+a granite shoulder we searched for it eagerly, just as our migrating
+predecessors must have done. But, owing to the high, sheer cliffs that
+wall it in, we caught no glimpse of it whatever until, our road emerging
+from the cañon’s mouth upon the precipice’s brink, we suddenly found
+ourselves looking down upon it as it lay below us in all its shimmering
+and sinuous beauty, its silvery length winding away, away, away: eastward
+to its birthplace in the country of the Kootenai: westward to Astoria and
+its mother, the sea. Far below us, so far below that it looked like the
+little wooden villages you see in the windows of toy stores, the white
+houses of The Dalles were clustered upon the river’s banks.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The highroad, which had been palpably ailing for some time, took a sudden
+turn for the worse a few miles south of The Dalles, so that, when it
+found the great, peaceful, silent-flowing Columbia athwart its path, the
+temptation became too great to resist and it ended its misery in the
+river, leaving us, its faithful friends, who had borne it company all the
+way from Mexico, disconsolate upon the bank. Thus it befell that we were
+compelled to put the car and ourselves aboard a boat and trust to steam,
+instead of gasoline, to bear us over the ensuing section of our journey.
+It was a humiliating thing for motorists to have to do, of course—but
+what would you? There were no more roads. We were in the deplorable
+position of the man who told his wife that he came home because all the
+other places were closed. And think how keenly the veteran car—
+
+  “Me that ’ave been what I’ve been,
+  Me that ’ave gone where I’ve gone,
+  Me that ’ave seen what I’ve seen”
+
+—must have felt the disgrace of being turned over to a crew of stevedores
+and a ruffianly, tobacco-chewing second mate, who unceremoniously
+sandwiched it between a pile of milk-cans and a crate of cabbages on the
+lower deck of a chug-achug-chugging stern-wheel river boat.
+
+But before the rickety deck chairs had ceased their creaking complaints
+about the burden we had imposed on them we were congratulating ourselves
+on the circumstance that had forced us to exchange a hot and dusty
+highroad for a cool and silent waterway. To me there is something
+irresistibly fascinating and seductive about a river. I always find
+myself wondering where it comes from, and what strange things it has
+seen along its course, and where it is going to, and I invariably have a
+hankering to take ship and keep it company. And the greater the stream,
+the greater its fascination, because, of course, it has travelled so much
+farther. Now the Columbia, as that friend of our boyhood, Huck Finn,
+would have put it, is no slouch of a river. If its kinks and twists were
+carefully straightened out it would reach half-way across the continent,
+or as far as from New York to Kansas City. It is somewhat disturbing for
+one who visits the valley of the Columbia for the first time, with the
+purpose of writing about it, to have these facts suddenly thrown, as it
+were, in his face, particularly if, like myself, he has been brought up
+in that part of the country where the Hudson is regarded as the only real
+river in America—doubtless because it washes the shores of Manhattan—and
+where all other waterways are looked upon as being not much better than
+creeks. I felt like apologising to somebody, and when, on top of all
+this, I was told that the Columbia and its tributaries drain a region
+equal in area to all the States along our Atlantic seaboard put together,
+I had a sudden desire to go ashore at the next landing and take a train
+back home.
+
+Though of British birth, for it has its source above the Canadian
+line in the country of the Kootenai, the Columbia emends this
+unfortunate circumstance by becoming naturalised when it is still a
+slender stripling, dividing its allegiance, however, between Oregon
+and Washington, for which it serves as a boundary for upward of four
+hundred miles. It is not only the father of Northwestern waters, but it
+is the big brother of all those streams, from the Straits of Behring
+to the Straits of Magellan, which call the Pacific Ocean “grandpa.” By
+white-hulled river steamer, by panting power-boat, by produce-laden
+barge, by bark canoe, by the goatskin raft called _kelek_, I have
+loitered my leisurely way down many famous rivers—the St. Lawrence, the
+Hudson, the Mississippi, the Fraser, the Skeena, the Rio Balsas, the
+Rhine, the Danube, the Volga, the Euphrates, the Ganges, the Zambesi,
+the Nile—and I assert, after having duly weighed my words, that in the
+continuity and grandeur of its scenery the Columbia is the superior of
+them all. If you think that I am carried away by enthusiasm you had
+better go and see it for yourself.
+
+It was Carlyle—was it not?—who remarked that all great works produce an
+unpleasant impression on first acquaintance. It is so with the Columbia.
+We saw it first on a broiling August day from the heights above
+Celilo—the great, silent, mysterious river winding away into the unknown
+between banks of lava as sinister and forbidding as the flanks of Etna,
+and with a sun beating down upon it from a sky of molten brass. There
+were no grassy banks, no trees, no flowers, no vegetation of any kind,
+none of the things that one usually associates with a river. But when the
+steamer bears you around the first of those frowning cliffs that rise
+sheer from the surface of the river below The Dalles—ah, well, that is
+quite another matter.
+
+Since Time began, the sheets of lava which give The Dalles its name,
+by compressing the half-mile-wide river into a channel barely sixscore
+feet across, have effectually obstructed continuous navigation upon the
+Upper Columbia. But, as towns multiplied and population increased along
+the upper reaches of the great river and its tributaries in Washington
+and Oregon, in Montana and Idaho, this hinderance to the navigation of
+so splendid a waterway became intolerable, unthinkable, absurd. At last
+the frock-coated gentlemen in Congress were prodded into action, and the
+passage of a bill for the construction of a canal around The Dalles,
+at Celilo, was the result. Came then keen-eyed, self-reliant men who,
+jeering at the obstacles which Nature had heaped in their path, proceeded
+to slash a canal through eight miles of shifting sands and basalt rock,
+so that hereafter the fruit growers and farmers and ranchers as far
+inland as Lewiston, in Idaho, can send their produce down to the sea in
+ships.
+
+“The trouble with the Columbia,” complained the Lady, “is that it’s all
+scenery and no romance. It’s too big, too prosaic, too commercial. It
+doesn’t arouse any overwhelming enthusiasm in me to be told that this
+river irrigates goodness knows how many thousand square miles of land,
+or that the top of that mountain over there is so many thousand feet
+above the level of the sea, or that so many thousand barrels of apples
+were grown last year in the valley we just passed and that they brought
+so many dollars a barrel. Facts like those are all well enough in an
+almanac, because no one ever reads almanacs anyway, but they don’t
+interest me and I don’t believe that they interest many other visitors,
+either. If a river hasn’t any romance connected with it, it isn’t much
+better than a canal. Don’t you remember that rock in the Bosphorus, near
+Scutari, to which Leander used to swim out to see Hero, and how when we
+passed it the passengers would all rush over to that side of the deck,
+and how the steamer would list until her rail was almost under water, and
+how the Turkish officers would get frightened half to death and shove the
+people back? You don’t see the passengers on this boat threatening to
+capsize it because of their anxiety to see something romantic, do you?
+I should say not. Do you remember Kerbela, that town on the Euphrates,
+where all Persians hope to be buried when they die, and how, long before
+we reached there, we could smell the Caravans of the Dead which were
+carrying the bodies there from across the desert? And those crumbling,
+ivy-covered castles along the Rhine, with their queer legends and
+traditions and superstitions? That’s what I mean by romance, and you know
+as well as I do that there is nothing romantic about apple orchards and
+salmon canneries and sawmills. Is there?”
+
+“Pardon me, madam,” said a gentleman who had been seated so close to us
+that he could not help overhearing what she said and who had been unable
+to conceal his disagreement with the views she had expressed, “but do
+you see that island over there near the Washington shore? The long, low
+one with the little white monument sticking up at the end of it. That is
+Memaloose—the Island of the Dead. It is the Indian Valhalla. Talk about
+the Persians whose bodies are borne across the desert to be buried at
+Kerbela! Did you happen to know that on the slopes of that island are
+buried untold thousands of Chinooks, whose bodies were brought on the
+backs of men hundreds of miles through the wilderness or in canoes down
+long and lonely rivers that they might find their last resting-places
+in its sacred soil? And the monument that you see marks the grave of a
+frontiersman who was as romantic a character as you will find in the
+pages of Fenimore Cooper. His name was Victor Trevet; he knew and liked
+the Indians; and he asked to be buried on Memaloose that his bones might
+lie among those of ‘honest men.’ Is it legend and tradition that you say
+the river lacks? A few miles ahead of us, at the Cascades, the river was
+once spanned, according to the Indian legend, by a stupendous natural
+bridge of rock. The Indians called it the Bridge of the Gods. The great
+river flowed under it, and on it lived a witch woman named Loowit, who
+had charge of the only fire in the world. Seeing how wretched was the lot
+of the fireless tribes, who had to live on uncooked meats and vegetables,
+she begged permission of the gods to give them fire. Her request was
+granted and the condition of the Indians was thus enormously improved.
+So gratified were the gods by Loowit’s consideration for the welfare
+of the Indians that they promised to grant any request that she might
+make. Womanlike, she promptly asked for youth and beauty. Whereupon she
+was transformed into a maiden whose loveliness would have caused Lina
+Cavalieri to go out of the professional beauty business. The news of
+her beauty spreading among the tribes like fire in summer grass, there
+came numberless youths who pleaded for her hand, or, rather, for the
+face and figure that went with it. Among them were two young chieftains:
+Klickitat from the north and Wiyeast from the west. As she was unable
+to decide between them, they and their tribesmen decided to settle the
+rivalry with the tomahawk. But the gods, angry at this senseless waste of
+lives over a pretty woman, put Loowit and her two gentlemen friends to
+death and sent the great bridge on which she had dwelt crashing down into
+the river. But as they had all three been good to look upon in life, so
+the gods, who were evidently æsthetic, made them good to look upon even
+in death by turning them into snow peaks. Wiyeast became the mountain
+which we palefaces call Mount Hood; Klickitat they transformed into the
+peak we know as Mount Adams; while Mount Saint Helens is the beautiful
+form taken by the fair Loowit. Thus was the wonderful Bridge of the Gods
+destroyed and the Columbia dammed by the débris which fell into it. In
+a few minutes we will be at the Cascades and you can see the ruins of
+the bridge for yourself. And, if you still have any lingering doubts as
+to the truth of the story, why, there is Klickitat in his white blanket
+rising above the forests to the right, and Wiyeast is over there to your
+left, and ahead of us, down the river, is the Loowit lady disguised as
+Mount Saint Helens. So you see there is no room for doubt.
+
+“You assert that the Columbia is lacking in romance because, forsooth,
+no Leander has swum across it to see a Hero. Good heavens, my dear young
+lady, I can tell you a story that has more all-wool-and-a-yard-wide
+romance in it than a dozen such Hellespontine fables. Did you never hear
+of Whitman the missionary, who, instead of crossing a measly strait to
+win a woman, crossed a continent and won an empire?
+
+“In the early forties Whitman established a mission station near the
+present site of Walla Walla. Hearing rumours that our government was
+on the point of accommodatingly ceding the Valley of the Columbia to
+England in return for some paltry fishing rights off the banks of
+Newfoundland—the government officials of those days evidently preferred
+codfish to salmon—he rode overland to Washington in the dead of winter,
+through blinding snow-storms, swimming icy rivers, subsisting on his
+pack-mules and his dogs when his food ran out, facing death by torture at
+the hands of hostile Indians. Gaining admission to the White House in his
+dress of furs and buckskin, with his feet and fingers terribly frozen,
+he so impressed President Tyler and Secretary of State Webster by his
+vivid description of the richness and fertility of the region which they
+were on the point of ceding to England that he saved the entire Pacific
+Northwest to the Union. If that isn’t sufficient romance for you, then
+I’m afraid you’re hard to please.”
+
+“I surrender,” said the Lady. “Your old Columbia has plenty of romance,
+after all. The trouble is that tourists don’t know these interesting
+things that you’ve just been telling us and they _do_ know all about the
+Danube and the Rhine.”
+
+“That’s easily remedied,” said I. “I’ll tell them about it myself.”
+
+And that, my friends, is precisely what I have just been trying to do.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+“Next stop Hood River!” bawled the purser.
+
+“That’s where the apples come from,” remarked our deck acquaintance,
+who had turned himself into a guide-book for our benefit. “In some of
+the orchards up the valley you’ll find apples with paper letters pasted
+on them: ‘C de P’ for the Café de Paris, you know, and ‘W-A’ for the
+Waldorf-Astoria, and ‘G R & I’ for Georgius Rex et Imperator—which is
+_not_ the name of the restaurant. They paste the letters on quite
+carefully when the apples are still green upon the tree, and when they
+ripen the paper is torn off, leaving the yellow initials on the bright
+red fruit. Those are the apples that they serve at royal banquets
+and that they charge a dollar apiece for in the smart restaurants in
+Europe. I don’t mean to imply that all of the Hood River apples are thus
+initialled to order, but some of them are. The average value of the land
+in that valley, cultivated and uncultivated, is three hundred and forty
+dollars an acre, and if a man wanted to purchase an orchard in bearing
+he would have to pay at least four thousand dollars an acre for it. Some
+people think that it was the original Garden of Eden. If it was, I don’t
+blame Eve for stealing the apple. I’d steal a Hood River apple myself if
+I got the chance.”
+
+Had the second mate been a little more obliging, and had there not
+been so formidable a barricade of crates and milk cans about the car,
+I would have had it run ashore then and there and would have taken a
+whirl through the famous apple orchards which cover the lower slopes of
+Mount Hood and have kept on up the zigzag mountain road as far as the
+cosy little hostelry called Cloud Cap Inn, which some public-spirited
+Portlander has built upon the snow-line. Perhaps it was just as well we
+didn’t, however, for I learned afterward that the famous valley is only
+about twenty miles long, so, if we had not put on the emergency brake
+before we started, we would have run through it before we could have
+stopped and would not have seen it at all. Nowhere in Switzerland do I
+recall a picture of such surpassing splendour as that which stood before
+us, as though on a titanic easel, as, from the vantage of the steamer’s
+upper deck, we looked up the vista formed by this fragrant, verdant
+valley toward the great white cone of Mount Hood. It is, indeed, so
+very beautiful that those Americans who know and love the world’s white
+rooftrees can find scant justification for turning their faces toward
+the Alps when here, in the upper left-hand corner of their own country,
+are mountains which would make the ghost of the great Whymper moan for
+an alpenstock and hobnailed boots. This startlingly sudden transition
+from orchards groaning with fruit to dense primeval forests, and from
+these forests to the stately, isolated snow peaks, is very different
+from Switzerland, of course. Indeed, to compare these mountains of the
+Pacific Northwest with the Alps, as is so frequently done, seems to me
+to be a grave injustice to them both. The Alps form a wild and angry
+sea of icy mountains, and we have nothing in America to which they can
+be fittingly compared. The Cascades, on the other hand, form a great
+system of lofty forest-wrapped ranges surmounted by the towering isolated
+peaks of snowy volcanoes, and Europe contains nothing to equal them. I
+am perfectly aware, of course, that the very large number of Americans
+who spend their summers in the ascent of the orthodox Swiss peaks—more
+often than not, if the truth were known, by means of funicular railways
+or through telescopes on hotel piazzas—look with scorn and contumely
+upon these mountains of the far Nor’west, which they regard as home-made
+and unfashionable and vulgar and not worth bothering about. Perhaps they
+are not aware, however, that no less an authority on mountaineering than
+James Bryce (I don’t recall the title that he has taken now that he has
+been made a peer, and no one would recognise him if I used it) said not
+long ago, in speaking of these sentinels that guard the Columbia:
+
+“We have nothing more beautiful in Switzerland or Tyrol, in Norway or
+the Pyrenees. The combination of ice scenery with woodland scenery of
+the grandest type is to be found nowhere in the Old World, unless it be
+in the Himalayas, and, so far as we know, nowhere else on the American
+continent.”
+
+Which but serves to point the truth that foreigners are more appreciative
+of the beauties and grandeurs of our country than we are ourselves.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At the Cascades the Columbia takes a drop of half a hundred feet and
+we had, perforce, to bide our time in the locks, by means of which the
+rapids have been circumvented, until the waters found their level. It
+is not until the Cascades are passed that the scenery for which the
+Columbia is famous begins in all its sublimity and grandeur. The Great
+Artist has painted pictures more colourful, more sensational, perhaps, as
+the Grand Cañon, for example, the Yellowstone, and the Sahara, but none
+which combines the qualities of strength and restfulness as this mighty
+river, flowing swiftly, silently between the everlasting hills. From the
+shores the orchards and the gardens rise, terrace above terrace, until
+they become merged in the forest-covered ranges, and above the ranges
+rise the august snow peaks, solitary, silent, like a line of sentries
+strung along the horizon. At times, particularly in the early morning and
+again at sunset, these snow mountains present that singular appearance
+familiar to the traveller in the Himalayas and the Cordilleras, when
+the snowy cone seems to be floating ethereally upon a sea of mist which
+completely shrouds the hills and forests at its base. Immediately below
+the Cascades commences the series of waterfalls for which the lower
+reaches of the Columbia are famous, the granite cliffs which, for nearly
+twoscore miles border the Oregon shore with a sheer wall of rock, being
+scored at frequent intervals by what seem, from a distance, to be ribbons
+of shining silver. As the boat draws nearer, however, you see that what
+looked like ribbons are really mountain streams which are so impatient to
+join their mother, the Columbia, that, instead of taking the more sedate
+but circuitous route, they fling themselves tempestuously over the brink
+of the sheer cliff into the arms of the parent stream. First come the
+Horsetail Falls, whose falling waters, blown by the wind into silvery
+strands, are suggestive of the flowing tail of a white Arab; then, in
+quick succession, the Oneonta Falls, at the end of a narrow gorge which
+penetrates the cliffs for a mile or more; the nine-hundred-feet-high
+Multnomah, the highest falls in all the northwest country if not, indeed,
+on the entire Pacific Coast; the Bridal Veil, as radiantly beautiful as
+its namesake of the Yosemite; and finally, just below the great monolith
+rising from the river known as Rooster Rock, the Falls of Latourelle. On
+the opposite shore the mighty promontory known as Cape Horn rises five
+hundred feet above the surface of the river, and, a few miles farther
+up-stream, Castle Rock, whose turreted crags bear a striking resemblance
+to some stronghold of the Middle Ages, attains to twice that height. By
+the time the steamer reaches the mighty natural gateway known as the
+Pillars of Hercules, the traveller is actually surfeited with grandeur
+and is quite ready for the simple, friendly, pastoral scenes again, just
+as one after a season of Wagnerian opera welcomes the simple airs and the
+old-fashioned songs.
+
+[Illustration: “WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON.”
+
+The Columbia from Saint Peter’s Dome, with Mount Adams in the distance.
+“The Great Artist has painted pictures more colorful, more sensational,
+perhaps, but none which so combine the qualities of strength and
+restfulness as this mighty river.”]
+
+As I do not chew popcorn, peanuts, gum, or candy, nor munch dripping
+ice-cream cones, and as I have an unconquerable aversion to other
+people doing those unpleasant things in my immediate vicinity, I left
+the others, who did not seem to mind such minor annoyances, among the
+excursionists upon the upper deck and made my way below. After clambering
+over great piles of crates, sacks, and barrels filled with Columbia River
+produce, I finally succeeded in finding a secluded spot in the vessel’s
+bows, whence I could watch, undisturbed by sticky-fingered youngsters or
+idle chatter, the varied commerce of the mighty water road. Stern-wheel,
+twin-funnelled passenger boats zigzagged from shore to shore to pick up
+the passengers and freight that patiently awaited their coming; rusty
+freighters scuttled down-stream laden with fruit for the coast towns
+and salmon for the Astoria canneries; spick-and-span pleasure craft,
+with shining brass work and graceful, tapering spars, daintily picked
+their way through the press of river traffic as a pretty girl picks
+her way along a crowded street; grimy fishing craft, their sails as
+weather-beaten as the faces of the men that raise them, danced by us,
+eager for home and supper and the evening fire; great log rafts wallowed
+by, sent down by the forests to propitiate the greedy sawmills, whose
+sharp-toothed jaws devour the sacrifice and scream for more.
+
+Perhaps the most interesting and characteristic feature of the landscape
+along the lower Columbia are the fish-wheels—ingenious contrivances,
+twenty to forty feet in diameter and six to eight feet across, which
+look like pocket editions of the passenger-carrying Ferris wheel at the
+Chicago Exposition. The wheels, which are hung in substantial frameworks
+close to the banks, where the salmon run the thickest, are revolved by
+the current, which keeps the wire-meshed scoops with which each pair of
+spokes are fitted for ever lifting from the water. The great schools
+of salmon are guided toward the wheel by means of a lattice dam which
+reaches out into the river like the arm of a false friend, and, before
+the unsuspecting fish know what has happened to them, they are hoisted
+into the air in the wire scoops and dumped into an inclined trough, down
+which they slide into a fenced-in pool, where the fishermen can get them
+at their leisure. They are then strung on wires and attached to a barrel
+which acts as a buoy, the barrel, sometimes with a ton of fish trailing
+behind it like the tail to a kite, floating down-stream to the nearest
+cannery, where a man in a launch is on the lookout and tows them ashore.
+Months later, in Pekin or Peoria, in Rome or Rumford Falls, or wherever
+else you may happen to be dining, you will see the item “Columbia River
+Salmon” on the hotel menu.
+
+As I hung over the steamer’s bow, with the incomparable landscape
+slipping past me as though on Burton Holmes’s picture screen, and no
+sound save the muffled throbbing of the engines and the ripple of
+the water running aft along the hull, I unconsciously yielded to the
+Columbia’s mystic spell. I closed my eyes and in a moment the surface
+of the river seemed peopled with the ghosts of the history makers.
+Nez Percés, in paint and feathers, slipped silently along, in the
+shadow of yonder wooded bank, in their barken war canoes. Two lean and
+sun-bronzed white men, clad in the fringed buckskin of the adventuring
+frontiersman, floated past me down the mighty stream which they had
+trekked across a continent to find. Half-breed trappers, chanting at
+the paddles, descended with precious freights of fur. A square-rigged
+merchantman poked its inquisitive bowsprit around a rocky headland,
+and as she passed I noted the words _Columbia, of Boston_, in raised
+gilt letters on her stern, and I remembered that it was from this same
+square-rigged vessel that the river took its name. A warship, flying the
+flag of England and with the black muzzles of guns peering from its rows
+of ports, cautiously ascended, the leadsmen in the shrouds sounding
+for river bars. Log forts and trading-posts and mission stations once
+again crowned the encircling hills. Forgotten battles blew by on the
+evening breeze. A yellow dust cloud rose above the river bank and out
+of it emerged a plodding wagon-train. The smoke of pioneer camp-fires
+spiralled skyward from those rich valleys where in reality the cattle
+browse and the orchards droop with fruit. From the vantage of a rocky
+promontory a ghostly war party peered down upon me—a paleface—taking a
+summer’s holiday along that mighty stream upon whose bosom of old went
+forth the bepainted fighting men. The furtive twilight slipped behind
+night’s velvet curtain. The mountains changed from jade to coral, from
+coral to sapphire, from sapphire to amethyst. The snow peaks gleamed
+luminously, like sheeted ghosts, against the purple velvet of the sky.
+The night-breeze rose and I shivered. The steamer swung silently around
+a bend in the river and, all suddenly, the darkness ahead was sprinkled
+with a million blinking fireflies. At least they looked like fireflies.
+
+“Portland!” shouted a raucous voice, far off somewhere, on the upper
+deck. “Portland! All ashore!”
+
+I felt a hand upon my shoulder. It was the Lady.
+
+“Where on earth have you been?” she asked. “We have been hunting for you
+everywhere.”
+
+“I’ve been on a long journey,” said I.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+A FRONTIER ARCADY
+
+  “Oh, woods of the West, I am sighing to-day
+    For the sea songs your voices repeat,
+  For the evergreen glades, for the glades far away
+    From the stifling air of the street.
+
+  “And I long, ah, I long to be with you again,
+    And to dream in that region of rest,
+  Forever apart from this warring of men—
+    Oh, wonderful woods of the West.”
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+A FRONTIER ARCADY
+
+
+“_Arcady—the home of piping shepherds and coy shepherdesses, where rustic
+simplicity and plenty satisfied the ambition of untutored hearts and
+where ambition and its crimes were unknown._”
+
+Some pamphlet writer with a gift for turning phrases has called
+Oregon “The Land That Lures.” And, so far as home and fortune seekers
+are concerned, it is. Whether it is the spirit of romance that our
+people have always associated with the great Northwest; whether it is
+the glamour of its booming rivers and its silent, axe-ripe forests
+or the appeal of its soft and balmy climate; or whether it is the
+extraordinary opportunities it offers for the acquirement of modest
+fortunes before one is too old to enjoy them, I do not know, but the
+undeniable fact remains that no region between the Portlands exercises
+so irresistible a fascination for the man who knows the trick of coaxing
+a fortune from the soil as this great, rich, hospitable, unfenced,
+forest-and-mountain-and-stream, meadow-and-orchard-and-home land that
+stretches from the Columbia south to the Siskiyous. It may be that
+California holds more attractions for the man who has already made his
+fortune, but certainly Oregon is the place to make the fortune in. No
+Western State is essentially less “Western” in the accepted sense of
+the term. This is due in part, no doubt, to the fact that it has been
+longer settled by Americans than any other portion of the Pacific Coast.
+Portland was a thriving city, remember, when St. Paul and Minneapolis
+were little more than trading-posts on the frontier. Settlers from the
+Atlantic seaboard and from the Middle West find themselves, upon reaching
+Oregon, in the midst of “home folks” and all the friendly, kindly,
+homely things that the term implies: ice-cream sociables and grange
+meetings and church picnics and literary societies and debating clubs and
+county fairs. The name of the State capital is inseparably associated
+with Puritan New England, one of its largest cities is named after the
+Massachusetts town which gave its name to rum, and I can show you a
+score of towns whose peaceful, elm-shaded streets and white-porticoed,
+red-brick houses might almost—but hot quite—deceive you into thinking
+that you are in Cooperstown, N. Y., or Newburyport, Mass., or Biddeford,
+Me. Almost, as I have said, but not quite, for all of these Oregonian
+towns, despite the staidness and sobriety of their appearance, are
+animated by an enthusiasm, an up-to-dateness, by an unshakable faith in
+their future, that is essentially a characteristic of the West.
+
+The orthodox way of entering Oregon from the south is by way of Ashland,
+Medford, and Grant’s Pass, and so northward, through Roseburg and
+Eugene and Albany and Salem, to Portland. But, as I have related in the
+preceding chapter, we deliberately chose the back-stairs route, crossing
+the California-Oregon line at Klamath Lake and motoring northward, along
+the trail of the Lewis and Clark expedition, via Crater Lake and the
+valley of the Deschutes to The Dalles, and thence down the Columbia to
+Portland. We prided ourselves on having thus obtained an extraordinarily
+comprehensive idea of the State and its resources, not to mention having
+traversed a region which is quite inaccessible to the tourist unless he
+travels, as we did, by motor-car, but when we came to talk with some
+people from western Oregon we found that we didn’t know nearly as much
+about the State as we thought we did.
+
+“How did you find the roads in the Willamette Valley?” inquired a friend
+with whom we were dining one night in Portland.
+
+“We haven’t seen the Willamette Valley,” I explained. “You see, we came
+round the other way.”
+
+“I suppose you’ve been down to Salem, though—nice city, Salem.”
+
+“No,” I was forced to admit, “we haven’t been to Salem.”
+
+“What did you think of the Marble Halls? Many people claim they’re finer
+than the Mammoth Cave.”
+
+“The Marble Halls? Where are they? What are they? I never heard of them.”
+
+“I suppose you had some fine fishing in the Grant’s Pass country. I hear
+that the trout are running big down there this season.”
+
+“No, we didn’t come through Grant’s Pass.”
+
+“Well, you surely don’t mean to tell me that you didn’t visit the Rogue
+River Valley—the apple-cellar of the world?”
+
+“Sorry to say we didn’t.”
+
+“Nor the valley of the Umpqua?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“Well,” after a long and painful pause, “what in the name of Heaven
+_have_ you seen?”
+
+“I think,” said I, turning to the others, “that the thing for us to do is
+to turn the car south again and see Oregon. Else we shall never be able
+to hold up our heads and look an Oregonian in the eye. The thousand miles
+or so of the State that we’ve just come through apparently don’t count.”
+
+Though I made the remark facetiously, it contained a good-sized germ
+of truth. Just now the back country of Oregon, the hinterland, as our
+Teutonic friends would call it, doesn’t count for very much. It is going
+to count tremendously, mind you, in the not far distant future, when
+the railroads now under construction have opened it up to civilisation
+and commerce and when it is settled by the European hordes that will
+pour into it through the gateway of Panama. As things stand at present,
+however, the wealth and prosperity of Oregon are concentrated in that
+comparatively narrow but incredibly fertile zone which lies between the
+sea and the mile-high mountain wall formed by the Cascades, and whose
+farms and orchards are watered by the Willamette, the Umpqua, and the
+Rogue.
+
+It was one of those autumn days so characteristic of the Pacific
+Northwest, which seem to be a combination of an Italian June and a
+Devonshire September, when we slipped out of Portland’s rush and bustle
+and turmoil and turned our front tires toward the south and the open
+country. For a dozen miles or more our road, built high on the hill slope
+above the broad reaches of the lower Willamette, commanded as entrancing
+a vista of beautiful homes as I have ever seen. For six solid miles south
+of Portland the banks of the Willamette are bordered by country houses of
+shingle, stone, and stucco, rising from the most beautiful rose gardens
+this side of Persia (Portland, you know, is called “The City of Roses”)
+and with shaven lawns sweeping gently down, like unrolled carpets, to the
+river’s edge. Through gaps in the screen of shrubbery which lines the
+highway we caught fleeting glimpses, as we whirled past, of vine-covered
+garages housing shiny motor-cars, while along the river front were moored
+lean power-boats, every line of them bespeaking speed, for those who are
+fortunate enough—and wealthy enough—to own homes upon the Willamette are
+able to run in to their offices in the city either by road or river.
+Far in the distance the Fujiyama-like cone of Mount Saint Helens rose
+above the miles of intervening forest, and, farther to the southward,
+the hoary head of Mount Hood. About this portion of residential Portland
+which lies along the banks of the Willamette there is a suggestion of
+the Thames near Hampton Court, a hint of the Seine near Saint Cloud, a
+subtle reminder of those residences which have been built by the rich
+of Budapest along the Danube, but most of all it recalls Stockholm. This
+is due, I suppose, to the proximity of the forests which surround the
+city, to the snow-capped mountains which loom up behind them, and to the
+ever-present scent of balsam in the air.
+
+It is fifty miles or thereabout from Portland to Salem, which is the
+capital of the State, and when the roads are dry you can leave one city
+after an early dinner and reach the other before the theatre curtains
+have gone up for the first act. After a rain, however, it is a different
+matter altogether, for the roads, which leave a great deal to be desired,
+are for the most part of red clay, and so slippery that a car, even with
+chains on all four wheels, slips and slides and staggers like a Scotchman
+going home after celebrating the birthday of Robert Burns. Salem is
+as pleasing to the eye as a certified cheque. It is asphalted and
+electric-lighted and landscaped to the very limit. Though the residential
+architecture of the city shows unmistakable traces of the influence of
+both Queen Anne and Mary Anne, their artistic deficiencies are more than
+counter-balanced by the pleasant, shady lawns and the broad, hospitable
+piazzas, which seem to say to the passer-by: “Come right up, friend,
+and sit down and make yourself to home.” That’s the most striking
+characteristic of the place—hospitality.
+
+The gates of the State Fair were thrown open the same day that we
+arrived in Salem, though I do not wish to be understood as intimating
+that the two events bore any relation to each other. Now, a fair is
+generally a pretty reliable index to the agricultural condition of a
+region. The first thing that strikes the visitor upon entering the
+gates of a New England fair is the extraordinary number of ramshackle,
+mud-stained, “democrat” wagons lined up along the fence, the horses
+munching contentedly in their nose-bags. The first thing that struck me
+as we entered the grounds of the Oregon State Fair was the extraordinary
+number of shiny new automobiles. Save en route to a Vanderbilt Cup
+Race, I don’t recall ever having seen so many motor-cars on one stretch
+of road as we encountered on our way to the fair-grounds. They made a
+noise like the droning of a billion bumblebees. Though there was, of
+course, a preponderance of little cars, there were also any number of big
+six-cylinder seven-passenger machines, for your Oregonian is nothing if
+not up to the minute. Instead of jogging in from the farm in rattletrap
+wagons, they came tearing down the pike in shiny, spick-and-span
+automobiles; pa at the steering-wheel, hat on the back of his head and
+whiskers streaming, ma in her new bonnet sitting proudly beside him,
+and grandma and the youngsters filling up the tonneau. It did my heart
+good to see them. There is an intangible something about a motor-car
+that seems to give the most hidebound old farmer in the community a new
+lease of life. A year or so ago a weekly magazine published a picture of
+a group of cars at some rural gathering in the Northwest, and unwisely
+labelled it: “Where the old cars go to.” It elicited a wave of indignant
+letters from automobile dealers and automobile owners in that section
+of the country that made the editor feel as though he had stepped on a
+charged wire. That gentleman learned, at the cost of several cancelled
+subscriptions, that, wherever else the second-hand cars go, they
+certainly do not go to the Northwest, whose people might well take as
+their motto: “The best is none too good for us.”
+
+Your Oregonian farmer, unlike his fellows in the older, colder States,
+is neither hidebound nor conservative. He has no kinship with the
+bewhiskered, bebooted, by-gum and by-gosh hayseed made familiar by the
+comic papers and the bucolic dramas. Instead of shying from a new-fangled
+device as a horse does from a steam roller, he promptly gives it a trial
+and, if it makes good, he adopts it. He milks his cows and makes his
+butter by electricity, orders his groceries from the nearest town and
+asks for the baseball score by telephone, goes to church and to market
+in his motor-car, and passes his evenings with the aid of a circulating
+library, a pianola, and a phonograph. It did not take me long to find
+out that Oregon is as progressive agriculturally as it is politically.
+If the farmer does not succeed in Oregon it is because he has been
+hypnotised by those siren sisters, Obstinacy and Laziness; for if he is
+ignorant, the State stands ready to educate him; if he is perplexed, it
+stands ready to advise him; and if he gets into trouble, it stands ready
+to assist him. In other words, it wants him to make good, and it isn’t
+the fault of the State if he does not. For this purpose it maintains, in
+addition to the State Agricultural College at Corvallis, which is one of
+the most completely equipped institutions of its kind in the world, six
+experimental farms which are geographically distributed so as to meet
+practically every condition of agriculture found in Oregon. Two extensive
+demonstration farms are maintained, moreover, by business interests, and
+there is an enormous amount of agricultural co-operative work among the
+farmers themselves, so that if a man is in doubt as to whether he had
+better go in for Jerseys or Holsteins, for White Wyandottes or Plymouth
+Rocks, for Spitzenbergs or Newtown Pippins, all he has to do to obtain
+expert advice is to ask for it.
+
+It is an undeniable fact that at most fairs in the
+East, and at a great many in the West, for that matter,
+the wheel-of-fortune, the ring-and-cane, and the
+three-balls-for-a-dime-and-your-money-back-if-you-hit-the-coon
+concessionaires, the fat woman, the living skeleton, the bearded
+lady, and the wild man from Borneo, to say nothing of the
+raucous-voiced venders of ice-cold-lemonade-made-in-the-shade and
+red-hot-coney-islands-only-a-nickel-half-a-dime, serve to distract both
+the attention and the shekels of the rural visitors from the legitimate
+exhibits. It seemed to me that the farmers and fruit growers who came
+pouring into the Salem fair were there for purposes of education rather
+than recreation. They seemed to take the fair seriously and with the
+idea of obtaining all the information and suggestions that they could
+from it. Eager, attentive groups surrounded the lecturers from the State
+Agricultural College and constantly interrupted them with intelligent,
+penetrating queries as to soils, grafting, fertilisers, insect sprays,
+and the like, while out in the long cattle sheds the men who are growing
+rich from milk and butter talked of Aaggie Arethusa Korndyke Koningen
+Colantha Clothilde Netherland Pietertje’s Queen of the Dairy IV and of
+Alban Albino Segis Pontiac Johann Hengerveld’s Monarch of the Meadows
+(the bearer of this last resonant title proving, upon investigation, to
+be a wabbly-kneed three-weeks-old calf) as casually as a New Yorker would
+refer to Connie Mack or Caruso or John Drew.
+
+We went to the fair, as I have already intimated, for the primary
+purpose of getting a line on rural conditions as they exist in
+Oregon; but that did not prevent us from doing things which visitors
+to county fairs have done ever since county fairs began. We tossed
+rings—three-for-a-dime-step-right-this-way-and-try-your-luck-ladies-and-
+gents—over a bed of cane heads so temptingly thick that it seemed it
+would be only by a miracle that you could miss one, and after spending
+a dollar in rings the Lady won a bamboo walking-stick which she could
+have bought for ten cents almost anywhere and which she didn’t have the
+remotest use for, anyway. We tried our luck at breaking clay pipes in
+the shooting-gallery, and, in spite of the fact that the sights on my
+rifle had been deliberately hammered a quarter of an inch out of line, I
+succeeded in winning three dubious-looking cigars, to the proprietor’s
+very great astonishment. Had I smoked them I should not have survived
+to write this story. Then we leaned over the pig-pens and poked the
+pink, fat hogs with the yard-sticks which some enterprising advertiser
+had forced upon us; in the art department we gravely admired the
+cross-stitched mottoes bearing such virtuous sentiments as, “Virtue Is
+Its Own Reward,” and “There’s No Place Like Home,” and the water-colour
+studies of impossible fruit perpetrated “by Jane Maria Simpkins, aged
+eleven years.” Then we went over to the race-track and hung over the rail
+and became as excited over the result of the 2.40 free-for-all as we used
+to be in the old days at Morris Park before the anti-racing bill became
+a law. In fact, I surreptitiously wagered a dollar with an itinerant
+book-maker on a sixteen-to-one shot, on the ground that, as the horse had
+the same name as the Lady, it would surely prove a winner—and lost. Not
+until dark settled down and the lights of the homeward-bound cars had
+turned the highway into an excellent imitation of the Chicago freight
+yards did we climb into the tonneau again, sticky and dusty and tired,
+and tell the driver to “hit it up for the nearest hotel.”
+
+From Salem to Eugene, down the pretty and well-wooded valley of the
+Willamette, is seventy odd miles as the motor goes, and the scenery
+throughout every mile of the distance looks exactly like those pictures
+you see on bill-boards advertising Swiss chocolate or condensed milk—I
+forget which: black cows with white spots, or white cows with black
+spots, grazing contentedly on emerald hillsides, with white mountains
+sticking up behind; rivers meandering through lush, green meadows; white
+farmhouses with red roofs and neat, green blinds peering out between the
+mathematically arranged orchard rows. But always there are the orchards.
+No matter how wide you open your throttle, no matter how high your
+speedometer needle climbs, you can’t escape them. They border the road on
+both sides, for mile after mile after mile, and in the spring, when they
+are in blossom, the countryside looks as though it had been struck by a
+snow-storm—and smells like Roger & Gallet’s perfumery works.
+
+When I visited the Southwest the horny-handed farmer folk would meet me
+when I stepped from the train and whirl me incredible distances across
+the desert to show me a patch of alfalfa—“the finest patch of alfalfa,
+by jingo, in the whole blamed State!” In Oregon they did much the same
+thing, except, instead of showing me alfalfa they showed me apples.
+Up north of the Siskiyous, they’re literally apple drunk. They talk
+apples, think apples, dream apples, eat apple dumplings and apple pies,
+drink apple cider and apple brandy and applejack. Even their women are
+apple-cheeked. You can’t blame them for being a trifle boisterous about
+their apple crops, however, when you see what the apple has done for
+Oregon. I was shown one orchard of forty-five acres whose crop had sold
+the preceding year for seventy-five thousand dollars. Another orchard
+of but eight acres brought its owner sixteen thousand dollars. Five
+hundred trees yielded another man five thousand dollars. And I could
+repeat similar instances _ad infinitum_. They assured us in Medford that
+the apple cellars at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle always contain
+barrels stencilled “Grown in Oregon”—which is, I believe, a fact—and,
+though they didn’t say so in so many words, they intimated that when
+King George feels the need of a bite after a court ball or some equally
+arduous function, he lights a candle and shuffles down the cellar stairs
+in his dressing-gown and slippers and gropes about until he finds an
+Oregon-grown Northern Spy or a big, green Newtown Pippin.
+
+Oregon’s success in apple growing—a success that has headed the pioneer
+northwestward as the gold craze of ’49 started the frontiersman
+Californiaward—is the joint product of work and brains. Where New England
+has given up all thought of saving her orchards, Oregon, by tincturing
+labour with scientific knowledge, has founded an industry which is
+doing for the State what wheat did for the Dakotas, what gold did for
+California. What happened to the orchards all through New England? There
+was enough hard work put into them, Heaven knows. The old New England
+farmer and his wife slaved to the bone and were eventually trundled away
+to the insane asylum or the cemetery from overwork, from devotion to the
+arid soil. The orchards of New England have been watered with blood and
+sweat and fertilised with blasted hopes. The young men were away in the
+universities acquiring scientific knowledge and learning how to apply
+that knowledge on the farms, and it never occurred to the old men that
+the wearied soil needed some encouragement, some strengthening, some
+vivifying, even as their spirits did, to bring material and spiritual
+prosperity. And Oregon has taken to heart and is profiting by the
+pathetic example of the New England farmer.
+
+It is approximately four hundred miles as a motor goes from the Columbia
+to the California line and, as our object was to see the country, we
+spent upward of a week upon the journey, stopping as our fancies dictated
+to cast for trout in the swirling rivers, to gossip with village folk and
+farmers, and sometimes just to lie on our backs on inviting hillsides and
+smoke and chat and throw pebbles at inquisitive squirrels and watch the
+sunbeams filter through the foliage of the trees. That’s where the true
+joy of motoring comes in: to be able to stop when and where you please,
+without the necessity of having to give any why or wherefore, and, when
+you grow weary of one place, flying on again until you find another that
+tempts you. I have never been able to comprehend why those speed maniacs
+who tear through the country so fast that the telegraph-poles look like
+palings in a picket fence bother with automobiles at all; they could
+travel quite as fast in a train and ever so much more comfortably.
+
+From Eugene our course lay south, due south through a bountiful and
+smiling land. We tore down yellow highroads between orchard rows as
+precisely placed and uniform as ranks of Prussian grenadiers; we flashed
+past trim farmhouses overshadowed by huge hip-roofed barns which seemed
+to be bursting with produce, as, in fact, they were; we rolled through
+villages so neat and clean and happy that they might have served as
+models for the street-car advertisement of Spotless Town; we spun along
+the banks of sun-flecked rivers whose waters were broken by trout jumping
+hungry for the fly; we boomed down forest roads so dim and silent that we
+felt as though we were motoring down a cathedral nave; Diamond Peak and
+the white-bonneted Three Sisters came into view and disappeared again;
+until at last, churning our way up the tortuous road that climbs the
+Umpqua Range, we looked down upon the enchanted valley of the Rogue.
+
+Imagine a four-hundred-thousand-acre valley, every foot of which is
+tilled or tillable, protected on every side by mountain walls—on
+the east by the Cascades, on the west by the Coast Range, on the
+north by the Umpqua chain, and on the south by the Siskiyous; and
+meandering through this garden valley, watering its every corner, the
+winding, mischievous, inquisitive Rogue. It is indeed a beckoning
+land. But mind you, it is not a get-rich-quick land. It is a
+work-like-the-devil-and-you’ll-become-prosperous country. The soil and
+the climate will do as much for the farmer, perhaps more, than anywhere
+else in the world, but he must do his share. And no one should buy a
+ticket to Oregon expecting to find immediate employment in any line.
+Jobs are not lying loose on the streets, waiting for some one to come
+along and pick them up, any more than they are in Chicago or New York.
+I doubt very much, indeed, if the workingman with no other capital than
+his two hands has much to gain by emigrating to Oregon. Large projects,
+it is true, require many labourers, and these openings often present
+themselves; but the means of bringing in workmen are just as cheap and
+rapid as in other sections of the country, so it need not be expected
+that there would be any great difference in wages. The chief advantages
+that Oregon offers to labouring people without sufficient accumulations
+to give them a start are: a mild and equable climate, an absence of
+damaging storms, a certainty of crops, and opportunities as good, though
+perhaps no better, than any other State. If, however, he has been able
+to accumulate anywhere from a thousand to three thousand dollars, he is
+then in a position to avail himself of the innumerable opportunities
+which exist for men of small capital. Such men will find their best
+opportunities in buying a few acres of land, building a modest home upon
+it, and then “going in,” as the English say, for fruit growing or poultry
+raising or dairying or market-gardening. As sawmills are as plentiful in
+Oregon as pretty women are on Fifth Avenue, and as the State contains
+one fifth of all the standing timber in the country (you didn’t know
+that, did you?) lumber is extraordinarily cheap, the cost of the material
+for a comfortable four-room farmhouse, for example, not running to more
+than one hundred and fifty dollars. It is a mistake for the intending
+emigrant to count on getting a farm under the terms of the Homestead Act,
+for, though the total government lands open to homestead entry in Oregon
+are greater in area than the entire State of West Virginia, they are,
+for the most part, in the least desirable portions of the State and the
+settler who occupied them would have to pay the price incident to life
+in a remote and semicivilised region. On the other hand, excellent land,
+within easy reach of towns and railroads, can be had in the valleys of
+western Oregon all the way from fifty to one hundred and fifty dollars an
+acre, and this would, I am convinced, prove the best investment in the
+end.
+
+There is no space to dwell at any length on the towns of western
+Oregon—Salem, Eugene, Roseburg, Drain, Grant’s Pass, Medford, Ashland.
+All of these towns have paved streets lined with comfortable and
+homelike residences and remarkably well-stocked shops; up-to-the-minute
+educational, lighting, and sewage systems; about double the number of
+parks, hotels, garages, and moving-picture houses that you would find
+in towns of similar size in the East; and boards of trade and chambers
+of commerce with enough surplus energy and enthusiasm to make a booster
+out of an Egyptian mummy. In most of these towns prohibition reigns,
+and, though, to be quite truthful, I am not accustomed to raise an
+admonishing hand when some one uncorks a gilt-topped bottle, I repeatedly
+remarked the fact that they were cleaner, quieter, more orderly—in
+short, pleasanter places to live—than those whose streets are dotted
+by the familiar swinging half-doors. That prohibition has done no harm
+to business is best proved by the fact that the very merchants who in
+the beginning were its most bitter assailants have become its most
+ardent advocates. After comparing the “dry” towns of Oregon to the “wet”
+ones—say, in the vicinity of Bakersfield, in California—it seems to me
+that, so far as the smaller rural communities are concerned, at least,
+there is only one side to the prohibition question.
+
+Thirty miles from Grant’s Pass, in the fastnesses of the Siskiyous, are
+the recently discovered mammoth caves, which some genius in the art of
+appellation has christened “The Marble Halls of Oregon.” It needed an
+inspiration to conceive a name like that! Such a name would induce one
+to make a trip to see a hole in a sand-bank. As a matter of fact, these
+Oregonian caverns are decidedly worth the journey. Though they are very
+far from having been completely explored, sufficient investigations have
+been made to prove conclusively that they are much superior, both in
+size and beauty, to the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky, a visit to which was
+considered as essential for every well-travelled American half a century
+ago as to have seen the Virginia Natural Bridge and Niagara Falls.
+
+[Illustration: Trout fishing in the high Sierras.
+
+Salmon fishing in a Northwestern river.
+
+WHERE RODS BEND DOUBLE AND REELS GO WHIR-R-R-R.]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Oregon, with its fish-filled streams, its game-filled forests, and
+its coast-line rich in bays and coves and beaches, possesses all the
+requisites for one of the world’s great playgrounds, but some years must
+pass before it will possess the luxuries demanded by that class of
+summer vacationists who travel with wardrobe trunks. With less than one
+fifteenth of its sixty odd million acres under cultivation, it is still
+to a great extent a frontier region, with many of a frontier’s crudities
+and discomforts and, for a man who knows and loves the open, with all
+of a frontier country’s charm. I am perfectly aware, of course, that
+the farmers who are growing such amazing quantities of big, red apples
+in the valleys of the Hood and the Rogue and the real-estate boosters
+who are so frantically chopping town sites out of the primeval forest
+within cannon-shot of Portland will resent the statement that this is
+still a frontier country; but it is, nevertheless, and will be for a
+number of years to come. Barring the system which parallels the coast
+from north to south and the one which cuts across its northeast corner,
+there are no railways in Oregon; the scantiness of population and the
+peculiarly savage nature of a great portion of the country having offered
+few inducements to the railroad builders. This condition is changing
+rapidly, however, for the transcontinental systems which enter the
+State are working overtime to give it population, cities and towns and
+villages are springing up like mushrooms along its many waterways, the
+vast grants held by the railway and trading companies and by the pioneers
+are gradually being cut up into small farms, and a rural situation is
+being slowly created which is bound to effect a marked change in the
+conditions which have heretofore prevailed. But it has not yet, thank
+Heaven, reached that stage of civilisation which is characterised by
+summer hotels with miles of piazzas and acres of green lawns and oceans
+of red-and-white striped awnings. Taking the place of these sophisticated
+and ostentatious summer resorts are the unpretentious inns and camps and
+summer colonies which are sprinkled along the Oregon shore from the mouth
+of the Columbia to the California line.
+
+The easiest way to reach this summer land is to take the little
+jerk-water railroad which meanders eastward from Hillsboro, a main-line
+townlet fifty miles or so south of Portland, through Tillamook County
+to the sea. For many miles the train follows the tumultuous Nehalem,
+stopping every now and then, as the fancy seems to strike it, at
+shrieking sawmills or at groups of slab-walled loggers’ shacks set down
+in clearings in the forest, where bearded, flannel-shirted men come out
+and swap stories and tobacco with the engineer. After a time the woods
+begin to dwindle into tracts of stumps and second-growths, and these
+merge gradually into farms, with neat white houses and orderly rows of
+fruit-trees and herds of sleek cattle grazing contentedly in clover
+meadows. Quite soon Nehalem Bay comes in sight and the lush meadows give
+way to wire-grass and the wire-grass runs out in beaches of yellow sand
+so much like those which border Cape Cod and Buzzard’s Bay that it is
+hard to believe that one is not on the coast of New England. From the
+names of the towns and from the types of faces that I saw, I gathered
+that much of this country was settled by New Englanders, who must have
+found in its hills and forests and fertile farm lands and alternate
+stretches of sandy beach and rock-bound shore much to remind them of
+home. Oregon is, as a glance at the map will show you, in exactly
+the same latitude as the New England States and has the same cool,
+invigorating summer weather that one finds in Maine, though its winters,
+thanks to the warm Japan current which sweeps along its shores, are
+characterised by rains instead of snow. From Nehalem to Tillamook the
+railroad hugs the coast. On one side the bosom of the Pacific rises and
+falls languorously under a genial sun; on the other the line of rugged
+hills, in their shaggy mantles of green, go up to meet the sky. Here
+and there some placid lake mirrors the crags and wind-bent trees, or a
+river, complaining noisily at the delay to which it has been subjected,
+finds a devious way through the hindering hill range to the waiting
+ocean. Nor are the attractions of the Tillamook country those of the sea
+alone, for within a dozen miles of the coast bear, panther, wildcats,
+deer, partridge, pheasant, duck, and geese are to be found, while the
+mountain streams are alive with trout waiting to be lured by the fly.
+It is a storied region, too, for thousands of moccasined feet have trod
+the famous Indian trail which was once the only route from the wilds of
+southern Oregon to the fur-post which the first Astor established at
+the mouth of the Columbia and which still bears his name, and here and
+there along the coast are the remains of the forts and trading stations
+which the Russians, in their campaign for the commercial mastery of
+the Pacific half a century ago, pushed southward even to the Bay of San
+Francisco. The lives led by those who summer along this shore would
+delight such rugged apostles of the simple life as John Muir and John
+Burroughs and Colonel Roosevelt, for there is a gratifying absence of
+fashionable hotels and luxurious camps and cottages, though there is an
+abundance of unpretentious but comfortable tent colonies and inns. The
+people whom I met in Portland and elsewhere apologised profusely for
+Oregon’s deficiencies in this respect and assured me very earnestly that
+in two or three years more the State would have a complete assortment
+of summer hotels “as good as anything you’ll find at Atlantic City
+or Narragansett Pier, by George.” All I have to say is that when
+their promises are realised, Oregon’s chiefest and most distinctive
+charm—its near-to-nature simplicity—will have disappeared, and, so far
+as the traveller and the pleasure seeker are concerned, it will be
+merely an indifferent imitation of the humdrum and prosaic East. At
+present, however, it is still a big, free, unfenced, keep-on-the-grass,
+do-as-you-please, happy-go-lucky, flannel-shirt-and-slouch-hat land.
+Even as I write I can hear its insistent, subtle summons in my ears: the
+whisper of the forests, the chatter of the rivers, the murmur of the
+ocean, the snarling of the sawmills, the chunk-a-chunk of paddles, the
+creak of saddle gear, all seeming to say: “Cut loose from towns and men;
+pack your kit and come again.” And that’s precisely what I’m going to do.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+BREAKING THE WILDERNESS
+
+  “They rise to mastery of wind and snow;
+    They go like soldiers grimly into strife
+  To colonise the plain. They plough and sow,
+    And fertilise the sod with their own life,
+  As did the Indian and the buffalo.”
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+BREAKING THE WILDERNESS
+
+
+When white men in Africa make long desert journeys on camel-back, they
+follow the example of the Arabs and wind themselves tightly from chest
+to hips with bandages like those with which trainers wrap the legs of
+race-horses. This, to put it inelegantly but plainly, is done to prevent
+their bursting from the violent and sustained shaking to which they are
+subjected by the roughness of the camel’s gait. When I said good-bye to
+the Sudan, taking it for granted that I would have no further use for my
+spiral corselet in the presumably civilised country to which I was going,
+I left it behind me in Khartoum. How was I to know that I would need it
+far more than I ever had in Africa while journeying in so essentially
+Occidental a conveyance as a motor-car through a region where camels are
+confined to circuses and Turkish-rug advertisements? But long before we
+had traversed the forty atrocious miles which make the distance between
+Portland, Ore., and Kalama, Wash., seem more like four hundred, I would
+have given a good deal to have had my racked and aching body snugly
+wrapped in it again. I have had more than a speaking acquaintance with
+some roads so bad that they ought to have been in jail—in Asiatic Turkey
+and in Baja California and in other places—but to the Portland-Kalama
+road I present the red-white-and-blue championship ribbon. Roll down
+a rocky hillside in a barrel; climb into an electric churn and tell
+the dairyman to turn on the power; ride a bicycle across a railroad
+trestle and you will have had but the caviare course of the dinner of
+discomfort that was served to us. As, after five hours of this sort of
+thing, we bumped our way down a particularly vicious bit of hill road,
+every joint and bolt in the car squealing in agonised complaint, I saw a
+prosperous-looking farmer in his shirt-sleeves leaning comfortably over
+the front gate, interestedly watching our progress.
+
+“St-t-t-op a m-m-m-inute,” I chattered to the chauffeur, as we jounced
+into the thank-ye-marms and rattled over the loose stones, “I w-w-want to
+t-t-t-t-ell this m-m-m-an-n-n w-what I think of the r-r-r-oad.”
+
+As we drew up in front of the gate, the farmer, taking a straw out of his
+mouth, drawled:
+
+“Say, stranger, you might like to know that you’ve just come over the
+most gol-damnedest piece of road north o’ Panama.”
+
+So, unless the gentlemen who have the say in this portion of the State of
+Washington have repaired the road since we passed over it, I would advise
+those automobilists who are Seattle-bound to keep on the Oregon side
+of the Columbia as far as Goble (I think that is the name of the tiny
+hamlet), where they can put their car on a barge and hire the ferryman to
+tow them across the river to Kalama. This will cost them five dollars,
+but it’s worth it.
+
+[Illustration: A road near the Columbia as it was.
+
+A road near the Columbia as it is.
+
+WHAT THE ROAD-BUILDERS HAVE DONE IN WASHINGTON.]
+
+Were one to prejudge a country by the names of its villages and towns
+and counties he would form a peculiar conception of Washington, for I do
+not recall ever having heard anything quite so outlandish as the names
+which some one—the Siwash aborigine, presumably—has wished upon it. How
+would you like to get this sort of a reply to your question as to some
+one’s antecedents? “Me? Oh, I was born near Wahkiacus, down in Klickitat
+County, and I met my wife, whose folks live up Snohomish way, in Walla
+Walla, and later on we moved to Puyallup, but I’ve a sort of notion of
+goin’ into the cannery business at Skamokawa, over in Wahkiakum County,
+though the wife, she’s been a-pesterin’ me to buy an apple orchard up in
+the Okanogan.” Still, it’s more interesting to motor through a country
+like that, always wondering what bizarre, heathenish name is going to
+turn up next, than to tour through a region sprinkled with Simpson’s
+Centres and Cranberry Crossroads and New Carthages and Hickory Hollows
+until you feel as though you were an actor in “The Old Homestead.”
+
+Throughout our trip through Washington we were caused untold annoyance,
+and in several instances were compelled to travel many weary and needless
+miles, because of the wanton destruction of the sign-posts by amateur
+marksmen. Up in that country every boy gets a gun with his first pair
+of pants, and, when there is nothing else to shoot, he makes a target
+of the enamelled guide-posts which have been erected for the benefit of
+tourists. More than once, coming to a crossroads in the forest, we found
+these placards so riddled with bullets that we were compelled to guess
+which road to take—and we usually guessed wrong. “I wish to goodness,”
+said my friend in exasperation, after we had gone half a dozen miles out
+of our way on one of these occasions, “that they would declare a close
+season on sign-posts, just as they have on elk, and then give the man the
+limit who is caught shooting them.”
+
+It would be a grave injustice to place undue emphasis upon the crudities
+and inconveniences which annoy the traveller in certain portions of
+Washington, for, when you get down to bed-rock facts, its farmers are
+still wrestling with the wilderness—and in most instances they have had
+to put up a desperate resistance to keep the wilderness from shoving
+them off the mat. We passed through many a community, far removed from
+the railway (for the railway builders have done little more than nibble
+at the crust of the Washington pie) where the people were living under
+conditions almost identical with those which confronted the Pilgrim
+settlers of New England. Many a farmstead that we passed was chopped
+out of the virgin forest, the house being built from the trees that had
+grown upon its site. Cleared land, as an Eastern or Middle Western farmer
+knows the term, seemed almost non-existent. Black and massive stumps
+rose everywhere, like gravestones to the dead forest. “There’s so danged
+many stumps in this country,” one of these pioneer farmers remarked,
+“that sometimes I think that the Lord never intended for it to be cleared
+at all.” The problem of getting rid of these stumps is one of the most
+perplexing with which the Northwestern farmer has to contend, the expense
+of clearing land averaging in the neighbourhood of seventy-five dollars
+an acre. So inimical to colonisation has the question of land clearing
+become, indeed, that the State has found it necessary to step in and
+finance the stump-pullers in districts established in accordance with
+recent legislation. Though Washington is a country of hustle and hard
+work, no one who spends any length of time in it can fail to be impressed
+with the belief that it has a promising future. The climate is, as a
+whole, attractive. Though the cold is never extreme, the climate does not
+lack vigour, and, as a result of the Oregon mists, there is plenty of
+moisture. “We call ’em Oregon mists,” a farmer explained to me, “because
+they missed Oregon and hit here.” They are really more of a fog than a
+rain, and no one pays the slightest attention to them, even the womenfolk
+scorning to use umbrellas. These mists, taken with the verdancy of the
+vegetation and the pink-and-white complexions of the women, constantly
+reminded me of Ireland and the south of England. In striking contrast
+to the _arroyos secos_ to which we became accustomed in many parts of
+California are the streams of Washington, which flow throughout the year,
+enough water-power going to waste annually to run a plant that would
+supply the nation.
+
+As the Pacific Highway goes, it is close to a hundred and fifty
+miles from Portland to Tacoma, but we made a slight detour so as to
+see Olympia, which is the capital of the State. Beyond its rococo
+State-house, which is surmounted by a statue of a female—it might be
+Justice and it might be Mrs. Pankhurst in her peignoir—there is nothing
+to distinguish Olympia from any one of a score of other pretty little
+towns whose back doors open onto the primeval forest. Because there was a
+moon in the heavens as big and yellow as a Stilton cheese, we decided to
+push on to Tacoma, which is thirty miles from Olympia, that night. I’ll
+not soon forget the beauty of that ride. With our engines purring like a
+contented cat we boomed down the radiant path that our headlights cut out
+of the darkness; the night air, charged with balsamic fragrance, beat in
+our faces; the black walls of the forest rose skyward on either hand, the
+tree tops bordering with ghostly hedges a star-sprinkled lane of sky. I
+wish you might have been there ... it was so enchanting and mysterious.
+
+The theatres were vomiting their throngs of playgoers when we rolled
+under the row of electric arches which turns Tacoma’s chief thoroughfare
+into an avenue of dazzling light and drew up beneath the grotesque and
+towering totem-pole in the square in front of our hotel. Tacoma is as
+up-and-doing a city as you will find in a week’s journey through a busy
+land. It does not need to be rapped on the feet with a night-stick to be
+kept awake. Magnificently situated on a series of terraces rising above
+an arm of Puget Sound, its streets, instead of defying the steepness
+of the hills, as do those of San Francisco and Seattle, sweep up them
+in long diagonals, like the ramps at the Grand Central Terminal in New
+York. Tacoma is peculiarly fortunate in being girdled by a series of
+so-called natural parks, a zone ten miles in width in which the landscape
+architect has not been permitted to improve on the lakes and woods and
+wild-flower-carpeted glades provided by the Creator. But Tacoma’s chief
+boast and glory is, of course, a mountain whose graceful, snow-capped
+cone, which bears an astonishing resemblance to Fujiyama, rises like
+an ermine-mantled monarch above the encircling forest. The name of the
+mountain is Rainier or Tacoma, according to whether you live in Seattle
+or Tacoma, an acrimonious dispute having been in progress between the
+people of the two cities over the question for some time, the citizens
+of Seattle claiming that the mountain is far too beautiful to be used as
+an asset in Tacoma’s municipal advertising campaign, while the people
+of the latter city assert that, as the British Admiral Rainier, for
+whom the peak was originally named, fought against the Americans in the
+Revolution, he does not deserve to have his name tacked onto an American
+mountain.
+
+For thirty miles or more the road from Tacoma to Mount Rainier (for that
+is the name to which the Federal Government has given its approval)
+strikes across a wooded country as level as the top of a table, until,
+reaching the base of the mountain, it sweeps upward in long and graceful
+spirals which were laid out by army engineers, for the region has been
+taken over by the government under its new and admirable policy of
+protecting the beauty-spots of the country through the formation of
+national parks. Nowhere, not even in the Alps, have I driven over a
+finer mountain road, the gradients being so gradual and the curves so
+skilfully designed that one scarcely appreciates, upon reaching National
+Park Inn, in the heart of the reservation, that he has climbed upward
+of five thousand feet since leaving tide-water at Tacoma. We spent the
+night at the Inn, a low-roofed, big-fireplaced tavern which has an air of
+cosiness and comfort in keeping with the surroundings. Everything about
+it reminded us of hotels we knew in the Alpine valleys, and when I drew
+up the shade in the morning the illusion was complete, for the great
+peak, its snow-clad flanks all sparkling in the morning sunlight, towered
+above us, just as Mont Blanc towers above Chamonix, dazzling, majestic,
+sublime. Leaving the Inn after an early breakfast, we motored up the
+mountain road as far as the snout of the great Nisqually Glacier, which
+is as far as automobiles are permitted to go. Take my word for it, this
+glacier—the largest on the continent outside of Alaska—is one of the most
+worth-while sights in all America. A river of ice, seven miles long and
+half a mile wide, it coils down the slope of the mountain like a mammoth
+boa-constrictor whose progress has been barred in other directions by
+the encircling wall of forest. We left the car at the glacier’s snout,
+and, after an hour’s hard climbing over loose rubble and slippery rock,
+succeeded, in defiance of the danger signs, in reaching a flat shelf of
+rock from which we could look directly down upon the ice torrent, and
+there we ate the lunch that we had brought with us to the accompaniment
+of the intermittent crashes which marked the glacial torrent’s slow
+advance.
+
+We descended to the road in time to catch the four-horse stage which runs
+twice daily from the Inn to Paradise Valley, which the Lady insisted that
+we must visit, “because,” she said, “there are snow-fields and fields of
+wild flowers side by side.”
+
+“But you’ve seen much the same sort of thing in Switzerland,” I objected.
+“Don’t you remember that place above the Lake of Geneva, Territet, I
+think it was, where people in furs were skating on one side of the hotel
+and other people were having tea under big red parasols on the other?”
+
+“I remember it, of course,” she answered, “but that was in Switzerland
+and this is in my own country, which makes all the difference in
+the world. Evidently you have forgotten that German baron we met at
+Grindelwald, who asked us if we didn’t think that the view from Paradise
+Valley was finer than the one from Andermatt, and we had to admit that we
+didn’t know where Paradise Valley was. I’m not going to let that sort of
+thing happen again. The next time I meet a foreigner I’m not going to be
+embarrassed to death by finding that he knows more about my own country
+than I know myself.”
+
+So she had her way and, leaving the car behind us, we took the creaking
+stage up the steep and narrow road to the valley, where we gathered
+armfuls of wild flowers one minute and pelted each other with snowballs
+the next, and peered through the telescope—at a quarter a look—at the
+thirteen glaciers which radiate from the mountain’s summit, and aroused
+perfectly shameless appetites for supper, and slept as only healthily
+tired people can sleep, and the next morning, half intoxicated with the
+combination of blazing sunlight and sparkling mountain air, we rattled
+down again to the Inn and the waiting car.
+
+The run from Rainier National Park, through Tacoma, to Seattle is as
+smooth and exhilarating as sliding down the banisters of the front
+stairs. Auto-intoxicated by the perfection of the roads, I stepped
+on the accelerator and in obedience to the signal the car suddenly
+leaped into its stride and hurtled down the highway at express-train
+speed, while farmhouses and barns and fields and orchards swept by us
+in an indistinguishable blur. It was glorious while it lasted. But
+out of the distance came racing toward us a big white placard, “City
+Limits of Seattle,” and I slowed down to a pace more conformable with
+the law and rolled over the miles of trestles which span the swamps
+and lowlands adjacent to Seattle as sedately as though a motor-cycle
+policeman had his eye upon us. The builders of Seattle must have been
+men of resource as well as courage, for those portions of the city that
+have not been reclaimed from the tide-lands have been blasted out
+of the rocky hillsides, so that the city gives one the impression of
+clinging precariously to a slippery mountain slope midway between sea
+and sky. Instead of propitiating the hills, as is the case in Tacoma,
+the streets go storming up them at angles which give a motorist much the
+same sensation a rider has when his horse rears and threatens to fall
+over backward. Though Seattle is very big and very busy, with teeming
+streets and huge department stores and miles of harbour frontage and
+one of the tallest sky-scrapers in existence and a park and boulevard
+system probably unequalled anywhere, it gave me the impression of being a
+little crude, a trifle _nouveau riche_, and not yet entirely at home in
+its resplendent garments. Between Seattle and Portland the most intense
+rivalry exists, the two cities running almost neck-and-neck as regards
+population, although this assertion will be indignantly denied by the
+citizens of both of them. Standing at one of the world’s crossways, the
+terminus of several transcontinental railways and several trans-Pacific
+steamship lines, with a superb harbour and the recognised gateway to
+Alaska, Seattle has a tremendous commercial advantage over her Oregonian
+rival, but from a residential standpoint Portland, exquisitely situated
+on the Willamette near its junction with the Columbia, with its milder
+climate, its greater number of theatres and hotels, and its older
+society, has rather a more metropolitan atmosphere, a more assured air
+than its northern neighbour.
+
+Seattle is the natural portal to the Puget Sound country, that
+wilderness of mountains, glaciers, forests, lakes, lagoons, islands,
+bays, and inlets which makes the upper left-hand corner of the map of the
+United States look like a ragged fringe. It is not an easy country to
+describe. Southward from the Straits of Juan de Fuca, an eighty-mile-long
+arm of the Pacific penetrates the State of Washington—that is Puget
+Sound. On its eastern shore are the cities of Seattle and Tacoma, at the
+head of the sound is Olympia, the capital of the State, and bordering
+the western shore rise the splendid peaks of the unexplored Olympic
+Range. If your imagination will stand the further strain of picturing
+an archipelago four times the size of the Thousand Islands, clothed
+with forests of cedar, fir, and pine, and indented with countless bays,
+harbours, coves, and inlets, dropped down in this body of water, you will
+have a hazy conception of the island labyrinth of Puget Sound, which
+is generally admitted, I believe, to be the most beautiful salt-water
+estuary in the world. Despite the narrowness of many of its channels,
+the water is so deep and the banks so precipitous that at many points a
+ship’s side would touch the shore before its keel would touch the ground,
+which, taken in conjunction with its innumerable excellent harbours,
+makes it the most ideal cruising ground for power-boats on our coasts.
+
+I can conceive, indeed, of no more enchanting summer than one spent
+in a well-powered, well-stocked motor-boat cruising in and about this
+archipelago, loitering from island to island as the fancy seized one,
+dropping anchor in inviting harbours for a day or a week, as one pleased.
+There are deer and bear in the forests and trout in the rivers and
+salmon in the deeper waters, and, if those did not provide sufficient
+recreation, one could run across to the mainland and get the stiffest
+kind of mountain climbing on Mount Olympus or Mount Rainier. During the
+summer months scores of small steamers, the “mosquito fleet,” ply out of
+Seattle and Tacoma, hurrying backward and forward between the city wharfs
+and the fishing villages, farming communities, lumber camps, sawmills,
+and summer resorts that are scattered everywhere about the archipelago’s
+inland waterways, so that the camper on their shores, seemingly far
+off in the wilds, need never be without his daily paper, his fresh
+vegetables, or his mail.
+
+Let us give ourselves the luxury of imagining—for, to my way of
+thinking, there is about as much enjoyment to be had in imagination as
+in realisation—that we have a fortnight at our disposal on which no
+business worries shall be permitted to intrude, that we have the deck of
+a sturdy power-boat beneath our feet, and that the placid, island-dotted
+waters of Puget Sound lie before us, asparkle on a summer’s morning.
+Leaving Seattle, seated on her stately hills, astern, and the grim,
+grey fighting ships across the Sound at the Bremerton Navy Yard abeam,
+we will push the wheel to starboard and point the nose of our craft
+toward Admiralty Inlet, the Straits of Juan de Fuca, and the open sea.
+Our first port of call will be, I think, at Dungeness, whose waters
+are the habitat of those Dungeness crabs which tickle the palates and
+deplete the pocketbooks of gourmets from Vancouver to San Diego. At the
+back of Dungeness is Sequim Prairie, whose seventy odd thousand acres of
+irrigated lands produce “those great big baked potatoes” which are so
+prominent an item on dining-car menus in the Northwest. It is nothing
+of a run from Dungeness to Port Angeles, which is the most convenient
+gateway to the unexplored Olympics. A score or so of miles southward
+from Port Angeles by automobile, a portion of which is by ferry across
+the beautiful mountain Lake Crescent, and over a road which is a marvel
+of mountain engineering, are the Sol Duc Hot Springs, whose great
+modern hotel is in startling contrast to the savagery of the region
+which surrounds it. Laying our course from Port Angeles straight into
+the setting sun, we coast along the rock-bound, heavily timbered shores
+of the Olympic Peninsula to Neah Bay, where a crew of Macah Indians
+will take us in one of their frail canoes close around the harsh face
+of Cape Flattery, which is the extreme northwest corner of the United
+States. Westward of Cape Flattery we may not go, for beyond it lies
+the open sea; but, steering eastward again, we can nose about at will,
+loitering through the romantic scenery of Deception Pass and Rosario
+Straits, dropping in at Anacortes, whose canneries supply a considerable
+portion of the world with salmon, and coming thus to Friday Harbour,
+the county-seat of the San Juan Islands, which, despite the Robinson
+Crusoe-ness of its name, looks exactly like one of those quaint,
+old-fashioned seaport towns which dot the coast of Maine. The San Juan
+Islands, which are a less civilised and more beautiful edition of the
+Thousand Islands of the Saint Lawrence, like their counterparts on the
+other side of the continent, lie midway between the American and the
+Canadian shores. They were the scene of numerous exciting incidents in
+the boundary dispute of the late fifties, being for a number of years
+jointly occupied by British and American troops; but, though several
+crumbling British blockhouses still rise above the island harbours,
+the nearest British soil is Vancouver Island, across the Strait of
+Georgia. That the Stars and Stripes, and not the Union Jack, fly to-day
+over this picturesque archipelago is due, curiously enough, to the
+Emperor Frederick, father of the present Kaiser, who was asked to act as
+arbitrator between England and the United States and decided in favour of
+the latter.
+
+[Illustration: THE UNEXPLORED OLYMPICS.
+
+A forest fire sweeping across the flanks of the Olympic range near Lake
+Chelan. In the foreground is a sea of glacial ice.]
+
+Did you ever, by any chance, drop into a sporting-goods store only
+to find yourself so bewildered by the amazing number and variety of
+implements for sports and recreations displayed upon its shelves that you
+scarcely knew what to choose? Well, that is precisely the sensation I had
+the first time I visited the Puget Sound country. I felt as though I had
+been turned loose in a gigantic sporting-goods store with so many things
+to choose from that I couldn’t make up my mind which to take first. And,
+mark you, everything is comparatively close at hand. If a Londoner wants
+to get some mountain climbing he has to go to Chamonix or Zermatt, which
+means a journey of at least two days. If, getting his fill of precipices
+and glaciers and crevasses, he wishes some bear shooting, he must turn
+his face toward the Caucasus, to reach which will require seven or eight
+days more. Should he suddenly take it into his head that he would like
+some salmon fishing he will have to spend ten days and several hundred
+dollars in recrossing Europe to reach the fishing streams of Norway—and
+then pay a good round sum for the privilege of fishing in them when he
+gets there. On the other hand, one can leave Tacoma by train or motor-car
+and reach the slopes of the second highest peak in the United States,
+a mountain higher and more difficult of ascent than the Jungfrau, as
+quickly and as easily as one can go from New York to Poughkeepsie. From
+Seattle one can reach the country of the big grizzlies as easily as a
+Boston sportsman can reach the Maine woods. From Victoria, the island
+capital of British Columbia, a gallon of gasoline and a road as smooth
+as a billiard-table will take one to the banks of a stream where the
+salmon are too large to be weighed on pocket scales in less time than a
+Chicagoan spends in getting out to the golf-links at Onwentsia.
+
+There is no other region of equal size, so far as I am aware, which
+offers so many worth-while things in a superlative degree for red-blooded
+people to do. Where else, pray, can you climb a mountain which is higher
+than any peak in Europe save one (Mount Hooker, in British Columbia,
+is only eighty feet lower than Mont Blanc, the monarch of the Alps,
+while Mount Rainier, which, as I have remarked, is almost in Tacoma’s
+front yard, is nearly a thousand feet higher than the Jungfrau); where
+else can you look along your rifle barrel at such big game as grizzly,
+elk, panther, mountain-sheep, and even the spotted bear, the rarest of
+all North American big game; where else can you have your fly-rod bent
+like a sapling in a storm and hear your reel whir like a sawmill by a
+sixty-pound salmon or a six-pound trout; where else can you cruise, for
+weeks on end, amid the islands of an archipelago more beautiful than
+those of Georgian Bay and more numerous than those of the Ægean, without
+the necessity of ever dropping anchor twice in the same harbour; where
+else can you canoe by day and camp by night along rivers which have their
+sources on the roof of a continent and, after taking their course through
+a thousand miles of wilderness, empty into the greatest of the oceans;
+where else can you throw open the throttle of your motor on a macadamised
+highway which, in another year or two, will stretch its length across
+twenty-five degrees of latitude, linking Mexico with Alaska? Where else
+can you find such amusements as these, I ask? Answer me that.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Were it not for the complicated customs formalities that a motorist
+has, perforce, to go through at the Canadian border, one could, by
+getting an early start and not lingering over his lunch, make the
+one-hundred-and-seventy-mile journey from Seattle to Vancouver between
+dawn and dark of the same day. But the red tape which the American
+officials insist upon unwinding before you can leave the land of the beef
+trust and the home of the Pullman porter and the equal amount of red
+tape which the Canadian officials wind up before you are permitted to
+enter the dominions of his gracious Majesty King George make a one-day
+trip out of the question; so we did it comfortably in two and spent the
+intervening night in the seaport town of Bellingham. It’s a great place
+for canneries, is Bellingham; indeed, I should think that the residents
+would be ashamed to look a salmon in the face. Twenty miles farther on,
+at a hamlet called Blaine, we were greeted by a huge sign whose staring
+letters read: “International Boundary.” On one side the Stars and
+Stripes floated over an eight-by-ten shanty; on the other side of this
+imaginary but significant line the Union Jack flapped in the breeze over
+a shanty a trifle larger. They are inquisitive, those British customs
+officials, and when they had finished with our car there wasn’t much
+they didn’t know about it. They inspected it as thoroughly as a Kaffir
+is inspected when he knocks off work in a South African diamond mine.
+Before entering Canada it is wise to obtain from the American authorities
+at the border a certificate containing a description of your car and
+all that it contains; otherwise you will be subjected to innumerable
+formalities upon entering the country again, while the Canadian laws
+require that a tourist desiring to remain more than eight days in the
+Dominion must provide a bond to cover the value of his car and make in
+addition a deposit of twenty-five dollars, both of which will be returned
+to him when he leaves the country. There is a grocer in Blaine—I forget
+his name, but he is a most obliging fellow—who makes a specialty of
+providing bonds for motorists, and by going to him we saved ourselves
+much trouble. It was all very informal. He simply called up the Canadian
+customs house on the phone and said: “Say, Bill, there’s some folks
+here that’s motorin’ into Canada. I ain’t got time to make out a bond
+just now, ’cause there’s an old lady here waitin’ to buy some potatoes,
+but you just let ’em skip through and I’ll fix it up the next time I
+see you.” Careless and informal, just like that. So all they did was to
+take the pedigree of the car for four generations, note the numbers of
+the spare tires, inventory the extra parts, go through our belongings
+with a dandruff comb, inquire where I was born, what the E. in my name
+stood for, and was I unfortunate enough to have to pay taxes; and, after
+presenting me with a list of the pains and penalties which I would incur
+if I broke any of his Majesty’s orders in council, permitted us to enter
+the territory of the Dominion.
+
+[Illustration: WHERE THE SALMON COME FROM.
+
+“It’s a great place for canneries, is Bellingham; I should think the
+residents would be ashamed to look a salmon in the face.”]
+
+I hope, for the sake of those who follow in our tire tracks, that the
+fifty miles of highway between Blaine and Vancouver has been materially
+improved since we went over it. Doubtless with the best intentions in
+the world, they had constructed a “crowned” road, which, as its name
+implies, is one that is rounded upward in the middle so as to drain the
+more readily; but, as a result of the rains, the sloping sides were so
+greasy that it was only with considerable difficulty that I kept the car
+from sliding into the ditch. There is one thing that the motorist must
+bear constantly in mind from the moment his front tires roll across the
+Canadian border, and that is _keep to the left_. Barring New Brunswick
+and Nova Scotia, British Columbia is the only Canadian province which
+retains the English system of turning to the left and passing to the
+right, and it takes an American some time to become habituated to it.
+
+After seemingly endless miles of slippery going through dripping woods,
+we entered the outskirts of New Westminster, a prosperous seaport near
+the mouth of the Fraser and the oldest place in this region, as age is
+counted in western Canada. A splendid boulevard, twenty-five miles long,
+connects New Westminster with Vancouver, and the car fled along it as
+swiftly as an aeroplane and as silently as a ghost. The virgin forest
+dwindled and ran out in recently made clearings, where gangs of men were
+still at work dynamiting and burning the stumps; and on the cleared land
+neat cottages of mushroom growth appeared, and these changed gradually
+to two-storied, frame houses, and these again to the increasingly ornate
+mansions of the well-to-do, the wealthy, and the _rich_. Through the murk
+beyond them the white sky-scrapers of Vancouver shot skyward—memorials to
+the men who have roped and tied and tamed a savage land.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+CLINCHING THE RIVETS OF EMPIRE
+
+  “Up along the hostile mountains where the hair-poised snowslide shivers—
+    Down and through the big fat marshes that the virgin ore bed stains,
+  Till I heard the mile-wide muttering of unimagined rivers
+    And beyond the nameless timber saw illimitable plains.
+  Plotted sites of future cities, traced the easy grades between ’em;
+    Watched unharnessed rapids wasting fifty thousand head an hour;
+  Counted leagues of water frontage through the axe-ripe woods that
+      screen ’em—
+    Saw the plant to feed a people—up and waiting for the power!”
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+CLINCHING THE RIVETS OF EMPIRE
+
+
+Darkness had fallen on the Oregonian forest when our forward tire
+exploded with a report which sounded in that eerie stillness like a
+bursting shell. It was not a reassuring place to have a blowout—in the
+heart of a forest as large as many a European kingdom, with the nearest
+settlement half a hundred miles away and the nearest apology for a hotel
+as many more. Between the cathedral-like columns of the pines, however,
+I glimpsed a signal of human presence in the twinkling of a fire, and
+toward it I made my way through underbrush and over fallen trunks,
+while my chauffeur, blaspheming under his breath, busied himself at the
+maddening task of fitting on another tire in the darkness.
+
+I shall not soon forget the incongruity of the scene which greeted me
+as I halted on the edge of a little clearing fitfully illuminated by a
+roaring camp-fire. Within the circle of warmth—for the summer nights are
+chilly in the north country—stood a canvas-topped wagon which appeared to
+be a half-brother to a prairie-schooner, an uncle to an army ambulance,
+and a cousin to a moving van. Its side curtains had been let down, so
+that it formed a sort of tent on wheels, and seated beside it on an
+upended soap box a plump little woman in a calico dress was preparing
+six small youngsters for bed as unconcernedly as though she were in a
+New England farmhouse, with the neighbours’ lights twinkling through the
+trees, instead of in the middle of a primeval wilderness, a long day’s
+journey from anywhere. The horses had been outspanned, as they say in
+South Africa, and were placidly exploring the recesses of their nose-bags
+for the last stray grams of oats. A lank, stoop-shouldered, sinewy-framed
+man, who had been squatting beside the fire watching the slow progress
+of a pot of coffee, slowly rose to his feet on my approach and slouched
+forward with outstretched hand. He radiated good nature and hospitality
+and an air of easy-going efficiency, and from the first I liked him.
+
+“Howdy, friend,” he drawled, with the unmistakable nasal twang of the
+Middle West. “I reckon you’ve had a little bad luck with your machine,
+ain’t you? We heard you a-comin’ chug-chuggin’ through the woods, hell
+bent for election, an’ all to once there was a noise ’s if some one had
+pulled the trigger of a shotgun. ‘There,’ says I to Arethusa, ‘some pore
+autermobile feller’s limpin’ ’round in the darkness on three legs,’ says
+I, ‘an’ as soon ’s I get this coffee to boilin’ I reckon I’ll stroll over
+with a lantern an’ see if I can’t give him some help.’”
+
+“Just as much obliged,” said I, “but my man has the tire pretty well on
+by now. But we could do with a cup or so of that coffee if you’ve some to
+spare.”
+
+[Illustration: This settler’s nearest neighbour was fifty miles away—
+
+And he was a Swede farmer with a Siwash wife.
+
+OUTPOSTS OF CIVILISATION.]
+
+“That’s what coffee’s for, friend—to drink,” he said cordially, reaching
+for a tin cup. “Where’ve you come from?” he added with polite curiosity.
+
+“From the Mexican border,” said I, with, I suspect, a trace of
+self-satisfaction in my voice, for fifteen hundred miles of desert,
+forest, and mountains lay behind us. “And you?” I asked in turn.
+
+“Us?” he answered. “Oh, we’ve come from Kansas.” (He said it as
+unconcernedly as a New Yorker might mention that he had just run over to
+Philadelphia for a day.) “Left Emporia thirteen weeks ago come Thursday
+and have averaged nigh on twenty-five miles a day ever since. An’ the
+horses ain’t in bad condition, neither.”
+
+“And where, in the name of Heaven,” I exclaimed, “are you going?”
+
+“Well,” was the reply, “we’re headed for British Columbia, but I reckon
+we’ll have to winter somewheres in Washington and push on across the line
+in the spring. You see, friend,” he continued, in his placid, easy-going
+manner, in reply to my rapid fire of inquiries, “it was this way. I was
+in the furniture business back in Kansas, furniture an’ undertakin’, but
+I didn’t much care for the business ’cause it kept me indoors so much,
+my folks always havin’ been farmers and such like. Well, one day a while
+back, I picked up one of them folders sent out by the Canadian Gov’ment,
+tellin’ ’bout the rich resources up in British Columbia, an’ how land
+was to be had for the askin’. So that night when I went home I says to
+Arethusa: ‘What’d you think of sellin’ out an’ packin’ up and goin’ up
+British Columbia way, an’ gettin’ a farm where we can live out o’ doors
+an’ make a decent livin’?’ ‘Sure,’ says she, ‘I’d like it fine. An’ it’ll
+be great for the kids.’ ‘All right,’ says I,’ it’s all decided. I’ll
+build a body for the delivery wagon that we can sleep in, an’ we’ll take
+Peter an’ Repeater, the delivery team, an’ it won’t take us more than six
+or eight months to make the trip if we keep movin’.’ You see, friend,” he
+added, “my paw moved out to Kansas when there warn’t nothin’ there but
+Indians an’ sage-brush, an’ hers did, too, so I reckon this movin’ on to
+new places is sort of in the blood.”
+
+“But why British Columbia?” I queried. “Why Canada at all? What’s the
+reason that you, an American, don’t remain in the United States?”
+
+“Well, I don’t know exactly, friend,” he answered, a little shamefacedly,
+I thought, “unless it’s because it’s a newer country up there an’ a
+man has a better chance. What with the Swedes an’ the Germans an’ the
+Eyetalians, this country’s gettin’ pretty well settled an’ there ain’t
+the chances in it there was once; but up British Columbia way it’s still
+a frontier country, they tell me, an’ a man who’s willin’ to buckle down
+an’ work can make a home an’ a good livin’ quicker’n anywhere else, I
+guess. It’s fine land up in the middle o’ Vancouver Island, I hear, an’
+in the Cariboo country, too, an’ they want settlers so darn bad that
+they’ll give you a farm for nothin’. An’ it’s a pretty good country for a
+man to live in, too. Here in the United States we do a heap o’ talkin’
+’bout our laws, but up in Canada they don’t talk about ’em at all—they
+just go right ahead an’ enforce ’em. I may be in wrong, of course, but
+from all I hear it’s goin’ to be a great country up there one of these
+days, when they get the railroads through, an’ me an’ Arethusa sorta got
+the notion in our heads that we’d like to be pioneers, like our paws
+were, an’ get in an’ help build the country, an’ let our kids grow up
+with it. You’ve got to be startin’, eh? Won’t you have another cup o’
+coffee before you go? Well, friend, I’m mighty glad to’ve met you. Good
+luck to you.”
+
+“Good luck to _you_,” said I.
+
+[Illustration: “Chopping a path to To-morrow—” Frontiersmen clearing a
+town site in the forests of British Columbia.
+
+Law and order in the back country: the sheriff of the Cariboo—the only
+law-officer for three hundred miles.
+
+BREAKING THE WILDERNESS.]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Though I didn’t appreciate it at the time, my acquaintance of the forest
+was a soldier in an army of invasion. This army had come from the south
+quietly, unostentatiously, without blare of bugle or beat of drum, its
+weapons the plough and the reaper, the hoe and the spade, its object the
+conquest, not of a people but of a wilderness. Have you any conception,
+I wonder, of the astounding proportions which this agricultural invasion
+of Canada has assumed? Did you know that last year upward of one hundred
+thousand Americans crossed the border to take up farms and carve out
+fortunes for themselves under another flag? These settlers who are
+trekking northward by rail and road are the very pick of the farming
+communities of our Middle West. Besides being men of splendid character
+and fine physique, and of a rugged honesty that is characteristic of
+those closely associated with the soil, they take with them a substantial
+amount of capital—probably a thousand dollars at least, on an average,
+either in cash, stock, or household goods. Moreover, they bring what
+is most valuable of all—experience. Coming from a region where the
+agricultural conditions are similar to those prevailing in the Canadian
+West, they quickly adapt themselves to the new life. Unlike the settlers
+from the mother country and from the Continent, to whom everything
+is strange and new, and who consequently require some time to adjust
+themselves to the changed conditions, the American wastes not a moment
+in contemplation but rolls up his sleeves, spits on his hands, and goes
+hammer and tongs at the task of making a farm and building a home. He is
+efficient, energetic, industrious, businesslike, adaptable, and quite
+frankly admits that he has come to the country because it offers him
+better prospects. So, though he may not sing “God Save the King” with the
+fervour of a newly arrived Briton, he is none the less valuable to the
+land of his adoption.
+
+[Illustration: A heavy load but well packed.
+
+Even the dogs have to carry their share.
+
+A heavy load poorly packed.
+
+PACK-HORSES AND A PACK-DOG.]
+
+Ask your average well-informed American what he knows about British
+Columbia, and it is dollars to doughnuts that he will remark rather
+dubiously: “Oh, yes, that’s the place where the tinned salmon comes from,
+isn’t it?” Take yourself, for example. Did you happen to be aware that,
+though it has barely as many inhabitants as Newark, N. J., its area
+is equal to that of California, Oregon, and Washington put together,
+with Indiana thrown in to make good measure? Or, if the comparison
+is more graphic, that it is larger than the combined areas of Italy,
+Switzerland, and France? Westernmost of the eleven provinces comprising
+the Dominion, it is bounded on the south by the orchards of Washington
+and the mines of Idaho; eastward it ends where the cattle-ranges of
+Alberta begin; to its north are the fur-bearing Mackenzie Territories
+and the gold-fields of the Yukon; westward it is bordered by the heaving
+Pacific and that narrow strip of ragged coast which forms the panhandle
+of Alaska. Though clinging to its edges are a score of towns and two
+great cities; though a transcontinental railway (the only one on the
+continent, by the way, which runs from tide-water to tide-water under
+the same management and the same name) hugs the province’s southern
+border and another is cutting it through the middle; its vast hinterland,
+larger than the two Scandinavian kingdoms, with its network of unnamed
+rivers and its unguessed-at wealth in forests, fish, furs, and minerals,
+contains thousands upon thousands of square miles which have never felt
+the pressure of a white man’s foot or echoed to a white man’s voice.
+Do you realise that, should you turn your horse’s head northwestward
+from the Kootenai, on the Idaho border, you would have to ride as far
+as from Lake Superior to the Gulf of Mexico before you could unsaddle
+beneath the Stars and Stripes at White Pass, on the frontier of Alaska?
+Did you know that the province contains the greatest compact area of
+merchantable timber in North America, its forests being greater in extent
+than those of the New England States, New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan,
+Wisconsin, Minnesota, and the Blue Ridge combined? I have heard naval
+experts and railway presidents and mining men talk ponderously of a
+future shortage in the coal supply—but they need not worry, for British
+Columbia’s coal measures are estimated to contain forty billion tons of
+bituminous and sixty billion tons of anthracite (100,000,000,000, tons
+in all, if so endless a caravan of ciphers means anything to you)—enough
+to run the engines of the world until Gabriel’s trumpet sounds “Cease
+working.” The output of its salmon canneries will provide those who order
+fish on Fridays with most excellent and inexpensive eating until the
+crack of doom. Its untouched deposits of magnetite and hematite are so
+extensive that they bid fair to make the ironmasters of Pittsburg break
+that commandment (I forget which one it is) which says: “Thou shalt
+not covet thy neighbour’s goods.” The province has enough pulpwood to
+supply the Hearst and Harmsworth presses with paper until the last “extra
+special edition” is issued on the morning of judgment day. The recently
+discovered petroleum deposits have proved so large that they promise to
+materially reduce the income of the lean old gentleman who plays golf
+on the Pocantico Hills. The area of agricultural and fruit lands in the
+province is estimated at sixty million acres, of which less than one
+tenth has been taken up, much less put under cultivation. And scattered
+through the length and breadth of this great Cave-of-Al-ed-Din-like
+territory is a total population of less than four hundred thousand
+souls. Everything considered, it has, I suppose, greater natural
+resources than any area of the same size on the globe. So I don’t see
+how a young man with courage, energy, ambition, a little capital, and
+a speaking acquaintance with hard work could do better than to drop
+into the nearest railway ticket office and say to the clerk behind the
+counter: “A ticket to British Columbia—and step lively, if you please. I
+want to get there before it is too late to be a pioneer.”
+
+Situated in the same latitude as the British Isles, sheltered from the
+winter blizzards of the prairie provinces by the high wall of the Rocky
+Mountains, its long western coast washed by the warm waves of the Japan
+current, its air tinctured with the balsamic fragrance of millions of
+acres of hemlock, spruce, and pine, British Columbia’s climate is, to
+use the phraseology of the real-estate boosters, “highly salubrious”;
+although, to be strictly truthful, I am compelled to add that it is
+extremely wet during a considerable portion of the year. But it is a
+misty, drizzly sort of rain to which no one pays the slightest attention.
+You will see ladies without umbrellas stop to chat on the streets,
+and men lounging and laughing in front of the clubs and hotels in a
+rain which would make a Chicagoan hail a taxicab and a Bostonian turn
+up his collar and seek the subway. When you speak about it they laugh
+good-naturedly and say in a surprised sort of way: “Why, is it raining?
+By Jove, it is a trifle misty, isn’t it? Really, you know, I hadn’t
+noticed it at all.” Then they will go on to tell you that it is the
+moistness of the climate which gives British Columbia its beautiful women
+and its beautiful flowers. And I can, and gladly do, vouch for the beauty
+of them both. They—particularly the women—are worth going a long way to
+see.
+
+You mustn’t confuse British Columbia, you understand, with the flat,
+monotonous, grain-growing provinces which lie on the other side of the
+Rockies. It isn’t that sort of a country at all. It is too mountainous,
+too ravined, with many impassable chasms and nigh-impenetrable forests.
+Its plateaus are eroded by lake and river into gorges which are younger
+sisters of the Grand Cañon of the Colorado. From a little distance the
+mountain slopes look as though they had been neatly upholstered in the
+green plush to which the builders of Pullman cars are so partial, but,
+upon closer inspection, the green covering resolves itself into dense
+forests of spruce and pine. Thousands and thousands of brooks empty into
+the creeks and hundreds of creeks empty into the big rivers, and these
+mighty waterways, the Fraser, the Kootenai, the Skeena, the Columbia, go
+roaring and booming seaward through their rock-walled channels, wasting
+a million head of power an hour. Nowhere, that I can recall, are so
+many picturesque and interesting scenes combined with such sensational
+and impressive scenery as along the cañon of the Lower Fraser. Here the
+mountains of the Coast Range rise to a height of nearly two miles above
+the surface of the swirling, angry river, the walls of the cañon being
+so precipitous and smooth that one marvels at the daring and ingenuity
+of the men who built a railway there. As the cañon widens, the traveller
+catches fleeting glimpses of Chinamen washing for gold on the river
+bars; of bearded, booted lumberjacks guiding with their spike-shod poles
+the course of mile-long log rafts; of Siwash Indians, standing with
+poised salmon-spears on the rocks above the stream, like statues cast
+in bronze. Then the outposts of civilisation begin to appear in the
+form of hillsides which have been cleared and set out to fruit-trees,
+of Japanese truck-gardens, every foot of which is tended by the little
+yellow men with almost pathetic care, of sawmills, and salmon canneries;
+and so through a region where neat hamlets alternate with stretches of
+primeval forest, until in the distance, looming above the smoke pall, the
+sky-scrapers of Vancouver appear.
+
+[Illustration: The Upper Fraser: “Streams of threaded quicksilver hasten
+through the valleys as though anxious to escape from the solitude that
+reigns.”
+
+“On the flanks of the ridges, massed in their black battalions, stand the
+bleak, barbarian pines.”
+
+IN THE GREAT, STILL LAND.]
+
+The chief cities of the province are Vancouver, the commercial capital
+and a port and railway terminus of great industrial importance, and
+Victoria, the seat of government and the centre of provincial society.
+There are also several smaller cities: New Westminster, at the mouth
+of the Fraser and so close to Vancouver that it is almost impossible
+for the stranger to determine where the one ends and the other begins;
+Nanaimo, a coal-mining town of considerable importance on the eastern
+shore of Vancouver Island, and Alberni, famous for its salmon fisheries,
+at the head of an arm of the sea extending inland from the western coast;
+Nelson, the _chef-lieu_ of the prosperous fruit-growing district of
+the Kootenai, in the extreme southeastern corner of the province; Bella
+Coola, on a fiord at the mouth of the Bella Coola River; Ashcroft, the
+gateway to the hinterland, on the main line of the Canadian Pacific
+Railway; Fort George, at the junction of the Fraser and Nechako Rivers;
+and Prince Rupert, the remarkable mushroom city which the Grand Trunk
+Pacific Railway has built, from the ground up, on the coast of British
+Columbia, forty miles south of the Alaskan border, as the Pacific
+Coast terminus for the transcontinental system which has recently been
+completed.
+
+Between Vancouver and Victoria the most intense rivalry exists. They are
+as jealous of each other as two prima donnas singing in the same opera.
+Vancouver is a great and prosperous city, with broad and teeming streets,
+clanging street-cars, rumbling traffic, belching factory chimneys,
+towering office-buildings, extensive railroad yards, excellent pavements,
+and attractive residential suburbs. Of course there is nothing very
+startling in all this, were it not for the fact that it is all new—twenty
+years ago there was no such place on the map. It is a busy, bustling
+place, where every one seems too much occupied in making fortunes
+overnight to have much time to spare for social amenities. There was a
+land boom on the last time I was in Vancouver—in fact, I gathered that
+it was a perennial condition—and prices were being asked (and paid!) for
+town lots not yet cleared of forest which would have made an American
+real-estate agent admit quite frankly that he had not progressed beyond
+the kindergarten stage of the game. I am perfectly serious in saying that
+within the city limits of Vancouver lots are being sold which are still
+covered with virgin forest. Within less than two miles of the city hall
+you can see gangs of men clearing residential sites by chopping down the
+primeval forest with which they are covered and blowing out and burning
+the stumps. This real-estate boom, with its consequent inflation of land
+values, has had a bad effect on the prosperity of Vancouver, however, for
+many ordinarily conservative business men, dazzled by visions of sudden
+wealth, have gone land mad; money is difficult to get, for Canadian banks
+are prohibited by law from loaning on real estate; and, like so many
+other towns which have been stimulated by artificial means, Vancouver is
+already beginning to show the effects of the inevitable reaction.
+
+Victoria, unlike Vancouver, is old, as oldness counts in the Dominion. It
+was the seat of government when Vancouver was part jungle and part beach.
+It is the residential city of western Canada, and is much in vogue as a
+place of permanent abode for those who in any of the nearer provinces
+“have made their pile,” for well-to-do men with marriageable daughters
+and socially ambitious wives, and for military and naval officers who
+have retired and wish to get as much as possible out of their limited
+incomes. Victoria is as essentially English as Vancouver is American.
+It is, indeed, a bit of England set down in this remote corner of the
+empire. It has stately government buildings, broad, tree-shaded streets,
+endless rows of the beam-and-plaster villas which one sees in every
+London suburb, and one of the most beautiful parks I have ever seen. Its
+people spend much of their time on the tennis-courts, cricket-fields,
+and golf-links, and are careful not to let business interfere with
+pleasure. That is the reason, no doubt, why in business Vancouver has
+swept by Victoria as an automobile sweeps by a horse and buggy. Vancouver
+might aptly be compared to a hustling, energetic business man who never
+lets slip an opportunity to make a dollar and who is always on the job.
+Victoria, on the contrary, is a quietly prosperous, rather sportily
+inclined old gentleman who is fond of good living and believes that no
+time is wasted that is devoted to sport. Each town has a whole-souled
+contempt for the other. The Victorian takes you aside and says: “Oh, yes,
+Vancouver is progressing quite rapidly, I hear, although, fact is, the
+subject really doesn’t interest me. The people are so impossible, you
+know. Why, would you believe it, my dear fellow, most of them came there
+without a dollar to their names—fact, I assure you. Now they’re all bally
+millionaires. Positively vulgar, I call it. Very worthy folk, no doubt,
+but scarcely in our class. Look here, let’s have a drink and then motor
+out and have a round of golf. What say, old chap? Right-o!”
+
+The Vancouver man shoves his derby on the back of his head, sticks a
+thumb in the armhole of his waistcoat, and with the other hand gives
+you a resounding whack on the shoulder. “Victoria? Pshaw, no one takes
+Victoria seriously. Nice little place to send the madam and the kids
+for the summer. But it’s asleep—nothing doing—no business. Why, say,
+friend, do you know what they do down there? _They drink afternoon tea!_
+Believe me, Vancouver is the only real, growing, progressive, wide-awake,
+up-and-doing burg this side of Broadway. Say, have you got an hour to
+spare? Then just jump into my car here and I’ll run you out and show you
+a piece of property that you can make a fortune on if you buy it quick.
+Yes, sirree, you can get rich quick, all right all right, if you invest
+your money in Vancouver.”
+
+There are not more than ten harbours in the world, certainly not more
+than a dozen at the most, that have a right to be spoken of in the
+same breath with Victoria’s landlocked port. Picking her cautious way
+through the long, narrow, curving entrance that makes the harbour of
+Victoria resemble a chemist’s retort, our vessel swept ahead with
+stately deliberation, while we leaned over the rail in the crispness of
+the early morning and watched the scenes that accommodatingly spread
+themselves before us. Slender, white-hulled pleasure yachts, dainty as a
+débutante; impertinent, omnipresent launches, poking their inquisitive
+noses everywhere and escaping disaster by the thickness of their paint;
+greasy, hard-working tugboats, panting like an expressman who has carried
+your trunk upstairs; whalers outfitting for the Arctic—you can tell
+’em by the scarlet lookout’s barrel lashed to the fore masthead; rusty
+freighters from Sitka, Callao, Singapore, Heaven knows where; Japanese
+fishing-boats with tattered, weather-beaten sails such as the artists
+love to paint; Siwash canoes manned by squat, shock-headed descendants
+of the first inhabitants; huge twin-funnelled Canadian Pacific liners
+outward bound for Yokohama or homeward bound for Vancouver, for Victoria
+boasts of being “the first and last port of call”—take my word for it,
+it’s a sight worth seeing, is Victoria Harbour on a sunny morning. We
+forged ahead at half speed and the city crept nearer and nearer, until
+we could make out the line of four-horsed brakes waiting to rattle those
+tourists whose time was limited to the customary “points of interest,”
+and the crowd of loungers along the quay, and the constables with their
+helmet straps under their lower lips and blue-and-white-striped bands
+on their sleeves, exactly like their fellows in Oxford Circus and
+Piccadilly. At the right the imposing stone façade of the Parliament
+buildings rose from an expanse of vivid lawn—as a result of the combined
+warmth and moisture the vegetation of Victoria is unsurpassed in the
+temperate zone; at the left the business portion of the city stretched
+away in stolid and uncompromising brick and stone; squarely ahead of us
+loomed the great bulk of the Empress Hotel. We would have run into it had
+we kept straight on, but of course we didn’t, for the captain yanked a
+lever on the bridge and bells jangled noisily in the engine room, and the
+vessel, turning ever so deliberately, poked her prow into the berth that
+awaited it like a horse entering its accustomed stall.
+
+What I like about Victoria is that it is so blamed British. Unless
+you are observing enough to notice that the date-lines of the London
+papers in the Union Club are quite a fortnight old, you would never
+dream that you were upward of six thousand miles from Trafalgar
+Square and barely sixty from the totem-pole in Seattle. If you still
+have any lingering doubts as to the atmosphere of the place being
+completely and unreservedly British, they will promptly be dispelled
+if you will drop into the lobby (they call it lounge) of the Empress
+Hotel any afternoon at four o’clock and see the knickerbockered
+sons of Albion engaged in the national diversion of drinking tea.
+When an American is caught drinking afternoon tea he assumes an I-give-
+you-my-word-I-never-did-this-before-but-the-ladies-dragged-me-into-it
+air, but your Britisher does it with all the matter-of-courseness
+with which a New Yorker orders his pre-dinner cocktail. One of the
+earliest impressions one gets in Victoria is that all the inhabitants
+are suffering from extraordinarily hard colds—brought on, you suppose,
+by the dampness of the climate—but after a little it dawns on you that
+they are merely employing the broad A that they brought with them from
+the old country, along with their monocles and their beautifully cut
+riding clothes. In Vancouver, on the contrary, you never hear the broad A
+used at all unless by a new arrival with the brand of Bond Street fresh
+upon him. They have no time for it. They are too busy making money. The
+Victorians, on the other hand, never lie awake nights fretting about
+the filthy lucre. _They_ are too busy having a good time. They have
+enough money to be comfortable, and that seems to be all they want.
+That’s the plan on which the place is run—comfort and pleasure. Most
+of the Victorians, so I was told, are people with beer pocketbooks and
+champagne thirsts. For a man with a modest income and an unquenchable
+thirst for sport Victoria is the best place of residence I know. In
+most places it needs a rich man’s income to lead the sporting life, for
+game-preserves and salmon rivers and polo ponies run into a lot of money,
+but in Victoria almost any one can be a sport, if not a sportsman, for
+you can pick up a pony that can be broken to polo for sixty or seventy
+dollars and a few miles back of the city lies one of the greatest fishing
+and shooting regions in the world. The last time I was in Victoria I
+found all the banks and business houses closed, and flags were flying
+from every public building, and a procession, headed by mounted police
+and a band, was coming down the street. “What’s going on?” I inquired of
+a deeply interested bystander. “Is it the King’s birthday or is there
+royalty in town, or what?” “Not on your life!” he answered witheringly.
+“It’s the prime minister on his way to open the baseball season.”
+
+If you want to go a-motoring in a foreign country without the expense
+and trouble of an ocean voyage, I doubt if you could do better than
+to put your car on a steamer at Seattle or Vancouver, with “Victoria”
+pencilled on the bill of lading. Take my word for it, you will find
+Vancouver Island as foreign (perhaps I should say as un-American) as
+England; in many respects it is more English than England itself. Though
+the aggregate length of the insular highways is not very great, for
+civilisation has as yet but nibbled at the island’s edges, the roads that
+have been built are unsurpassed anywhere. If roads are judged not only
+by their smoothness but by the scenery through which they pass, then
+the highways of Vancouver Island are in a class by themselves. They are
+as smooth as the arguments of an automobile salesman; their grades are
+as easy as the path to shame; they are bordered by scenery as alluring
+as Scherezade. The spinal column of Vancouver’s highway system is the
+splendid Island Highway, which, after leaving Victoria, parallels the
+east coast, running through Cowichan, Chemainus, Ladysmith, Nanaimo, and
+Wellington, to Nanoose Bay. Here the road divides, one fork continuing up
+the coast to Campbell River, which is the northernmost point that can be
+reached by road, while the other fork swings inland, skirting the shores
+of Cameron Lake and through Alberni, at the head of Barclay Sound, to
+Great Central Lake, which, as its name indicates, is in the very heart
+of the island, upward of a hundred and fifty miles from Victoria as
+the motor goes. The first twenty miles of the Island Highway are known
+as the Malahat Drive, the road here climbing over a mountain range of
+considerable height by means of a splendidly surfaced but none too wide
+shelf, with many uncomfortably sharp turns, cut in the rocky face of
+the cliff. This shelf gradually ascends until the giant firs in the
+gloomy gorge below look no larger than hedge-plants, and the waters of
+the sound, with its wild and wooded shores, like a miniature lakelet in
+a garden. The Malahat is a safe enough road if you drive with caution.
+But it is no place for joy riding. It is too narrow, in the first place,
+and the turns are too sharp, and it is such a fearfully long way to the
+bottom that they would have to gather up your remains with a shovel,
+which is messy and inconvenient.
+
+Throughout our tour on Vancouver Island we were impressed with the
+universal politeness and good nature of the people we met, particularly
+in the back country, and by the courteous wording of the signs along
+the highways. The highway signs in the United States have a habit of
+shaking a fist in your face, metaphorically speaking, and shouting at
+you: “Go any faster if you dare!” But in Vancouver they assume that you
+are a gentleman and address you as such. Instead of curtly ordering you
+to “Go slow” without condescending to give any reason, they erect a sign
+like this: “Schoolhouse ahead. Please look out for the children,” and,
+a little way beyond, another which says, “Thank you”—a little courtesy
+which costs nothing except a few extra strokes of the brush and leaves
+you permeated with a glow of good feeling.
+
+When we reached Nanaimo, which is a coal-mining centre of considerable
+importance, we found one of the periodic strikes which serve to relieve
+the tedium of life in the drab little colliery town in progress and a
+militia regiment of Highlanders encamped in its streets. When we speak
+of militia in the United States we usually think of slouch-hatted youths
+in rather slovenly uniforms of yellow khaki, who meet every Wednesday
+night for drill at the local armoury, spend ten days in an instruction
+camp each summer, and parade down the main streets of their respective
+towns on Decoration Day and the Fourth of July. But these Canadian
+militiamen were something quite different. I don’t suppose that they are
+a whit more efficient when it comes to the business of slaughter than
+their cousins south of the border, but they are certainly a lot more
+picturesque. But I ask you now, candidly, can you imagine several hundred
+young Americans dressed in plaid kilts and plaid stockings, with an
+interim of bare knees, jackets chopped off at the waist-line, and dinky
+little caps with ribbons hanging down behind keeping the upper hand in a
+strike-ridden American city? I can’t. These young men belonged, so I was
+told, to a “Highland” regiment, though after talking with a few of them I
+gathered that their acquaintance with the Highlands consisted in having
+occupied seats in the upper gallery at a performance by Harry Lauder.
+But, kilts or no kilts, there was no doubt that they were running the
+show in Nanaimo and, from all indications, running it very well.
+
+Decidedly the most worth-while thing on Vancouver Island, either from
+the view-point of an artist or a motorist, is that portion of the Island
+Highway between Nanoose Bay, on the Straits of Georgia, and Alberni,
+at the head of Barclay Sound. When I first traversed it in the golden
+radiance of an October day, I thought it was the most beautiful road I
+had ever seen. And as I traverse it again in the motor-car of memory,
+with a knowledge of most of the other beautiful highways of the world
+to compare it with, I am still of the same opinion. So impressive is
+the scenery, so profound the silence that we felt a trifle awed and
+spoke in whispers when we spoke at all, as though we were in the nave
+of a great cathedral. High above us the tree tops interlaced in a roof
+of translucent green through which the sun-rays filtered, turning the
+road into a golden trail and the moss on the rocks and the tree trunks
+into old-gold plush. The meadowed hillsides were so thickly strewn with
+lacy ferns and wild flowers that it seemed as though the Great Architect
+had draped them in the dainty, flowered cretonne they use in ladies’
+boudoirs; and scattered about, as might be expected in a lady’s boudoir,
+were silver mirrors—with rainbow-trout leaping in them. Then there were
+the mountains: range piled upon range, peaks peering over the shoulders
+of other peaks like soldiers _en échelon_. They ran the gamut of the more
+sober colours; green at the base, where the lush meadows lay, then the
+dark green of the forest, then the rusty brown of scrub and underbrush,
+the violet and blue and purple of the naked rock, and, atop of all, a
+crown of dazzling white.
+
+The versatile gentlemen who write those alluring folders that you find
+in racks in railway offices and hotel lobbies very cleverly play on
+the Anglo-Saxon love for sport by describing the region through which
+their particular system runs as “a sportsman’s paradise.” It makes small
+difference whether they are describing the New Jersey mud-flats or the
+Berkshire hills, they are all “sportsman’s paradises.” But the northern
+half of Vancouver Island is all that this much-abused term implies and
+more. It is, I suppose, the finest and most accessible fish and game
+country on the continent south of the Skeena. I am perfectly aware that I
+may be accused of belonging to the Ananias Club when I say that certain
+of the smaller streams in Vancouver Island (and also in northern British
+Columbia) are at certain seasons of the year so choked with salmon
+that they can be, _and are_, speared with a pitchfork, and that ruffed
+grouse and Chinese pheasants are so plentiful and tame that they can be
+knocked over with a long-handled shovel. It’s true, just the same. We
+didn’t pitchfork any salmon ourselves, because it isn’t our conception
+of sport, but we saw natives tossing them out of a stream north of
+Alberni as unconcernedly as though they were pitchforking hay. Nor did
+we assassinate any game-birds with a shovel; but more than once, during
+the run from Nanoose Bay to Great Central Lake, we had to swerve aside to
+avoid running down grouse, which were so tame that a Plymouth Rock would
+be wild in comparison; and once, near Cameron Lake, we actually did run
+over the trailing tail-feathers of a gorgeous Chinese cock pheasant that
+insolently refused to get off the road.
+
+Alberni and its bigger, busier sister, Port Alberni, occupy the
+anomalous position of being in the middle of the island and at the same
+time on its western coast. If you will take the trouble to look at the
+map you will see that the arm of the sea called Barclay Sound reaches
+into the very heart of the island, thus permitting deep-sea merchantmen
+to tie up at Port Alberni’s wharfs and take aboard cargoes of lumber and
+dried salmon. Alberni was one of the places that I should have liked to
+linger in, so peaceful and easy-going is its Old-World atmosphere as
+it dozes the sunny days away, the soft salt breath of the sea mingling
+with the balsamic fragrance of the forest which surrounds it. Because
+it is so comparatively little visited, and because the waters of the
+sound are famous for their salmon runs, we expected that we would have
+an opportunity to bend our rods off Alberni, but we were met with
+disappointment, for the salmon with which these waters swarm were, for
+strictly domestic reasons, not biting at the time we were there. So we
+kept on to Great Central Lake, a dozen miles north of Alberni, through
+the forest.
+
+[Illustration: The Ark, on Great Central Lake. “Like its prototype of
+Noah’s day, it is a floating caravansary.”
+
+A wolverine caught in a trap in the forest at the northern end of
+Vancouver Island.
+
+SPORT ON VANCOUVER ISLAND.]
+
+Even though you do not know a trout from a turbot, a fly from a spoon;
+even though some of the finest scenery in the three Americas could not
+elicit an “Oh!” of admiration or an “Ah!” of pleasure, I hope that some
+day you will visit Great Central Lake, if for no other reason than to
+experience the novelty of spending a night in its extraordinary hotel.
+It is called The Ark, and, like its prototype of Noah’s day, it is a
+floating caravansary. Briefly, it is a hotel of twenty bedrooms built on
+a raft anchored in the lake. When the fishing becomes indifferent in the
+neighbourhood, the proprietor hoists his anchors, starts up the engines
+of his launch, and tows his floating hotel elsewhere. The fish have a
+hard time keeping away from it, for it pursues them remorselessly. It
+is patronised in the main by that world-wide brotherhood whose members
+believe that no place is too remote or too difficult of access if their
+journey is rewarded by the thrill of a six-pound trout on an eight-ounce
+rod or by glimpsing a bighorn or a bear along a rifle barrel. For that
+reason one is quite likely to run across some very interesting people at
+The Ark. While we were there a party of English notabilities arrived.
+There were the Earl of Something-or-Other and his beautiful daughter,
+Lady Marjorie What’s-her-Name, and a cousin, the Honourable So-and-So,
+and the earl’s mine manager, and one or two others. Now there isn’t
+anything very remarkable about meeting British nobility in the Colonies,
+for nowadays you find earls and marquises and dukes floating around
+everywhere. In fact, as Mark Twain once remarked of decorations, you
+can’t escape them. The remarkable thing about this particular party was
+that they had tramped overland from the extreme northern end of the
+island, where some mining properties in which the earl was interested
+are situated, through unmapped and almost unknown forests, sleeping in
+the open with no covering save the blankets they carried on their backs,
+and with the Lady Marjorie for their cook. She was as slim and trim and
+pretty a girl as one could ask for, and, with her curly hair creeping out
+from under her soft hat, her Norfolk jacket snugly belted to her lissom
+figure, her smartly cut knickerbockers and her leather stockings, she
+might have stepped out of one of those novels by the Williamsons.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The chief factor in the colonisation of British Columbia and in the
+development of its resources is the remarkable railway expansion which is
+now taking place. No region in the world has witnessed such extraordinary
+progress in railway construction during the past five years. Until the
+spring of 1914 the “C. P. R.,” as the Canadian Pacific is commonly called
+throughout the Dominion, enjoyed a monopoly of freight and passenger
+transportation in the province, being scarcely less autocratic in its
+attitude and methods than the Standard Oil Company before it was curbed
+by Federal legislation. But when, early in 1914, the last rail of the
+Grand Trunk Pacific was laid in the vicinity of Fort George and the last
+spike driven, the “C. P. R.” suddenly found its hitherto undisputed
+supremacy challenged by a rich, powerful, and splendidly equipped system,
+which, owing to its more northerly route and easier gradients, is able
+to make considerably faster running time from ocean to ocean than its
+long-established rival. Moreover, another great transcontinental system,
+the Canadian Northern, is already in partial operation and is rapidly
+nearing completion, while the construction gangs have begun work on the
+Pacific Great Eastern, a subsidiary of the Grand Trunk Pacific, over
+whose rails the latter plans to reach tide-water at Vancouver, thus
+invading territory which the Canadian Pacific has heretofore regarded as
+peculiarly its own. In another year or so, therefore, British Columbia
+will not only have a more complete railway system than either Washington
+or Oregon, but it will be the terminus of three great transcontinental
+systems, each of which will run from tide-water to tide-water, under the
+same management and the same name.
+
+If you will glance at the map at the back of this volume you will see
+that the railway systems of British Columbia roughly resemble a gigantic
+Z. The lower right-hand corner of the Z represents Kicking Horse Pass,
+near Lake Louise, where the Canadian Pacific crosses the Rockies; the
+lower left-hand corner may stand for Vancouver, which is the terminus
+of the Canadian Pacific, the Canadian Northern, and the Pacific Great
+Eastern; the upper right-hand corner of the Z we will designate as
+Yellowhead (or Tête Jaune) Pass, where both the Grand Trunk Pacific and
+the Canadian Northern cross the Rockies; while the upper left-hand corner
+is the great terminal port which the Grand Trunk Pacific has built to
+order at Prince Rupert. The lower bar of the Z approximately represents
+the Canadian Pacific, the upper bar the Grand Trunk Pacific, and the
+diagonal the Canadian Northern.
+
+The main line of the Canadian Pacific enters the province at Kicking
+Horse Pass and, dropping southward in a series of sweeping curves,
+strikes the Fraser at Lytton and hugs its northern bank to Vancouver.
+From the main line numerous branches straggle southward to the American
+border, thus giving access to the rich country lying between the Kootenai
+and the Okanogan. Entering British Columbia far to the northward, through
+the Tête Jaune Pass, where the mountains are much lower, the Canadian
+Northern lays its course southwestward in almost a straight line,
+crossing the Thompson just above its junction with the Fraser and thence
+paralleling the Canadian Pacific through the cañon of the Fraser, though
+on the opposite side of the river, to Vancouver. The Canadian Northern
+is, I might add, spending a large sum in the construction of railway
+shops and yards at Port Mann, a place which it is building to order
+amid the virgin forest, a few miles east of New Westminster. The Grand
+Trunk Pacific likewise uses the Tête Jaune Pass as a gateway. Instead of
+turning southward after crossing the mountains, however, it swings far
+to the north, following the east fork of the Fraser to Fort George and
+thence up the level and fertile valleys of the Nechako and the Bulkley
+to New Hazelton and so down the Skeena to Prince Rupert. Recognising
+the necessity of having a means of direct access to Vancouver, which
+is the metropolis of western Canada, the Grand Trunk Pacific now has
+under construction a subsidiary system, to be known as the Pacific Great
+Eastern, which, leaving the main line at Fort George, will follow the
+Fraser due southward to Lillooet and then strike directly across a virgin
+country to Vancouver, thus giving the Grand Trunk Pacific two west-coast
+terminals instead of one. The Grand Trunk Pacific engineers have also
+drawn plans for a line running due north from New Hazelton toward the
+Yukon, which would throw open to exploitation the rich coal-fields of the
+Groundhog and the fertile prairies of northernmost British Columbia, the
+idea being, of course, to ultimately effect a junction with the proposed
+Federal railway in Alaska, thus bringing Alaska into direct railway
+communication with the outside world.
+
+[Illustration: Indians breaking camp.
+
+Mr. Powell arriving at a frontier hotel in the Nechako country.
+
+An Indian bridge near New Hazelton.
+
+LIFE AT THE BACK OF BEYOND.]
+
+Though enormously rich in timber and ore, Vancouver Island has not yet
+had its share of railway expansion, its only system of transportation at
+present being the Esquimault & Nanaimo Railway, which runs from Victoria
+to Alberni, in the heart of the island. The Canadian Northern, however,
+proposes to build a line from Victoria half-way up the west coast of the
+island, while the Grand Trunk Pacific, going its rival one better, has
+obtained a concession for building a railway from one end of the island
+to the other, thus opening up its enormously rich fisheries, mines, and
+forests. With this era of railway expansion immediately before them, it
+seems to me that the British Columbians are quite justified in looking at
+the future through rose-coloured glasses.
+
+[Illustration: The bull train: the last on the continent.
+
+The dog train: taking in supplies to the miners of the Groundhog
+coal-fields.
+
+TRANSPORT ON AMERICA’S LAST FRONTIER.]
+
+Consider the cities, how they grow—Prince Rupert, for example. A city
+literally made to order, just as a tailor would make a suit of clothes,
+is something of a novelty even in an age which jeers at precedent and
+slaps tradition in the face. “Rome was not built in a day,” but that
+was because it had no transcontinental railway system to finance and
+superintend and push forward its construction. If a Gaul, Transalpine,
+& Pompeian Railway had been in operation, and its directors knew their
+business, they would have turned loose their engineers, architects, and
+builders and, after staking out and draining a town site beside the
+Tiberian marshes, they would have run up the Eternal City and auctioned
+off the building lots along the Via Appia as expeditiously as the Grand
+Trunk Pacific Railway has brought into being the west-coast terminus
+which it has named Prince Rupert after that adventurous Palatine prince,
+nephew of Charles I, who was in turn a cavalry leader, a naval commander,
+and the first governor of the Hudson Bay Company. Unless your family
+atlas is of recent vintage (and I have regretfully observed that most
+of them were purchased at about the period of Stanley’s explorations)
+you will search it in vain for Prince Rupert, for this custom-made
+municipality came into existence about the same time as the tango and
+the turkey-trot. The easiest way to locate it, then, is to trace with
+your finger parallel 54° 40′ North (the slogan “Fifty-four forty or
+fight!” you will recall, once nearly brought on a war with England)
+until it reaches the Pacific Coast of North America. There, five hundred
+and fifty miles north of Vancouver, forty miles south of the Alaskan
+border, on Kai-en Island, at the mouth of the Skeena River, set on a
+range of hills overlooking one of the finest deep-water harbours in
+the world, is Prince Rupert. It is in the same latitude as London and
+has a wet and foggy climate which cannot fail to make a Londoner feel
+very much at home. Probably never before have there been so much time
+and money expended in the planning and preliminary work of a new city.
+The town site was chosen only after a careful inspection of the entire
+British Columbia coast-line and was laid out by a famous firm of Boston
+landscape engineers with the same attention to detail which they would
+have given to laying out a great estate. Experts who have studied the
+plan on which Prince Rupert is built assert that in time it will be one
+of the most beautiful cities on the continent. The site is a picturesque
+one, for, from the six-mile-long shore-line which sweeps around the front
+of the city, the ground rises abruptly, so that on clear days—which,
+by the way, are far from common—a magnificent view may be had from the
+heights of the forested and fiord-indented coast, of the island-studded
+channel, of the Indian village of Metlakatla, known as the “Holy City,”
+and, on rare occasions, of the mountains of Alaska. Unless one is
+conversant with the development of the Pacific Coast; unless one has
+seen its seaports—Victoria, Vancouver, Seattle, Tacoma, San Pedro, San
+Diego—spring into being almost overnight, one cannot fully realise the
+possibilities and potentialities of this new city with the unfamiliar
+name. To begin with, the distance from Liverpool to Yokohama by way of
+Prince Rupert is eight hundred miles shorter than via New York and San
+Francisco; it is five hundred miles nearer the Orient than any other
+Pacific port. Nothing illustrates more graphically the strategic value
+of its position than the fact that a traveller bound, say, for New York
+from China, Japan, or Alaska can board a train at Prince Rupert and be
+as far as Winnipeg, or virtually half across the continent, before the
+steamer from which he disembarked could reach Vancouver. In addition to
+the shorter distance across the Pacific must be added the much faster
+time that can be made by rail over the practically level grades (four
+tenths of one per cent) that the Grand Trunk Pacific has obtained through
+the lower mountains to the north, which will enable trains to be moved at
+the rate of two miles for every one mile on the heavier grades of rival
+systems. What is most important of all, however, Prince Rupert has at its
+back probably the potentially richest hinterland in the world—a veritable
+commercial empire waiting to be explored, developed, and exploited. The
+mineral wealth of all this vast region, the forest products, the gold,
+the coal, the copper, the iron ore of northern British Columbia and the
+Yukon, the food products of the prairie provinces, and the fish and
+fur of the far North—in short, all the westbound export wealth of this
+resourceful region—will find its outlet to the sea at Prince Rupert as
+surely and as true to natural laws as its rivers empty into the Pacific.
+
+[Illustration: The pack-train: crossing the prairies of northern British
+Columbia.
+
+The wagon-train: a settler on his way into the interior over the Cariboo
+Trail.
+
+TRANSPORT ON AMERICA’S LAST FRONTIER.]
+
+You of the sheltered life: you, Mr. Bank President, you, Mr. Lawyer,
+you, Mr. Business Man, you, Mr. Tourist, who travel in Pullman cars
+and sleep in palatial hostelries, have you any real conception of the
+breed of men who are conquering this wilderness, who are laying these
+railways, who are building these cities, who are making these new
+markets and new playgrounds for you and me? Some of them have saved and
+scrimped for years that they might be able to buy a ticket from the
+Middle West, or from the English shires, or from the Rhine banks to this
+beckoning, primeval, promiseful land. Others, taking their families and
+their household belongings with them, have trekked overland by wagon,
+just as their grandfathers did before them for the taking of the West,
+trudging in the dust beside the weary horses, cooking over camp-fires in
+the forest or on the open prairie, sleeping, rolled in their blankets,
+under the stars. Some there are who have come overland from the Yukon,
+on snowshoes, mayhap; their pitifully meagre possessions on their back,
+living on the food which they killed, their only sign-posts the endless
+line of wire-draped poles. There are the engineers, who, mocking at the
+hostility of the countenance which this savage, untamed land turns toward
+them, are pushing forward and ever forward their twin lines of steel,
+cutting their way through well-nigh impenetrable forests, throwing their
+spider spans across angry rivers and forbidding gorges, running their
+levels and laying their rails and driving their spikes oblivious to
+torrential rains or blinding snows, to blistering heat or freezing cold.
+Then, too, there are the silent, efficient, quick-witted men who have
+maintained law and order through the length and breadth of this great
+province—travelling on duty through its wildest parts, amid dangers
+and privations without end, at one time deep in the snows of the far
+Nor’west, at others making their hazardous way on horseback along the
+brink of precipices which make one sick and dizzy to look down; swimming
+rapid rivers holding to the tails of their horses or journeying over the
+frozen lands with teams of dogs; one month in the mining camps on the
+uppermost reaches of the Fraser and the next carrying the fear of the law
+to the wild tribes of the Kootenai. Such are the men who, in Britain’s
+westernmost outpost, are clinching down the rivets of empire.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+BACK OF BEYOND
+
+  “I hear the tread of pioneers,
+    Of millions yet to be;
+  The first low wash of waves where soon
+    Shall roll a human sea.
+  The elements of empire here
+    Are plastic yet and warm,
+  The chaos of a mighty world
+    Is rounding into form.”
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+BACK OF BEYOND
+
+
+Most people—and by that I mean nine hundred and ninety-eight in every
+thousand—have come to believe quite positively that, on this continent
+at least, there is no longer any region that can truthfully be called
+“The Frontier.” Therein they are wrong. Because the municipality of
+Tombstone has applied to the Arizona Legislature for permission to change
+its name, because the cow-puncher is abandoning the range for the more
+lucrative occupation of cavorting before a moving-picture camera, because
+the roulette ball clicks no longer behind open doors in any Western town
+is no proof that the frontier is no more. As a matter of fact, it has
+only been pushed back. There still exists a real frontier, all wool and
+eight hundred miles wide, together with all the orthodox concomitants of
+cowboys, Concord coaches, log cabins, prairie-schooners, pack-trains,
+trappers, grizzly bears, and Indians. But it won’t last much longer.
+This is the last call. If you would see this stage of nation building
+in all its thrilling realism and picturesqueness you have need to
+hurry. A few more years—half a dozen at the most—and store clothes will
+replace the _chaparejos_ and sombreros; the mail-sacks, instead of being
+carried in the boots of stage-coaches, will be flung from the doors of
+flying trains; the motor-car will supplant the prairie-schooner and the
+pack-train.
+
+Answer me, now. If, at a moderate outlay of time, money, and exertion,
+you could visit a region as untamed and colourful as was the country
+beyond the Pecos forty years back and peopled by the hardiest breed of
+adventurers that ever foreran the columns of civilisation, would you
+give up for a time the comforts of the sheltered life and go? You would?
+I hoped so. Get out the atlas, then, from its dusty place of exile and
+open it to the map of North America that I may show you the way. In
+the upper left-hand corner, stretching its scarlet bulk across eleven
+degrees of printed latitude, is British Columbia, whose central and
+northern portions contain thousands upon thousands of square miles that
+have never felt the pressure of a white man’s foot or echoed to a white
+man’s voice. Here is the last of the “Last West”; here the frontier
+is making its final stand; here, fighting the battles and solving the
+problems of civilisation, are to be found the survivors of that race of
+rugged adventurers, now almost extinct, who replaced the forest with the
+wheat-field—the Pioneers.
+
+There are several routes by which one can reach the interior of the
+province: from the made-to-order seaport of Prince Rupert up the
+Skeena by railway to New Hazelton and Fort Fraser, for example; or
+down the South Fork of the Fraser by river steamer from Tête Jaune
+Cache to Fort George; or from the country of the Kootenai overland
+through the Okanogan and Lillooet. These, however, are obscure side
+entrances and more or less difficult of access. The front door to the
+hinterland, and the logical way to enter it, is by way of Ashcroft, a
+one-street-two-hotels-and-eight-saloons town on the main line of the
+Canadian Pacific, eight hours east of Vancouver as the _Imperial Limited_
+goes. At Ashcroft, which is the principal outfitting point for all this
+region, begins the historic highway known as the Cariboo Trail, by which
+you can travel northward—provided you are able to get a seat in the
+crowded stages—until civilisation sits down to rest and the wilderness
+begins.
+
+What the Wells-Fargo Company, with its comprehensive system of mail,
+passenger, and freight services, was to our own West in the days before
+the railway came, the British Columbia Express Company, commonly known as
+the “B. C. X.,” is to that vast region which is watered by the Fraser.
+Nowhere that I can recall has travelling through a wild and mountainous
+country been reduced to such a science. Although the company operates
+upward of a thousand miles of stage lines, along which are distributed
+more than three hundred horses at relay stations approximately sixteen
+miles apart, its coaches, in spite of blizzards, torrential rains, and
+ofttimes incredibly atrocious roads, maintain their schedules with the
+rigidity of mail-trains. The company’s equipment is as complete in its
+way as that of a great railway system, its rolling stock consisting
+of everything from a two-horse thorough-brace “jerky” to a six-horse
+Concord stage, to say nothing of automobiles and sleighs. In conjunction
+with its system of vehicular transportation it operates a service of
+river steamers, specially constructed for running the rapids, upon the
+Upper Fraser and the Nechako.
+
+The backbone of the “B. C. X.” system, and, indeed, of all transportation
+in the British Columbian hinterland, is the Cariboo Trail, a government
+post-road, three hundred miles long, which was built by the Royal
+Engineers in the early sixties as a result of the rush to the gold-fields
+on Williams Creek. Starting from Ashcroft, it runs due north for two
+hundred and twenty miles to Quesnel, on the Upper Fraser, where it
+abruptly turns westward and continues to its terminus at Barkerville,
+once a famous mining-camp but now a quiet agricultural community in the
+heart of the Cariboo. Scattered along the trail, at intervals of fifteen
+miles or so, are rest-houses where the wayfarer can obtain surprisingly
+well-cooked meals at a uniform charge of six bits—a “bit,” I might
+explain for the benefit of the Eastern chechako, being equivalent to
+twelve and a half cents. For the same price the traveller can get a clean
+and moderately soft bed, although he must accept it as part and parcel
+of frontier life should he find that the room to which he is assigned
+already contains half a dozen snoring occupants. These rest-houses,
+which, with their out-buildings, stables, and corrals, are built entirely
+of logs, are often liberally coated with whitewash and occasionally
+surrounded by stockades and constantly reminded me of the post stations
+which marked the end of a day’s journey on the Great Siberian Road before
+Prince Orloff and his railway builders came. During the summer months
+the “up journey” of three hundred and twenty miles from Ashcroft to Fort
+George is performed by a conjoined service of motor-cars, stage-coaches,
+and river boats, and, if the roads are dry, is made in about four days.
+As a one-way ticket costs sixty-five dollars, exclusive of meals, the
+fare works out at a trifle over twenty cents a mile, thus making it
+one of the most expensive journeys of its length in the world, being
+even costlier, if I remember rightly, than the one by the Abyssinian
+railway from Djibuti to Deré Dawa. It is worth every last penny of the
+fare, however, for there is about it a novelty, a picturesqueness, an
+excitement, which cannot be duplicated on this continent. From the moment
+that you set your foot on the hub of the stage-coach in Ashcroft until
+your steamer slips out of Prince Rupert Harbour, southward bound, you are
+seeing with your own eyes, instead of through the unconvincing mediums
+of the Western novel and the moving-picture screen, a nation in the
+cellar-digging stage of its existence; you are transported for a brief
+time to the Epoch of the Dawn.
+
+In anticipation of the atrocious roads which we expected to encounter,
+I had had the car fitted with shock-absorbers and had brought with me
+from Vancouver an entire extra set of springs, and at Ashcroft we
+selected an equipment with as great care as though we were starting on
+an East African _safari_. A pick, a long-handled shovel, a pair of axes,
+a block and tackle, four spare tires, and a dozen inner tubes comprised
+the essentials of our outfit, to which was added at Quesnel a supply of
+tinned foods, a small shelter tent, a set of rubber sheets, and three
+of the largest-size Hudson Bay blankets. It’s a costly business, this
+motoring in lands where motors have never gone before. The most important
+thing of all, of course, is the gasoline, the entire success of our
+venture depending upon our ability to carry a sufficient supply with
+us to get us through the six hundred miles of uninhabited wilderness
+between Quesnel and the Skeena. By reducing our personal belongings
+to a minimum, we succeeded in getting eight five-gallon tins into the
+tonneau of the car, in addition to the twenty gallons in the tank, thus
+giving us a total of sixty gallons, which, theoretically at least, should
+have sufficed us. As a matter of fact, it did not suffice to carry
+us half-way to the Skeena, so slow was the going and so terrible the
+condition of the road, and, had I not been so fortunate as to obtain an
+order from a British development company on its agents at several points
+in the interior, instructing them to supply us with gasoline from some
+drums which had been taken in at enormous expense a year or so before
+in a futile attempt to establish an automobile service, we should have
+been compelled to abandon the car in the wilderness for lack of fuel.
+Gasoline, like everything else, is expensive in the interior: at Ashcroft
+I paid fifty cents a gallon, at Quesnel a dollar, and thereafter, until
+we reached the end of steel at Moricetown, two dollars a gallon—which,
+so I was assured, was exactly what it had cost the company to freight
+it in. Briefly, our plan was this: to start from Ashcroft, a station on
+the Canadian Pacific, two hundred miles from the coast, and follow the
+Cariboo Trail northward to Quesnel, thence striking through the unsettled
+and almost unexplored wilderness which reaches from the Fraser to the
+Skeena, following the Yukon Telegraph Trail through Fort Fraser to New
+Hazleton, on the Skeena, which is barely half a hundred miles south of
+the Alaskan border. I asked every one I met in Ashcroft as to our chances
+of getting through, and the more people to whom I talked the slimmer they
+seemed to become.
+
+One man assured us that there was no road whatever north of Fort Fraser
+and that, if we wanted to get through, we would have to take the car
+apart and pack it in on the backs of horses, as an automobile agent from
+Seattle had done the year before; another told us that there were no
+bridges and that we would be compelled to hire Siwash Indians to make
+rafts to ferry us across the streams; still a third cheered us up by
+assuring us that we could always get a team to haul us out.
+
+“An eight-horse swing ought to haul you out in a fortnight,” he remarked
+cheeringly.
+
+“What would it cost?” I inquired.
+
+“Oh,” he answered, “if you’re a good hand at bargaining you ought to get
+the outfit for about a hundred dollars a day.”
+
+That cheered us up tremendously, of course.
+
+We started from Ashcroft early on an autumn morning. The air was like
+sparkling Moselle, overhead was a sky of wash-tub blue, and before us the
+gray ribbon of the Cariboo Trail stretched away, between dun and barren
+hills, into the unknown. The entire population of the little town had
+turned out to see us off, and as we moved away, with the long, low bonnet
+of the car pointed northward, they gave us a cheer and shouted after
+us, “Hope you’ll get through, fellows!” and “Good luck!” Before we left
+Seattle I had bought a little silk American flag, and this we flew from
+a metal rod at the front of the hood, and more than once, when we were
+mired in the mud below the Nechako, and were utterly exhausted and ready
+to quit, it was the sight of that bit of tricoloured bunting fluttering
+bravely before us which spurred us on.
+
+Were the Cariboo Trail in certain of the Eastern States it would be
+described by the natives as “a fair to middlin’ road,” and it is all
+of that and more—in the dry season. When we traversed it, in the early
+fall, it had not yet been rutted by the torrential autumn rains and heavy
+teaming and was as good a road as an automobile pioneer could ask for.
+In that journey up the Cariboo Trail were concentrated all the glamour
+and colour and panorama of that strange, wild border life which most
+people think of as having passed with the pony express and the buffalo.
+A stage-coach rattled past amid a rolling cloud of dust, its scarlet
+body lurching and swaying on its leathern springs, its four horses
+at a spanking trot, the driver cracking his whip-lash spasmodically
+between the ears of his leaders, for he carried his Majesty’s mails and
+must make his six miles an hour, hour in and hour out. Like a gigantic
+boa-constrictor, a pack-train wound slowly past, the burdened mules
+plodding by dejectedly, long ears to shaven tails. Scattered along the
+line, like mounted officers beside a marching column, were the packers:
+wiry, iron-hard fellows, their faces sun tanned to the colour of their
+saddles; picturesque figures in their goatskin _chaparejos_, their vivid
+neckerchiefs, and their broad-brimmed, rakish hats. Where they were bound
+for, Heaven only knows: with supplies for the operators of the Yukon
+Telegraph, perhaps, or the miners of the Groundhog, or, it might be, for
+the lonely trading-posts on Great Slave Lake and the headwaters of the
+Liard and the Peace. In the pack-train’s dusty wake would plod a solitary
+prospector, dog dirty, his buckskin shirt glazed with grime, his tent,
+pick, shovel, and his meagre store of food loaded upon a single patient
+donkey. Occasionally we passed some Sguswap and Siwash ranchers—for the
+Indian of British Columbia takes more kindly to an agricultural life than
+do his brothers on the American side of the border—gaily clad squaws
+and bright-eyed children peering curiously at our strange vehicle from
+beneath the canvas covers of the wagons, driving into the settlements to
+barter the produce of their holdings in the back country for cartridges,
+red blankets, ginger ale, perhaps a phonograph.
+
+But oftenest of all we met the freighters, their six and eight and twelve
+horse teams straining at the huge, creaking, white-topped wagons—the
+freight trains of the railroadless frontier. Though they bear a marked
+resemblance to the prairie-schooners of crossing-the-plains days, the
+British Columbian freight wagons are barely half as large as the enormous
+scow-bodied vehicles in which the American pioneers trekked westward.
+Their inferior carrying capacity is compensated for, however, by the
+custom of linking them in pairs, experience having proven that to attempt
+to negotiate the hairpin turns in the mountain roads with vehicles having
+an unusually long wheel-base is but to invite disaster. In freighting
+parlance, five wagons with their teams are called a “swing,” the drivers
+are known as “skinners,” and the man in charge of the outfit is the
+“swing boss.” To meet one of these wagon-trains on a road that was
+uncomfortably narrow at the best and frequently bordered by a sheer cliff
+was not a pleasant business, for, according to law, the freighter is
+always permitted to take the inside of the road, so that more than once
+we were compelled to pull so far to the outside, in order to give the
+huge vehicles space to get by, that there was not room between our outer
+wheels and the precipice’s brink for a starved greyhound to pass.
+
+The deeper into the wilderness you push, the more infrequent become the
+mails, until, north of the Fraser, the settlers receive their letters
+and newspapers only once a month during the summer and frequently not for
+many months on end when the rains have turned the trails into impassable
+morasses. When we left Quesnel for Fort Fraser the mail was already two
+weeks overdue, and the roads were in such terrible condition that the
+driver of the mail-stage would not even hazard a guess as to when he
+could start. At frequent intervals along the way men were camping in the
+rain-soaked brush beside the road, with no protection save the scant
+shelter afforded by a dog-tent or a bit of canvas stretched between two
+trees. At the sound of our approach they would run out and hail us and
+inquire eagerly as to whether we could tell them when the mail was likely
+to be along. These men were settlers whose ranches lay far back in the
+wilderness, and they had been waiting patiently beside that road for many
+days, straining their ears to catch the rattle of the wheels which would
+bring them word from the loved ones at home. One of them, a clean-cut,
+clear-eyed young Englishman, who was camping beside the road in a little
+shelter tent, told us that he had been there for fifteen days waiting for
+the postman.
+
+“I’ve got a little ranch about thirty miles back,” he explained, “and I
+was so afraid that I might miss the mail that I tramped out and have been
+sleeping here by the roadside waiting for it. My wife and the kiddies
+are back in the old country, in Devonshire, waiting until I can get a
+home for them out here. I haven’t had a letter from them now for going
+on seven weeks. The last one that I had told me that my little girl was
+sick, and I’m pretty anxious about her. It’s bad news that the coach
+hasn’t started yet. I guess the only thing to do is to keep on waiting.”
+
+To such men as these I lift my hat in respect and admiration. Resolute,
+patient, persevering, facing with stout hearts and smiling lips all the
+hardships and discouragements that such a life has to bring, they are
+the real advance-guards of progress, the skirmishers of civilisation. In
+Rhodesia, the Sudan, West Africa, New Zealand, Australia, Canada you find
+them, wherever the flag of England flies, clamping down the rivets of
+empire.
+
+A great deal has been written about the brand of Englishman who goes by
+the name of remittance-man. With a few pounds a month to go to the devil
+on, he haunts the highways and byways of the newer lands, working when he
+must, idling when he may. In Cape Town, Bulawayo, Johannesburg, Sydney,
+Melbourne, Calgary you will find him, hanging over the polished bars,
+or, if his remittances permit, in the local clubs. As his long-suffering
+relatives generally send him as far from home as they can buy a ticket,
+he has become a familiar figure in the western provinces of the Dominion
+and particularly along the Pacific Coast. Dressed in well-cut tweeds or
+flannels and smoking the inevitable brier, you can see him at almost any
+hour of any day strolling aimlessly about the corridors of the Empress
+Hotel in Victoria or dawdling about the Union Club. But you rarely
+find him in the British Columbian bush. The atmosphere—and by this I
+do not mean the climate—is uncongenial, for “he ain’t a worker” and in
+consequence is cordially detested by the native-born no less than by
+those industrious settlers whose mail from home brings them no monthly
+cheques. In that country, if a man does not go out to his labour in
+the morning he is counted an undesirable addition to the population.
+Hence, though the hinterland is filled with the discards of the pack,
+comparatively few of them bear the despised label of remittance-man.
+
+[Illustration: A meeting of the old and the new.
+
+“The freight trains of the railroadless frontier.”
+
+“The rest-houses are built entirely of logs and occasionally surrounded
+by stockades.”
+
+SCENES ON THE CARIBOO TRAIL.]
+
+But that is not saying that you do not find numbers of well-bred,
+well-educated young Englishmen chopping out careers for themselves up
+there in the forests of the North. We came across two such at a desolate
+and lonely ranch midway between Quesnel and Blackwater, three hundred
+miles from the nearest railway and thirty from the nearest house. We
+stopped at their little cabin and asked for lunch, and they welcomed
+us as they would a certified cheque. One of them, I learned after
+considerable questioning, was the nephew of an earl and had stroked an
+Oxford crew; the other, with a diffidence that was delightful, showed me
+the picture of a rambling, ivy-covered manor-house in Hampshire which he
+called home, and remarked quite casually that he had been something of
+a cricketer before he came out to the Colonies and had played for the
+Gentlemen of England. Yet here were these two youngsters, gently born
+and cleanly bred, “pigging it,” as they themselves expressed it, in a
+one-room cabin up here at the Back of Beyond. Good Heavens! how glad
+they were to see us—not for our own sakes, you understand, but because
+we were messengers from that great, gay world from which they had exiled
+themselves. While one of them pared the potatoes, the other fried the
+bacon—“sow-belly” they called it—in ill-smelling cottolene, and both of
+them fired questions at us like shots from an automatic: what were the
+newest plays, the latest songs, how long since I had been in London, was
+the chorus at the Gaiety as good-looking as it used to be, was Winston
+Churchill really making good in the cabinet or was he just a bally ass,
+did we think that there was anything to this talk about the Ulstermen
+revolting—and all the other questions that homesick exiles ask.
+
+“What on earth induces you to stay on in this God-forsaken place?” I
+asked, when at length they paused in their questioning for lack of
+breath. “No neighbours, no theatres, no amusements, mails once a month
+if you are lucky, rain six months out of the twelve, and snow for four
+months more. Why don’t you try some place nearer civilisation? You can’t
+do much more than make a bare living up here, and a pretty poor one at
+that, eh?”
+
+“Well,” said one of them apologetically, “we do a lot better up here than
+you’d think. Why, last season we cut a hundred tons of hay and this year,
+now that we’ve cleared some more land, we’ll probably get a hundred and
+fifty.”
+
+“A hundred tons of hay!” I exclaimed, with pity in my voice. “Heavens
+alive, man, what does that amount to?”
+
+“It amounted to something over ten thousand dollars,” he answered. “Up
+here, you see, hay is a pretty profitable crop—it sells for a hundred
+dollars a ton. Besides, we like the life jolly well. It’s a bit lonely,
+of course, but we’re fond of the open and there’s all sort of fishin’ and
+shootin’—there’s a skin of a grizzly that I killed last week tacked up
+at the back of the house. And,” he added, with a hint of embarrassment,
+“this life is a lot more worth while than loafin’ around London and doin’
+the society-Johnnie act. We feel, y’ know, as though we were doin’ a bit
+toward buildin’ up the country—sort of bally pioneers.”
+
+Though they probably didn’t know it, those two young fellows in flannel
+shirts and cord breeches, who had evidently left England because they
+were tired of living _à la métronome_, because they had wearied of
+garden-parties and club windows and the family pew, were members in good
+standing of the Brotherhood of Nation Builders.
+
+Though we had started from Quesnel with sixty gallons of gasoline, the
+going had been so heavy that by the time we reached the telegraph hut
+at Bobtail Lake, where the development company of which I have already
+spoken had left the first of its drums of gasoline, our supply was
+seriously diminished. These relay telegraph stations are scattered at
+intervals of fifty miles or so along that single strand of copper wire,
+two thousand miles long, which connects Dawson City with Vancouver. Many
+of them are so remotely situated that the only time the operators see
+a white man’s face or hear a white man’s voice is when the semiannual
+pack-train brings them their supplies in the spring and fall. I can
+conceive of no more intolerable existence than the lives led by these
+men, sitting at deal tables within the lithograph-covered walls of their
+log cabins, with no neighbours, no amusements, nothing under the sun
+to do save listen to the ceaseless chatter of a telegraph instrument,
+day after day, week after week, month after month the same. Imagine the
+monotony of it! There were two young men at the Bobtail Lake hut, an
+operator and a linesman, and when they saw the little flag of stripes and
+stars fluttering from the bonnet of the car they waved their hats and
+cheered madly. To you who lead sheltered lives in offices or factories
+or stores, the flag may be nothing more than a bit of red-white-and-blue
+bunting, but to those who live in the earth’s far corners, where it is
+rarely seen, it stands for home and country and family and friends, and
+is reverenced accordingly.
+
+“It seems darned good to see the old flag again,” one of the young men
+remarked a trifle huskily. “This is the first time I’ve laid eyes on
+it in more’n two years. When we heard you coming through the woods we
+thought we must be dreaming. We never expected to see an automobile up in
+this God-forsaken hole.”
+
+“You’re not a Canadian, then?” I asked.
+
+“Not on your tintype. I’m from Tennessee. Used to be a train-despatcher
+down in Texas, got tired of living in a box car with no trees but
+sage-brush and no neighbours but coyotes, so I wandered up here. And
+believe me, I wish I was back in God’s country again.”
+
+That night we spent at a ranch on the Blackwater. The English owner and
+his wife were absent in Vancouver, but the ranch hand in charge of the
+place was only too willing to play the part of host. The ranch-house,
+though built of logs, for up there there is nothing else to build with,
+was considerably more pretentious than the general run of frontier
+dwellings. Instead of the customary kitchen-living-dining-sleeping room,
+it had a comfortable living-room with a hospitable stone fireplace and
+the floor thickly strewn with bearskins, and two sleeping rooms, while
+in front, in pathetic imitation of some old-country garden, was a tiny
+plat set out to fuchsias and mignonette and geraniums and surrounded
+by an attempt at a picket fence. The floor of the house was of planks
+hand-hewn; cedar poles laid lengthwise and covered with shakes and sod
+formed a roof impervious to snow or rain; the chinks in the log walls
+were stuffed with moss and clay and papered over with illustrations torn
+from the London weeklies. Like nearly all of the houses that we saw in
+the interior of the province, its furniture was crude and obviously
+home-made, with benches instead of chairs, for the freighters, who
+charge thirty cents a pound for hauling merchandise in from the railway,
+refuse to bother with anything so unprofitable as chairs, which require
+space out of all proportion to their weight. Lying on the table in the
+living-room, atop of a heap of year-old newspapers and magazines (for
+in the north country printed matter of any description is something to
+be read and reread and then read once again before it is passed on to a
+neighbour) were two much-thumbed volumes. I picked them up, for I was
+curious to see what sort of literature would appeal to people who lived
+their lives in such a place. One was the “Discourses of Epictetus,”
+the other “Manners and Social Usages”—with a book-mark at the chapter
+entitled “The Etiquette of Visiting Cards”! And the nearest neighbour, a
+Swedish rancher with a Siwash wife, lived fifty miles away.
+
+If the food at Blackwater had been as good as the house, or only half as
+good, there would have been little left to be desired. The ranch hand
+who was in charge of the place and who did the cooking—he vouchsafed
+the information that he had been a British soldier in India before
+coming to Canada to seek his fortune and wished to God that he was
+back in India again—made it a point, so he told us, to bake enough
+soda-biscuits the first of every month to last until the next month came
+round. As we were there about the twenty-eighth, the biscuits were quite
+hard—like dog-biscuits, only not so appetising. Then we had a platter
+of “sow-belly” swimming in an ocean of rancid grease; stone-cold boiled
+potatoes, a pan of the inevitable stewed prunes, and mugs of evil-looking
+coffee, which was really chicory in disguise. But what would you? This
+was not Fifth Avenue; this was the Frontier.
+
+I was particularly impressed throughout our journey across British
+Columbia with the almost paternal interest the provincial government
+takes in the welfare of the settlers. On trees and buildings everywhere
+are posted crown-surmounted notices relating to everything from the
+filing of homestead claims to the prevention of forest-fires. Rest-houses
+are maintained by the government along certain of the less-travelled
+routes; new roads are being cut through the wilderness in every
+direction; forest-rangers and agricultural experts are constantly
+riding about the province with open eyes and ears; in every settlement
+is stationed a government agent from whom the settlers can obtain
+information and advice on every subject under the sun. Law and order
+prevail to an extraordinary degree. I was told that there are only
+three police constables between Ashcroft and Fort George, a distance of
+more than three hundred miles—and this in a savage and sparsely settled
+country, where a criminal would have comparatively little difficulty
+in making his escape. This remarkable absence of crime is due in large
+measure, no doubt, to the rigid prohibition of the sale of alcoholic
+liquor within a certain distance of a public work, such as the building
+of a railway; in fact, the workman is debarred from intoxicants as
+rigorously as the Indian. “No drink, no crime,” say the authorities, and
+results have shown that they know what they are talking about. Not until
+the railway is completed and the construction gangs have moved on are
+the saloons permitted to throw open their doors. Although this policy
+unquestionably makes for law and order, it is by no means popular with
+the workmen, who refuse to consider any place deserving of the name of
+town until it has obtained a licence. “Such and such a place is a hell
+of a fine town,” I was frequently assured. “They’ve got a saloon there!”
+Judged by this standard, Fort George, which is a division point on the
+Grand Trunk Pacific, at the junction of the Fraser and Nechako Rivers,
+and will unquestionably become in time a second Winnipeg or Calgary, is
+a veritable metropolis, for it has considerably more than its share of
+gin-palaces and booze joints. The poet has vividly described it in a
+single couplet:
+
+  “The camp at the bend of the river, with its dozen saloons aglare,
+  Its gambling dens ariot, its gramophones all ablare.”
+
+It is not surprising, therefore, that Fort George is a Mecca for the dry
+of throat, who make bacchanalian pilgrimages from incredible distances
+to its bottle-decorated shrines; for if a man is determined to “go on a
+jag” no power on earth, not even a journey of a hundred miles or more,
+can prevent him from gratifying his desires. Indeed, it is by no means
+unusual for a man to work on a ranch or on the railway until he has
+accumulated a half year’s wages, and then, throwing up his job, to tramp
+a hundred miles through the wilderness to Fort George and blow every
+last cent of his hard-earned money in one grand jamboree. What a sudden
+falling off in intemperance there would be in a civilised community
+if a man had to walk a hundred miles to get a drink! What? Yet this
+proscription of alcohol has, in a way, defeated its own object, for the
+men, being denied what might be described as legal liquors, resort to
+innumerable more or less efficient substitutes. Red ink they will swallow
+with avidity, for it contains a good percentage of low-grade alcohol, and
+the colour, no doubt, completes the illusion. Another popular refreshment
+is lemon extract, such as is commonly used in civilised households for
+flavouring jellies and puddings. But the favourite beverage, which is to
+all other alcoholic substitutes what vintage champagne is to all other
+wines, is a certain patent medicine which contains _eighty per cent of
+pure alcohol_. This is as common in the “end-of-steel” towns and the
+construction camps as cocktails are in a New York club, both workmen and
+Indians pouring it down like water. It is warranted to cure all pains,
+and it does, for the man who drinks two bottles of it is dead to the
+world for at least a day.
+
+As a result of its popularity with the thirsty ones, Fort George might
+truthfully be described as a very lively town. In one of its saloons
+twelve white-aproned individuals are constantly on duty behind a bar of
+polished oak; behind the cash-register sits a watchful man with a cocked
+revolver on his knees; while mingling with the crowd in front of the bar
+are three bull-necked, big-bicepsed persons known as the “chuckers-out.”
+Instead of throwing a patron who becomes obstreperous into the street,
+however, in which case he would stagger to the saloon opposite and get
+rid of the balance of his money, he is thrown into the “cooler,” where
+he is given an opportunity to sleep off the effects of his debauch,
+after which he is ready to start in all over again. As a result of this
+ingenious system of conservation, very little money gets away.
+
+These frontier communities have handled the perplexing problem of the
+social evil in a novel manner. The bedecked and bedizened women who
+follow in the wake of the gold seekers and the construction gangs,
+instead of being permitted to flaunt themselves within the town, are
+forced to reside in colonies of their own well without the municipal
+limits, sometimes half a dozen miles back in the bush. The miner who
+wishes to see his light-o’-love is compelled, therefore, to expend a
+considerable amount of time and shoe-leather, though I regret to add
+that this did not appear to act as a serious deterrent, the deepest-worn
+trails that I saw in the Northland being those which led from the
+settlements to these colonies of easy virtue.
+
+Shortly after we left Blackwater Ranch it began to rain—not a sudden
+shower which comes and drenches and goes, but one of those steady,
+disheartening drizzles, which in this region sometimes last for a week.
+The road—I call it a road merely for the sake of politeness—which had
+been atrocious from the moment we left the Fraser, quickly became worse.
+It was composed of the decayed vegetable accumulations of centuries,
+saturated with stagnant water, thus forming a very sticky and very
+slippery material peculiar to British Columbia, known as “muskeg.”
+Though it looks substantial enough, with its top growth of stubble and
+moss, it combines the most unpleasant qualities of Virginia red clay,
+Irish peat-bog, Mexican adobe, and New Orleans molasses. To make matters
+worse, a drove of several hundred cattle had recently preceded us, so
+that the road, which was inconceivably bad under any circumstances,
+had been trampled into a black morass which no vehicle could by any
+possibility get through. There was only one thing for us to do and that
+was to corduroy the road, or at least the worst stretches of it. I have
+heard veterans of the Civil War dwell on the difficulties of corduroying
+roads for the guns to pass over in the swamps of the Chickahominy, but
+I didn’t appreciate the truth of their remarks until I tried it myself.
+While camping in various parts of the world I had used an axe in a
+dilettante sort of way for cutting tent-poles and chopping fire-wood,
+but there is a vast deal of difference between that sort of thing and
+cutting down enough trees to pave a road. In an hour our hands were so
+blistered that every movement of the axe helve brought excruciating pain;
+but it was a question of corduroying that road or else abandoning the
+car and making our way to civilisation afoot through several hundred
+miles of forest. There was no garage to telephone to for assistance. At
+noon we paused long enough to light a fire and cook a meal of sorts,
+which we ate seated on logs amid a sea of slimy ooze, with rain pelting
+down and swarms of voracious black flies and mosquitoes hovering about
+us. Five hours more of tree felling and we decided that our corduroy
+causeway was sufficiently solid to get over it with the car. As a matter
+of fact, we doubted it in our hearts, but we had reached that stage of
+exhaustion and desperation where we didn’t care what happened. If the car
+stuck in the mud, well and good. She could stay there and take root and
+sprout motor-cycles, so far as I was concerned. Backing up so as to get
+a running start, our driver opened wide his throttle and the car tore
+at the stretch of home-made corduroy like a locomotive running amuck.
+Under the terrific impact logs as large as a man’s body were hurled a
+dozen feet away. The snapping of the limbs and the deafening explosions
+of the engines sounded like a battle in the Balkans. The car reeled and
+swayed like a schooner in a squall, and every instant I expected it to
+capsize; but our driver, clinging desperately to the wheel, contrived,
+with a skill in driving that I have never seen equalled, to keep it
+from going over, and, in far less time than it takes to tell it, we had
+traversed the morass we had spent an entire day in corduroying, and the
+car, trembling like a frightened horse, stood once again on solid ground.
+The road over which we had passed looked as though it had been struck by
+a combined hurricane, cyclone, and tornado.
+
+It was nightfall when we reached the ranch owned by a Swede named Peter
+Rasmussen. What the man at Blackwater had described as “a swell place”
+consisted of two small cabins and a group of log barns set down in the
+middle of a forest clearing. No smoke issued from the chimney, no dog
+barked a welcome, there was not a sign of life about the place, and for a
+few minutes we were assailed by the horrid fear that no one was at home.
+Presently, however, we saw a fair-haired, raw-boned Swede, an axe upon
+his shoulder, emerge from the forest and come swinging toward us across
+the pasture. I hailed him.
+
+“Are you Mr. Rasmussen?”
+
+“Ay ban reckon ay am.”
+
+“And can you put us up for the night?” I queried anxiously.
+
+“Ay ban reckon ay can.”
+
+A stone’s throw from the one-roomed log cabin in which Rasmussen and his
+single ranch-hand, a stolid and uncommunicative Swede, slept and cooked
+and ate and in the evenings read three-months-old papers by the light of
+a guttering candle was the bunk house. A bunk house, I might explain, is
+a building peculiar to the frontier, usually consisting of one large room
+with two, and sometimes three, tiers of bunks built against the wall.
+Here travellers may find a roof to shelter them and some hay on which
+to spread their blankets, for in British Columbia every one carries his
+bedding with him. From the musty odour which greeted us when Rasmussen
+threw open the heavy door, this particular bunk house had evidently not
+been occupied for some time. When we tried to go to sleep, however, we
+found that the bunks were very much occupied indeed. But after Pete had
+started a roaring fire in the little sheet-iron stove and when we had
+spread our “five-point” Hudson Bay blankets on the five-cents-a-pound
+hay which served in lieu of mattresses and had scrubbed off some of the
+mud with which we were veneered and had changed our wet clothes for dry
+ones, the complexion of things began to change from brunette to blonde.
+Between the intervals of corduroying the road in the morning, I had shot
+with my revolver half a dozen grouse that persisted in getting in our
+way. They were almost as large as Plymouth Rocks and we handed them over
+to Pete to pluck and cook for supper, which was still further eked out by
+a mess of lake trout brought in by his ranch hand. Up in that region one
+may have considerable difficulty in obtaining the every-day necessities,
+such as salt and butter and bread, but he can surfeit himself on such
+luxuries as venison and grouse and trout. We found that Rasmussen, like
+so many other settlers in British Columbia, had come from the American
+Northwest, lured by the glowing prospectuses issued by the provincial
+government. But he, like so many others, had found that the appalling
+cost of living had made it impossible, even with hay at a hundred dollars
+a ton, for him to clear as much as he had in the United States. “So ay
+ban tank ay go back an’ buy a farm in Minnesota,” he concluded, knocking
+the ashes from his pipe. And that’s precisely what a great many other
+discouraged Americans in western Canada are going to do.
+
+For thirty miles or so after leaving Rasmussen’s the road was rough,
+boggy, and exceedingly trying to the disposition, but it gradually
+improved until by the time we reached Stony Creek we found ourselves
+running along a short stretch of road of which a New England board of
+supervisors need not have felt too much ashamed. The terrible condition
+of the roads throughout the interior of British Columbia is largely due
+to the fact that they run for great distances through dense forests where
+the sun cannot penetrate to dry them up; this, taken with the abnormally
+heavy rains, serving to make them one long and terrifying slough. At
+Stony Creek there is a Siwash village consisting of some twoscore log
+cabins clustered about a mission church whose gaudy paint and bulging
+dome spoke of its proximity to Alaska and the influence of the Russians.
+The interior tribes are known as “stick Indians,” referring, of course,
+to the fact that they dwell in the forest, in contradistinction to
+those living along the coast, who are known as “salt-chuck Indians.”
+Squaws in vivid blankets and quill-embroidered moccasins sat sewing
+and gossiping before their cabin doors, just as womenfolk, be their
+skins white or black or bronze, sit and gossip the whole world over;
+bright-eyed, half-naked youngsters gambolled like frisky puppies in the
+street; bearskins were stretched on frames for drying, and at the rear
+of every house was a cache for dried salmon, which forms the Siwashes’
+staple article of food. Though only one of the braves, who had been out
+into civilisation, had ever set eyes on a motor-car before, none of them
+seemed to have any particular fear of it, although, strangely enough,
+they became as shy as deer at sight of my camera, one picturesque old
+squaw refusing consecutive offers of twenty-five cents, fifty cents,
+and a dollar to come out from behind the door where she was hiding and
+let us take her picture. The old lady’s daughter was willing enough to
+take a chance, however, for she offered to pose for as many pictures as
+we desired if we would give her a ride in the car, a proposal to which
+I promptly acceded. I brought her down the stone-strewn street of the
+village at a rattling clip, and she not only never turned a hair but
+asked me to go faster. Given an opportunity, that Siwash maiden would
+make a real road burner.
+
+It is less than twenty miles from Stony Creek to Fort Fraser and the road
+proved a surprisingly good one. You must bear in mind, however, that
+when I speak of a British Columbian road being a good one, I am speaking
+comparatively. The best road we encountered would, if it existed in the
+United States, drive a board of highway commissioners out of office,
+while the worst road we negotiated in a civilised community wouldn’t be
+considered a road at all—it would be used for a hog-wallow or for duck
+shooting. The mushroom settlement of Fort Fraser takes its name from the
+old Hudson Bay post, which is three miles from the town on the shores
+of Fraser Lake. When we were there the town consisted of half a hundred
+log and frame buildings, a blacksmith shop, four or five general stores,
+the branch of a Montreal bank, and the only hotel in the four hundred
+miles between Quesnel and Hazelton. It was a real frontier town when we
+were there, and was of particular interest to us because it represented
+a phase of civilisation which in our own country has long since passed,
+but now that the railway is in operation its picturesque log cabins will
+doubtless be replaced by prosaic white frame houses with green blinds,
+the boards laid along the edge of the road will give way to cement
+sidewalks, and it will have street lamps and a town hall and its name
+displayed in a mosaic of whitewashed pebbles on the station lawn and
+will look exactly like any one of a hundred other towns scattered along
+the transcontinental lines of railway. Some day, no doubt, I shall pass
+through it again, this time from the observation platform of a Pullman,
+and I shall remark quite nonchalantly to my fellow travellers: “Oh, yes,
+I was up here in the good old days when this was nothing but a cluster of
+log huts at the Back of Beyond.”
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+THE MAP THAT IS HALF UNROLLED
+
+  “Have you gazed on naked grandeur where there’s nothing else to gaze on,
+    Set pieces and drop-curtain scenes galore,
+  Big mountains heaved to heaven, which the blinding sunsets blazon,
+    Black canyons where the rapids rip and roar?
+  Have you swept the visioned valley with the green stream streaking
+      through it,
+    Searched the Vastness for a something you have lost?
+  Have you strung your soul to silence? Then for God’s sake go and do it;
+    Hear the challenge, learn the lesson, pay the cost.”
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+THE MAP THAT IS HALF UNROLLED
+
+
+It wasn’t much of a chain as chains go—it really wasn’t. After a good
+deal of poking about I had come upon its dozen feet of rusted links
+thrown carelessly behind the forge in the only blacksmith shop in Fort
+Fraser. Now, I had an imperative need for a chain of some sort, for our
+skid chains, as the result of the wear and tear to which they had been
+subjected on the journey from Quesnel, were on the point of giving out,
+and it is not wise to attempt to negotiate what the settlers of northern
+British Columbia, with an appalling disregard for the truth, call roads
+unless you have taken all possible precautions against skidding. Up in
+that country of two-mile-high mountains, and mountain roads as slippery
+as the inside of a banana peel, a side-slip of only a few inches is as
+likely as not to send car and occupants hurtling through half a mile of
+emptiness. As the chain would answer our purpose after a fashion, and as
+we could get nothing better, I told the smith to throw it in the car.
+After he had attended to a few minor repairs I asked him how much I owed
+him.
+
+“Well,” he answered, figuring with his pencil on a chip of wood, “the
+chain comes to sixteen dollars an’ forty cents, an——”
+
+“Hold on!” I interrupted. “Please say that over again. It must be that
+I’m getting hard of hearing.”
+
+“Sixteen dollars and forty cents for the chain,” he repeated, unabashed.
+
+I leaned against the door of the log smithy for support. “Not for
+the chain?” I gasped unbelievingly. “Not for twelve feet of rusty,
+second-hand, five-eighths-inch chain that I could get for half a dollar
+almost anywhere?”
+
+“Sure,” said he. “An’ I ain’t makin’ no profit on it at that. The freight
+charges for bringin’ it in from the coast were eighteen cents a pound.
+But lookee here, friend, I don’t want you to go away from Fort Fraser
+with the idee in your head that things up here is high-priced, ’cause
+they ain’t. I wanta do the right thing by you. I’ll tell you what I’ll
+do—_I’ll knock off the forty cents_.”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Despite the assurances of the blacksmith, by no stretch of the
+imagination could Fort Fraser be called a poor man’s town. Some of the
+prices which were asked—and which we paid—in the local store where we
+replenished our supply of provisions were as follows:
+
+  Flour                                             16 cents per pound
+
+  Sugar                                             25 cents per pound
+
+  Tea and coffee                                       $1.00 per pound
+
+  Butter                                            75 cents per pound
+
+  Oatmeal                                           30 cents per pound
+
+  Dried fruits                                      25 cents per pound
+
+  Tinned fruits                      75 cents to $1.00 per 2-pound tin
+
+  Bacon                                             50 cents per pound
+
+  Eggs (when procurable)                               $1.50 per dozen
+                (In winter they sell for 50 cents each.)
+
+  Potted meats                               50 cents to $1.00 per tin
+
+  Bread                                      25 cents per 1-pound loaf
+   (Farther in the interior 50 cents per loaf is the standard price.)
+
+  Potatoes                                            $3.00 per bushel
+
+  Chickens                                                  $4.00 each
+
+It was my introduction to a scale of frontier prices to which I soon
+became accustomed though not reconciled. It is only fair to say, however,
+that this was before the completion of the railway. Now that Fort Fraser
+is a station on a transcontinental system, the cost of living has
+doubtless been materially reduced, though I have no doubt that the scale
+of prices just quoted still obtains and will for a very long time to come
+in the settlements to the north of the Skeena.
+
+[Illustration: A Siwash lady going shopping.
+
+Half-breeds of the Upper Skeena.
+
+“Blackwater Kate.”
+
+SOME LADIES FROM THE UPPER SKEENA.]
+
+The population of Fort Fraser turned out _en masse_ to see us off, the
+mothers—there were only eight white women in the town when we were
+there—bringing their children to the cabin doors to see their first
+motor-car. Did you ever stop to think of the deprivations suffered
+by these women who dwell along “the edge of things”: no soda-water
+fountains, no afternoon teas, no bargain sales, no moving-picture shows,
+and the fashion papers usually six months late? It must be terrible.
+
+We felt quite gay and light-hearted that morning, I remember, for we had
+slept in beds instead of vermin-infested bunks or in blankets beside
+the road, we had breakfasted on coffee, eggs, and porridge instead of
+the customary chicory, “sow-belly,” and prunes, and a feeble sun was
+doing its best to dry up the rain-soaked roads. Three miles out of Fort
+Fraser the swollen Nechako lay athwart our path and our troubles once
+more began, for the ferry was not built to carry three-ton motor-cars,
+or, indeed, any motor-cars at all, and when it felt the sudden weight
+of the big machine upon its deck it dipped so alarmingly that for a
+moment it looked as though the car would end its journey at the bottom
+of the river. Barring numerous short stretches where the treacherous
+black mud was up to our hubs, several miles of bone-racking corduroy,
+two torrential showers, any number of stumps which threatened to rip off
+our pan and had to be levelled before we could pass, two punctures, a
+blowout, and a broken spring, the journey from the banks of the Nechako
+to Burns Lake was uneventful.
+
+Darkness had long since fallen when we zigzagged down the precipitous
+flank of a forest-clothed mountain, and the beams from our head lamps
+illumined the cluster of tents, shacks, and cabins which compose the
+settlement known as Burns Lake. Though the settlement boasted at the time
+we were there the population of a fair-sized village, notwithstanding
+the fact that there was not a woman or a child in it, it was nothing
+more than a railway-construction camp, with its usual concomitants of
+hash houses, bunk houses, and gambling dens. With the completion of
+the railway it has doubtless disappeared as suddenly as it arose. Upon
+inquiring for sleeping quarters, we were taken up a creaking ladder into
+a loft above an eating-house, where fully twoscore labourers from the
+south of Europe lay stretched on their backs on piles of filthy straw,
+snoring or scratching or tossing, in an atmosphere so dense with the
+mingled odours of garlic, fried pork, wet leather, and perspiration that
+it could have been removed with a shovel. While we were debating as to
+whether we should look for less impossible quarters or wrap up in our
+blankets and spend the night in the car, an American, who, from his air
+of authority, I gathered to be a foreman, addressed us:
+
+“There’s no place here that’s fit to sleep in,” he said, “but I
+understand that one of the contracting company’s barges is leaving for
+Decker Lake at midnight. She’s empty, so they’d probably be willing to
+carry you and your car. You’d have to sleep in the car, of course, and
+it’s pretty cold on the water at this time of the year, but, believe me,
+it’ll be a heap more comfortable than spending the night in one of these
+bunk houses. There’s no road around the lake anyway, so you’ll have to go
+by water if you go at all.”
+
+Thanking him for his suggestion, we set out in quest of the manager of
+the contracting company, whom we found in a log cabin at the entrance to
+the roughly constructed wharf. It took but a few words to explain our
+errand and complete arrangements for being transported down the lakes
+by the barge which was leaving at midnight. Burns and Decker Lakes,
+which are each approximately ten miles in length and whose shores are
+lined with almost impenetrable forest, are connected by a shallow and
+tortuous channel which winds its devious course through a wilderness of
+swamps, lagoons, and bulrushes known as the Drowned Lands. The firm of
+Spokane contractors engaged in the construction of the western division
+of the Grand Trunk Pacific had availed itself of this devious waterway
+for transporting its men, materials, and supplies to the front, using
+for the purpose flat-bottomed barges drawing only a few inches of water.
+Notwithstanding the fact that the pilots frequently lost their way at
+night and the barges went aground in the shallow channel, the fortunate
+circumstance of the two lakes being thus connected had saved the company
+tens of thousands of dollars.
+
+It will be a long time, a very long time, before my recollection of that
+night journey down those dark and lonely lakes will fade. The deck of
+the barge was but a few inches wider than the car, so that, as we sat
+in our accustomed seats, wrapped to the eyes in blankets, it seemed as
+though the car were floating on the surface of the water. The little
+gasoline engine that supplied the barge’s motive power was aft of us,
+and its steady throb, together with the twin swaths of light which our
+lamps mowed out of the darkness, put the final touch to the illusion.
+It was an eerie sensation—very. Though a crescent moon shone fitfully
+through scudding clouds, its feeble light but served to emphasise the
+darkness and mystery of the forest-covered shores, which were as black
+as the grave and as silent as the dead. Once some heavy animal—a bear,
+no doubt—went crashing through the underbrush with a noise that was
+positively startling in that uncanny stillness. By the time we reached
+the shallow channel that winds its devious course through the Drowned
+Lands the moon had disappeared and a thick white fog had fallen on
+everything, hiding the shores with its impalpable curtain and completely
+nullifying the effect of our powerful lights. The only sound was the
+laboured panting of the engine and the scraping of the bulrushes against
+the bow. How the skipper found his way through that fog-bound channel I
+can’t imagine, unless he smelt it, for he couldn’t see an object five
+feet away. Day was breaking above the eastern forest when the barge
+crunched against the timbers of the wharf at Decker Lake, and I breathed
+a little prayer of thanksgiving for our safe arrival; for, truth to tell,
+I had fully expected that the light of morning would find us hard and
+fast aground in the middle of a swamp. Word of our coming had preceded us
+and we found that the company’s local manager—an American—had cots and
+blankets awaiting us in the log shanty that served him as an office. We
+were shivering with the cold and heavy-eyed from weariness. My word, how
+we slept! I can’t remember when I have so enjoyed a pillow.
+
+Before leaving Decker Lake we acquired an addition to our party. His
+name was Duncan and he was an axeman from the forests of Quebec. He had
+the shoulders of a Clydesdale, the sinews of a mule, and could handle
+an axe as an artist handles a brush. One of those restless spirits who,
+with their worldly possessions on their backs, are here to-day and gone
+to-morrow, he had worked on the railway grade just long enough to earn
+a little money and, when we arrived, was setting out on foot for New
+Hazelton, two hundred miles away, to spend it. He was only too glad to
+work his passage and we were only too glad to have him along—he was so
+extremely capable that his presence gave us a feeling of reassurance. It
+was well that we took him along, for before we had left Decker Lake an
+hour behind us we found ourselves at the beginning of as ugly a stretch
+of road as I ever expect to set eyes on.
+
+“That’s not a road,” said my companion disgustedly, as he stood looking
+at the sea of slime. “That’s a lake, and if we once get into it we’ll
+never see the car again.”
+
+What he said was so obviously true that we decided that the only thing
+to do was to avoid the road altogether and chop our way around it. This
+involved cutting a path through three quarters of a mile of primeval
+forest and the removal of scores of trees. There was nothing to be gained
+by groaning over the prospect, so we rolled up our sleeves, spat on our
+lacerated palms, and went at it with the axes. Did you ever see an expert
+woodsman in action? No? Well, it’s a sight worth seeing, take my word
+for it. Duncan would walk up to a forest giant that looked as big as the
+Tower of Pisa and slam-bang into it with his double-bitted axe, amid a
+perfect shower of chips, until he had chopped a hole in the base the size
+of a hotel fireplace. A few more strokes at the right spot, a warning
+shout of “Timber!” “Timber!” and the great tree would come crashing down
+within a hand’s breadth of where he wanted it. A few minutes more of the
+axe business and the prone trunk would be cut into sections and rolled
+away. “She’s all jake, boys,” Duncan would bellow, and, putting on the
+power, we would push the car a few yards more ahead. It took the four
+of us eight hours of steady chopping to make our way around that awful
+stretch of road, but we did get through finally with no more serious
+mishap than crumpling up one of the forward fenders, caused by the car
+swerving into a tree. While we were still congratulating ourselves on
+having gotten out of the woods in more senses than one, we swung around
+a bend in the road and came to a sudden halt before a hog-wallow which
+stretched away, like a black and slimy serpent, as far as the eye could
+see.
+
+[Illustration: After the car had passed: a stretch of road south of the
+Nechako.
+
+Mired in muskeg on the Yukon Telegraph Trail.
+
+Prying the car out of a swamp in the Blackwater country.
+
+WHERE NO MOTOR-CAR HAD EVER GONE: SOME INCIDENTS OF MR. POWELL’S JOURNEY
+THROUGH THE BRITISH COLUMBIAN WILDERNESS.]
+
+“We’re up against it good and hard this time,” said our driver, grown
+pessimistic for the first and only time. “I don’t believe the car can
+make it. There’s too much of it and it’s too deep—the wheels simply can’t
+get traction.”
+
+As we were contemplating it in dismal silence we heard the welcome
+rattle of wheels and clink of harness, and an empty freight wagon, drawn
+by eight sturdy mules, pulled out of the forest behind us, the bearded
+“mule-skinner” urging on his beasts with cracking whip and a crackle of
+oaths. I waded toward him through the mire.
+
+“Where’s the nearest place that we can eat and sleep?” I demanded.
+
+“Waal,” he drawled with exasperating slowness, “I reckon’s how they
+mought fix ye up fer the night at th’ Hunderd an’ Fifty Mile House.
+Thet’s the only place I knows on, an’ it’s darned poor, too.”
+
+“How far is it from here?” I asked.
+
+“Waal, I calkilate it mought be a matter o’ two mile an’ a half or three
+mile.”
+
+“Good,” said I, “and what will you charge to haul us there? We can’t get
+through this mud-hole alone, but the car’s got lots of power and with the
+help of your mules we ought to make it all right.”
+
+Instantly the man’s native shrewdness asserted itself. He cast an
+appraising eye over my mud-stained garments, over the mud-bespattered car
+and at the yawning sea of mud ahead.
+
+“I’ll haul ye to th’ Hunderd an’ Fifty Mile House for fifteen dollars,”
+he said.
+
+“Fifteen dollars for a two-and-a-half-mile haul?” I exclaimed.
+
+“Take it or leave it,” said the teamster rudely. “I ain’t got no time to
+stand in the road bargainin’.”
+
+I promptly capitulated, for I had no intention of letting our only hope
+of rescue get away. “Hitch on to the car,” said I.
+
+That was where the sixteen-dollar-and-forty-cent chain to which I
+referred at the beginning of this story came in handy, for we had no rope
+that would have stood the strain of hauling that car through those three
+_perfectly awful_ miles. Night was tucking up the land in a black and
+sodden blanket when the driver pulled up his weary mules at the roadside
+post bearing the numerals “150,” which signified that we were still a
+hundred and fifty miles from our journey’s end, and I counted into his
+grimy paw the sum agreed upon in the greasy bank-notes of the realm. _It
+had taken us just eleven hours to make fourteen miles._
+
+Though we had not deluded ourselves into expecting that we would find
+anything but the most primitive accommodation at the 150 Mile House,
+we were none of us, unless it might have been Duncan, prepared for the
+wholly impossible quarters that greeted us. Standing in a clearing in the
+wilderness was a log cabin containing but a single room, in one corner
+of which was a stove and in the other a rickety table piled high with
+unwashed dishes. Such space as was left in the twelve-by-fourteen room
+was occupied by a huge home-made bed which provided sleeping quarters for
+the English rancher, his gaunt, starved-looking wife, and a veritable
+litter of small children.
+
+“We’ve nothing here that ’ud do for the likes of you, sir,” said the man
+civilly, in reply to my request for accommodations. “The missis can fix
+you up a meal, but there’s not a place that you could lay your heads,
+unless ’twould be in the loft.”
+
+“Good Heavens, man!” interrupted my companion, “We can’t sleep
+out-of-doors on such a night as this. Let’s see the loft.”
+
+Assuring us once more that “it was no place for the likes of us,” the
+rancher pointed to a ladder made of saplings which poked its nose through
+a black square in the ceiling directly above the family couch. Taking a
+candle from the woman I ascended. The fitful light illuminated a space
+formed by the ceiling of the room below and the steeply pitched roof
+of the cabin, barely large enough for a man to enter on his hands and
+knees. Its uneven floor, made of saplings, laid lengthwise, was strewn
+with musty hay, upon which were thrown some tattered pieces of filthy
+burlap bagging. One of these pieces of bedding seemed to move, but upon
+looking at it more closely I saw it was fairly aswarm with vermin. I took
+one glance and scrambled down the ladder. “Where’s the nearest ditch?” I
+asked. “I’d rather sleep in a ditch any time than in that loft.”
+
+But we did not have to do either, for Duncan, who had previous
+acquaintance of the place, wasting no time in lamentation, had set to
+work with his axe and in ten minutes a great fire was sending its hail of
+sparks into the evening sky. It’s marvellous what wonders can be worked
+in the wilderness with a sharp axe by a man who knows how to handle
+it. By stretching the piece of sail-cloth we had with us between two
+convenient trees and keeping it in place with saplings, in an amazingly
+brief time Duncan had constructed a shelter which was proof against any
+but a driving rain, and which, thanks to the camp-fire blazing in front
+of it, was as warm as a steam-heated room in a hotel. Covering the soggy
+ground with a layer of hemlock branches, and this in turn with a layer
+of hay bought from the rancher at five cents per pound, and spreading on
+top of the hay our rubber sheets and our blankets—behold, we were as
+comfortable as kings; more comfortable, I fancy, than certain monarchs in
+the Balkans. We lay side by side beneath the flimsy shelter like sardines
+in a tin, while outside the rain fell drearily and the night wind soughed
+in the tree tops, and the flickering flames of the camp-fire alternately
+illumined and left in darkness everything.
+
+We awoke the next morning to find that the sun, which is an infrequent
+visitor to northern British Columbia in the autumn, had tardily come
+to our assistance and was trying to make up for its remissness by a
+desperate attempt to dry up the roads which, for the succeeding hundred
+miles or so, lay across an open, rolling country bordered by distant
+ranges of snow-capped mountains. Though the recollection of that day
+stands out sharp and clear in my memory as the only one since leaving
+Quesnel when we were not delayed by mud, our progress was hampered
+by something much more inimical to the car—stumps. When the road was
+constructed it evidently never entered into the calculations of its
+builders that it would be used by a motor-car, so they sawed off the
+trees which occupied the route at a height which would permit of their
+stumps being cleared without difficulty by the axles of the high-wheeled
+freight wagons, but which, had they been struck by the automobile, would
+have torn the pan from the body and put it permanently out of business.
+Along the stump-strewn stretches, therefore, our progress was necessarily
+slow, for Duncan marched in advance, axe on shoulder, like a scout before
+an advancing army, and whenever he found an enemy in the form of a stump
+lying in wait to disable us he would destroy it with a few well-directed
+blows of his axe. But it was a tiresome business. After a time, however,
+the stump-dotted trail was supplanted by quite an excellent road of
+gravel, and down this we spun for thirty miles with nothing to interrupt
+our progress. When we started that morning we would have laughed
+derisively if any one had told us that we could make Aldermere that
+night, but, thanks to the unexpected blessing of good roads, we whirled
+into that little frontier village at five o’clock in the afternoon,
+ascertained from the open-mouthed loungers on the steps of the grocery
+store that it was only thirty miles to Moricetown, which was at that time
+the “end of steel,” and determined to push on that night. The good roads
+soon died a sudden death, however, and it was late that night before
+there twinkled in the blackness of the valley below us the bewildering
+arrangement of green and scarlet lights which denote a railway yard all
+the world over, and heard the familiar friendly shriek of a locomotive.
+
+I don’t care to dwell on the night we spent at Moricetown. The
+recollection is not a pleasant one. In a few years, no doubt, it will
+grow into a prosperous country village, with cement sidewalks and street
+lamps and rows of neat cottages, but when we were there it was simply
+the “end of steel.” In other words, it was the place where civilisation,
+as typified by the railway in operation between there and the coast,
+quit work and the wilderness began. The “town” consisted of the railway
+station, still smelling of yellow paint, two or three log cabins, a group
+of hybrid structures, half house, half tent, and another building which,
+if one had no regard whatever for veracity, might have been called a
+hotel. Let me tell you about it. It was built of scantlings covered with
+log slabs, and the partition walls consisted of nothing thicker than
+tarred paper. In certain respects this had its advantages, for if you
+needed more light or air in your room all you had to do was to poke your
+finger through the wall. Because we had arrived by automobile and were
+therefore fair game, we were given the _suite de luxe_. This consisted
+of a six-by-eight room containing an iron bed with a dubious-looking
+coverlet which had evidently passed through every possible experience
+save a washing. There being no place in the room for a wash-stand, the
+cracked wash-bowl was kept under the bed. Indeed, had not the door
+opened outward we could never have gotten into the room at all. The
+partitions were so flimsy that we were awakened every time the occupant
+of the next room changed his mind. Outside our door was what, for want
+of a better term, I will call the lobby: a low-ceilinged room warmed to
+the suffocating point by a huge whitewashed stove, around which those
+who could not get rooms sat through the night on rude benches, talking,
+whispering, cursing, snoring, spitting, coughing, smoking. The place was
+blue with the acrid fumes of Bull Durham. Dozing on the benches were all
+the types peculiar to this remote corner of the empire: Montenegrin and
+Croatian railway labourers, stolid and dirty; Canadian lumberjacks in
+their moccasins and hooded parkas; Scandinavian ranchers from the back
+country; a group of immigrants, fresh from England, their faces whitened
+by the confinement of the long journey, who had left their rented farms
+in Sussex or their stools in London counting-houses to come out to the
+colonies to earn a living; even some pallid women with squalling children
+in their arms, fretful from lack of sleep, who had come from the old
+country to join their husbands and lead pioneer lives in the British
+Columbian wild. The men snored sickeningly, the tired mothers scolded
+their crying children, the clouds of tobacco smoke eddied toward the
+ceiling, the army of insects that we found in possession of the bed
+attacked us from all directions, the rain pattered dishearteningly upon
+the tin roof, the air was heavy with the odours of grimy, sweat-soaked,
+tired humanity. It was a _nuit du diable_, as our Paris friends would say.
+
+It is only about five-and-twenty miles from Moricetown to New Hazelton,
+the prefix “new” distinguishing it from the “old town,” which lies five
+miles from the railway to the north. The road, so we were told, though
+slippery after the rains and very hilly, was moderately smooth, and we
+were as confident that we would eat our Sunday dinner in New Hazelton as
+we were that the next day was Monday. But the best-laid plans of mice and
+motorists, you know, “gang aft agley,” which, according to the glossary
+of Scottish phrases in the back of the dictionary, means “to go off to
+the side,” and that was precisely what we did, for when only five miles
+from our destination our driver, in his eagerness to taste civilised
+cooking again, took a slippery curve at incautious speed and the car
+skidded over into the ditch and reclined against the shelving bank like
+some mud-stained, weary monster. It took the better part of an hour to
+get out the jacks and build a causeway of stones and pry her up. But at
+last everything was ready and we shouted to the driver to throw on the
+power. But there was no response from the engines to his pressure on the
+throttle.
+
+“By Jove!” he muttered despondently. “We’re out of gasoline!”
+
+Sunday noon, a deserted mountain road, a ditched and helpless car, a sky
+leaden with impending rain—and only five miles from our destination.
+There was nothing for it but for some one to walk into New Hazelton,
+rouse the local storekeeper from his Sunday nap, and bring us a tin of
+gasoline. The choice unanimously fell on Duncan, who set off down the
+middle of the muddy road at a four-miles-an-hour pace. Meanwhile, we set
+about preparations for our Sunday dinner. While the driver skirmished
+about with an axe in search of wood that was not too rain-soaked to burn,
+my friend opened such of the tinned goods as were left, and I attempted
+to wash the knives and forks and tin plates in a convenient mud puddle.
+As we had neglected to clean them after our last meal in the open, on the
+ground that we would have no further use for them, the task I had set
+myself was not an easy one: it’s surprising how difficult it is to remove
+grease from tin with nothing but a stick and some cold water. We achieved
+a meal at last, however—tinned sausages, tinned spaghetti, mouldy bread
+made palatable by toasting, and some week-old coffee which we found in
+one of the thermos bottles and heated—and I’ve had many a worse meal,
+too. Just as the rain began to descend in earnest, a horse and sulky
+swung round the bend bearing Duncan and the precious tin of gasoline.
+Thirty minutes later we were rolling between a double line of welcoming
+townspeople down the muddy main street of New Hazelton. We were at our
+journey’s end!
+
+Though New Hazelton now boasts the most pretentious hotel in all the
+North country, when we were there this hostelry was still in course of
+construction, so we were compelled to look elsewhere for bed and board.
+After some searching we found accommodation in the cabin occupied by the
+operator of the Yukon Telegraph and ate our meals at the pie counter run
+by an American known as “Black Jack” Macdonald. And it was good eating,
+too. Our first question after reaching New Hazelton was, of course:
+
+“Is there any chance of our getting through to the Alaskan border?”
+
+“Not a chance in the world,” was the chorused answer. But we protested
+that that was the answer we had received at Vancouver and Ashcroft and
+Quesnel and Fort Fraser when we inquired as to the chances of getting
+through to Hazelton.
+
+“The boys are quite right, gentlemen,” said a bearded frontiersman named
+“Dutch” Cline. “There isn’t a chance in the world. I’ve lived in this
+country close on twenty years and I know what I’m talking about. It’s
+only about forty miles in an air-line from here to the Alaskan boundary,
+but I doubt if a pack-mule could get through, let alone a motor-car. You
+would have to actually chop your way through forests that haven’t so
+much as a trail. You would have to devise some way of getting your car
+across no less than a dozen dangerous rivers. You would have to climb
+to the very summit of a six-thousand-foot mountain range and then drop
+down on the other side; and, finally, you would have to find some means
+of crossing the Portland Canal, which separates British Columbia from
+Alaska. Add to that the fact that winter is at hand and that you would
+probably be snowed in before you had got a quarter of the way, and you
+will understand just how utterly impossible it is.”
+
+So we were forced to abandon regretfully the hope of hearing the Alaskan
+gravel crunch beneath our tires and to content ourselves with the
+knowledge that we had driven farther north than a motor-car had ever been
+driven on this continent before: farther north than the Aleutian Islands,
+farther north than Hudson Bay, farther north than the Peninsula of
+Kamchatka, half a hundred miles farther north, in fact, than the southern
+boundary of Alaska itself.
+
+New Hazelton is in the very heart of northern British Columbia, where the
+Skeena, the Babine, and the Bulkley meet, and in the same latitude as
+the lower end of the Alaskan panhandle.
+
+A collection of log cabins and weather-beaten shacks huddled on the river
+bank at the foot of the Rocher de Boulé, whose cloud-wreathed summit,
+seven thousand feet in height, seems to scrape the sky, it is one of
+those boom towns with which the pioneer business men of the region are
+shaking dice against fate. If they lose, the place will revert to the
+primeval wilderness from which it sprang; if they win—and the coming
+of the railway has made it all but certain that they will—they will
+have laid the foundation of a future Winnipeg or Vancouver. Save only
+in Constantinople during the stirring days which marked the end of the
+Hamidieh régime, and at Casablanca with the Foreign Legion, I do not
+recall ever having encountered so many strange and picturesque and
+interesting figures as I did in this log town on the ragged edge of
+things. Every evening after supper the men would come dropping into the
+hut by twos and threes until there were a dozen or more gathered in a
+circle about the whitewashed stove and the air was so thick with the
+fumes of Bull Durham that you could have cut it with a knife. Talk about
+the Arabian Nights! Those were the British Columbian Nights, and if the
+Caliph of Bagdad had sat in that circle of frontiersmen and listened
+to the tales that passed round with the black bottle in that cabin on
+the banks of the Skeena he would have beheaded Scherezade in disgust.
+Here, in the flesh, were the characters of which the novelists love to
+write: men whom the wanderlust had lured from the Morris chairs of ease;
+men who had gone the pace in England long ago; men who had left their
+country between two days and for their country’s good; men who, in clubs
+or regimental messes, had been caught with an ace too many; men who, on
+nameless rivers or in strange valleys, had played knuckle down with Death.
+
+The talk fest of anecdote and reminiscence would generally be opened
+by “Dutch” Cline, a hairy, iron-hard pioneer who would have delighted
+the heart of Remington. I remember that the first time I met him he
+remarked that there would be an early winter, and when I asked him how
+he knew he explained quite soberly it was because he was afflicted with
+an uncontrollable desire to steal a dog. Cline was a Boer by birth—hence
+his nickname of “Dutch”—and in his youth had fought in turn the Zulus,
+the Basutos, and the Matabele, having, as he expressed it, lived on the
+frontier ever since he was knee-high to a grasshopper. He was a born
+raconteur and would hold us spellbound as he yarned of the days when
+he sailed under Captain Hansen, “the Flying Dutchman,” and poached for
+seals off the Pribilofs. Hansen, who was a Dane, evolved the ingenious
+idea of having a ship built in Japan but owned by Americans and sailing
+under the British flag, so that when he was overhauled by a gunboat,
+whether American, British, Japanese, or Russian, and arrested for pelagic
+sealing, it stirred up such an international rumpus with all the other
+nations concerned that it was easier to let him go. He once gave his
+vessel a coat of the grey-green paint used on the Czar’s warships,
+uniformed his crew as Russian sailors, and, with guns of stovepipe
+frowning from his decks and the flag of Saint Andrew flaunting from
+his stern, bore majestically down on the sealing grounds, and when his
+unsuspecting rivals cut their cables and fled seaward he helped himself
+to the skins. Though a pirate and an outlaw whose hands were stained with
+blood, he met his death not on deep water, as he would have wished, but
+in a little harbour at the north end of Vancouver Island while trying to
+save a little child. I remember that “Dutch” wiped his eyes as he told
+the story, and no one smiled at his doing it, either; for, though these
+men of the North have the hearts of vikings, they likewise often have the
+tenderness of a woman.
+
+Then there was Bob MacDonald, a red-headed man-o’-war’s man who had
+served under Dewey at the taking of the Philippines and later on had
+been a steam-shovel man at Panama. He needed no urging to reel off
+tales of mad pranks and wild adventures on every seaboard of the world,
+but when the deed for which he had been recommended for the Carnegie
+medal was mentioned his face would turn as fiery as his hair. So, as
+he could never be induced to tell the story, some one, to his intense
+embarrassment, would insist on telling it for him. While prospecting
+in that remote and barren region which borders on the Great Slave Lake
+his only companion had gone suddenly insane. MacDonald bound the
+raging madman hand and foot, placed him in a canoe which he built of
+whip-sawed planks, and brought him down a thousand miles of unexplored
+and supposedly unnavigable rivers, sometimes dragging his flimsy craft
+across mile-long portages, sometimes hoisting it, inch by inch, foot by
+foot, over rocky walls half a thousand feet in height, sometimes running
+cataracts and rapids where his life hung on the twist of a paddle, living
+on wild berries and such game as he could kill along the way, but always
+caring for the gibbering maniac as tenderly as though he were a child. He
+reached New Hazelton and its hospital with his charge at last, after one
+of the most intrepid journeys ever made by a white man—and the next day
+his comrade died. Yet when I exclaimed over his heroism, MacDonald was
+genuinely abashed. “Hell,” he blurted, “what else was there for me to do?
+You wouldn’t have had me go off and leave him up there to die, would you?
+You’d do the same thing if your pal was took sick on the trail. Sure you
+would.”
+
+When his instrument would cease its chatter for a time, the telegraph
+operator would chip in with stories of the men who sit in those lonely
+cabins scattered along two thousand miles of copper wire and relay the
+news of the world to the miners of the Yukon. In hair-raising detail he
+told of that terrible winter when the pack-train with its supplies was
+lost and the snow-bound operators had to keep themselves alive for many
+months upon such scanty game as they could find in the frozen forests.
+He told of the insufferable loneliness that drives men raving mad, of
+the awful silence that seems to crush one down. He told, with the thrill
+in the voice that comes only from actual experience, of how men run from
+their own shadows and become frightened at the sound of their own voices;
+of how each succeeding day is the intolerable same, only a little worse,
+the messages that come faintly over the line being the sole relief from
+the awful feeling that you are the only person left on all the earth.
+
+Occasionally Eugene Caux, or Old Man Cataline as he is invariably called
+because of his Catalonian origin, would join our conversazione. His
+ninety odd years notwithstanding, he is a magnificent figure of a man,
+six feet four in his elk-hide moccasins, with a chest like a barrel, his
+mop of snowy hair in striking contrast to a skin which has been tanned
+by sun and wind to the rich, ripe colour of a well-smoked meerschaum.
+Cataline is the most noted packer in the whole North country, being, in
+fact, the owner of the last great pack-train north of the Rio Grande.
+So much of his life has been spent in the wild, with Indian packers
+and French-Canadian trappers for his only companions, that his speech
+has become a strange mélange of English, French, half a dozen Indian
+dialects, and some remnants of his native Spanish, the whole thickly
+spiced with oaths. When, upon his periodic visits to the settlements, he
+is compelled to sleep under a roof, he strips the bed of its blankets
+and, wrapping himself in them, spends the night in comfort on the
+floor, his cocked revolver next his leg so that he can shoot through the
+coverings in case a marauder should appear. It is a custom among those
+who know him to invariably offer him a drink for the sake of enjoying the
+unique performance that ensues. His invariable brand of “hooch” is Hudson
+Bay rum, strong enough to eat the lining from a copper boiler. “Salue,
+señores!” says the old Spaniard, and drains half his glass at a single
+gulp. But he does not drink the other half. Instead, he pours it slowly
+over his mop of tousled hair and carefully rubs it in. It is a strange
+performance.
+
+They tell with relish in the northern camps the story of how Old Man
+Cataline, summoned to appear before the court sitting at Quesnel to
+defend the title to some land that he had filed a claim on, strode into
+the crowded court-room in the midst of a trial, and, shoving aside
+the bailiffs, menacingly confronted the startled judge. “Je worka
+pour that land, señor!” he thundered, shaking his fist and his whole
+frame trembling with passion. “Je payez pour heem, mister! He belonga
+to moi! Je killa any one who try tak heem away! Oui, by God, je killa
+you, m’sieu!” and, drawing a hunting-knife from his belt, he drove its
+blade deep into the top of the judge’s table. Leaving this grim memento
+quivering in the wood, Cataline turned upon his heel and strode away. He
+was not molested.
+
+When the world was electrified by the news that gold had been discovered
+on the Yukon, the authorities at Ottawa, anticipating the stampede of
+the lawless and the desperate that ensued, rushed a body of troops to
+the scene for the preservation of law and order. To Old Man Cataline
+was intrusted the task of transporting the several hundred soldiers and
+their supplies overland to the gold-fields by pack-train. The officer
+in command was a pompous person, fresh from the Eastern provinces and
+much impressed with his own importance, who insisted that the routine
+of barrack life should be rigidly observed upon the long and tedious
+march through the wilderness, the men rising and eating and going to bed
+by bugle-call. The absurdity of this proceeding aroused the contempt
+of Cataline, who would snort disgustedly: “Pour cinquante, soixante
+year I live in the grand forêt. Je connais when it ees time to get
+up. Je connais when I am hongry. Je connais when I am tired. But now
+it ees blowa de bug’ to get up; blowa de bug’ to eat; blowa de damned
+bug’ to sleep. Nom d’un nom d’un nom du chien! What t’ell for?” Within
+twenty-four hours Cataline and the commanding officer were not on
+speaking terms. But the expedition continued to press steadily forward,
+the commander riding at the head of the mile-long string of soldiers on
+mule back, and Cataline bringing up the rear. One day a heavily laden
+pack-mule became mired in a marsh and, despite the orders of the officer
+and the efforts of the soldiers, could not be extricated. As they were
+standing in deep perplexity about the helpless animal Cataline came
+riding up from the rear. Pulling up his mule, he sat quietly in his
+saddle without volunteering any advice. At last the officer, at his wit’s
+end, pocketed his pride.
+
+“How would you suggest that we get this mule out, Mr. Cataline?” he asked
+politely.
+
+“Oh,” remarked the old frontiersman drily, “blowa de bug’.”
+
+Nor will I readily forget Michael Flaherty, a genial Irish section boss
+on the Grand Trunk Pacific, whose effervescent Celtic wit formed a
+grateful relief to the grim stories of hardship and suffering. He had
+a front tooth conveniently missing, I remember, and one of his chief
+delights was to lean back in his chair and write patriotic “G. R.’s” and
+“U. S. A.’s” in squirts of tobacco juice upon the ceiling. One day he
+ordered out his hand-car in a hurry.
+
+“And where moight yez be goin’, Misther Flaherty?” solicitously inquired
+his assistant.
+
+“To hell wid yer questions,” was the answer. “Did Napoleon always be
+tellin’ his min where he was goin’?”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Indians of British Columbia, doubtless because of their remoteness
+from civilisation, have retained far more of their racial customs and
+characteristics than have their cousins below the international boundary.
+Though divided into innumerable clans and tribes, under local names,
+they fall naturally, on linguistic grounds, into a few large groups.
+Thus, the southern portion of the hinterland is occupied by the Salish
+and the Kootenay; in the northern interior are to be found the Tinneh or
+Athapackan people; while the Haidas, Tsimshians, Kwakiatles, and Nootkas
+have their villages along the coast, though the white settlers speak
+of them collectively as Siwashes, “Siwash” being nothing more than a
+corruption of the French _sauvage_. These British Columbian aborigines
+are strikingly Oriental in appearance, having so many of the facial
+characteristics of the Mongol that it does not need the arguments of an
+ethnologist to convince one that they owe their origin to Asia. Indeed,
+it is a common saying that if you cut the hair of a Siwash you will find
+a Japanese. They are generally short and squat of figure and, though
+habitually lazy, are possessed of almost incredible endurance. One of
+them was pointed out to me, a brave named Chickens, who packed a piece of
+machinery weighing three hundred pounds over one hundred and eighty miles
+of rough forest trails in twelve days. Some years ago the Indians of the
+Hag-wel-get village constructed a suspension bridge of rope and timbers
+across the dizzy chasm at the bottom of which flows the raging Bulkley.
+This bridge is an interesting piece of work, for in building it the
+Indians adopted the cantilever system, a form of construction generally
+supposed to be beyond the comprehension of uncivilised peoples. But the
+amazing feature of the structure is that the varying members are not
+secured together by nails, bolts, or screws but simply lashed with willow
+withes. It is a crazy-looking affair, and when you venture on it it
+creaks, groans, and swings as if threatening to collapse. Even the weight
+of a dog is sufficient to set it vibrating sickeningly. When it was
+completed, the Indians were evidently in some doubt as to the stability
+of their handiwork, for they tested it by sending a score of kloochmen
+out upon the quivering structure. If it held, well and good—it was strong
+enough to bear the weight of an Indian; if it gave way—oh, well, there
+were plenty of other squaws where those came from.
+
+[Illustration: “Some of the cemeteries look as though they were filled
+with white-enamelled cribs.”
+
+The grave-house of a chieftain near Kispiox.
+
+“Over each grave is a house which is a cross between ... a Turkish kiosk
+and a Chinese pagoda.”
+
+SOME SIWASH CEMETERIES.]
+
+The Siwashes bury their dead in some of the strangest cemeteries in
+the world, over each grave being erected a grave house of grotesquely
+carved and gaudily painted wood, which is a cross between a dog kennel,
+a chicken-coop, a Chinese pagoda, and a Turkish kiosk. In these strange
+mausoleums the personal belongings and gewgaws of the dear departed are
+prominently displayed. It may be a trunk or a dressing-table, usually
+bedecked with vases of withered flowers; from a line stretched across the
+interior of the structure hang the remnants of his or her clothing, and
+always in a conspicuous position is a photograph of the deceased. Though
+sometimes several hundred dollars are expended in the erection of one of
+these quaint structures, as soon as the funeral rites are over the tomb
+is left to the ravages of wind and rain, not a cent being expended upon
+its up-keep. Of recent years, however, those Indians who can afford it
+are abandoning the old-time wooden grave houses for elaborate enclosures
+of wire netting which gave the cemeteries the appearance of being filled
+with enamelled iron cribs. Perhaps their most curious custom, however,
+is that of potlatch giving. A potlatch is generosity carried to the nth
+degree. Some of them are very grand affairs, the Indians coming in to
+attend them from miles around. It is by no means unusual for an Indian to
+actually beggar himself by his munificence on these occasions, a wealthy
+chieftain who gave a potlatch recently at Kispiox piling blankets, which
+are the Indians’ chief measure of wealth, around a totem-pole to a height
+of forty feet.
+
+The Siwash villages are usually built high on a bank above some navigable
+stream, the totem-poles in front of the miserable cabins being so thick
+in places as to look from a distance like a forest that has been ravaged
+by fire. The Skeena might, indeed, be called the Totem-Pole River, for
+from end to end it is bordered by Indian villages whose grotesquely
+carven spars proclaim to all who traverse that great wilderness
+thoroughfare the genealogies of the families before whose dwellings they
+are reared. Though the Siwashes are accustomed to desert a village when
+the fishing and hunting run out and establish themselves elsewhere, their
+totem-poles may not be disturbed with impunity, as some business men of
+Seattle once found out. A few years ago the Seattle Chamber of Commerce
+arranged an excursion to Alaska, chartering a steamer for the purpose.
+While returning down the British Columbian coast, the vessel dropped
+anchor for a few hours at the head of a fiord, off a deserted Siwash
+village whose water-front was lined with imposing totem-poles.
+
+[Illustration: “Proclaiming ... the stories of the families before whose
+dwellings they are reared.”
+
+“The Skeena might be called the Totem Pole River.”
+
+The base of a Siwash totem-pole—“the God of Love.”
+
+HERALDRY IN THE HINTERLAND.]
+
+“Say,” said an enterprising business man, “this place is deserted, all
+right, all right. The Indians have evidently gotten out for good. So
+what’s the matter with our chopping down that big totem-pole over there,
+hoisting it on deck, and taking it back to Seattle? It’ll look perfectly
+bully set up in Pioneer Square.”
+
+Every one agreed that it was, indeed, a perfectly bully suggestion and
+it was carried out, the purloined pole being erected in due time in the
+heart of Seattle’s business section, where it stands to-day. The affair
+received considerable notice in the newspapers, of course, and those
+responsible for thus adding to the city’s attractions were editorially
+patted on the back. A few weeks later, however, they were served with
+papers in a civil suit brought against them by the Indians from whose
+village, without so much as a by-your-leave, they had removed the pole.
+At first they jeered at the idea of a handful of Siwash villagers
+dwelling up there on the skirts of civilisation having any rights which
+they could enforce in a court of law, but they soon found that it was
+no laughing matter, for the Indians, backed by the British Columbian
+Government, pressed their claim and it cost the gentlemen concerned four
+thousand dollars for their Siwash souvenir.
+
+Everything considered, British Columbia is, I believe, the finest game
+country in the western hemisphere, bar none, for the sportsmen have as
+yet barely nibbled at its edges. It is to America, in fact, what the
+Victoria Nyanza country is to Africa: a veritable sportsman’s paradise,
+to make use of a term which the writers of railway folders have taken
+for their own. It is the sole remaining region south of Alaska where the
+hunter can go with almost positive assurance that he will have a chance
+to draw a bead upon a grizzly bear; mountain sheep and goat are seen
+so frequently on the slopes of the Rocher de Boulé, at the back of New
+Hazelton, that they do not provoke even passing comment; the islands off
+the province’s ragged coast are the only habitat of that _rara avis_,
+the spotted bear; musk-ox and wood-buffalo, among the scarcest big game
+in existence, still graze on the prairies which are watered by the
+headwaters of the Mackenzie and the Peace; elk, caribou, and mule-deer
+are as common as squirrels in Central Park; wolves, wolverenes, lynxes,
+and the fox in all its species, to say nothing of the beaver, the marten,
+and the mink, still make the province one of the richest fur grounds in
+the world. Wild fowl literally blacken its lakes and fiords in the spring
+and autumn; grouse and pheasant, as I have previously remarked, are so
+tame that they can be and are killed with a club; while salmon, trout,
+and sturgeon fill the countless streams, sometimes in such vast numbers
+that they actually choke the smaller creeks and rivers. When there is
+taken into consideration the fact of its comparative accessibility (New
+Hazelton can be reached from Seattle in a little more than three days)
+and the healthfulness of its climate—for British Columbia, unlike most
+of the other celebrated hunting-grounds, is distinctly a “white man’s
+country”—it is almost incomprehensible why it has not attracted far
+greater attention from the men who go into the wild with rod and gun.
+
+[Illustration: The Rocher de Boulé from the Indian village of Awillgate.
+
+The Upper Fraser at Quesnel. This is the head of steamer navigation and
+the end of the Cariboo Trail.
+
+The Babine Range from Old Hazelton.
+
+A LAND OF SUBLIMITY AND MAGNIFICENCE AND GRANDEUR, OF GLOOM AND
+LONELINESS AND DREAD.]
+
+It is a land of immensity and majesty and opportunity, is this almost
+unknown empire in the near-by North. It is a region of sublimity and
+magnificence and grandeur, of gloom and loneliness and dread. It is as
+savage as a grizzly, as alluring as a lovely woman. Its scenery is of
+the set-piece and drop-curtain kind. Streams of threaded quicksilver,
+coming from God knows where, hasten through deep-gashed valleys as though
+anxious to escape from the solitude that reigns. On the flanks of the
+ridges, massed in their black battalions, stand the bleak barbarian
+pines, while above the scented pine gloom, like blanketed chiefs in
+council under the wigwam of the sky, the snow peaks gleam in splendour,
+and behind them, beyond them, the sun-god paints his canvas in the
+West. Pregnant with the seed of unborn cities, potent in resources and
+possibilities beyond the stranger’s ken, it lies waiting to be conquered:
+
+  “The last and the largest empire,
+  The map that is half unrolled.”
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+  Abbott, Judge, ranch-house of, 22.
+
+  Acoma, New Mexico, 22, 35, 40-55;
+    antiquity, 44;
+    costumes, 52, 53;
+    church, 48, 49;
+    customs, 44, 55;
+    dwellings, 46;
+    funeral, 51;
+    graveyard, 51;
+    houses, 45-47;
+    industries, 53, 54;
+    paths to, 42;
+    people of, 42;
+    picture of San José in, 49, 50;
+    police, 58;
+    site of, 40, 41, 45;
+    symbolic hair-dressing, 54, 55;
+    women, 53-55.
+
+  Agricultural College, Oregon, 315, 316.
+
+  Agriculture, United States Department of, 98.
+
+  Alaska, 381, 438, 439.
+
+  Alberni, B. C., 363, 375, 376.
+
+  Albuquerque, New Mexico, 13-16, 35;
+    agricultural possibilities, 14;
+    climate, 13;
+    commercial club, 14, 15;
+    university at, 15.
+
+  Alcatraz, prison at, 218.
+
+  Aldermere, B. C., 434.
+
+  Alejandro, Padre, 179.
+
+  Alfalfa raising, 9, 74, 75, 100, 260.
+
+  Algiers, 190.
+
+  Amargosa River, the, 174.
+
+  “American Alps,” the, 217.
+
+  “American Mentone,” the, 217.
+
+  American River, the, 229, 230.
+
+  American School of Archæology, 23, 25.
+
+  Anacapa Island, 151
+
+  Anacortes, 344.
+
+  Apple orchards, Oregon, 296, 297, 318, 319.
+
+  Archæological research in the United States, 22-25.
+
+  Architecture, California, 199, 200.
+
+  Arizona, 31;
+    admitted to the Union, 79;
+    cities, 80;
+    climate, 83-85;
+    contrasted with Egypt, 71;
+    copper output, 81;
+    desert, 72, 73;
+    early inhabitants, 77;
+    effects of civilization in, 63-65;
+    game-hunting, 85-87;
+    history of, 76-79, 91;
+    irrigation, 70, 88, 93, 94;
+    misconceptions concerning, 71, 74;
+    missions, 91-93;
+    organised as territory, 79;
+    people law-abiding, 88, 89;
+    pioneers, 67-69, 79;
+    prison system, 89, 90;
+    products of the soil, 74-76;
+    progress in, 66-69;
+    two distinct regions of, 87, 88.
+
+  Arizona Rangers, the, 89.
+
+  Ark, the, 376, 377.
+
+  Arroyo Hondo, 56.
+
+  Ashcroft, B. C., 391-6.
+
+  Ashland, Oregon, 323.
+
+  Automobiles, in Oregon, 313.
+
+  Avalon, Santa Catalina, 148-151.
+
+
+  Bakersfield, California, 259-261, 324.
+
+  Banning Company, the, 147.
+
+  Barbareños, 152, 153.
+
+  Barkerville, B. C., 392.
+
+  Barrancas, 56.
+
+  Bay of Monterey, the lost, 195.
+
+  Beaman, Judge, 150.
+
+  Bellingham, 348.
+
+  “Ben Hur,” 16.
+
+  Benedict, Judge Kirby, 50.
+
+  Benicia, California, 219, 220.
+
+  Bent, Governor, 21.
+
+  Big-game hunting, 85-87, 347, 451-3.
+
+  Big trees of California, 254, 255, 257, 258.
+
+  Bisbee, Arizona, 87.
+
+  Black Hills, 81.
+
+  Blackwater, B. C., 401, 405, 406.
+
+  Blaine, 348, 349.
+
+  Boar-hunting, 153.
+
+  Bobtail Lake, B. C., 403, 404.
+
+  Bohemian Club of San Francisco, the, 158, 202.
+
+  Bohemians in California, 282, 283.
+
+  Borax deposits, 174, 177.
+
+  Bradshaw Mountains, 82.
+
+  Bret Harte, 229, 230.
+
+  Bridge built by Indians, 448, 449.
+
+  Bridger, Jim, 56.
+
+  British Columbia, 209, 355 _et seq._;
+    area, 358, 359;
+    character of the country, 362, 363, 453;
+    cities of, 363, 364;
+    climate, 361;
+    corduroying roads in, 411, 412;
+    cutting path through forest, 428, 429;
+    freighters, 398;
+    frontier, 389 _et seq._, 421 _et seq._;
+    game-hunting, 451-3;
+    government’s interest in settlers, 407;
+    Indians, 415, 447-451;
+    “muskeg,” 410, 411;
+    pioneers in, 385, 386, 390, 397 _et seq._;
+    prohibition in, 407-9;
+    railways, 378-382;
+    resources, 359-361;
+    roads, 411, 415, 416, 433.
+
+  British Columbia Express Company, 391, 392.
+
+  Brussels, restoration of, 17.
+
+  Bryce, James, 299.
+
+  Bunk-houses, British Columbia, 413.
+
+  Bureau of Indian Affairs, 58.
+
+  Burlingame, California, 198, 199.
+
+  Burns Lake, B. C., 424, 425.
+
+  Busch Gardens, Pasadena, 141.
+
+
+  Cabbage-growing in New Mexico, 10.
+
+  Cabrillo, Juan Rodrigues, 147, 171, 172.
+
+  _Cabrillo_, the, 147, 149.
+
+  Caire estate, the, 152.
+
+  California Debris Commission, 226.
+
+  California, 160 _et seq._;
+    agriculture of, 218;
+    architecture, 199, 200;
+    Chinese in, 207;
+    climate, 157-9;
+    coast, 161, 162;
+    discovery of, 172;
+    dust, 159;
+    festivals, 201-3;
+    fogs, 159;
+    Great Valley of, 242-4;
+    hinterland, 240 _et seq._;
+    Japanese in, 207-210;
+    labour problems in, 206-8;
+    missions, 117-122, 179, 180, 183, 186, 195, 198;
+    orange groves, 125-8, 133-8;
+    popular misnomers, 216, 217;
+    rain, 158;
+    roads, 116, 132, 197, 198;
+    seaside resorts, 142-4;
+    summer climate, 157-160;
+    three distinct zones of, 157;
+    trees, 254-8.
+
+  Camels, wild, 86, 87.
+
+  Camino Real, El, 21, 108, 115, 122, 161, 178, 185, 197, 198.
+
+  Camp Sierra, 257.
+
+  Canada, agricultural invasion of, 357, 358;
+    motoring in, 348-350;
+    railways, 378-381.
+
+  Canadian Northern Railway, 378-381.
+
+  Canadian Pacific Railway, 378-380, 395.
+
+  Canal at Celilo, 291.
+
+  Cañon of the Macho, 21;
+    of the Santa Fé, 21.
+
+  Cañons, 21, 23.
+
+  Cañon’s Crest, 131.
+
+  Cape Flattery, 344.
+
+  Cape Horn, 232, 301.
+
+  Caravels, miniature, 171, 172.
+
+  Cariboo Trail, the, 391-9.
+
+  Carmel, mission of, 183.
+
+  Carpinteria, California, 166.
+
+  Carquinez Straits, the, 219.
+
+  Carson, Kit, 21, 56.
+
+  Casa Grande, ruins of, 91, 94;
+    irrigation, 110.
+
+  Cascade Range, the, 277, 285, 293, 295, 298-300, 310.
+
+  Casitas Pass, the, 166.
+
+  Casteñeda, 45.
+
+  Castle Hot Springs, Arizona, 81-83.
+
+  Castle Rock, 301.
+
+  Castro, General, 186.
+
+  Catalina Range, 85.
+
+  Cattle-raising in New Mexico, 26.
+
+  Caux, Eugene (Old Man Cataline), 444-7.
+
+  Cave-dwellers, 22-25.
+
+  Caves, painted, of Santa Cruz, 151;
+    Oregon, 324.
+
+  Celilo, canal at, 291.
+
+  Channel Islands, the, 146-154.
+
+  Charles the Second of Aragon, 49.
+
+  Chinese, in California, 207;
+    farming, 7, 8.
+
+  Church, adobe, at Acoma, 48-50.
+
+  Civil War, 79.
+
+  Clarksburg, California, 223.
+
+  Cline, “Dutch,” 439, 441.
+
+  Cloud Cap Inn, 297.
+
+  Coast Range, the, 241.
+
+  Colorado Desert, 98.
+
+  Colorado River, the, 99, 100.
+
+  Colton Hall, Monterey, 183.
+
+  _Columbia, of Boston_, the, 303.
+
+  Columbia River, the, 273 _et seq._;
+    Indian legend, 293-5;
+    length of, 289, 290;
+    romance of, 292-6;
+    salmon, 302;
+    scenery, 290, 299-301;
+    traffic, 301, 302;
+    waterfalls, 300, 301.
+
+  Commerce of the prairies, 20, 21.
+
+  Commercial Club in Albuquerque, 14, 15.
+
+  Contra Costa County, California, 219.
+
+  Copper mines, 32, 81.
+
+  Coronado, California, 103-7, 216;
+    hotel, 105-7;
+    Polo Club, 104;
+    Tent City, 112, 113.
+
+  Coronado, Don Francisco Vasquez de, expedition of, 45, 78, 115.
+
+  Coronados Islands, the, 146.
+
+  Cotton, Egyptian, 75, 76.
+
+  Coulterville, California, 256;
+    road, 246.
+
+  Crater Lake, 285, 286.
+
+  Crocker’s Sierra Resort, 246, 247.
+
+  Czechs, 282.
+
+
+  Dalton Divide, the, 21, 22.
+
+  Dams, Laguna and Roosevelt, 70, 88, 91, 93, 94;
+    Elephant Butte, 110.
+
+  Date, the Algerian, 75, 76;
+    the Deglet Noor, 100.
+
+  Death Valley, 83, 172-8;
+    borax deposits, 177;
+    climatic variation, 176;
+    effects of ultrararefied air, 175;
+    sand-storms, 176, 177.
+
+  Decker Lake, 425-8.
+
+  Del Mar, California, 117-9.
+
+  Del Monte, California, 184, 185.
+
+  Deming, New Mexico, 3-8, 13.
+
+  Denver, 21.
+
+  Depew, Chauncey, 84, 85.
+
+  Deschutes, the, 287.
+
+  Desert, Arizona, 72, 73;
+    Colorado, 98;
+    New Mexican, 36, 38, 39.
+
+  Dikes on the Sacramento, 226, 227.
+
+  Donner Lake, 233.
+
+  Donner party tragedy, story of, 233, 234.
+
+  Drain, Oregon, 323.
+
+  Drowned Lands, the, 426, 428.
+
+  Dry Lake Ranch, 282.
+
+  Duncan, woodsman, 427-433, 437, 438.
+
+  Dungeness, 344.
+
+
+  Easter pilgrimage, 129-131.
+
+  Egypt, 71, 72.
+
+  El Centro, 101, 102.
+
+  El Paso, 21.
+
+  Elephant Butte, dam at, 110.
+
+  Elkins, Stephen B., 21.
+
+  English in New Mexico, 12;
+    pioneers in the North, 399-403.
+
+  Erosion, Acoma, a striking example of, 41.
+
+  Eugene, Oregon, 317, 320, 323.
+
+
+  Fair, Oregon State, 312-7.
+
+  Farms, New Mexico, 7-11;
+    Oregon, 314, 315.
+
+  Feast of the Blossoms, the, 192, 193, 201.
+
+  Festivities, California out-of-door, 201-3.
+
+  Fishing, deep-sea, at Avalon, 149-151.
+
+  Fishing industry of the Sacramento, 220, 221.
+
+  Fish-wheels, 302.
+
+  Flaherty, Michael, 447.
+
+  Floral mosaic, 267.
+
+  Florence, Arizona, State penitentiary at, 89.
+
+  Folsom, California, 229.
+
+  Foot-hills Hotel, the, 164-6.
+
+  Forests, Sierran, 266.
+
+  Fort Fraser, B. C., 390, 395, 399, 416, 421-4;
+    cost of provisions in, 422.
+
+  Fort George, B. C., 393, 408, 409.
+
+  Fowl, wild, 220.
+
+  Fraser River, the, 391, 392, 398.
+
+  Freight wagons, British Columbian, 398.
+
+  Frémont, 115, 186, 228.
+
+  Fresno, California, 256.
+
+  Friday Harbour, 344.
+
+  Frontier, the last, 389 _et seq._, 421 _et seq._
+
+  Frontiersmen, British Columbian, 440-7.
+
+  Frost in the orange belt, 133, 257.
+
+  Fruit-growing, in Arizona, 75.
+
+  Fruit-packing industry, 205.
+
+  Funeral Range, the, 173, 174.
+
+  Furnace Creek, 174.
+
+
+  Gadsden Treaty, 79.
+
+  Gasoline, cost of in British Columbia, 394, 395.
+
+  Gaviota Pass, the, 178.
+
+  General Grant Big Tree Grove, 257.
+
+  Gila River, the, 9, 79, 83, 110.
+
+  Gilroy, California, 196.
+
+  Glacier meadows, 266, 267.
+
+  Globe, Arizona, 90.
+
+  Goat, wild, 153.
+
+  Gold discovery, California, 79, 173, 224.
+
+  Gold dredger, 230-2.
+
+  Golden Gate, the, 241.
+
+  Golf-links, California, 159, 185.
+
+  Grand Island, 227.
+
+  Grand Trunk Pacific Railway, 364, 378-382, 384, 408, 426.
+
+  Grant’s Pass, Oregon, 323, 324.
+
+  Great Central Lake, B. C., 220, 375, 376.
+
+  Great Valley of California, the, 242 _et seq._;
+    irrigation of, 243, 244;
+    petroleum fields, 258, 259.
+
+  Grove Play, Bohemian Club’s, 158, 202, 203.
+
+
+  Halleck, 183.
+
+  Harriman, E. H., 284.
+
+  Hawk’s Nest, the, 186.
+
+  Heenan, the “Benicia Boy,” 220.
+
+  High Sierras, the, 266.
+
+  Highways, 21, 102, 108, 114-8, 161, 166, 197, 198, 215, 229, 278.
+
+  Hillsboro, California, 198;
+    Oregon, 326.
+
+  Holland, waterways of, 215, 216.
+
+  Hollanders in New Mexico, 13.
+
+  Hollywood, California, 199.
+
+  Homestead and Desert Land Acts, 6, 323.
+
+  Honey Lake, 279, 280.
+
+  Hood River, 296, 297.
+
+  Hopi Indians, 16, 47, 53-59.
+
+  Horton, Alonzo, 108.
+
+  Hot Springs Junction, 81.
+
+  Hotel Arlington, 170, 171;
+    del Coronado, 105-7;
+    The Foot-hills, 164-6.
+
+  Hund, John, 6.
+
+  Hundred and Fifty Mile House, the, 430-2.
+
+  Hunt, Governor George W. P., 79, 89.
+
+  Hunting big game in Arizona, 85-87;
+    in British Columbia, 451-3;
+    in the Puget Sound country, 347.
+
+  Hydraulic mining, 226, 230.
+
+
+  Imperial Valley, the, 8, 97-102, 110, 194;
+    agricultural products, 100;
+    highway into, 102, 103;
+    irrigation of, 99;
+    soil expert’s report concerning, 98, 99;
+    towns in, 101.
+
+  Indian education, 47, 48;
+    legend of the Columbia, 293-5;
+    punishments, 58-60;
+    revolt of 1680, 19, 78;
+    settlement in the Yosemite, 250-2;
+    sheep-owners, 27.
+
+  Indians, Palatingwa, 120, 121;
+    Hopi, 16, 47, 53-59;
+    Siwash, 415, 447-451.
+
+  Invalids, in Albuquerque, 13.
+
+  Iron Hills, the, 279.
+
+  Irrigation, 5, 6, 8, 14, 30, 32, 70, 88, 93, 94, 99, 110, 225-7, 243,
+        246.
+
+  Isleton, California, 223.
+
+
+  Japanese in California, 207-210.
+
+  Jewellery, Indian, 53.
+
+
+  Kalama, 331, 332.
+
+  Katzimo, 40, 41.
+
+  Kearney Boulevard, the, 256.
+
+  Kearney, General, 19, 20.
+
+  King’s Highway. (See _Camino Real_.)
+
+  Kino, Jesuit Father, 91.
+
+  Klamath Falls, 283-5.
+
+
+  La Jolla, California, 117.
+
+  Labour problems in California, 206-8.
+
+  Laguna, New Mexico, 35, 37, 38, 49, 50;
+    dam, 70, 88.
+
+  Lake Chapala, 220.
+
+  Lake of Elsinore, 117.
+
+  Lake Tahoe, 228, 232, 235, 236, 264-270.
+
+  Larkin house, Monterey, 183.
+
+  Leland Stanford, Jr., University, 197.
+
+  Lick, James, 147.
+
+  Linda Vista grade, the, 114.
+
+  Lisa, Manuel, 56.
+
+  Long Beach, California, 143.
+
+  Los Angeles, California, 142-5, 209;
+    harbour, 144, 145;
+    name, 139.
+
+  Los Gatos, 191.
+
+  Los Olivos, inn at, 180, 181.
+
+  Lummis, Charles, 139.
+
+
+  Macdonald, “Black Jack,” 438.
+
+  MacDonald, Bob, 442, 443.
+
+  Machine shearing, 27.
+
+  Madera, California, 256.
+
+  Manzano Ranges, the, 14.
+
+  “Marble Halls of Oregon,” the, 324.
+
+  Marcos de Niza, 78.
+
+  Mare Island Navy Yard, 219.
+
+  Mariposa Big Tree Grove, 254, 255.
+
+  Mark Twain, 230.
+
+  Marshall, John, 229.
+
+  Matilija Valley, the, 162, 164.
+
+  Meadows, mountain, 266, 267.
+
+  Medford, Oregon, 319, 323.
+
+  Mediterranean Riviera, the, 161.
+
+  Memaloose, the Island of the Dead, 293.
+
+  Merced Big Tree Grove, 247, 256.
+
+  _Mesa Encantada, La_ (the Enchanted Mesa), 30-41.
+
+  Mexican War, 79.
+
+  Mexicans, in New Mexico, 28, 29.
+
+  Militiamen, Canadian, 372, 373.
+
+  Miller, Frank, 121.
+
+  Mimbres Valley, the, 6 _et seq._, 32;
+    climate, 8, 9.
+
+  Mining, 226, 230-2.
+
+  Miramar, California, 167.
+
+  Mission Inn at Riverside, 121, 127.
+
+  Mission Valley, 117.
+
+  Missions, Arizona, 91-93;
+    California, 117-122, 179, 180, 183, 186, 195, 198.
+
+  Modesto, California, 246.
+
+  Mojave City, Arizona, 87.
+
+  Montecito, California, 167, 199, 223.
+
+  Monterey, California, 159, 181-5, 195, 216;
+    historic interest of, 182, 183.
+
+  Morehouse, Colonel C. P., 150.
+
+  Moricetown, B. C., 434-6.
+
+  Motoring in British Columbia, 348-350, 372, 439;
+    in California, 113-8, 132, 166, 228, 261-4, 278, 279;
+    in Oregon, 320;
+    in the Yosemite, 246-8, 254.
+
+  Mount Adams, 295;
+    Hamilton, 191;
+    Hood, 295, 298;
+    Hooker, 346;
+    Lowe, 142;
+    Rubidoux, 128, 129;
+    Rainier, 337-340, 347;
+    Shasta, 160;
+    Saint Helens, 295;
+    San Jacinto, 160;
+    Tamalpais, 219;
+    Topotopo, 163.
+
+  Moving pictures taken in the West, 64, 90, 171.
+
+  Muir, John, 249.
+
+
+  Nanaimo, 363, 372, 373.
+
+  Napoleon, 182.
+
+  _Natalie_, the, 182.
+
+  Nechako River, the, 424.
+
+  Nehalem Bay, 326.
+
+  “Netherlands Route,” the, 217.
+
+  New Hazelton, B. C., 380, 381, 428, 436-440, 443, 452.
+
+  “New Helvetia,” 227.
+
+  New Mexico, annexation of, 19, 20;
+    changes in, 3 _et seq._;
+    character of the people, 31, 32;
+    climate of, 8, 9;
+    desert, 36, 38, 39;
+    dress, 10;
+    farming in, 7-11;
+    fuel, 11;
+    industries, 25-28;
+    Mexicans in, 28, 29;
+    mineral deposits, 32;
+    prosperity of, 31, 32;
+    religious fanaticism, 29, 30;
+    settlers in, 10-13;
+    social fabric, 28, 30;
+    Spanish spoken in, 29;
+    turquoise deposits, 32;
+    water discovery, 5, 6;
+    well-digging, 11;
+    white population, 30.
+
+  New Westminster, B. C., 350, 363.
+
+  Nisqually Glacier, the, 338-340.
+
+
+  Oak Knoll, California, 109.
+
+  Oceanside, California, 117-9.
+
+  Oil-fields, California, 258, 259.
+
+  Ojai Valley, the, 162-6.
+
+  Olympia, 336.
+
+  Oñate, Juan de, 19, 51.
+
+  Orange groves of California, 125-8, 133-8, 257.
+
+  Oregon, 307-328;
+    Agricultural College, 315;
+    apple orchards, 296, 318, 319;
+    caves, 324;
+    character of the country, 324-8;
+    charm of, 326-8;
+    climate, 327;
+    emigration to, 321-3;
+    farmer, 313-6;
+    a frontier country, 325;
+    hinterland, 275 _et seq._, 309, 310;
+    opportunities in, 322;
+    prohibition in, 323, 324;
+    railroad, 325-7;
+    State Fair, 312-7;
+    timber, 322;
+    towns, 308, 323, 324.
+
+  Oregon Trail, the, 276.
+
+  “Our Italy,” 216.
+
+
+  Pacific Great Eastern Railway, 379-380.
+
+  Pack-train on the Cariboo Trail, 397.
+
+  “Padre’s Path,” 42.
+
+  Pajarito National Park, 22-25.
+
+  Pala, San Antonia de, mission chapel, 117, 120.
+
+  Palatingwa tribe, the, 120, 121.
+
+  Palo Alto, 197, 198.
+
+  Panamint Range, the, 174.
+
+  Pasadena, California, 131-3, 138-142, 170, 201, 223;
+    Busch Gardens, 140, 141;
+    Mount Lowe, 140, 142;
+    Orange Grove Avenue, 140, 141.
+
+  Pecos, the, valley of, 9, 32;
+    Forest Reserve, 22.
+
+  Pelican Bay Lodge, 285.
+
+  Pelicans, 283.
+
+  Penitentes, the, 29, 30.
+
+  Petroleum fields, California, 258, 259.
+
+  Philip III, 147.
+
+  Phœnix, Arizona, 80, 83, 90, 91, 93, 110.
+
+  Pillars of Hercules, 301.
+
+  Pilot Peak, 278.
+
+  Pio Pico, 147.
+
+  Placerville, California, 228, 229, 232.
+
+  Plaza del Mar, Santa Barbara, 169, 171.
+
+  Point Loma, 103.
+
+  Polo Club at Coronado, 104.
+
+  Port Alberni, B. C., 376.
+
+  Port Angeles, 344.
+
+  Port Mann, B. C., 380.
+
+  Portland, Oregon, 202, 308, 331, 332, 341;
+    residences, 311.
+
+  Portola, Don Caspar de, 195, 210.
+
+  Prescott, Arizona, 80, 81.
+
+  Prince Rupert, B. C., 379-384, 390.
+
+  Prison system, Arizona, 89.
+
+  Prunes, California, 193.
+
+  Pueblo system of government, 58.
+
+  Puget Sound country, the, 341-7;
+    a trip through, 343-5;
+    variety of sports and recreations, 345-7.
+
+  Punishments, Indian, 58-60.
+
+
+  Quesnel, B. C., 392, 394, 395, 399, 401, 445.
+
+
+  Railways in British Columbia, 378-382.
+
+  Rainier National Park, 338, 340.
+
+  Raisin industry, 256.
+
+  _Ramona_, home of, 117.
+
+  Ranches, Californian, 242.
+
+  Rasmussen, Peter, 412-4.
+
+  Raton, New Mexico, 12.
+
+  Redlands, California, 131, 132.
+
+  Redondo, California, 143.
+
+  Remittance-man, the, 400, 401.
+
+  Rincon route, the, 166.
+
+  Rio Grande, the, 14, 23, 110.
+
+  Rito de los Frijoles, the, 23-25.
+
+  River gardens, 221, 222.
+
+  Riverside, California, 117, 120, 125-133, 136;
+    Easter pilgrimage, 129-131;
+    Mission Inn at, 121, 127.
+
+  Riviera, the Californian, 161, 216.
+
+  Rogue, valley of the, 321.
+
+  Roosevelt dam, 70, 88, 91, 93, 94, 110.
+
+  Roseburg, Oregon, 323.
+
+
+  Sacramento, 215, 224-8.
+
+  Sacramento River, the, 215-227, 233, 241;
+    dikes, 226, 227;
+    fishing industry, 220, 221;
+    homes along, 223;
+    house-boats, 224;
+    reclamation of banks, 225-7;
+    traffic, 222;
+    truck-gardens, 221.
+
+  Salem, Oregon, 312, 323.
+
+  Salmon fisheries, 302, 348, 375.
+
+  Salt River Valley, 93.
+
+  San Antonio de Pala, mission chapel of, 117, 120.
+
+  San Bernardino Range, the, 241.
+
+  San Buenaventura, 162.
+
+  San Carlos, Church of, Monterey, 183.
+
+  San Clemente, island of, 151.
+
+  San Diego, 97, 98, 102, 107-112, 117, 118;
+    advantages, 109, 110;
+    climate, 111, 112;
+    geography, 103;
+    growth of, 108;
+    highway, 102, 103;
+    history, 107, 108;
+    prospects, 109-111.
+
+  San Francisco, 215;
+    Portola Festival at, 201.
+
+  San Joaquin River, the, 221, 241, 242, 245, 256.
+
+  San José, California, 196, 200;
+    mission, 195.
+
+  San José, picture of, 49, 50.
+
+  San Juan Bautista, mission of, 186.
+
+  San Juan Islands, 343, 344.
+
+  San Luis Obispo, California, 172.
+
+  San Luis Rey, mission of, 117, 119, 120.
+
+  San Mateo, California, 198, 199;
+    New Mexico, 29.
+
+  San Pedro, harbour of, 144, 145.
+
+  _San Salvador_, the, 171.
+
+  San Xavier del Bac, mission of, 91-94.
+
+  Sand-storms in Death Valley, 176, 177.
+
+  Sangre de Cristo Range, the, 18, 22.
+
+  Santa Barbara, 166-172, 202, 217;
+    architecture, 170;
+    Arlington Hotel, 170, 171;
+    college, 170;
+    contrasts in, 167;
+    Old Town section, 168;
+    Plaza del Mar, 169;
+    State Street, 169, 170.
+
+  Santa Barbara Islands, the, 146, 151-3.
+
+  Santa Catalina Island, 146-151, 153.
+
+  Santa Clara Valley, the, 8, 190-210;
+    air in, 206;
+    blossom-time in, 192, 193;
+    climate, 200, 201;
+    land values, 204, 205;
+    productiveness of, 193-5;
+    schools in, 196;
+    ultrafashionable colonies of, 198.
+
+  Santa Clara Valley (southern), 262, 263.
+
+  Santa Cruz Island, 151-3.
+
+  Santa Fé, 16-21, 56;
+    governor’s palace, 16;
+    history, 19;
+    Mexicans in, 29;
+    name of, 19;
+    possibilities of, 17, 18;
+    scenery, 16.
+
+  Santa Fé, Prescott & Phœnix Railway, 81.
+
+  Santa Fé Trail, the, 18, 20.
+
+  Santa Monica, California, 143.
+
+  Santa Paula, California, 263, 264.
+
+  Santa Rita Mountains, 92.
+
+  Santa Ynez, inn near, 180;
+    mission of, 179.
+
+  Santa Ynez Range, the, 178, 216.
+
+  Saugus, California, 262, 263.
+
+  Scenic Highway, the, 21, 22.
+
+  Schoolhouses in the Santa Clara, 196.
+
+  Seals, of Santa Cruz, 151.
+
+  Seaside resorts, California, 142-4.
+
+  Seattle, 202;
+    compared with Portland, 340, 341, 346.
+
+  Sentinel Hotel, the, 249, 250.
+
+  Sequim Prairie, 344.
+
+  Sequoia trees, the, 254, 255, 257, 258.
+
+  Serra, Father Junipero, 108, 115, 121, 130, 180, 181, 183, 184, 195,
+        198, 210, 246.
+
+  Servilleta, 56.
+
+  Sespe Valley, the, 164.
+
+  Sheep-raising, 26-28, 262.
+
+  Sherman, 183.
+
+  Sierra Nevada Range, the, 160, 232, 241, 265-7.
+
+  Silver City, New Mexico, 32.
+
+  Siskiyous, the, 324.
+
+  Siwash Indians, 415, 416, 447-451.
+
+  Skeena, the, 390, 394, 395.
+
+  Skylanders, 42 _et seq._
+
+  Smiley Heights, California, 131.
+
+  Smith, Captain Jedediah, 56, 115, 210.
+
+  Smithsonian Institution, 40.
+
+  Sol Duc Hot Springs, 344.
+
+  Southern California, 97.
+
+  Spanish dominion in Mexico, overthrow of, 19.
+
+  Sprockets, John D., 109.
+
+  Stage-coaches, 90.
+
+  Stanford, Leland, 197, 210.
+
+  Stevenson, Robert Louis, 183.
+
+  Stockton, California, 244-6.
+
+  Stony Creek, B. C., 415, 416.
+
+  Studebaker, John, 229.
+
+  Suisun Bay, 220, 221.
+
+  Summerland, California, 167.
+
+  Summit, California, 232, 233.
+
+  Superstition Mountains, 93.
+
+  Susanville, 277, 280-2.
+
+  Sutler, John Augustus, 227, 228, 234.
+
+  Sutler’s Fort, 227, 228, 234.
+
+  Swamp and Drowned Lands Act, 260.
+
+
+  Tacoma, 336-8, 346.
+
+  Tahoe. (See _Lake Tahoe_.)
+
+  Tahoe Tavern, 268.
+
+  Tallac, California, 232.
+
+  Taos, New Mexico, 22, 55-58;
+    houses, 45, 57.
+
+  Tehachapi Range, the, 97, 241, 261.
+
+  Telegraph stations, frontier, 403, 404.
+
+  Tennis Club, Ojai Valley, 164.
+
+  Tent City, at Coronado, 112, 113.
+
+  Tête Jaune Pass, the, 379, 380.
+
+  The Dalles, Oregon, 276, 277, 286-8, 291.
+
+  Tiles, Spanish, 168.
+
+  Tillamook County, Oregon, 326, 327.
+
+  Tingley, Madame, 103.
+
+  Torrey pine, the, 118.
+
+  Trail riding, 260.
+
+  Trees, California Big, 254, 255, 257, 258.
+
+  Trevet, Victor, 293.
+
+  Truck-gardens, 221, 222.
+
+  Truckee, California, 233-5, 268, 269.
+
+  Tucson, Arizona, 80, 81, 92, 94.
+
+  Tucson Farms, 110.
+
+  Tuna Club, the, at Avalon, 150, 151.
+
+  Tuna fishing, 140-151.
+
+  Turquoise deposits, 32.
+
+  Tyler, President, 296.
+
+
+  Union Pacific Railroad, 21.
+
+  Universal Brotherhood, the, 103.
+
+  University of California, Greek Theatre at, 202.
+
+  University of New Mexico, the, 15.
+
+
+  Vallejo, California, 219, 220.
+
+  Vancouver, B. C., 116, 349, 350, 363-7, 369.
+
+  Vancouver Island, 345, 370-6, 442;
+    fish and game, 375;
+    Island Highway, 371-4;
+    motoring on, 372;
+    railway, 381;
+    scenery, 373, 374.
+
+  van Dyke, Dr. Henry, 130.
+
+  Vargas, De, 19.
+
+  Venice, California, 143, 144.
+
+  Ventura, California, 162.
+
+  Victoria, B. C., 346, 363-370;
+    Harbour, 367, 368.
+
+  Visalia, California, 246, 257, 258.
+
+  _Vittoria_, the, 171.
+
+  Vizcaino, 181.
+
+
+  Wagon-trains, 20, 21, 398.
+
+  Wah, the brothers, 7, 8.
+
+  Walla Walla, 295.
+
+  Wallace, General Lew, 16.
+
+  Washington, 331 _et seq._;
+    character of the country, 334, 335;
+    climate, 335;
+    land clearing, 334, 335;
+    names of towns, 333;
+    roads, 331, 332;
+    sign-posts, 333, 334;
+    water-power, 335.
+
+  Water discovery in the Mimbres Valley, 5, 6.
+
+  Waterfalls of the Columbia River, 300, 301.
+
+  Wawona, California, 254.
+
+  Webster, secretary of state, 296.
+
+  Well-digging in New Mexico, 11.
+
+  White Rock Cañon, 23.
+
+  Whitman, 295, 296.
+
+  Willamette River, the, 309-311, 317.
+
+  Wood, Mr., 150.
+
+  Wool industry, the, 26-28.
+
+
+  Yavapai Club, the, 81.
+
+  Yosemite Valley, the, 246-260;
+    Indian settlement, 250-2;
+    Sentinel Hotel, 249, 250;
+    variety of recreation, 253.
+
+  Yukon Telegraph Trail, 395.
+
+  Yuma, Arizona, 83-85, 97, 98, 102, 110.
+
+[Illustration: MAP OF THE FAR WEST, FROM NEW MEXICO TO BRITISH COLUMBIA,
+SHOWING THE ROUTE FOLLOWED BY THE AUTHOR]
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75697 ***
diff --git a/75697-h/75697-h.htm b/75697-h/75697-h.htm
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4476ce3
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75697-h/75697-h.htm
@@ -0,0 +1,16233 @@
+<!DOCTYPE html>
+<html lang="en">
+<head>
+    <meta charset="UTF-8">
+    <title>
+      The End of the Trail | Project Gutenberg
+    </title>
+    <link rel="icon" href="images/cover.jpg" type="image/x-cover">
+    <style>
+
+a {
+    text-decoration: none;
+}
+
+body {
+    margin-left: 10%;
+    margin-right: 10%;
+}
+
+h1,h2,h3 {
+    text-align: center;
+    clear: both;
+}
+
+h2.nobreak {
+    page-break-before: avoid;
+}
+
+hr.chap {
+    margin-top: 2em;
+    margin-bottom: 2em;
+    clear: both;
+    width: 65%;
+    margin-left: 17.5%;
+    margin-right: 17.5%;
+}
+
+img.w100 {
+    width: 100%;
+}
+
+div.chapter {
+    page-break-before: always;
+}
+
+ul {
+    list-style-type: none;
+}
+
+li.indx {
+    margin-top: .5em;
+    padding-left: 2em;
+    text-indent: -2em;
+}
+
+li.ifrst {
+    margin-top: 2em;
+    padding-left: 2em;
+    text-indent: -2em;
+}
+
+li.isub1 {
+    padding-left: 4em;
+    text-indent: -2em;
+}
+
+p {
+    margin-top: 0.5em;
+    text-align: justify;
+    margin-bottom: 0.5em;
+    text-indent: 1em;
+}
+
+table {
+    margin: 1em auto 1em auto;
+    max-width: 40em;
+    border-collapse: collapse;
+}
+
+td {
+    padding-left: 2.25em;
+    padding-right: 0.25em;
+    vertical-align: top;
+    text-indent: -2em;
+    text-align: justify;
+}
+
+.tdc {
+    text-align: center;
+}
+
+.tdr {
+    text-align: right;
+}
+
+.tdpg {
+    vertical-align: bottom;
+    text-align: right;
+    white-space: nowrap;
+}
+
+.caption p {
+    text-align: center;
+    margin-bottom: 1em;
+    font-size: 90%;
+    text-indent: 0em;
+}
+
+.caption table {
+    min-width: 100%;
+    margin-bottom: 0;
+}
+
+.caption td {
+    padding-left: 0.25em;
+}
+
+.caption .td3 {
+    width: 33%;
+}
+
+.caption .td2 {
+    width: 49%;
+}
+
+.caption p.attr {
+    text-align: left;
+    font-size: 85%;
+    margin-bottom: 0;
+}
+
+.center {
+    text-align: center;
+    text-indent: 0em;
+}
+
+.dedication {
+    text-align: center;
+    text-indent: 0em;
+    line-height: 1.8em;
+}
+
+.figcenter {
+    margin: auto;
+    text-align: center;
+}
+
+.larger {
+    font-size: 150%;
+}
+
+.noindent {
+    text-indent: 0em;
+}
+
+.pagenum {
+    position: absolute;
+    right: 4%;
+    font-size: smaller;
+    text-align: right;
+    font-style: normal;
+}
+
+.poetry-container {
+    text-align: center;
+}
+
+.poetry {
+    display: inline-block;
+    text-align: left;
+}
+
+.poetry .stanza {
+    margin: 1em 0em 1em 0em;
+}
+
+.poetry .verse {
+    padding-left: 3em;
+}
+
+.poetry .indent0 {
+    text-indent: -3em;
+}
+
+.poetry .indent2 {
+    text-indent: -2em;
+}
+
+.right {
+    text-align: right;
+}
+
+.smaller {
+    font-size: 80%;
+}
+
+.smcap {
+    font-variant: small-caps;
+    font-style: normal;
+}
+
+.tb {
+    margin-top: 2em;
+}
+
+.titlepage {
+    text-align: center;
+    margin-top: 3em;
+    text-indent: 0em;
+}
+
+.x-ebookmaker img {
+    max-width: 100%;
+    width: auto;
+    height: auto;
+}
+
+.x-ebookmaker .poetry {
+    display: block;
+    margin-left: 1.5em;
+}
+
+.illowp100 {width: 100%;}
+.illowp50 {width: 50%;}
+.x-ebookmaker .illowp50 {width: 100%;}
+
+    </style>
+  </head>
+<body>
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75697 ***</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_i"></a>[i]</span></p>
+
+<h1>THE END OF THE TRAIL</h1>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus01" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus01.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><p class="attr"><i>From a photograph by H. A.
+  Erickson, Coronado, Cal.</i></p>
+  <p>THE PROMISED LAND.</p>
+  <p>Looking southward to the Gulf of California—and Mexico.</p></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="BOOKS_BY_E_ALEXANDER_POWELL">BOOKS BY E. ALEXANDER POWELL</h2>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">Published by CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS</span></p>
+
+</div>
+
+<table>
+  <tr>
+    <td>THE LAST FRONTIER: <span class="smcap">The White Man’s War for<br>
+    Civilization in Africa</span>. Illustrated. 8vo</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><i>net</i> $1.50</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>GENTLEMEN ROVERS. Illustrated. 8vo</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><i>net</i> $1.50</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>THE END OF THE TRAIL. Illustrated. 8vo</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><i>net</i> $3.00</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_ii"></a>[ii]</span></p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_iii"></a>[iii]</span></p>
+
+<p class="titlepage larger"><span class="smaller">THE</span><br>
+END OF THE TRAIL</p>
+
+<p class="center">THE FAR WEST FROM<br>
+NEW MEXICO TO BRITISH COLUMBIA</p>
+
+<p class="titlepage"><span class="smaller">BY</span><br>
+E. ALEXANDER POWELL, F.R.G.S.<br>
+<span class="smaller">AUTHOR OF “THE LAST FRONTIER,” “GENTLEMEN ROVERS,” ETC., ETC.</span></p>
+
+<p class="titlepage"><i>WITH FORTY-EIGHT FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS<br>
+AND A MAP</i></p>
+
+<p class="titlepage">NEW YORK<br>
+CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS<br>
+<span class="smaller">1914</span></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_iv"></a>[iv]</span></p>
+
+<p class="titlepage smaller"><span class="smcap">Copyright, 1914, by<br>
+CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS</span></p>
+
+<p class="center smaller">Published November, 1914</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter titlepage illowp100" id="signet" style="max-width: 9.375em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/signet.jpg" alt="">
+</figure>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_v"></a>[v]</span></p>
+
+<p class="dedication">TO<br>
+<span class="smaller">MY FRIEND AND FELLOW-ADVENTURER</span><br>
+ALBERT C. KUHN<br>
+<span class="smaller">OF<br>
+RANCHO YERBA BUENA<br>
+IN “THE VALLEY OF HEART’S DELIGHT”</span></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_vi"></a>[vi]</span></p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_vii"></a>[vii]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="FOREWORD">FOREWORD</h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>In the dim dawn of history the Aryans, forsaking
+the birthplace of the race upon the Caspian shore,
+poured through the passes of the Caucasus and peopled
+Europe. By caravel and merchantman adventuring
+Europeans crossed the western ocean and established
+a fringe of settlements along this continent’s eastern
+rim. The American pioneers, taking up the historic
+march, slowly but inexorably pressed westward, from
+the Hudson to the Ohio, from the Ohio to the Mississippi,
+from the Mississippi across the plains, across the
+Rockies, until athwart the line of their advance they
+found another ocean. They could go no farther, for
+beyond that ocean lay the overpopulated countries of
+the yellow race. The white man had completed his
+age-long migration toward the beckoning West; his
+march was finished; in the golden lands which look
+upon the Pacific he had come to the End of the Trail.</p>
+
+<p>In the great march which substituted the wheat-field
+for the desert, the orchard for the forest, the
+work was done by the hardiest breed of adventurers
+that ever foreran the columns of civilisation—the
+Pioneers. And the pioneer has always lived on the
+frontier. Most people believe that there is no longer
+any quarter of this continent that can properly be<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_viii"></a>[viii]</span>
+called the frontier and that the pioneer is as extinct
+as the buffalo. To prove that they are wrong I have
+written this book. Though the gambler and the gun-fighter
+have vanished before the storm of public disapproval;
+though the bison no longer roams the ranges;
+though the express rider has given way to the express-train;
+in the hinterland of that vast region which
+sweeps westward and northward from the Pecos to
+the Skeena, and which includes New Mexico, Arizona,
+California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia,
+frontier conditions still endure and the frontiersman is
+still to be found. In the unexplored and unexploited
+portions of this, “the Last West,” white-topped prairie
+schooners—full sisters of those which crossed the
+plains in ’49—creak into the wilderness in the wake of
+the home seeker; the settler chops his little farmstead
+from the virgin forest and rears his cabin of logs from
+the trees which grew upon the site; mile-long pack-trains
+wend their way into the northern wild; six-horse
+Concord coaches tear along the roads amid
+rolling clouds of dust, their scarlet bodies swaying
+drunkenly upon their leathern springs; out in the back
+country, where the roads run out and the trails begin,
+the cow-puncher still rides the ranges in his picturesque
+panoply of high-crowned Stetson and Angora chaps
+and vivid shirt. But this is the last call. It is the
+last chance to see a nation in the primeval stage of
+its existence. In a few more years, a very few, there
+will be no place on this continent, or on any continent,
+that can truthfully be called the frontier, and with it<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_ix"></a>[ix]</span>
+will disappear, never to return, those stern and hardy
+figures—the pioneer, the prospector, the packer, the
+puncher—who won for us the West.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>real</i> West—and by the term I do not mean
+that sun-kissed, flower-carpeted coast zone, with its
+orange groves and apple orchards, its palatial mansions
+and luxurious hotels, its fashionable resorts and
+teeming, all-of-a-sudden cities, which stretches from
+San Diego to Vancouver and which to the Eastern
+visitor represents “the West”—cannot be seen from
+the terraces of tourist hostelries or the observation
+platforms of transcontinental trains. Because I wished
+to visit those portions of the West which cannot be
+viewed from a car-window and because I wished to acquaint
+myself with the characteristics and problems
+and ideals of the people who dwell in them, I travelled
+from Mexico to the borders of Alaska by motor-car—the
+only time, I believe, that a car has made that
+journey on its own wheels and under its own power.
+Because that journey was so crowded with incident
+and obstacle and adventure, and because the incidents
+and obstacles and adventures thus encountered so
+graphically illustrate the conditions which prevail in
+“the Last West,” is my excuse for having to a certain
+extent made a personal narrative of the following
+chapters.</p>
+
+<p>Without entering into a tedious recital of distances
+and road conditions, I have outlined certain
+routes which the motorist who contemplates turning
+the bonnet of his car westward might follow with profit<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_x"></a>[x]</span>
+and pleasure. With no desire to usurp the guide-book’s
+place, I have deemed it as important to describe
+that enchanted littoral which has become the nation’s
+winter playground as to depict that back country
+which the tourist seldom sees. Though I hold no
+brief for boards of trade and kindred organisations, I
+have incorporated the more significant facts and figures
+as to land values, soils, crops, climates, and resources
+which every prospective home-seeker wishes to know.
+But, more than anything else, I have tried to convey
+something of the spell of that big, open, unfenced, keep-on-the-grass,
+do-as-you-please, glad-to-see-you land and
+of the spirit of energy, industry, and determination
+which animates the kindly, hospitable, big-hearted,
+broad-minded, open-handed men who dwell there.
+They are the modern Argonauts, the present-day
+Pioneers. To them, across the miles, I lift my glass.</p>
+
+<p class="right"><span class="smcap">E. Alexander Powell.</span></p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xi"></a>[xi]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="CONTENTS">CONTENTS</h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<table>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr smaller">CHAPTER</td>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdpg smaller">PAGE</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">I.</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">Conquerors of Sun and Sand</span></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#I">1</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">II.</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">The Skylanders</span></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#II">33</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">III.</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">Chopping a Path to To-Morrow</span></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#III">61</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">IV.</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">The Land of Dreams-Come-True</span></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#IV">95</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">V.</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">Where Gold Grows on Trees</span></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#V">123</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">VI.</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">The Coast of Fairyland</span></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#VI">155</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">VII.</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">The Valley of Heart’s Delight</span></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#VII">187</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">VIII.</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">The Modern Argonauts</span></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#VIII">211</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">IX.</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">The Inland Empire</span></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#IX">237</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">X.</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">“Where Rolls the Oregon”</span></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#X">271</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">XI.</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">A Frontier Arcady</span></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#XI">305</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">XII.</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">Breaking the Wilderness</span></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#XII">329</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">XIII.</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">Clinching the Rivets of Empire</span></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#XIII">351</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">XIV.</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">Back of Beyond</span></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#XIV">387</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr">XV.</td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">The Map that is Half Unrolled</span></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#XV">419</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td class="tdr"></td>
+    <td><span class="smcap">Index</span></td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#INDEX">455</a></td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xii"></a>[xii]</span></p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xiii"></a>[xiii]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="ILLUSTRATIONS">ILLUSTRATIONS</h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<table>
+  <tr>
+    <td>The Promised Land</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus01"><i>Frontispiece</i></a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdpg smaller">FACING PAGE</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>A Desert Dawn in New Mexico</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus02">4</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Santa Fé: the Most Picturesque City between the Oceans</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus03">18</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Remains of an Ancient Civilisation</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus04">24</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>The Land of the Turquoise Sky</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus05">38</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Acoma: Supposed Ancient Site and Present Site</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus06">40</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Acoma as It is To-Day</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus07">44</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Acoma Hunter Home from the Hunt</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus08">48</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Acoma Artisans</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus09">50</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>“Dance Mad!”</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus10">52</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Young Acomans</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus11">54</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>The Education of a Young Hopi</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus12">56</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>The Pyramid-Pueblo of Taos</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus13">58</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>The Passing of the Puncher</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus14">64</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Where the Roads Run Out and the Trails Begin</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus15">72</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>The Trail of a Thousand Thrills</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus16">88</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Throwing the Diamond Hitch</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus17">90</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Scenes in the Motor Journey Through Arizona</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus18">98</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Not in Catalonia but in California</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus19">120</a><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xiv"></a>[xiv]</span></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>A Modern Version of the Sermon on the Mount</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus20">130</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Santa Barbara, a City of Contrasts</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus21">168</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>The Mission of Santa Barbara</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus22">170</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Lake Tahoe from the Slopes of the High Sierras</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus23">232</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>The Yosemite—and a Lady Who Didn’t Know Fear</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus24">250</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Yosemite Youngsters, White and Red</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus25">252</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>The Greatest Oil Fields in the World</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus26">260</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Over the Tehachapis</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus27">262</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>The Overland Mail</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus28">274</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>In the Oregon Hinterland</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus29">284</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>“Where Rolls the Oregon”</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus30">300</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Where Rods Bend Double and Reels Go Whir-r-r-r</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus31">324</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>What the Road-Builders Have Done in Washington</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus32">332</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>The Unexplored Olympics</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus33">344</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Where the Salmon Come from</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus34">348</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Outposts of Civilisation</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus35">354</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Breaking the Wilderness</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus36">356</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Pack-Horses and a Pack-Dog</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus37">358</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>In the Great, Still Land</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus38">362</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Sport on Vancouver Island</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus39">376</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Life at the Back of Beyond</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus40">380</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Transport on America’s Last Frontier</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus41">382</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Transport on America’s Last Frontier</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus42">384</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Scenes on the Cariboo Trail</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus43">400</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Some Ladies from the Upper Skeena</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus44">422</a><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xv"></a>[xv]</span></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Where No Motor-Car Had Ever Gone: Some Incidents of Mr. Powell’s Journey Through the British Columbian Wilderness</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus45">428</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Some Siwash Cemeteries</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus46">448</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Heraldry in the Hinterland</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus47">450</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>A Land of Sublimity and Magnificence and Grandeur, of Gloom and
+    Loneliness and Dread</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#illus48">452</a></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Map of the Far West, from New Mexico to British Columbia, Showing
+    the Route Followed by the Author</td>
+    <td class="tdpg"><a href="#map"><i>at end of volume</i></a></td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_1"></a>[1]</span></p>
+
+<h1>THE END OF THE TRAIL</h1>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="I">I<br>
+<span class="smaller">CONQUERORS OF SUN AND SAND</span></h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_2"></a>[2]</span></p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">“The song of the deed in the doing, of the work still hot from the hand;</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Of the yoke of man laid friendly-wise on the neck of a tameless land.</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">While your merchandise is weighing, we will bit and bridle and rein</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">The floods of the storm-rocked mountains and lead them down to the plain;</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">And the foam-ribbed, dark-hued waters, tired from that mighty race,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Shall lie at the feet of palm and vine and know their appointed place;</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">And out of that subtle union, desert and mountain-flood,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Shall be homes for a nation’s choosing, where no homes else had stood.”</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_3"></a>[3]</span></p>
+
+<h3>I<br>
+<span class="smaller">CONQUERORS OF SUN AND SAND</span></h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>“Isn’t this invigorating?” said a passenger on the
+Sunset Limited to a lounger on a station platform
+as he inhaled delightedly the crisp, clear air of New
+Mexico.</p>
+
+<p>“No, sir,” replied the man, who happened to be a
+native filled with civic pride; “this is Deming.”</p>
+
+<p>The story <i>may</i> be true, of course; but if it isn’t it
+ought to be, for it is wholly typical of the attitude of
+the citizens of the youngest-but-one of our national
+family. Indeed, I had not spent twenty-four hours
+within the borders of the State before I had discovered
+that the most characteristic and likeable qualities of its
+inhabitants are their pride and faith in the land wherein
+they dwell. And this despite the fact that their neighbours
+across the line in Arizona refer to New Mexico
+slightingly—though not without some truth—as a State
+“where they dig for water and plough for wood.”</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps no region in the world, certainly none in
+the United States, has changed so remarkably in the
+space of a single decade. Ten years ago the only things
+suggested by a mention of New Mexico were cowboys,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_4"></a>[4]</span>
+Hopi snake-dances, Navajo blankets, and Harvey eating-houses.
+Five years ago Deming was as typical a
+cow-town as you could find west of the Pecos. Gin-palaces
+and gambling-hells were running twenty-four
+hours a day; cattlemen in Angora chaps and high-crowned
+sombreros lounged under the shade of the
+wooden awnings and used the sidewalks of yellow pine
+for cuspidors; wiry, unkempt cow-ponies stood in rows
+along the hitching rails which lined a street ankle-deep
+in dust. Those were the careless days of “chaps and
+taps and latigo-straps,” when writers of the Wild West
+school of fiction could find characters, satisfying as
+though made to their order, in every barroom, and
+groups of spurred and booted figures awaited the
+moving-picture man (who had not then come into his
+own) on every corner.</p>
+
+<p>All southern New Mexico was held by experts—at
+least they called themselves experts—to be a waterless
+and next-to-good-for-nothing waste. Government
+engineers had traversed the region and, without considering
+it worth the time or trouble to sink test wells,
+had written it down in their reports as being a worthless
+desert; and the gentlemen who make the school
+geographies and the atlases followed suit by painting
+it a speckled yellow, like the Sahara and the Kalahari.
+Real-estate operators, racing westward to earn a few
+speculative millions in California, glanced from the
+windows of their Pullmans at the tedious expanse of
+sun-swept sand and, with a regretful sigh that Providence
+had been so careless as to forget the water, settled<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_5"></a>[5]</span>
+back to their magazines and their cigars. So the
+cattlemen who had turned their longhorns in among
+the straggling scrub, to get such a living as they could
+from the sparse desert grasses, were left in undisturbed
+possession, and if their uniform success in finding water
+wherever they sank their infrequent wells suggested
+any agricultural possibilities they were careful to keep
+the thought to themselves.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus02" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus02.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><p class="attr"><i>From a photograph
+  copyright by Fred Harvey.</i></p>
+  <p>A DESERT DAWN IN NEW MEXICO.</p></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>One day, however, one of the men in the Pullman,
+instead of leaning back regretfully, descended from the
+train, hired a horse, and rode out into the mesquite-dotted
+waste. He told the liveryman that he was a
+prospector, and, in a manner of speaking, he was.
+Being, incidentally, the manager of one of the largest
+and most profitable ranches in California, he was as
+familiar with the vagaries of the desert as a cowboy
+is with the caprices of his pony; and, moreover, he
+understood the science of irrigation from I to N.
+After a few days of quiet investigation he dropped
+into the commissioner’s office in Deming one morning
+and filed a claim for several hundred acres of land.
+Most of those who heard about it said that he was
+merely a fool of a tenderfoot who was throwing away
+his time and money and who ought to have a guardian
+appointed to take care of him, but some of the wise
+old cattlemen looked worried. Within a fortnight he
+had erected his machinery and was drilling for water.
+And wherever his wells went down, there water came
+up: fine, clear, sparkling water—gallons and gallons of
+it. It soused the thirsty desert and turned its good-for-nothing<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_6"></a>[6]</span>
+sand into good-for-anything loam. The
+seeds which the far-seeing Californian planted,
+sprouted, and the sprouts became blades, and the
+blades shot into stalks of alfalfa and corn and cane—and
+the future of all southern New Mexico was assured.</p>
+
+<p>The news of the discovery of water in the Mimbres
+valley and of the miracles that had been performed
+through its agency spread over the country
+as though by wireless, and sun-tanned, horny-handed
+men from half the States in the Union began to pile
+into Deming by every train, eager to take up the land
+while it was still to be had under the hospitable terms
+of the Homestead and Desert Land acts. It was in
+1910 that the Californian, John Hund, sunk his first
+well; when I was in the office of the United States
+commissioner in Deming four years later I found that
+the nearest unoccupied land was sixteen miles from
+the city limits.</p>
+
+<p>Should you ever have occasion to fly over New
+Mexico in an aeroplane you will have no difficulty
+whatever in recognising the Mimbres valley; viewed
+from the sky it looks exactly like a bright-green rug
+spread across one end of a vast hardwood floor. Most
+of the valley holdings were, I noticed, of but ten or
+twenty acres, comparatively few of them being more
+than fifty, for the New Mexican homesteader has found
+that his bank-account increases faster if he cultivates
+ten acres thoroughly rather than a hundred superficially.
+This lesson they have had hammered into<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_7"></a>[7]</span>
+them not alone from experience but from observing
+the operations of a couple of almond-eyed brethren
+named Wah, hailing originally, I believe, from Canton,
+who own a twenty-three-acre truck-farm near Deming.
+Those vineyards on the slopes of Capri and those
+farmsteads clinging to the rocky hillsides of Calabria,
+where soil of any kind is so precious that every inch is
+tended with pathetic care, seem but crude and amateurish
+efforts in agriculture when compared with the efforts
+to which these Chinese brothers have carried their
+intensive farming. Though watered only by a small
+and primitive well, their farm graphically illustrates
+what can be accomplished by paying attention to those
+little things which the American farmer is accustomed
+contemptuously to disregard, as well as being an object-lesson
+in the remarkable variety of fruits and vegetables
+which the valley is capable of producing. These
+Chinamen make every one of their acres produce three
+crops of vegetables a year. Not a foot of soil is wasted.
+They even begrudge the narrow strips which are
+used for paths. Fruit-trees and grape-vines border the
+banks of the irrigation channels, and peas, beans, and
+tomatoes are grown between melon rows. A drove of
+corpulent porkers attend voraciously to the garden
+refuse and even the reservoir has had its usefulness
+doubled by being stocked with fish. Were the New
+Mexicans notoriously <i>not</i> lotus-eaters, the Brothers
+Wah would doubtless find still another use for their
+reservoir by raising in it the Egyptian water-lily. It
+is paying attention to such relatively insignificant<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_8"></a>[8]</span>
+details as these which makes J. Chinaman, Esquire,
+the best gardener in the world. It pays, too, for they
+told me in Deming that the Wahs, from their twenty-three-acre
+holding, are increasing their bank-account
+at the rate of eight thousand dollars a year. After
+noting the cordiality with which they were greeted by
+the president of the local bank, I did not doubt it. I
+should like to have a bank president greet me the way
+he did them.</p>
+
+<p>I have seen many remarkable farming countries—in
+Rhodesia, for example, and the hinterland of
+Morocco, and the Crimea, and the prairie provinces of
+Canada, not to mention the Santa Clara and the Imperial
+valleys of California—but I can recall none
+where soil and climate seemed to have combined so
+effectively to befriend the farmer as in the valley of the
+Mimbres. Imagine what a comfort it must be to do
+your farming in a region where you will never have
+to worry about how long it will be before it rains, nor
+to tramp about in the mud afterward. As the annual
+rainfall in this portion of New Mexico does not exceed
+eight inches, there is a generous margin left for sunshine.
+Instead of praying for rain, and then cursing
+his luck because it doesn’t come, or because it comes
+too heavily, the New Mexican farmer strolls over to his
+artesian well and throws over an electric switch which
+sets the pump agoing. When his fields are sufficiently
+irrigated he throws the switch back again. From
+the view-point of health it would be hard to improve
+upon the climate of the Mimbres valley, or, for that<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_9"></a>[9]</span>
+matter, of any other portion of New Mexico, its elevation
+of four thousand three hundred feet, taken with
+the fact that it is in the same latitude as Algeria and
+Japan and southernmost California, giving it summers
+which are hot without being humid or oppressive and
+winters which are never uncomfortably cold.</p>
+
+<p>Like their neighbours in other parts of the Southwest,
+the farmers of southern New Mexico have gone
+daft over alfalfa. To me—I might as well admit it
+frankly—one patch of alfalfa looks exactly like another,
+and they all look extremely uninteresting, but
+I suppose that if they were netting me from fifty to
+seventy-five dollars an acre a year, as they are their
+owners, I would take a more lively interest in them.
+I never arrived at a town in New Mexico, dirty, hungry,
+and tired, but that there was a group of eager
+boosters with a dust-covered automobile awaiting me
+at the station.</p>
+
+<p>“Jump right in,” they would say. “We have an
+alfalfa field over here that we want to show you. It’s
+only about thirty miles across the desert and we’ll
+get you back before the hotel dining-room is closed.”</p>
+
+<p>They’re as enthusiastic about a patch of alfalfa
+in New Mexico as the Esquimaux of Labrador are
+about a stranded whale.</p>
+
+<p>If you have an idea that you would like to be a
+hardy frontiersman and wear a broad-brimmed hat
+and become the owner of a ranch somewhere in that
+region which lies between the Gila and the Pecos, it
+were well to disabuse yourself of several erroneous<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_10"></a>[10]</span>
+impressions which seem to prevail about life in the
+Southwest. In the first place, you can dress just as
+much like the ranchmen whom you have seen depicted
+in the magazines as you wish—fleecy <i>chaparejos</i> and
+a horsehair hat band and a pair of spurs that jingle
+like an approaching four-in-hand when the wearer
+walks and all the rest of the paraphernalia—for they
+are a tolerant folk, are the New Mexicans, and have
+become accustomed to all sorts of queer doings by newcomers.
+In many respects they are the politest people
+that I know. When I was in New Mexico I carried a
+cane, and no one even smiled. But the newcomer
+must not imagine that he can gallop madly across the
+ranges, at least in the vicinity of the towns, for he is
+more likely than not to be hauled up before a justice
+of the peace and fined for trespassing on some one’s
+alfalfa field or cabbage patch. (Cabbages, though
+painfully prosaic, are about the most profitable crop
+you can grow in New Mexico; they pay as high as
+three hundred and fifty dollars an acre.) And the
+intending rancher must make up his mind that he
+must begin at the beginning. New Mexico is no place
+for the agriculturist <i>de luxe</i> who expects to sit on the
+piazza of his ranch-house and watch the hired men do
+the work. No, sirree! It is a roll-up-your-sleeves-spit-on-your-hands-and-pitch-in
+land where every one works
+and is proud of it. And there is always enough to do,
+goodness knows! This is virgin soil, remember, and
+first of all it has to be cleared of the <i>piñon</i> and mesquite
+and chaparral which cover it. This clearing and<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_11"></a>[11]</span>
+grubbing costs on an average, so I was told, about
+five dollars an acre, but you get a supply of fire-wood
+in return—and there’s nothing that makes a cheerier
+blaze on a winter’s night than a hearth heaped with
+the roots of mesquite. In other countries you chop
+down your fuel with an axe; in New Mexico you dig it
+up with a hoe. Then there is the matter of well
+digging, which, including the cost of boring, machinery,
+and housing, works out at from fifteen to twenty-five
+dollars an acre. Since the construction of several
+large power-plants, the cost of pumping has been
+greatly reduced by the use of electricity. It is quite
+possible, of course, for the five or ten acre man to secure
+tracts close to town with all the preliminary work
+done for him, water being provided from a central
+pumping plant and his pro-rata share of the capitalised
+cost added to the price of his land, which may
+be purchased, like a piano or an encyclopedia, on the
+instalment plan. That will be about all, I think, for
+facts and figures.</p>
+
+<p>One of the most interesting things about the settlers
+with whom I talked in southern New Mexico is
+that, so far as any previous knowledge of agriculture
+was concerned, most of them were the veriest amateurs.
+One man whom I met had taught school in
+Iowa for a quarter of a century, but along in middle
+life he decided that there was more money to be made
+in teaching corn and cabbages how to shoot than there
+was in teaching the same thing to the young idea.
+Another was a Methodist clergyman from Kentucky<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_12"></a>[12]</span>
+who told me that he had never had a real conception
+of the hell-fire he preached about until he started in
+one scorching July morning to sink an artesian well in
+the desert. Still a third successful settler had been a
+physician in Oklahoma, while there are any number of
+“long-horned Texicans,” as the Texan cattlemen are
+called, who have moved over into New Mexico and
+become farmers. Scattered through the country are
+a few Englishmen; not of the club-lounging, bar-loafing,
+remittance-man type so common in Canada
+and Australia, but energetic, hard-working youngsters
+who are earnestly engaged in building homes for
+themselves in a new country and under an adopted
+flag. Not all of the Englishmen who have come out to
+New Mexico have proven so steady or successful,
+however, for a few years ago an English syndicate
+purchased a Spanish land grant of some two million
+acres in the vicinity of Raton and sent out a complete
+equipment of British managers, superintendents, foremen,
+butlers, valets, men servants, lodge keepers, gardeners,
+coachmen, and other functionaries, not to mention
+coaches, tandem carts, a pack of foxhounds, and
+other paraphernalia of the sporting life. A man who
+witnessed their detrainment at Raton told me that it
+was more fun than watching the unloading of the
+Greatest Show on Earth. It was a great life those
+Englishmen led while it lasted—tea at four every
+afternoon, evening clothes for dinner, and then a few
+rubbers of bridge—but it ended in the property being
+taken over at forced sale by a group of hard-headed<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_13"></a>[13]</span>
+Hollanders, who harnessed the four-in-hands to ploughs,
+used the tandem carts for hauling wood, set the hounds
+to churning butter, and are making the big place pay
+dividends regularly.</p>
+
+<p>Some two hundred miles north of Deming as the
+mail-train goes is Albuquerque, the metropolis of the
+State—if the term metropolis can properly be applied
+to a place with not much over twelve thousand inhabitants—set
+squarely in the centre of the one hundred
+and twenty-two thousand square mile parallelogram
+which is New Mexico. Albuquerque is a railway centre
+of considerable importance, for from there one can
+get through cars north to Denver and Pike’s Peak, south
+to the borders of Mexico and its revolutions, and west
+to the Golden Gate. One of the things that struck me
+most forcibly about Albuquerque—and the observation
+is equally applicable to all the rest of New Mexico—is
+that instead of having weather they enjoy climate.
+It is pretty hard to beat a land where the
+moths have a chance to eat holes in your overcoat but
+never in your bed blankets. Climate is, in fact, Albuquerque’s
+most valuable asset, and she trades on
+it for all she is worth—and it is worth to her several
+million dollars per annum. It is one of the few cities
+that I know of where they want and welcome invalids
+and say so frankly. They could not do otherwise with
+any consistency, however, for half the leading citizens
+of the town arrived there on their backs, clinging
+desperately to life, and were lifted out of the car
+window on a stretcher. These one-time invalids are<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_14"></a>[14]</span>
+to-day as husky, energetic, up-and-doing men as you
+will find anywhere. Heretofore Albuquerque has been
+much too busy catering to the wants of the thousands
+of tourists and invalids who step onto its station platform
+each year to pay much attention to agricultural
+development; but bordering on the town are several
+thousand acres of as fine, healthy desert as you will
+find anywhere outside of the Sahara. They are enclosed,
+as though by a great garden wall, by the Manzano
+ranges, and the gentleman who whirled me
+across the billiard-table surface of the desert in his
+motor-car told me that the government now has an
+irrigation project under consideration which, by damming
+the waters of the Rio Grande, will reclaim upward
+of four hundred thousand acres of this arid land.
+And the great government irrigation projects now in
+operation elsewhere in the Southwest have shown
+that water can produce as many things from a desert
+as the late Monsieur Hermann could from a gentleman’s
+hat. So one of these days, I expect, the country
+around Albuquerque, from the city limits to the distant
+foot-hills, will be as green with alfalfa as Ireland
+is with shamrock.</p>
+
+<p>They have a commercial club in Albuquerque
+that <i>is</i> a club. At first I thought I had wandered into
+a hotel by mistake, for, with its spacious lobby, its
+busy billiard-tables, its handsome rugs and furniture,
+and the mahogany desk with the solicitous clerk behind
+it, it is about as distantly related to the usual
+commercial club as one could well imagine. It gives<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_15"></a>[15]</span>
+those men in the community who are doing things,
+and the others who want to be doing things or ought
+to be doing things, a place where they can meet and
+discuss, over tall, thin glasses with ice tinkling in them,
+the perennial problems of taxes, pavements, irrigation,
+crops, fishing, house building, automobiles, and
+the climate. I would suggest to the club’s board of
+governors, however, that it take steps to remove the
+undertaker’s establishment which flanks the entrance.
+When one drops into a place to get some facts regarding
+the desirability of settling there, it is not exactly
+reassuring to be greeted by a pile of coffins.</p>
+
+<p>Whoever was responsible for the architecture of
+the University of New Mexico buildings, which stand
+in the outskirts of Albuquerque, deserves a metaphorical
+slap of commendation. New Mexico is a young
+State and not yet overly rich in this world’s goods, so
+that if, with their limited resources, they had attempted
+to erect collegiate buildings along the usual hackneyed
+lines, with Doric porticoes and gilded cupolas and all
+that sort of thing, the result would probably have
+looked more like a third-rate normal school than like
+a State university. But they did nothing of the sort.
+Instead, they erected buildings adapted from the ancient
+communal cliff dwellings, constructing them of
+the native adobe, which is durable, inexpensive, warm
+in winter and in summer cool. All the decorations,
+inside and out, are Indian symbols and pictures
+painted in dull colors upon the adobe walls. Thus,
+at a moderate cost, they have a group of buildings<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_16"></a>[16]</span>
+which typify the history of New Mexico and are in
+harmony with its strongly characteristic landscape;
+which are admirably suited to the climate; and which
+are unique among collegiate institutions in that they
+are modelled after those great houses in which the
+Hopi lived and worked before the dawn of history on
+the American continent.</p>
+
+<p>Santa Fé, the capital of the State, is, to my way
+of thinking, the quaintest and most fascinating city
+between the oceans. Very old, very sleepy, very picturesque,
+it presents more neglected opportunities
+than any place I know. I should like to have a chance
+to stage-manage Santa Fé, for the scenery, which
+ranks among the best efforts of the Great Scene Painter,
+is all set and the costumed actors are waiting in the
+wings for their cues. Give it the advertising it deserves
+and the curtain could be rung up to a capacity
+house. Where else within our borders is there a three-hundred-year-old
+palace whose red-tiled roof has sheltered
+nearly five-score governors—Spanish, Pueblo,
+Mexican, and American? (In a back room of the
+palace, as you doubtless know, General Lew Wallace,
+while governor of New Mexico, wrote “Ben Hur.”)
+Where else are Indians in scarlet blankets and beaded
+moccasins, their braided hair hanging in front of their
+shoulders in long plaits, as common sights in the streets
+as are traffic policemen on Broadway? Where else
+can you see groups of cow-punchers on sweating, dancing
+ponies and sullen-faced Mexicans in high-crowned
+hats and gaudy sashes, and dusty prospectors with<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_17"></a>[17]</span>
+their patient pack-mules plodding along behind them,
+and diminutive burros trotting to market under burdens
+so enormous that nothing can be seen of the
+burro but his ears and tail?</p>
+
+<p>Though at present it is only a sleepy and forgotten
+backwater, with the main arteries of commerce
+running along their steel channels a score of miles
+away, Santa Fé could be made, at a small expenditure
+of anything save energy and taste, one of the great
+tourist Meccas of America. To begin with, it is the
+only place still left in the United States where Buffalo
+Bill’s Wild West could merge into the landscape without
+causing a stampede. Those who know how much
+pains and money were spent by the municipality of
+Brussels in restoring a single square of that city to its
+original mediæval picturesqueness, whole blocks of
+brick and stone having to be torn down to produce the
+desired effect, will appreciate the possibilities of Santa
+Fé, where the necessary restorations have only to
+be made in inexpensive adobe. Desultory efforts are
+being made, it is true, to induce the residents to promote
+this scheme for a harmonious ensemble by restricting
+their architecture to those quaint and simple
+designs so characteristic of the country, the Board of
+Trade providing an object-lesson in the possibilities of
+the humble adobe by erecting a charming little two-room
+cottage, with an open fireplace, a veranda, and
+a pergola, at a total expense of one hundred dollars,
+but every now and then the sought-for architectural
+harmony is given a rude jolt by some one who could<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_18"></a>[18]</span>
+not resist the attractions of Queen Anne gables or
+Clydesdale piazza columns or Colonial red-brick-and-green-blinds.</p>
+
+<p>Set at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo Range, a
+mile above the level of the sea, with one of the kindliest
+all-the-year-round climates in the world, and with
+an atmosphere which is far more Oriental than American,
+Santa Fé has the making of just such another
+“show town” as Biskra, in southern Algeria, where
+Hichens laid the scene of “The Garden of Allah.” If
+its citizens would wake up to its possibilities sufficiently
+to advertise it as scores of Californian towns with not
+half of its attractions are advertised; if they would
+restore the more historically important of the crumbling
+adobe buildings to their original condition and
+erect their new buildings in the same characteristic
+and inexpensive style; if they would keep the streets
+alive with the colourful figures of blanketed Indians and
+Mexican venders of silver filigree; and if the local
+hotel would have the originality to meet the incoming
+trains with a four-horse Concord coach, such as is inseparably
+associated with the Santa Fé Trail, instead
+of a ramshackle bus, they would soon have so many
+visitors piling into the New Mexican capital that they
+could not take care of them. But they are a <i>dolce far
+niente</i> folk, are the people of Santa Fé, and I expect
+that they will placidly continue along the same happy,
+easy, sleepy path that they have always followed.
+And perhaps it is just as well that they should.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp50" id="illus03" style="max-width: 29.6875em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus03.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><p>A dwelling.</p>
+  <p>A street.</p>
+  <p class="attr"><i>From a photograph copyright by Jess Nusbaum.</i></p>
+  <p>Interior of a room.</p>
+  <p>SANTA FÉ: THE MOST PICTURESQUE CITY BETWEEN THE OCEANS.</p></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>“They call me Santa Fé for short,” the New<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_19"></a>[19]</span>
+Mexican capital might answer if one inquired its name,
+“but my whole name is La Ciudad Real de la Santa
+Fé de San Francisco,” which, translated into our own
+tongue, means “The Royal City of the Holy Faith of
+Saint Francis.” It is some name—there is no denying
+that—but historically the town is quite able to live
+up to it. Fifteen years before the anchor of the <i>Mayflower</i>
+rumbled down off New England’s rocky coast,
+Juan de Oñate, an adventurous and gold-hungry gentleman
+of Spain, marching up from Mexico, had raised
+over the Indian pueblo which had occupied this site
+from time beyond reckoning the banner of Castile.
+In 1680 came the great Indian revolt; the Spanish
+soldiers and settlers were surprised and massacred
+and the brown-robed friars were slain on the altars of
+the churches they had built. For twelve years the
+Pueblos ruled the land. Then came De Vargas, at
+the head of a column of steel-capped and cuirassed
+soldiery and, after a ferocious reckoning with the
+Indians, retook the city in the name of his Most
+Catholic Majesty of Spain. With the overthrow of
+Spanish dominion in Mexico, the City of the Holy
+Faith became the northernmost outpost of the Mexican
+Republic, and Mexican it remained until that August
+morning in 1846 when General Kearney and his brass-helmeted
+dragoons clattered into its plaza and raised
+on the palace flagstaff a flag that was never to come
+down. That episode is commemorated by a marble
+shaft which rises amid the cottonwoods on the historic
+plaza. On its base are carved the words in which<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_20"></a>[20]</span>
+General Kearney proclaimed the annexation of New
+Mexico to the United States:</p>
+
+<p>“<i>We come as friends to make you a part of the representative
+government. In our government all men are
+equal. Every man has a right to serve God according
+to his conscience and his heart.</i>”</p>
+
+<p>At the other end of the plaza another monument
+marks the end of the famous Santa Fé Trail, over
+which, in prairie-schooners and Concord coaches and
+on the backs of mules and horses, was borne the commerce
+of the prairies. Santa Fé was to the historic trail
+of which it was the end what Bagdad is to the caravan
+routes across the Persian desert. No sooner would
+the lead team of one of these mile-long wagon-trains
+top the surrounding hills than word of its approach
+would spread through Santa Fé like wildfire. “<i>Los
+Americanos! Los Carros! La Caravana!</i>” the inhabitants
+would call to one another as they turned their
+faces plazaward, for the coming of a wagon-train was
+as much of an event as is the arrival of a steamer at a
+South Sea island. By the time that the first of the
+creaking, white-topped wagons, with its five yoke of
+oxen, had come to a halt before the custom-house,
+every inhabitant of the town was in the streets. A
+necessary preliminary to any trading was for the
+chief trader to make a call of ceremony upon the
+Spanish governor and, after a laboured interchange of
+salutes and compliments, to pay him the enormous
+toll of five hundred dollars per wagon imposed by the
+Spanish government upon wagon-trains coming from<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_21"></a>[21]</span>
+the United States. It came out of the pockets of the
+Spaniards in the end, however, for the American
+traders simply added it to the prices which they
+charged for their merchandise, which were high enough
+already, goodness knows: linen brought four dollars a
+yard, broadcloth twenty-five dollars a yard, and everything
+else in proportion. It is no wonder that the
+traders of the plains often retired as wealthy men.
+Stephen B. Elkins came to New Mexico, where he was
+to found his fortune, as bull-whacker in a wagon-train;
+one of the traders, Bent by name, came in time to sit
+himself in the governor’s palace in Santa Fé; and
+Kit Carson’s earlier years were spent in guiding these
+commercial expeditions. With the driving of the last
+spike in the Union Pacific Railroad, however, the importance
+of Santa Fé as a half-way house on the overland
+route to California vanished, and since then it
+has dwelt, contentedly enough, in its glorious climate
+and its memories of the past.</p>
+
+<p>Up the Cañon of the Santa Fé, over the nine-thousand-foot
+Dalton Divide, and down into the
+Cañon of the Macho, several hundred gentlemen, in
+garments of a somewhat conspicuous pattern provided
+by the State, are building what will in time take rank
+as one of the world’s great highways. It is to be called
+the Scenic Highway, and when it is completed it will
+form a section of the projected Camino Real from
+Denver to El Paso. It promises to be to the American
+Southwest what the Sorrento-Amalfi Drive is to southern
+Italy and the famous Corniche Road is to the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_22"></a>[22]</span>
+south of France. By means of switchbacks—twenty-two
+of them in all—it will wind up the precipitous
+slopes of the great Dalton Divide, twist and turn
+among the snow-capped titans of the Sangre de Cristo
+Range, skirt the edges of sheer precipices and dizzy
+chasms, drop down through the leafy solitudes of the
+Pecos Forest Reserve, and then stretch its length
+across the rolling uplands toward Taos, the pyramid-city
+of the Pueblos.</p>
+
+<p>Within a hundred-mile radius of Santa Fé are
+three of the most wonderful “sights” in this or any
+other country: the hill-city of Acoma, the pyramid-pueblo
+of Taos (both of which are described at length
+in the succeeding chapter) and the Pajarito National
+Park. The Pajarito (in Spanish, remember, the j
+takes the sound of h) provides what is unquestionably
+the richest field of archæological research in the United
+States, the remains of the inconceivably ancient civilisation
+with which it is literally strewn, bearing much
+the same relation to the history of the New World that
+the ruins of Upper Egypt do to that of the Old. To
+reach the Pajarito, where the ruins of the cave people
+exist, you can ride or drive or motor. As the distance
+from Santa Fé is only about forty miles, if you
+are willing to get up with the chickens you can make
+it in a single day. Comfortable sleeping quarters and
+excellent meals can be had at the hospitable ranch-house
+of Judge Abbott, or, if you prefer, you can take
+along a pair of blankets and some provisions and
+sleep high and dry in a cave once occupied by one of<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_23"></a>[23]</span>
+your very remote ancestors. The very courteous gentlemen
+in charge of the American School of Archæology
+at Santa Fé are always glad to furnish information
+regarding the best way to enter the Pajarito. Twenty
+odd miles north of Santa Fé and, debouching quite
+unexpectedly upon the flat summit of a mesa, you
+look down upon the iridescent ribbon which is the
+Rio Grande as it twists and turns between the sheer,
+smooth walls of chalky rock which form the sides of
+White Rock Cañon. Coming into this great gorge at
+right angles are the smaller cañons—chief among them
+the one known as the Rito de los Frijoles—in whose
+precipitous walls the cave folk hewed their homes.
+Some of these smaller cañons are hundreds of feet
+above the bed of the Rio Grande, with openings barely
+wide enough to let the mountain streams fall through
+into the river below.</p>
+
+<p>You must picture the Rito de los Frijoles as an
+immensely long and narrow cañon—so narrow that
+Rube Marquard could probably pitch a stone across—with
+walls as steep and smooth and twice as high as
+those of the Flatiron Building. Then you must picture
+the lower face of this rocky wall as being literally
+honeycombed by thousands—and when I say thousands
+I do not mean hundreds—of windows and doors
+and port-holes and apertures and other openings to
+caves hollowed from the soft rock of the cliffs. It is a
+city of the dead, silent as a mausoleum, mysterious as
+the lines of the hand, older than recorded history.
+This once populous city consisted of a single street,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_24"></a>[24]</span>
+<i>twelve miles long</i>, its cave-dwellings, which were reached
+by ladders or by steps cut in the soft tufa, rising above
+each other, tier on tier, like some Gargantuan apartment
+building. Such portions of the face of the cliff
+as are not perforated with doors and windows are embellished
+with pictographs, many of them in an extraordinary
+state of preservation, which, if the sight-seeing
+public only knew it, are as interesting and far
+more perplexing than the wall-paintings in the Tombs
+of the Kings at Thebes. On the floor of the valley
+the archæologists have laid bare the ruins of a circular
+community house which, when viewed from above,
+bears a striking resemblance to the ancient Greek
+theatre at Taormina, while on the Puyé to the north
+a communal building of twelve hundred rooms—larger
+than the Waldorf-Astoria—has been excavated.
+Farther down the Rito is the stone circle or dancing
+floor to which the prehistoric young folk descended to
+make merry, while their parents kept an eye on them
+from their houses in the cliff. (I doubt not that,
+when the sun began to sink behind the Jemez, some
+skin-clad mother would lean from the window of her
+fifth-story flat and shrilly call to her daughter, engrossed
+in learning the steps of the prehistoric equivalent
+of the tango on the dancing floor below: “A-ya,
+come up this minute! You hear me? Your paw’s
+just come home with a dinosaur and he wants it
+cooked for supper.”) Three miles up the cañon, half
+a thousand feet up the face of the cliff, is the arched
+ceremonial cave where, secure from prying eyes, this
+strange people performed their still stranger rites.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_25"></a>[25]</span>
+Thanks to the energy of the American Archæological
+Society, this cave has been restored to the same condition
+in which it was when prehistoric lodge members
+worked their mysterious degrees and made the quaking
+initiates ride the goat. Though it is the aim of
+the society to year by year restore portions of the Rito
+until the whole cañon has returned to its original condition,
+such difficulty has been experienced in obtaining
+the necessary funds that at the present rate of
+progress it will take a century to effect a complete
+restoration. Yet our millionaires pour out their wealth
+like water to promote the excavation and restoration of
+the ruins of alien peoples in other lands. Though carloads
+of pottery and utensils have been carted away
+to enrich museums and private collections, the surface
+of the Pajarito has been scarcely scratched, <i>more than
+twenty thousand</i> communal caves and dwellings remaining
+to tempt the seekers of lost cities. Where did the
+inhabitants of this strange city go—and why? What
+swept their civilisation away? When did the age-old
+silence fall? These are questions which even the
+archæologists do not attempt to answer. All that
+they can assert with any degree of certainty is that the
+caves which underlie the communal dwellings in the
+Pajarito yield ample evidence of having been occupied
+by human beings in the days of the lava flow,
+when the mastodon and the dinosaur roamed the land
+and the world was very, very young.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp50" id="illus04" style="max-width: 31.25em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus04.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><p>“The arched ceremonial cave where ... this
+  strange people performed their still stranger rites.”</p>
+  <p>“The archæologists have laid bare the ruins of a circular community
+  house.”</p>
+  <p>REMAINS OF AN ANCIENT CIVILISATION.</p></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p class="tb">Of the three great elemental industries of New
+Mexico—cattle raising, sheep raising, and mining—cattle<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_26"></a>[26]</span>
+raising was the first and, more than any other,
+gave colour to the country. The early Spanish and
+Mexican settlers were cow-men, and the old Sonora
+stock, “all horns and backbone,” may still be seen on
+some of the interior ranges, though they are now almost
+a thing of the past. Then came the great wagon-trains
+of Texans, California bound, many of whom,
+attracted by the wealth of pasturage, stopped off and
+turned their long-horned cattle out on the grass-grown
+desert. As Texas and the Middle West became fenced
+and civilised, the old-time cattlemen drove their herds
+farther and farther toward the setting sun. In those
+days there were no sheep to compete for the pasture;
+mountains and desert were clothed with grass so rich
+and long that they looked as though they were upholstered
+in green velvet; there was not a strand of
+barbed wire between the Pecos and the Colorado.
+New Mexico was indeed the cow-man’s paradise.
+Though the range has in many places been ruined by
+droughts and overstocking; though a woolly wave has
+encroached upon the lands which the cow-man had
+regarded as inalienably his own, there are, nevertheless,
+close to a million head of cattle within the borders
+of the State, by far the greater part of which are Herefords
+and Durhams, for the imported stock has increased
+the cow-man’s profits out of all proportion to
+the initial expense.</p>
+
+<p>Feeding with equal right and freedom upon the
+same public domain are upward of five million head of
+sheep, for New Mexico is the home of the wool industry<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_27"></a>[27]</span>
+in America. The early Spanish settlers kept large
+flocks of the straight-necked, coarse-wooled Mexican
+sheep in the country around Santa Fé, and from them
+the Navajos and Moquis, those industrious weavers of
+blankets and workers in silver, soon stole or bartered
+for enough to start a sheep business of their own, it
+being said that a third of all the sheep in the State are
+now owned by Indians. Unlike cattle, sheep, in cool
+weather, can exist without water for a month at a
+time; so, when the desert turns from yellow to green
+in the spring, they drift out over it in great flocks
+which look for all the world like fleecy clouds. Each
+flock, which usually consists of several thousand sheep,
+is attended by a herder and his “rustler,” who cooks,
+packs in supplies, and brings water in casks from the
+nearest stream for the use of the herder and his dogs,
+the juicy browse providing all the moisture that the
+sheep require.</p>
+
+<p>Owing to its warm, dry weather, New Mexico is
+one of the earliest shearing stations in the world, the
+work beginning the latter part of January and lasting
+until the first of May. In this time enough wool is
+clipped to supply a considerable portion of the people
+of the United States with suits and blankets. Until
+quite recently the shearing of the wool was a long and
+tedious task, even the more expert hand shearers seldom
+being able to average more than sixty or seventy
+fleeces a day. When machine shearing was introduced
+into New Mexico a few years age, however, this daily
+average was promptly doubled. Sheep-shearers are<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_28"></a>[28]</span>
+probably the best-paid and hardest-working class of
+men in the world, receiving from seven to eight and a
+half cents a head and averaging one hundred and
+twenty-five sheep a day. The best of them, however,
+shear from two to three hundred sheep in a single day,
+the record, I believe, being three hundred and twenty-five.
+As the shearing season only lasts through six
+months of the year, during which time they must
+travel from Texas to Montana, the unionised shearers
+demand and receive high wages, some of them making
+as much as twenty dollars a day. Yet, in spite of this
+and of the grazing fee of six cents a head for all sheep
+that feed on forest reserves, it is safe to say that the
+wool-growers are the most prosperous men in New
+Mexico.</p>
+
+<p class="tb">The social fabric of New Mexico is a curious blending
+of Mexicans, Indians, and Americans. Of these
+elements the Mexicans are by far the most numerous,
+their customs, costumes, and language lending a decidedly
+Spanish flavour to the country. Living for the
+most part in scattered settlements along the mountain
+streams or in their own quarters in the towns, they
+enjoy a lazy, irresponsible, and not uncomfortable existence
+in return for their humble labour, not differing
+materially, either in their mode of life, manners, or
+morals, from their kinsmen below the Rio Grande.
+Shiftless, indolent, indifferently honest, the peons of
+New Mexico, like the South African Kaffirs and the
+Egyptian fellaheen, are nevertheless invaluable to the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_29"></a>[29]</span>
+welfare of the State, for they perform practically all
+the labour on the ranches, mines, and railways. Politically
+they are an element to be reckoned with, about
+seventy-five per cent of the population of Santa Fé
+being Mexicans, while sixty per cent of the State
+Legislature is from the same race. As a result of this
+Latin preponderance in the population, practically all
+Americans in New Mexico are compelled to have at
+least a working knowledge of Spanish, which is really
+the <i>lingua franca</i> of the country, it being by no means
+unusual to find one who speaks it better than the Mexicans
+themselves. Owing to the great influx of settlers
+during the last few years, the Mexican proportion of
+the population has been greatly reduced, as is confirmed
+by the increasing use of the English language
+and of English newspapers.</p>
+
+<p>One of the strangest religious sects in the world—the
+Penitentes—are recruited from the Mexican element
+of the population. Although this dread form of
+religious fanaticism has its centre in the region about
+San Mateo, it permeates peon life in every quarter of
+the State. For the Penitente is not an Indian; he is
+a Mexican. The Indians of the Pueblos repudiate
+Penitente practices. Neither is the Penitente a Catholic,
+for the Church has fought his terrible rites tooth
+and nail, though thus far it has fought them in vain.
+He is really a grim survivor of those secret orders
+whose fanaticism and religious excesses became a byword
+even in the calloused Europe of the Middle Ages.
+The sect is divided into two branches: the Brothers of<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_30"></a>[30]</span>
+Light—<i>La Luz</i>—and the Brothers of Darkness—<i>Las
+Tinieblas</i>. Though they hold secret meetings with
+more or less regularity throughout the year in their
+lodges or <i>morados</i>, they are really active only during the
+forty days of Lent. During that period both men and
+women flog their naked backs with scourges of aloe
+fibre, wind their limbs with wire or rope so tightly as to
+stop the circulation, lie for hours at a time on beds of
+cactus, make pilgrimages to mountain shrines with their
+unstockinged feet in shoes filled with jagged flints,
+stagger torturing miles across the sun-baked desert
+under the weight of enormous crosses, while on Good
+Friday this carnival of torture culminates in one of
+their number, chosen by lot, actually being crucified.
+It has been a number of years, however, since a Penitente
+has died on the cross, for, since the law came to
+New Mexico, they have found it wiser to fasten their
+willing victim to the cross with rope instead of nails.
+Though sporadic efforts have been made to break up
+the sect, they have thus far been unsuccessful, as it is
+no secret that many men high in the political life of
+New Mexico bear on their backs the tattooed cross
+which is the symbol of the order.</p>
+
+<p>Though the growth of the white population has
+heretofore been slow, it has begun to increase by
+leaps and bounds with the development of irrigation.
+Though New Mexico now contains representatives
+from every State in the Union and from pretty much
+every country in the world, the average run of society
+exhibits a tendency toward high-crowned hats that<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_31"></a>[31]</span>
+shows the dominating influence of Texas. They are, I
+think, the most hospitable folk that I have ever met;
+they are tolerant of other people’s opinions; have a
+tendency to ride rather than walk; are ready to fight
+at the drop of the hat; hate to count their money; lie
+only for the sake of entertainment; like a big proposition;
+and know how to handle it—there you have them,
+the gentlemen of New Mexico. But don’t go out to
+New Mexico, my Eastern friends, with the idea that
+you can butt into society with the aid of a good cigar—because
+you can’t. They are a free-born, free-living,
+free-speaking folk, are the dwellers out in the
+back country where the desert meets the mountains
+and the mountains meet the sky, and they don’t give
+a whoop-and-hurrah whether you come or stay away.</p>
+
+<p class="tb">Such, in brief, bold outline, is the New Mexico
+of to-day. I have tried to paint you a picture, as well
+as I know how, of the progress, potentialities, and prospects
+of this, the youngest but one of the sisterhood
+of States. Though New Mexico, as a Territory, was
+willing enough to be a synonym for Indian villages and
+snake-dances and cavorting cowboys, the State of New
+Mexico stands for something very different indeed.
+Though it welcomes the tourists who come-look-see-spend-go,
+it prefers the settlers who are prepared to
+stay and make it their home. Unlike its sister State of
+Arizona, New Mexico does not suffer from that greatest
+of privations—lack of water—for the mountain-flood
+waters that now go to waste would store great reservoirs,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_32"></a>[32]</span>
+there is the flow of numerous streams and river
+systems, and below the surface are artesian belts of
+water waiting only to be tapped by the farmer’s well.
+That the soil, once watered, is very fertile is best
+proved by the orchards, gardens, and meadows which
+cover the valleys of the Mimbres and the Pecos. Ten
+years ago the cattlemen of New Mexico used to say
+that it took “sixty acres to raise a steer”; to-day,
+thanks to irrigation, a single acre of alfalfa does the
+business. In gold, silver, coal, and copper the State is
+very rich—the largest copper mine in the world is at
+Silver City—while its turquoise deposits surpass those
+of Persia. And the people are as big-hearted and
+broad-minded and open-handed as you will find anywhere
+on earth. Taking it by and large, therefore, a
+man with some experience, a little capital, plenty of
+energy and ambition, and an intimate acquaintance
+with hard work should go a long way in New Mexico.
+He would find down there a big, new, unfenced, up-and-doing
+country and a set of sun-bronzed, iron-hard,
+self-reliant men of whom any country might be proud.
+These men are the modern <i>conquistadores</i>, for they
+have conquered sun and sand. To-day they are only
+commonplace farmers, but, when history has granted
+them the justice of perspective, they will be called the
+Pioneers.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_33"></a>[33]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="II">II<br>
+<span class="smaller">THE SKYLANDERS</span></h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_34"></a>[34]</span></p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">“Here still a lofty rock remains,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">On which the curious eye may trace</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">(Now wasted half by wearing rains)</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">The fancies of a ruder race.</div>
+  </div>
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="center">...</div>
+  </div>
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">And long shall timorous Fancy see</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">The painted chief, and pointed spear,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">And Reason’s self shall bow the knee</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">To shadows and delusions here.”</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_35"></a>[35]</span></p>
+
+<h3>II<br>
+<span class="smaller">THE SKYLANDERS</span></h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>Six minutes after midnight the mail-train came
+thundering out of nowhere. With hissing steam
+and brakes asqueal it paused just long enough for me to
+drop off and then roared on its transcontinental way
+again to the accompaniment of a droning chant which
+quickly dropped into diminuendo, its scarlet tail
+lamps disappearing at forty miles an hour, leaving me
+abandoned in the utter darkness of the desert. The
+Casa Alvarado at Albuquerque, with its red-shaded
+candles and snowy napery, where I had dined only four
+hours before, seemed very far away. Some one flashed
+a lantern in my face and a voice behind it inquired:</p>
+
+<p>“Are you the gent that’s goin’ to Acoma?”</p>
+
+<p>“I am,” said I, “if I can get there.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, I reckon you’ll get there all right, seein’ as
+how the trader at Laguna’s sent a rig over for you.
+Bob made a little money on a bunch o’ cattle a while
+back and he’s been pretty damned independent ever
+since ’bout takin’ folks over to Acoma. Says it’s too
+hard on his horses. But when Bob says he’ll do a
+thing he does it. Hi, Charlie!” he shouted, “you over
+there?”</p>
+
+<p>A guttural affirmative came out of the blackness.
+As the loquacious station agent made no offer to light<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_36"></a>[36]</span>
+my footsteps, I cautiously picked my way across the
+rails, slid down a steep embankment into a ditch,
+scrambled out of it, and descried before me the vague
+outlines of a ramshackle vehicle drawn by a pair of
+wiry, unkempt ponies.</p>
+
+<p>“How?” grunted the driver, who, as my eyes
+became accustomed to the darkness, I saw was an
+Indian, his hair, plaited in two long braids with strands
+of vivid flannel interwoven, hanging in front of his
+shoulders, schoolgirl fashion. I clambered in, the
+Indian spoke to his ponies, and, breaking into a lope,
+they swung off across the desert, the wretched vehicle
+lurching and pitching behind them.</p>
+
+<p>It is an unforgettable experience, a ride across the
+New Mexican desert in the night-time. The sky is
+like purple velvet and the stars seem very near. The
+silence is not the peaceful stillness that comes with
+nightfall in settled regions, but the mysterious, uncanny
+hush that hangs over other ancient and deserted
+lands—Upper Egypt, for example, and Turkestan.
+Our way was lined with dim, fantastic shapes whose
+phantom arms seemed to warn or beckon or implore,
+but which, in the prosaic light of morning, resolved
+themselves into clumps of piñon, and mesquite, and
+prickly-pear. The ponies shied suddenly at a stirring
+in the underbrush—probably a rattlesnake disturbed—and
+in the distance a coyote gave dismal tongue.
+Slipping and sliding down a declivity so abrupt that
+the axles were level with the ponies’ backs, we rattled
+across the stone-strewn bed of an <i>arroyo seco</i>, as they<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_37"></a>[37]</span>
+term a dried-up watercourse in that half-Spanish region,
+and clattered into a settlement whose squat,
+flat-roofed hovels of adobe, unlighted and silent as
+the houses of Pompeii, showed dimly on either hand.</p>
+
+<p>“Laguna?” I inquired.</p>
+
+<p>“Uh-huh,” responded my taciturn companion,
+pulling up his ponies sharply before a dwelling considerably
+more pretentious than the rest. “Trader’s,”
+he added laconically.</p>
+
+<p>As, stiff, chilled, and weary, I scrambled down,
+the door swung open to reveal a lean figure in shirt and
+trousers, silhouetted by the light from a guttering
+candle.</p>
+
+<p>“I’m the trader,” said he. “I reckon you’re the
+party we’ve been expectin’. We ain’t got much accommodation
+to offer you, but, such as it is, you’re
+welcome to it. I’m afeard my youngsters’ll keep you
+awake, though. I’ve got six on ’em an’ they’ve all
+got the whoopin’-cough, so me an’ my old woman
+hain’t had a chanct to shet our eyes for the last week.”</p>
+
+<p>It wasn’t the cough-harassed children who kept
+me wide-eyed and tossing through the night, however.
+It was Sheridan, I think, who remarked that had the
+fleas of a certain bed upon which he once slept been
+unanimous, they could easily have pushed him out.
+Had the tiny hordes which were in possession of my
+couch had an insect Kitchener to organise and lead
+them, I should certainly have had to spend the night
+upon the floor. I learned afterward that the Indians
+of the neighbouring pueblos have a name for Laguna<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_38"></a>[38]</span>
+which, in the white man’s tongue, means “Scratch-town.”</p>
+
+<p>From Laguna to Acoma is a four hours’ drive
+across the desert. It is very rough and more than
+once I feared that I should require the services of an
+osteopath to rejoint my vertebræ. And it is inconceivably
+dusty, the ponies kicking up clouds of fine,
+shifting sand which fills your eyes and nose and ears
+and sifts through your garments until you feel as
+though you were covered with sandpaper instead of
+skin. The sun beats down until the arid expanse of
+the desert is as hot as the whitewashed base of a railway-station
+stove at white heat. Everything considered,
+it is not the sort of a drive that one would choose
+for pleasure, but it is a very wonderful drive nevertheless,
+for the New Mexican desert is a kaleidoscope
+of colour. It is a land of black rocks and orange sand,
+flecked with discouraged, hopeless-looking clumps of
+sage-green vegetation; of violet, and amethyst, and
+purple mountain ranges; and overhead a sky of the
+brightest blue you will find anywhere outside a wash-tub.
+The cloud effects are the most beautiful I have
+ever seen, great masses of fleecy cirrus drifting lazily,
+like flocks of new-washed sheep, across the turquoise
+sky. Everywhere the colours are splashed on with a
+barbaric, almost a theatrical, touch. It is a regular
+back-drop of a country; its scenery looks as though it
+should have been painted on a curtain. When a party
+of Indians, with scarlet handkerchiefs twisted about
+their heads pirate fashion, lope by astride of spotted<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_39"></a>[39]</span>
+ponies, the illusion is complete. “You’re not really
+in New Mexico, you know,” you say to yourself.
+“This is much too theatrical to be real. You’re sitting
+in an orchestra chair watching a play, that’s what
+you’re doing.”</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus05" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus05.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption class="caption"> <p class="attr"><i>From a photograph by A. C. Vroman.</i></p>
+  <p>THE LAND OF THE TURQUOISE SKY.</p>
+  <p>“Great masses of fleecy cirrus drifting lazily, like flocks of new-washed
+  sheep, across the turquoise sky.”</p></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>Swinging sharply around the shoulder of a sand-dune,
+a mesa—a table-land of rock—reared itself out
+of the plain as unexpectedly as a slap in the face. The
+driver pointed unconcernedly with his whip. “<i>La
+Mesa Encantada</i>,” he grunted. The Enchanted Mesa!
+Was there ever a name which so reeked with mystery
+and romance? Picture, if you can, a bandbox-shaped
+rock, almost flat on top and covering as much ground
+as a good-sized city square, higher than the Times
+Building in New York and with sides almost as perpendicular,
+set down in the middle of the flattest,
+yellowest desert the imagination can conceive. Seen
+from the distance, it suggests the stump of an inconceivably
+gigantic tree—a tree a thousand feet in diameter
+and sawed squarely off four hundred and thirty
+feet above the ground. On one side it is as sheer and
+smooth as that face of Gibraltar which looks Spainward,
+and when the evening sun strikes it slantingly
+it turns the monstrous mass of sandstone into a pile
+of rosy coral. It is one of the most impressive things
+that I have ever seen. Solitary, silent, mysterious,
+redolent of legend and superstition, older than Time
+itself, it suggests, without in any way resembling,
+those Colossi of Memnon which stare out across the
+desert from ruined Thebes.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_40"></a>[40]</span></p>
+
+<p>Those disputatious cousins Science and Tradition
+seem to have agreed for once that the original
+Acoma stood on the top of the <i>Mesa Encantada</i>, or
+Katzimo, as the Indians call it, in the days when the
+world was very young. Ever since Katzimo first attracted
+scientific attention the archælogists have quarrelled
+like cats and dogs over this question of whether
+it had ever been inhabited, just as they are quarrelling
+in Palestine as to the site of Calvary. A few years ago
+the Smithsonian Institution, desirous of settling the
+controversy for good and all, despatched to New Mexico
+a gentleman of an inquiring turn of mind, who
+succeeded in performing the supposedly impossible feat
+of scaling the sheer cliffs which, from time beyond
+reckoning, have guarded the secret of the mesa. On
+the plateau at the top he found fragments of earthenware
+utensils, which would seem to prove quite conclusively
+that it had been inhabited in long-past ages
+by human beings, thus supporting the traditions which
+prevail among the Indians regarding this mighty
+monolith. Whether the Enchanted Mesa has ever
+been inhabited I do not know; no one knows; and, to
+tell the truth, it does not greatly matter. According
+to the legend current among the Pueblos, this island
+in the air was originally accessible by means of a huge,
+detached fragment leaning against it at such an angle
+that it formed a precarious and perilous ladder to the
+top. Its difficulty of access was more than compensated
+for, however, by its security from the attacks of
+enemies, whether on two feet or four, for Katzimo is<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_41"></a>[41]</span>
+supposed to have echoed to human voices in those dim
+and distant days when the mastodon and the dinosaur
+roamed the land. The Indian legend has it that, while
+the men of the tribe were absent on a hunting expedition
+and the able-bodied women were hoeing corn in
+the fields below, some cataclysm of nature—most
+probably an earthquake—jarred loose the ladder rock
+and toppled it over into the plain, leaving the town on
+the summit as completely cut off from human help as
+though it were on another planet. The women and
+children thus isolated perished miserably from starvation,
+and their spirits, so the Indians will assure you,
+still haunt the summit of Katzimo. On any windy
+night you can hear them for yourself, moaning and
+wailing for the help that never came. That is why it
+were easier to persuade a Mississippi darky to spend
+a night in a graveyard than to induce an Indian to
+linger in the vicinity of the Enchanted Mesa after dark.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp50" id="illus06" style="max-width: 31.25em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus06.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><p class="attr"><i>From a photograph by A. C. Vroman.</i></p>
+  <p>“A bandbox-shaped rock, higher than the Times Building in New York and with
+  sides almost as perpendicular.”</p>
+  <p class="attr"><i>From a photograph by A. C. Vroman.</i></p>
+  <p>“The mesa on which the modern Acoma is perched might be likened to a
+  gigantic billiard-table three hundred and fifty-seven feet high.”</p>
+  <p>ACOMA: SUPPOSED ANCIENT SITE AND PRESENT SITE.</p></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>The survivors of the tribe chose as the site of
+their new town the top of a somewhat lower mesa,
+three miles or so from their former home. If the Enchanted
+Mesa resembles a titanic bandbox, the mesa
+on which the modern Acoma is perched might be
+likened to a gigantic billiard-table, three hundred and
+fifty-seven feet high, seventy acres in area upon its
+level top, and supported by precipices which are not
+merely perpendicular but in many cases actually overhanging.
+It presents one of the most striking examples
+of erosion in the world, does Acoma, the sand
+which has been hurled against it by the wind of ages,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_42"></a>[42]</span>
+as by a natural sand-blast, having cut the soft rock
+into forms more fantastic than were ever conjured up
+by Little Nemo in his dreams. Battlements, turrets,
+arches, minarets, and gargoyles of weather-worn,
+tawny-tinted rock rise on every hand. There are
+two routes to the summit and both of them require
+leathern lungs and seasoned sinews. One, called, if I
+remember rightly, the “Padre’s Path,” is little more
+than a crevasse in the solid rock, its ascent necessitating
+the vigorous use of knees and elbows as well as
+hands and feet, it being about as easy to negotiate as
+the outside of the Statue of Liberty. The other path,
+which is considerably longer, suggests the stone-paved
+ascent to some stronghold of the Middle Ages—and,
+when you come to think about it, that is precisely
+what it is—the resemblance being heightened by the
+massive battlements of eroded rock between which it
+winds and the strings of patient donkeys which plod
+up it, faggot-laden. Though of fair width near the
+bottom, it gradually narrows as it zigzags upward,
+finally becoming so slim that there is not room between
+the face of the cliff and the brink of the precipice for
+two donkeys to pass. It was at this inauspicious spot
+that I first encountered one of these dwellers in the sky—“skylanders”
+they might fittingly be called. He
+was a low-browed, sullen-looking fellow, with a skin the
+colour of a well-worn saddle and an expression about as
+pleasant as a rainy morning. His shock of coarse
+black hair had been bobbed just below the ears and
+was kept back from his eyes by the inevitable <i>banda</i>;<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_43"></a>[43]</span>
+his legs were encased in <i>chaparejos</i> of fringed buckskin,
+and his shirt tails fluttered free. He came jogging
+down the perilous pathway astride of a calico
+donkey and, with the background of rocks and sand,
+cut a very striking and savage figure indeed. “He’ll
+make a perfectly bully picture,” I said to myself, and,
+suiting the action to the thought, I unlimbered my
+camera and ambushed myself behind a projecting
+shoulder of rock. As he swung into the range of my
+lens I snapped the shutter. It was speeded up to a
+hundredth of a second, but in much less time than that
+he had dismounted and was coming for me with a
+club. I have read somewhere that the Acomas are a
+mild-mannered, inoffensive folk. Well, perhaps. Still,
+I was glad that I had in my jacket pocket the largest-sized
+automatic used by a civilised people, and I was
+still gladder when Man-That-Wouldn’t-Have-His-Picture-Taken,
+glimpsing its ominous outline through the
+cloth, moved sullenly away, shaking his stick and
+muttering sentiments which needed no translation.
+He was an artist in the way he laid on his curses, was
+that Indian. An army mule-skinner would have taken
+off his hat to him in admiration.</p>
+
+<p>Of all the nineteen pueblos of New Mexico, Acoma
+is the most interesting by far. Indeed, I do not
+think that I am permitting my enthusiasm to get the
+better of my discrimination when I class it with Urga,
+Khiva, Mecca, the troglodyte town of Medenine in
+southern Tunisia, and Timbuktu as one of the half
+dozen most interesting semicivilised places in existence.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_44"></a>[44]</span>
+Where else in all the world can you find a
+town hanging, as it were, between land and sky and
+reached by some of the dizziest trails ever trod by
+human feet; a town of many-floored but doorless
+dwellings, which have ladders instead of stairs and
+whose windows are of gypsum instead of glass; a
+town where the women build and own the houses and
+the men weave the women’s gowns; where the husbands
+take the names of their wives and the children
+the names of their mothers; where the belongings of
+a dead man are destroyed upon his grave and the
+ghosts are distracted so that his spirit may have time
+to escape; a town where religious mysteries, as incredible
+as those of voodooism and as jealously guarded as
+those of Lhasa, are performed in an underground
+chamber as impossible of access by the uninitiated as
+the Kaaba? Where else shall you find such a place as
+that, I ask you? Tell me that.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp50" id="illus07" style="max-width: 29.6875em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus07.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><p class="attr"><i>From a photograph by A. C. Vroman.</i></p>
+  <p>“The massive battlements of eroded rock between which it winds ...
+  suggest the stone-paved ascent to some stronghold of the Middle Ages.”</p>
+  <p class="attr"><i>From a photograph by A. C. Vroman.</i></p>
+  <p>“You gain access to the first floor of an Acoma dwelling precisely as
+  you gain access to the hold of a ship.”</p>
+  <p>ACOMA AS IT IS TO-DAY.</p></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>Acoma has the unassailable distinction of being
+the oldest continuously inhabited town within our
+borders, though how old the archæologists have been
+unable to conjecture, much less positively say. Certain
+it is that it was ancient when the Great Navigator
+set foot on the beach of San Salvador; that it was
+hoary with antiquity when the Great Captain and his
+mail-clad men-at-arms came marching up from Vera
+Cruz for the taking of Mexico. One needs to be very
+close under its beetling cliffs before any sign of the
+village can be detected, as the houses are of the same
+color and, indeed of the same material as the rock<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_45"></a>[45]</span>
+upon which they stand and so far above the plain
+that, as old Casteñeda, the chronicler of Coronado’s
+expedition in 1540, records, “it was a very good musket
+that could throw a ball as high.” The lofty situation
+of the town and the effect of bleakness produced by
+the entire absence of vegetation and by the cold, grey
+rock of which it is built reminded me of San Marino,
+that mountain-top capital of a tiny republic in the
+Apennines, while in the startling abruptness with
+which the mesa rears itself out of the desert there is a
+suggestion of those strange monasteries of Metéora,
+perched on their rocky columns above the Thessalian
+plain. The village proper consists of three parallel
+blocks of houses running east and west perhaps a
+thousand feet and skyward forty. They are, in fact,
+primeval apartment-houses, each block being partitioned
+by cross-walls into separate little homes which
+have no interior communication with each other.
+Each of these blocks is three stories high, with a sheer
+wall behind but terraced in front, so that it looks like
+a flight of three gigantic steps. (At the sister pueblo
+of Taos, a hundred miles or so to the northward, this
+novel architectural scheme has been carried even
+further by building the houses six and even seven
+stories high and terracing them on all four sides so
+that they form a pyramid.) The second story is set
+well back on the roof of the first, thus giving it a
+broad, uncovered terrace across its entire front, and
+the third story is similarly placed upon the second.
+In Acoma, which has about seven hundred people,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_46"></a>[46]</span>
+there are scarcely a dozen doors on the ground; and
+these indicate the abodes of those progressive citizens
+who, not satisfied with what was good enough for
+their fathers, must be for ever experimenting with some
+new-fangled device. Barring these cases of recent
+innovation, there are no doors to the lower floor, the
+only access to a house being by a rude ladder to the
+first terrace. If you are making a call on the occupants
+of the first story, you wriggle through a tiny
+trap-door in the floor of the second and literally drop
+in upon them—so literally that your hosts see your
+feet before they see your face. It is a novel experience
+... yes, indeed. You gain access to the first
+floor of an Acoma dwelling precisely as you gain access
+to the hold of a ship—by climbing a ladder to the
+deck and then descending through a hatchway. If you
+wish to leave your visiting-card at the third-floor
+apartment or if you have a hankering to see the view
+from the topmost roof, you can ascend quite easily by
+means of queer little steps notched in the division
+walls. The ground floor is always occupied by the
+senior members of the family, the second terrace is
+allotted to the daughter first married, and the upper
+flat goes to the daughter who gets a husband next.
+If there are other married daughters they must seek
+apartments elsewhere or live with grandpa and grandma
+in the basement.</p>
+
+<p>Most writers about Acoma seem to be particularly
+impressed with the cleanliness of its inhabitants and
+the neatness of their homes. I don’t like to shatter<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_47"></a>[47]</span>
+any illusions, but it struck me that the much-vaunted
+neatness of these people consisted mainly in covering
+their beds with scarlet blankets and whitewashing
+their walls. I have heard visitors exclaim enthusiastically
+as they peered in through an open doorway:
+“Why, I wouldn’t mind sleeping there at all.” They
+are perfectly welcome to so far as I am concerned. As
+for me, I much prefer a warm blanket and the open
+mesa. All of the Pueblo Indians are as ignorant of
+the elements of sanitation as a Congo black. If you
+doubt it, visit one of these sky cities on a scorching
+summer’s day when there is no wind blowing. As
+an old frontiersman in Albuquerque confided to me:
+“Say, friend, I’d ruther have a skunk hangin’ round
+my tent than to have to spend a night to leeward o’
+one of them there Hopi towns.”</p>
+
+<p>Civilisation has evidently found the rocky path
+to Acoma too steep to climb, for when I was there not
+a soul in the place spoke a word of English. There
+was a daughter of the village who had been educated
+at Carlisle—Marie was her name, I think—but she
+was away on a visit. Perhaps she couldn’t stand the
+loneliness of being the only civilised person in the
+community. That is one of the deplorable features
+incident to our system of Indian education. A youth
+is sent to Carlisle or Hampton or Riverside, as the
+case may be, and after being broken to the white man’s
+ways is sent back to his own people on the theory
+that, by force of example, he will alter their mode of
+living. But he rarely does anything of the sort, for<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_48"></a>[48]</span>
+his fellow tribesmen either resent his attempts to introduce
+innovations or treat him with the same contemptuous
+tolerance with which the hidebound residents
+of a country village regard the youth who is
+“college l’arned.” So, after a time, becoming discouraged
+by the futility of attempting to teach his
+people something that they don’t want to know, he
+either goes out into the world to earn his own livelihood
+as best he may or else he again leaves his shirt
+tails outside his breeches, daubs his face with paint
+on dance days, and, forgetting how to use a fork and
+napkin, goes back to the manners and usages of his
+fathers. But you mustn’t get the idea that Acoma is
+wholly uncivilised, for it isn’t. One household has an
+iron bed with large brass knobs, another boasts a
+rocking-chair, and a third possesses a sewing-machine.
+But the most convincing proof that these untutored
+children of the sky possess a strain of culture is in the
+fact that Acoma can boast no phonograph to greet the
+visitor with the raucous strains of “Every Little Movement”
+and “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.”</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus08" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus08.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption class="caption"> <p class="attr"><i>From a photograph
+  copyright by Fred Harvey.</i></p>
+  <p>ACOMA HUNTER HOME FROM THE HUNT.</p></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>In many respects the most remarkable feature of
+Acoma is its immense adobe church, built upward of
+three centuries ago. It is remarkable because every
+stick and every adobe brick in it was carried up the
+heart-breaking, back-breaking trails from the plains
+three hundred feet below on the backs of patient
+Indians. There are timbers in that church a foot and
+a half square and forty feet long, brought by human
+muscle alone from the mountains a long day’s march<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_49"></a>[49]</span>
+away. And it is no tiny chapel, remember, but a
+building of enormous proportions, with walls ten feet
+thick and sixty feet high, and covering more ground
+than any modern church in America. As a monument
+of patient toil it is hardly less wonderful than the
+Pyramids; it was as long in building as the Children
+of Israel were in getting out of the wilderness. Above
+its gaudy altar hangs a royal gift, the town’s most
+treasured possession—a painting of San José, presented
+to Acoma two centuries and a half ago by his
+Most Catholic Majesty Charles the Second of Aragon
+and Castile. Faded and time-dimmed though it is,
+that picture once nearly caused an Indian war. Some
+years ago the neighbouring pueblo of Laguna, suffering
+from drought and cattle sickness and all manner of
+disasters, looked on the prosperity of Acoma and
+ascribed it to the patronage of the painted San José.
+So Laguna, believing that if the saint could bring prosperity
+to one pueblo, he could bring it to another,
+asked Acoma for the loan of the picture, and, after a
+tribal council, the request was granted. Their confidence
+in the saint was justified, for no sooner had
+the picture been transferred to the walls of Laguna’s
+bell-hung, mud-walled mission church than the rains
+came and the crops sprouted, and the cattle throve,
+and the tourists, leaning from their car windows,
+bought more pottery and blankets than they ever had
+before. After a time, however, Acoma gently intimated
+to Laguna that a loan was not a gift and asked
+for the return of the picture. Whereupon the Lagunas<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_50"></a>[50]</span>
+retorted that if possession was nine points of the law
+in the white man’s country, in the Indian country it
+was ten points—and then some, and that if the Acomas
+wanted the picture they could come and take it—if
+they could. For several weeks there was much sharpening
+of knives and cleaning of Winchesters in both
+pueblos, and at night the high mesa of Acoma resounded
+to those same war chants which preceded the
+massacre of Zaldivar and his Spaniards. But the
+saner counsels of the Indian agent prevailed, for these
+hill-folk are at heart a peaceable people, and they
+were induced to submit the dispute over the picture
+to the arbitrament of the white man’s courts. Perhaps
+it was well for the peace of central New Mexico
+that Judge Kirby Benedict, who heard the case, decided
+in favour of the plaintiffs and ordered the picture
+restored to Acoma forthwith. But when the messengers
+sent from Acoma to bring the sacred treasure
+back arrived at Laguna they found that the picture
+had mysteriously disappeared. But while riding dejectedly
+back to Acoma to break the news of the
+calamity they discovered under a mesquite bush,
+midway between the two pueblos—God be praised!—the
+missing picture. The Acomas instantly recognised,
+of course, that San José, released from bondage, had
+started homeward of his own volition and had doubtless
+sought shelter in the shade of the mesquite bush
+until the heat of the day had passed. He hangs once
+more on the wall of the ancient church, just where he
+did when he came, all fresh and shiny, from Madrid,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_51"></a>[51]</span>
+and every morning the hill people file in and cross
+themselves before him and mutter a little prayer.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus09" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus09.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><table><tr>
+  <td class="td3"><p class="attr"><i>From a photograph by A. C. Vroman.</i></p>
+  <p>The pottery painter.</p></td>
+  <td class="td3"><p class="attr"><i>From a photograph by A. C. Vroman.</i></p>
+  <p>The blanket weaver.</p></td>
+  <td class="td3"><p class="attr"><i>From a photograph by A. C. Vroman.</i></p>
+  <p>The turquoise driller.</p></td>
+  </tr></table>
+  <p>ACOMA ARTISANS.</p></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>In front of the church is the village graveyard, a
+depression in the rock forty feet deep and two hundred
+square, filled with earth brought on the backs of
+women from the far plain. It took them nearly forty
+years to make it. Is it any wonder that the patient,
+moccasined feet of centuries have sunk their imprint
+in the rock six inches deep? And the work was done
+by women! Imagine the New York suffragettes carrying
+enough dirt in sacks to the top of the Metropolitan
+Building to make a graveyard there. The bones
+lie thick on the surface soil, now literally a bank of
+human limestone. Dig down into that ghastly stratum
+and you would doubtless find among the myriads of
+bleached and grinning skulls some that had been cleft
+by sword-blade or pierced by bullet—grim reminders
+of that day, now three centuries agone, when Oñate’s
+men-at-arms carried Acoma by storm and put three
+thousand of its defenders to the sword, as was the
+Spanish custom. A funeral in Acoma’s sun-seared
+graveyard is worth journeying a long, long way to see.
+When the still form, wrapped in its costliest blanket,
+has been lowered into its narrow resting-place among
+the skeletons of its fathers; when upon the earth above
+it has been broken the symbolic jar of water; when the
+relatives have brought forth pottery and weapons and
+clothing to be broken and rent upon the grave that they
+may go with their departed owner; when all these
+weird rites have been performed the wailing mourners<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_52"></a>[52]</span>
+file away to those desolate houses where the shamans
+are blinding the eyes of the ghosts that they may not
+find the trail of the soul which has set out on its four
+days’ journey to the Land That Lies Beyond the
+Ranges. It is a strange business.</p>
+
+<p>American dominion has not yet resulted in destroying
+the picturesque costumes of the Acomas, and
+I hope to Heaven that it never will. Civilisation has
+enough to answer for in substituting the unlovely garments
+of Europe for the beautiful and becoming costumes
+of China and Japan. In Acoma the people
+always look as though they were dressed up for visitors,
+although, as a matter of fact, they are nothing
+of the sort. Like all barbarians, they are fond of
+colours. The tendencies of a man may be pretty accurately
+gauged by the manner in which he wears his
+shirt. If he lets it hang outside his trousers he is a
+dyed-in-the-wool conservative, and you can make up
+your mind that he has no glass in <i>his</i> windows or doors
+to <i>his</i> ground floor. But if he tucks it into his trousers,
+white-man fashion, it may be taken as a sign that
+he is a progressive, an aboriginal Bull Mooser, as it
+were, in which case he usually goes a step further by
+hiding the picturesque <i>banda</i>, with its suggestion of the
+buccaneers, beneath a sombrero several sizes too large.
+On dance days, however, liberals and conservatives
+alike discard their shirts and trousers for the primitive
+breech-clouts of their savage ancestors, streak and
+ring their lithe, brown bodies with red and yellow pigments,
+surmount their none too lovely features with<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_53"></a>[53]</span>
+fantastic head-dresses, and transform themselves into
+very ferocious and repellent figures indeed. A Hopi
+in his dancing dress looks like the creature of a bad
+dream.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp50" id="illus10" style="max-width: 29.6875em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus10.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><p class="attr"><i>From a photograph by A. C. Vroman.</i></p>
+  <p>“DANCE MAD!”</p>
+  <p>“On dance days they streak and ring their lithe bronze bodies with
+  red and yellow pigments, surmount their none too lovely features with
+  fantastic head-dresses, and transform themselves into the creatures of a
+  bad dream.”</p></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>The women wear a peculiar sort of tunic, somewhat
+resembling that worn by their cousins on the
+Isthmus of Tehuantepec, which exposes the neck and
+one round, bronze shoulder. The garment is well
+chosen, for the Acomas have the finest necks and busts
+of any women that I know. This is due, no doubt,
+to the fact that they carry all the water used in their
+houses from the communal reservoir in <i>tinajas</i> balanced
+on their heads, frequently up a ladder and two
+steep flights of stairs, thus unconsciously developing a
+litheness of figure and a mould of form that would
+arouse the envy of Gaby des Lys. Over their shoulders
+is drawn a little shawl, generally of vivid scarlet. Then
+there is more scarlet in the kilts which reach from
+the waist to the knees and a contrast in the black
+stockings which come to the ankle, leaving bare their
+dainty feet—the smallest and prettiest women’s feet
+that I have ever seen. The feet of all these hill-folk
+are abnormally small, the result, doubtless, of the constant
+clutching of the uneven rock. The picturesqueness
+of the women’s costumes is enormously increased
+by the quantities of turquoise-studded silver jewellery
+which they affect, which tinkles musically when they
+walk. This jewellery, which they hammer out of
+Mexican <i>pesos</i>, obtaining the turquoises from the rich
+and highly profitable local mines, forms one of the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_54"></a>[54]</span>
+Acomas’ chief sources of revenue, for they sell great
+quantities of it to the agents of the curiosity dealers
+along the railway and these resell it to the tourists on
+the transcontinental trains at a profit of many hundred
+per cent. They make several other forms of decorative
+wares: blankets, for example—though the Hopi
+blankets are not to be spoken of in the same breath
+with the beautiful products of the looms of their unfriendly
+Navajo neighbours—and pottery jars which
+they patiently decorate in fine grey-black designs and
+burn over dung-fed fires. Everything considered,
+their work is probably the most artistic done by any
+Indians in America to-day.</p>
+
+<p>But to return to the highway of narrative from
+which I find that I have inadvertently wandered.
+When a girl is old enough to get married, which is
+usually about the time that she reaches her twelfth
+birthday, she is expected to arrange her lustrous blue-black
+hair in two large whorls, like doughnuts, one on
+each side of her dainty head. The whorl is supposed
+to typify the squash blossom, which is the Hopi emblem
+of maidenhood. To arrange this complicated
+coiffure is a long day’s task, and after it is once made
+the owner puts herself to acute discomfort by sleeping
+on a wooden head-rest, so as not to disarrange it.
+When a girl marries, which she generally does very early
+in her teens, she must no longer wear the <i>nash-mi</i>, as
+the whorls are called. Instead, her hair is done up in
+two pendent rolls, symbolical of the ripened squash,
+which is the Hopi emblem of fruitfulness. And after<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_55"></a>[55]</span>
+you have seen the litters of fat, brown babies which
+gambol like puppies before every door, and the rows of
+roguish children’s faces which peer down at you from
+every sun-scorched housetop, you begin to think that
+there must be some virtue in this symbolical hair-dressing
+after all.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus11" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus11.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><table><tr>
+  <td class="td2"><p class="attr"><i>From a photograph by A. C. Vroman.</i></p>
+  <p>“When a girl is old enough to get married she is expected to arrange
+  her lustrous, blue-black hair in two large whorls.”</p></td>
+  <td class="td2"><p class="attr"><i>From a photograph by A. C. Vroman.</i></p>
+  <p>“Rows of roguish children’s faces which peer down at you from every
+  sun-baked housetop.”</p></td>
+  </tr></table>
+  <p>YOUNG ACOMANS.</p></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>Acoma is Mrs. Pankhurst’s dream come true.
+From time beyond reckoning the women have possessed
+the privileges and power for which their pale-faced
+sisters are so strenuously striving. Not only is
+Mrs. Acoma the ruler of her household but she is
+absolute owner of the house and all that is in it. In
+fact, a man is not permitted to own a house at all,
+and if his wife wishes to put him out of her house she
+may. Instead of a woman taking her husband’s name
+after marriage, he takes hers, and the children that
+they have also take the name of their mother. In other
+words, if Mr. Smith marries Miss Jones he becomes
+Mr. Jones and their children are the little Joneses.
+And the men accept their feminine rôles even to playing
+nursemaid while the women do the work, it being
+not the exception but the rule to see even the governors
+and war captains dandling squalling papooses on
+their knees or toting them up and down the main
+street on their backs. A comic artist couldn’t raise a
+smile in Acoma, for he would find that all his pet
+jokes are there accepted facts.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp50" id="illus12" style="max-width: 29.6875em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus12.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><p class="attr"><i>From a photograph copyright
+  by Fred Harvey</i>.</p>
+  <p>His first riding lesson.</p>
+  <p class="attr"><i>From a photograph copyright by Fred Harvey</i>.</p>
+  <p>The dancing lesson.</p>
+  <p class="attr"><i>From a photograph copyright by Fred Harvey</i>.</p>
+  <p>The history lesson.</p>
+  <p>THE EDUCATION OF A YOUNG HOPI.</p></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>Even more interesting than Acoma, from an architectural
+standpoint, is the pyramid pueblo of Taos
+(pronounced as though it were spelled “<i>tous</i>,” if you<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_56"></a>[56]</span>
+please). This strange town—in many respects the
+most extraordinary in the world—is built on the floor
+of a mountain-girdled valley, some seventy miles due
+north from Santa Fé, and can best be reached by leaving
+the main line of the railway at Barrancas or Servilleta
+and driving out to the pueblo by wagon or stage.
+Though it is quite possible to reach Taos from Santa
+Fé in a single day, the journey is a very fatiguing one,
+it being much better to spend the night at the ranch-house
+at Arroyo Hondo and go on to the pueblo in
+comfort the next morning. There are really two towns—the
+white man’s and the Indian’s—four miles apart.
+White man’s Taos consists of little more than a sun-swept
+plaza bordered on all four sides by Mexican
+houses of adobe, while running off from the plaza are
+numerous dim and narrow alleys, likewise lined by
+humble dwellings of whitewashed mud, in one of
+which that immortal hero of American boyhood, Kit
+Carson, lived and died. For Taos, you must understand,
+was long the terminus of that historic trail by
+which the traders and trappers from Kansas and Missouri
+went down into the Southwest. Here, then, came
+such famous frontiersmen as Carson and Jim Bridger,
+and Manuel Lisa, and Jedediah Smith to barter beads
+and calico and rum for blankets and turquoises and
+furs. Save for a few greybeards who dwell in their
+memories of the exciting past, the frontiersmen have
+all passed round that dark turning from which no
+man returns, and Taos plaza hears the jingle of their
+spurs and the clatter of their high-heeled boots no<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_57"></a>[57]</span>
+more. In their stead have come another breed of
+men, who carry palettes instead of pistols and who
+confront the Indian with brushes instead of bowie-knives;
+for Taos, because of its extraordinary wealth
+of sun and shadow, of yellow deserts and purple
+mesas, of scarlet blankets and white walls, has become
+the rendezvous for a group of brilliant painters who
+are perpetuating on canvas the red men of the terraced
+houses. Seen at dusk or in the dimness of the early
+dawn, Taos bears a striking resemblance to the low,
+squat pyramids at Sakkara, for it consists, in fact, of
+two huge pyramidal structures, one six the other
+seven stories high, with a stream meandering between.
+In their general construction the houses of Taos are
+like those of Acoma, but instead of being terraced only
+on the front, they are built in two huge squares which
+are terraced on all four sides, looking from a little
+distance like the pyramids which children erect with
+stone building-blocks. These two huge apartment
+houses together accommodate upward of eight hundred
+souls. Like other Hopi dwellings, they can only
+be entered by means of ladders, pulling up the ladder
+after him being the Pueblo’s way of bolting his door.
+Though it needs iron muscles and leathern lungs to
+reach the apartments at the top, the view over the
+surrounding country well repays the exertion. Taos
+presents, I suppose, the nearest approach to socialistic
+life that this country has yet known, for the houses are
+built and occupied communally, the truck-gardens,
+grain-fields, and grazing lands are held in common, and<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_58"></a>[58]</span>
+if there is a surplus of hay or grain it is sold by the
+community.</p>
+
+<p>The communal form of government existing
+among the Hopi has proven so successful in practice
+that the Bureau of Indian Affairs has long since
+adopted the policy of leaving well enough alone. Although
+these Indians of the terraced houses are wards
+of the nation, to use a term which has become almost
+ironic, the white man’s law stops short at the boundaries
+of their pueblos, for they make their own laws,
+enforce them with their own police, maintain their
+own courts of justice, and inflict their own peculiar
+punishments. In Taos, for example, the stocks are
+still used as a punishment for misdemeanours, though
+the Indians go the Puritans one better by clamping
+down the culprit’s head as well as his hands and feet.
+At the head of the Pueblo system of government is an
+elected governor, known as the <i>cacique</i>, whose word is
+law with a capital L. Associated with him is a council
+of wise men called <i>mayores</i>, whose powers are a sort of
+cross between those of a board of aldermen and a college
+faculty. The activities of this patriarchal council
+frequently assume an almost parental character, it
+being customary for it to advise the young men of the
+pueblo when to marry—and whom. If an Indian gets
+into a dispute with a white man the case is tried in
+the county court, but differences between themselves
+are settled according to their own time-honoured customs.
+Though the police force of Acoma consists of
+but a solitary constable, whose uniform is a gilt cord<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_59"></a>[59]</span>
+around the crown of his sombrero, he takes himself
+quite as seriously as a member of the Broadway traffic
+squad, and, judging from his magnificent physique
+and the extremely businesslike revolver swinging from
+his hip, I doubt not that he would prove quite as
+efficient in an emergency.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus13" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus13.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><p class="attr"><i>From a photograph by A. C. Vroman.</i></p>
+  <p>THE PYRAMID-PUEBLO OF TAOS.</p>
+  <p>“At Taos the novel architectural scheme has been carried even further
+  by building the houses five and even six stories high and terracing them
+  on all four sides, so that they form a sort of pyramid.”</p></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>The Hopi are as stern and inflexible in the administration
+of those laws regulating the conduct of the
+community as were the Old Testament prophets.
+When a member of the tribe plays football with the
+public morals, as occasionally happens, he or she is
+tried by the <i>mayores</i> and, if found guilty, is expelled
+from the pueblo, bag and baggage. The system is as
+efficacious as it is inexpensive. As it chanced, I had
+an opportunity to see this novel form of punishment
+in operation. I was descending from the mesa at
+Acoma with my Laguna driver, who, in the absence of
+Carlisle-taught Marie, had served as my interpreter.
+He was a surly, taciturn fellow whose name, if my
+memory serves me faithfully, was Kill Hi. It should
+have been Kill Joy. As we reached the foot of the
+precipitous path my attention was attracted by a
+crowd, composed of the major portion of the pueblo’s
+population, which was stolidly watching four Indians—the
+constable and three others—loading a woman
+whose hands and feet were bound with ropes into a
+wagon. Despite her screams and struggles, they tossed
+her in as indifferently as they would a sack of meal.</p>
+
+<p>“Who is she? What’s the matter?” I asked
+Kill Hi.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_60"></a>[60]</span></p>
+
+<p>“Oh, nothin’ much,” was the indifferent answer.
+“She damn bad woman. They no want her here.
+They tell her to get out quick—vamoose. She no go.
+So they take her off in wagon like you see.”</p>
+
+<p>“But what are they going to do with her?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, I don’ know. Dump her out in desert,
+mebbe.”</p>
+
+<p>“But what will happen to her?” I persisted.
+“Won’t she starve to death?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, I don’ know,” said Kill Hi carelessly,
+cramping the buckboard so that I could get in.
+“Mebbe. P’raps. Acomas, they queer folks; not like
+other people.”</p>
+
+<p>He was quite right—they certainly are <i>not</i>.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_61"></a>[61]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="III">III<br>
+<span class="smaller">CHOPPING A PATH TO TO-MORROW</span></h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_62"></a>[62]</span></p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">“We’re the men that always march a bit before</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Though we cannot tell the reason for the same;</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">We’re the fools that pick the lock that holds the door—</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Play and lose and pay the candle for the game.</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">There’s no blaze nor trail nor roadway where we go;</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">There’s no painted post to point the right-of-way,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">But we swing our sweat-grained helves and we chop a path ourselves</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">To To-morrow from the land of Yesterday.”</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_63"></a>[63]</span></p>
+
+<h3>III<br>
+<span class="smaller">CHOPPING A PATH TO TO-MORROW</span></h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>They came bucketing into town at a hand-gallop,
+hat brims flapping, spurs jingling, tie-down straps
+streaming, their ponies kicking the dusty road into a
+yellow haze behind them. With their gay neckerchiefs
+and sheepskin chaps they formed as vivid a group as
+one could find outside a Remington. They pulled up
+with a great clatter of hoofs in front of the Golden
+West saloon and, leaving their panting mounts standing
+dejectedly, heads to the ground and reins trailing,
+went stamping into the bar. Having had previous
+experience with their sort, I made bold to follow them
+through the swinging doors; for more unvarnished
+facts about a locality, its people, politics, progress, and
+prospects, are to be had over a mahogany bar than any
+place I know except a barber’s chair.</p>
+
+<p>“What’ll it be, boys?” sang out one of them, as
+they sprawled themselves over the polished mahogany.
+I expected to see the bartender matter-of-coursely
+shove out a black bottle and six small glasses, for, according
+to all the accepted canons of the cow country,
+as I had known it a dozen years before, there was only
+one kind of a drink ever ordered at a bar. So, when
+two of the party expressed a preference for ginger ale
+and the other four allowed that they would take lemonade,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_64"></a>[64]</span>
+I felt like going to the door and taking another
+look at the straggling frontier town and at the cactus-dotted
+desert which surrounded it, just to make sure
+I really was in Arizona and not at Chautauqua, New
+York.</p>
+
+<p>It required scant finesse to engage one of the lemonade
+drinkers in amicable and illuminating conversation.</p>
+
+<p>“Round-up hereabouts?” I inquired, by way of
+making an opening.</p>
+
+<p>“Nope,” said my questionee. “Leastways not as
+I knows of. You see,” he continued confidentially,
+“we’ve quit cow-punching. We’ve tied up with the
+movies.”</p>
+
+<p>“With the what?” I queried.</p>
+
+<p>“The movies—the moving-picture people, you
+know,” he explained. “You see, the folks back East
+have gone plumb crazy on these here Wild West
+picture plays and we’re gratifying ’em at so much per.
+Wagon-train attacked by Indians—good-lookin’ girl
+carried off by one of the bucks—cow-punchers to the
+rescue, and all that sort of thing. It’s good pay and
+easy work, and the grub’s first-rate. Yes, sirree, it’s
+got cow-punching beaten to a frazzle. I reckon you’re
+from the East yourself, ain’t you?”</p>
+
+<p>I admitted that I was, adding that my bag was
+labelled “New York.”</p>
+
+<p>“The hell you say!” he exclaimed, regarding me
+with suddenly increased respect. “From what I
+hearn tell that sure must be some wicked town.
+Gambling joints runnin’ wide open, an’ every one packs<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_65"></a>[65]</span>
+a gun, I hear, an’ shootin’ scraps so frequent no one
+thinks nothing about ’em. It ain’t a safe place to live,
+I say. Now, down here in Arizony things is different.
+We’re peaceable, we are. We don’t stand for no promisc’us
+gun-play and, barring one or two of the mining
+towns, there ain’t a poker palace left, and I wouldn’t
+be so blamed surprised if this State went dry in a year
+or two. Well, s’long, friend,” he added, sweeping off
+his hat, “I’m pleased to’ve made your acquaintance.
+The feller with the camera’s waitin’ an’ we’ve got to
+get out an’ run off a few miles of film so’s to amuse
+the people back East.”</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus14" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus14.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><p>THE PASSING OF THE PUNCHER.</p>
+  <p>“Cowboys cavorting in front of cinematographs instead of corralling
+  cattle—that’s what civilisation has done for Arizona.”</p></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>I stood in the doorway of the Golden West saloon
+and watched them as they swung easily into their saddles
+and went tearing up the street in a rolling cloud
+of dust. Then I went on my way, marvelling at the
+mutability of things. “That’s what civilisation does
+for a country,” I said to myself. “Lemonade instead
+of liquor; policemen instead of pistol fighters; cowboys
+cavorting in front of cinematographs instead of
+corralling cattle.” At first blush—I confess it frankly—I
+was as disappointed as a boy who wakes up to
+find it raining on circus morning, for I had revisited
+the Southwest expecting to find the same easy-going,
+devil-may-care, whoop-her-up-boys life so characteristic
+of that country’s territorial days. Instead I
+found a busy, prosperous State, still picturesque in
+many of its aspects but as orderly and peaceful as
+Commonwealth Avenue on a Sunday morning.</p>
+
+<p>It wasn’t much of a country, was Arizona, the
+first time I set foot in it, upward of a dozen years ago.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_66"></a>[66]</span>
+A howling wilderness is what the Old Testament
+prophets would have called it, I suppose, and they
+wouldn’t have been far wrong either. Certainly Moses
+and his Israelites could not have wandered through a
+region more forbidding. Sand and sage-brush and
+cactus; snakes and lizards and coyotes; grim purple
+mountains in the distance and, flaming in a cloudless
+sky, a sun pitiless as fate. Cattlemen and sheepmen
+still fought for supremacy on the ranges; faro players
+still drove a roaring business in the mining-camps and
+the cow-towns; men’s coats screened but did not altogether
+conceal the ominous outline of the six-shooter.
+As building materials adobe and corrugated iron still
+predominated. Portland cement, the barbed-wire
+fence, the irrigation ditch, and alfalfa had yet to come
+into their own. In those days—and they were not so
+very long ago, if you please—A-r-i-z-o-n-a spelled
+Frontier with a capital F.</p>
+
+<p>I recall a little incident of that first visit, insignificant
+enough in itself but strangely prophetical of the
+changes which were to come. Riding across the most
+desolate and inhospitable country I had ever seen, a
+roughly written notice, nailed over the door of a ramshackle
+adobe ranch-house standing solitary in the desert,
+riveted my attention. The ill-formed letters, scrawled
+apparently with a sheep brush dipped in tar, read:</p>
+
+<p class="center">40 MILES FROM WOOD<br>
+40 MILES FROM WATER<br>
+40 FEET FROM HELL<br>
+GOD BLESS OUR HOME</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_67"></a>[67]</span></p>
+
+<p>As I pulled up my horse, fascinated by the grim humour
+of the lines, the rancher appeared in the doorway
+and, with the hospitality characteristic of those who
+dwell in the earth’s waste places, bade me dismount
+and rest. Such of his face as was not bearded had been
+tanned by sun and wind to the colour of a well-smoked
+brier; corduroy trousers belted over lean hips and a
+flannel shirt open at the throat accentuated a figure as
+iron-hard and sinewy as a mountain-lion. About his
+eyes, puckered at the outer corners into innumerable
+little wrinkles by much staring across sun-scorched
+ranges, lurked the humorous twinkle which suggested
+the Yankee or the Celt.</p>
+
+<p>“I stopped to read your sign,” I explained. “If
+things are as discouraging as all that I suppose you’ll
+pull out of here the first chance you get?”</p>
+
+<p>“Not by a jugful!” he exclaimed. “I’m here to
+stay. You mustn’t take that sign too seriously; it’s
+just my brand of humour. This country don’t look up
+to much now, I admit, but come back here in a few
+years, friend, and you’ll need to be introduced to it
+all over again.”</p>
+
+<p>“But you’ve no water,” I remarked sceptically.</p>
+
+<p>“We’ll have that before long. You see,” he explained
+eagerly, “the Colorado’s not so very far away
+and there’s considerable talk about the government’s
+damming it and bringing the water down here in diversion
+canals and irrigation ditches. If the government
+doesn’t help us, then we’ll sink artesian wells
+and get the water that way. Once get water on it and<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_68"></a>[68]</span>
+this soil’ll do the rest. Why, friend, this land’ll raise
+anything—<i>anything!</i> I’m going to put in alfalfa the
+first year or two, until I get on my feet, and then I’m
+going to raise citrus fruits. There’s never enough
+frost here to worry about, and all we need is water to
+make this the finest soil for orange growing on God’s
+green earth. Just remember what I’m telling you,”
+he concluded impressively, tapping my knee with his
+forefinger to emphasise his words, “though things
+look damned discouraging just now, this is going to be
+a great country some day.”</p>
+
+<p>As I rode across the desert I turned in my saddle
+to wave him a farewell, but he had already forgotten
+me. He was marking, in the bone-dry, cactus-dotted
+soil, the places where he was going to set out his orange-trees.
+Though our paths have not crossed again, I
+have always remembered him. Resolute, resourceful,
+optimistic, self-reliant, blessed with a sense of humour
+which jeers at obstacles and laughs discouragements
+away, with as fanatic a faith in the future of the land
+as has a Moslem in the Koranic paradise, he has typified
+for me those pioneers who, by their indomitable
+courage and unyielding tenacity, are converting the
+arid deserts of the Southwest into a veritable garden
+of the Lord.</p>
+
+<p>Recently, after a lapse of little more than a decade,
+I passed that way again. So amazing were the changes
+which had taken place in that brief interim that, just
+as my optimist had prophesied, I needed a second
+introduction to the land. Where I had left a desert,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_69"></a>[69]</span>
+arid, sun-baked, forbidding, I found fields where sleek
+cattle grazed knee-deep in alfalfa, and groves ablaze
+with golden fruit. Stretching away to the foot-hills
+were roads which would have done credit to John
+Macadam, and scattered along them at intervals were
+prosperous looking ranch-houses of cement or wood;
+there was a post-office and a trim row of stores, and a
+schoolhouse with a flag floating over it; straggling
+cottonwoods marked the courses of the irrigation
+streams and in the air was the cheerful sound of running
+water. There were two things which had brought
+about this miracle—pluck and water.</p>
+
+<p>Nowhere has the white man fought a more courageous
+fight or won a more brilliant victory than in
+Arizona. His weapons have been the transit and the
+level, the drill and the dredge, the pick and the spade;
+and the enemy which he has conquered has been the
+most stubborn of all foes—the hostile forces of Nature.
+The story of how the white man, within the space of
+less than thirty years, penetrated and explored and
+mapped this almost unknown region; of how he carried
+law and order and justice into a section which
+had never had so much as a speaking acquaintance with
+any one of the three before; of how, realising the
+necessity for means of communication, he built highways
+of steel across this territory from east to west
+and from north to south; of how, undismayed by the
+savageness of the countenance which the desert turned
+upon him, he laughed, and rolled up his sleeves, and
+spat on his hands, and slashed the face of the desert<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_70"></a>[70]</span>
+with canals and irrigating ditches, and filled those
+canals and ditches with water brought from deep in
+the earth or high in the mountains; and of how, in the
+conquered and submissive soil, he replaced the aloe
+with alfalfa, the mesquite with maize, the cactus with
+cotton, forms one of the most inspiring chapters in
+our history. It is one of the epics of civilisation, this
+reclamation of the Southwest, and its heroes are,
+thank God, Americans.</p>
+
+<p>Other desert regions have been redeemed by irrigation;
+Egypt, for example, and Mesopotamia, and
+parts of the Sudan, but the peoples of all those regions
+lay stretched out in the shade of a convenient palm,
+metaphorically speaking, and waited for some one with
+more energy than themselves to come along and do
+the work. But the Arizonians, mindful of the fact that
+God, the government, and Carnegie help those who
+help themselves, spent their days wielding pick and
+shovel and their evenings in writing letters to Washington
+with toil-hardened hands. After a time the
+government was prodded into action and the great
+dams at Laguna and Roosevelt are the result. Then
+the people, organising themselves into co-operative
+leagues and water-users’ associations, took up the work
+of reclamation where the government left off, and it
+is to these energetic, persevering men who have drilled
+wells and ploughed fields and dug ditches through
+the length and breadth of that great region which
+stretches from Yuma to Tucson that the metamorphosis
+of Arizona is due.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_71"></a>[71]</span></p>
+
+<p>More misconceptions are prevalent about Arizona
+than about any other region on the continent. The
+reclamation phase of its development has been so
+emphasised and advertised that among most of those
+who have not seen it for themselves the impression
+exists that it is a flat, arid, sandy, treeless country, a
+small portion of which has, miraculously enough,
+proved amenable to irrigation. This impression has
+been confirmed by various writers who, sacrificing accuracy
+for a phrase, have dubbed Arizona “the American
+Egypt,” which, to one who is really familiar with
+the physical characteristics of the Nile country and
+the agricultural disabilities under which its people
+labour, seems a left-handed compliment at best. Egypt—barring
+the swamp-lands of the Delta and a fringe
+of cultivation along the Nile—is a country of sun-baked
+yellow sand, as arid, flat, and treeless as an expanse
+of asphalt pavement. Arizona is nothing of
+the sort. In its most arid regions there is a small
+growth of green even in the dry season, while after
+the rains the desert bursts into a brilliancy and diversity
+of bloom incredible to one who has not seen it.
+How many people who have not visited Arizona are
+aware that within the borders of this “desert State”
+is the largest pine forest in the United States—six
+thousand square miles in area? Egypt, on the other
+hand, is, with the exception of the date-palm, virtually
+treeless. In Egypt there is not a hill worthy the
+name between Alexandria and Wady Halfa; Arizona
+has range after range of mountains which rise two<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_72"></a>[72]</span>
+miles and more into the air. Egypt is not a white man’s
+land and never will be. Arizona will never be anything
+else. If it is necessary to drag in Egypt at all (save as
+concerns antiquities) then, for goodness sake, pay the
+Khedive’s country a real compliment by calling it
+“the African Arizona.”</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus15" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus15.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption class="caption"> <p class="attr"><i>From a photograph by H. A.
+  Erickson, Coronado, Cal.</i></p>
+  <p>WHERE THE ROADS RUN OUT AND THE TRAILS BEGIN.</p>
+  <p>The Arizona desert: “It is more or less rolling country, corrugated by
+  buttes and mesas and unexpected outcroppings of rock, its surface covered
+  by a confused tangle of desert vegetation.”</p></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>The thing that surprised me most in Arizona was
+the desert. An Arab would not call it desert at all; a
+Bedouin would never feel at home upon it. I had
+expected to find a waste of sand, treeless, shrubless,
+plantless, incapable of supporting anything—yellow as
+molten brass, sun-scorched, unrelenting. That is the
+desert as one knows it in Africa and in Asia. The
+Arizona desert is something very different indeed. In
+the first place, it is not yellow at all but a sort of bluish-grey;
+“driftwood” is probably the term which an
+interior decorator would use to describe its peculiarly
+soft and elusive colouring. Neither is it flat nor has
+it the sand-dunes so characteristic of the Sahara. On
+the contrary, it is a more or less rolling country, corrugated
+by buttes and mesas and unexpected outcroppings
+of rock and sometimes gashed by <i>arroyos</i>, its
+surface covered with a confused tangle of desert vegetation
+so whimsical and fantastic in the forms it assumes
+that it looks for all the world like a prim New
+England garden gone violently insane. There is the
+<i>cholla</i>, for example, whose fuzzy white spines, so innocent-looking
+at a distance, might deceive the stranger
+into supposing that it was a sort of wildcat cousin of
+the gentle pussy-willow; the towering <i>sajuaro</i>, often<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_73"></a>[73]</span>
+forty feet in height and bearing a striking resemblance
+to those mammoth candelabra which flank the altars
+of Spanish cathedrals; the octopus-like <i>ocatilla</i>, whose
+slender, sinuous branches, tipped with scarlet blossoms,
+seem to be for ever groping for something which they
+cannot find; the grotesque prickly pear, looking not
+unlike a collection of green pincushions, abristle with
+pins and glued together at the edges; the sombre
+creosote bush, the scraggy mesquite, the silvery grease-wood,
+the bright green <i>paloverde</i>. These, with the
+white blossoms of the yucca and the pink, orange,
+yellow, scarlet, and crimson flowers of the cacti, the
+brilliant shades of the rock strata, the purples and
+violets and blues of the encircling mountains, the
+fleecy clouds drifting like great flocks of unshorn sheep
+across an ultramarine sky, combine to form a picture
+as far removed from the desert of our imagination as
+one could well conceive. Less picturesque than these
+colour effects, the portrayal of which would have taxed
+the genius of Whistler, but more interesting to the
+farmer, are the fine indigenous grasses which spring
+up over the mesas after the summer rains (some of
+them being, indeed, extraordinarily independent of the
+rainfall) and furnish ample if not abundant pasturage
+for live stock. I am quite aware, of course, that those
+California-bound tourists who gather their impressions
+of Arizona from the observation platform of a mail-train
+while streaking across the country at fifty miles
+an hour are accustomed to dismiss the subject of its
+possibilities with a wave of the hand and the dictum:<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_74"></a>[74]</span>
+“Nothing to it but sun, sand, and sage-brush.” Were
+those same people to see New York City from the rear
+end of a train they would assert that it consisted of
+nothing but tenements and tunnels. It is easy to
+magnify the barrenness of an arid region, and, that
+being so, I would respectfully suggest to the people
+of Arizona (and I make no charge for the suggestion)
+that they instruct their legislators to enact a law banishing
+any one found guilty of applying the defamatory
+misnomer “desert” to any portion of the State.</p>
+
+<p>Though it were not well to take too literally the
+panegyrics of the soil and its potentialities which every
+board of trade and commercial club in the State print
+and distribute by the ton, there is no playing hide-and-seek
+with the fact that the soil of a very large part of
+Arizona is as versatile as it is productive. At the celebration
+with which the people of Yuma marked the
+completion of the Colorado River project, prizes were
+awarded for <i>forty-three distinct products of the soil</i>.
+To recount them would be to enumerate practically
+every fruit, vegetable, and cereal native to the temperate
+zone and many of those ordinarily found only in
+the torrid, for Arizona combines in an altogether exceptional
+degree the climatic characteristics of them both.
+This not being a seedsman’s catalogue, it is enough to
+say that the list began with alfalfa and ended with yams.</p>
+
+<p>Everything considered, I am inclined to think that
+the shortest road to agricultural prosperity lies through
+an Arizona alfalfa field, for this proliferous crop, whose
+fecundity would put a guinea-pig to shame, possesses
+the admirable quality of making the land on which it<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_75"></a>[75]</span>
+is grown richer with each cutting. They told me some
+prodigious alfalfa yarns in Arizona, but, as each district
+goes its neighbour’s record a few tons to the acre
+better, I will content myself with mentioning that, in
+certain parts of the State, as many as <i>twelve crops of
+alfalfa have been cut in a year</i>. I wonder what your
+Eastern farmer, who thanks his lucky stars if he can
+get one good crop of hay in a year, would think of life
+in a land like this?</p>
+
+<p>Certain of the orange-growing sections of Arizona
+have been unwisely advertised as “frostless.” This
+is not true, for there is no place within our borders
+which is wholly free from frost. It is quite true, however,
+that the citrus groves of southern Arizona stand
+a better chance of escaping the ravages of frost than
+those in any other part of the country. The fruit
+ripens, moreover, considerably earlier, the Arizona
+growers being able to place their oranges, lemons, and
+grapefruit on Eastern dinner-tables a full month in
+advance of their Californian competitors.</p>
+
+<p>Unless I am very much mistaken, two products
+hitherto regarded as alien to our soil—the Algerian
+date and Egyptian cotton—are bound to prove important
+factors in the agricultural future of Arizona.
+There is no tree which produces so large a quantity of
+fruit and at the same time requires so little attention
+as the date-palm when once it gets in bearing, date-palm
+groves in North Africa, where the prices are very
+low, yielding from five to ten dollars a tree per annum.
+They are, as it were, the camels among trees, for they
+thrive in soil so sandy and waterless that any other<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_76"></a>[76]</span>
+tree would die from sheer discouragement. The date-palm
+has long since passed the experimental stage in
+Arizona—the heavily laden groves, which any one who
+cares to take the trouble can see for himself at several
+places in the southern part of the State, giving ocular
+evidence of the success with which this toothsome
+fruit can be grown under American conditions. The
+other crop which has, I am convinced, a rosy future in
+Arizona is Egyptian cotton, which will thrive on less
+water than any crop grown under irrigation. The
+fibre of the Egyptian cotton being about three times
+the length of the ordinary American-grown staple, it
+can always find a profitable market among thread
+manufacturers when our Southern cotton frequently
+goes unharvested because prices are too low to pay for
+picking, an average of about fifty-five million pounds
+of Egyptian cotton being imported into the United
+States each year. With the fertile soil, the warm, dry
+climate, and the water resources which are being so
+rapidly developed, the day is not far distant when the
+traveller through certain sections of Arizona will look
+out of the window of his Pullman at a fleeting landscape
+of fleecy white.</p>
+
+<p>“That isn’t snow, is it, George?” he will ask the
+porter, and that grinning Ethiopian will answer:</p>
+
+<p>“No, suh, dat ain’t snow—dat’s ’Gyptian cotton.”</p>
+
+<p class="tb">This is no virgin, untried soil, remember. Centuries
+before the great Genoese navigator set foot on
+the beach of San Salvador, southern Arizona was the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_77"></a>[77]</span>
+home of a dense and prosperous population, skilled in
+agriculture and past masters in irrigation, the canals
+which they constructed, the ruins of which may still
+be seen, providing object-lessons for the engineers of
+to-day. It is peculiarly interesting to recall that when
+the crusaders were battling with the Saracens in Palestine,
+when the Byzantine Empire was at the height
+of its glory, when the Battle of Hastings had yet to be
+fought, when Canute of Denmark ruled in England, a
+remarkable degree of civilisation prevailed in this
+remote corner of the Americas. By civilisation I mean
+that the inhabitants of this region dwelt in desert sky-scrapers
+four, five, perhaps even six stories in height,
+that they possessed an organised government, that
+they had evolved a practical co-operative system not
+unlike the water-users’ associations of the Arizona of
+to-day, and that, by means of a system of dams, aqueducts,
+and reservoirs—the remains of which may still
+be seen—they had succeeded in reclaiming a by no
+means inconsiderable region. So great became the
+agricultural prosperity of this early people that it
+excited the cupidity of the warlike tribes to the north,
+who, in a series of forays probably extending over
+decades, at last succeeded in exterminating or driving
+out this agricultural population. Their many-storied
+dwellings crumbled, the canals and aqueducts which
+they constructed fell into disrepair, the soil once again
+dried up for lack of water and returned in time to
+its original state, the habitat of the cactus and the
+mesquite, the haunt of the coyote and the snake.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_78"></a>[78]</span></p>
+
+<p>Centuries passed, during which migratory bands
+of Indians were the only visitors to this silent and
+deserted land. Then, trudging up from the Spanish
+settlements to the southward, came Brother Marcos
+de Niza in his sandals and woollen robe. He, the
+first white man to set foot in Arizona, after penetrating
+as far northward as the Zuñi towns, returned
+to Mexico, or New Spain, as it was then called, where
+he related what he had seen to one of the Spanish
+officials, Don Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, who
+promptly equipped an expedition and started northward
+on his own account. Followed by half a thousand
+Spanish horse and foot, a few hundred friendly Indians,
+and a mile-long mule train, the expedition wound
+across the burning deserts of Chihuahua, over the
+snow-clad mountains of Sonora, through rivers swollen
+into torrents by the spring rains, and so into Arizona,
+where, raising the red-and-yellow banner, he took
+possession of all this country in the name of his Most
+Catholic Majesty of Spain. This was in the year of
+grace 1540, when the ghost of Anne Boleyn still
+disturbed the sleep of Henry VIII and when Solyman
+the Magnificent was hammering at the gates of Budapest.
+By the beginning of the seventeenth century
+the country now comprising the State of Arizona was
+dotted with Spanish priests, who, in their missions of
+sun-dried bricks, devoted themselves to the disheartening
+task of Christianising the Indians. In 1680, however,
+came the great Indian revolt; the friars were
+slain upon their altars, their missions were ransacked<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_79"></a>[79]</span>
+and destroyed, and the work of civilisation which they
+had begun was set back a hundred years.</p>
+
+<p>The nineteenth century was approaching its
+quarter mark before the first American frontiersmen,
+pushing southward from the Missouri in quest of furs
+and gold, penetrated Arizona. Came then in rapid
+succession the Mexican War, which resulted in the
+cession to the United States of New Mexico, which
+then included all that portion of Arizona lying north
+of the Gila River; the discovery of gold in California,
+which, by drawing attention to the country south of
+the Gila as a desirable transcontinental railway route,
+resulted in its purchase under the terms of the Gadsden
+Treaty; and the outbreak of the Civil War, a Confederate
+invasion of Arizona in 1862 resulting in its
+organisation as a Territory of the Union. The early
+period of American rule was extremely unsettled;
+Indian massacres and the dangerous elements which
+composed the population—prospectors, cow-punchers,
+adventurers, gamblers, bandits, horse thieves—leading
+to one of the worst though one of the most picturesque
+periods of our frontier history. On February the 14th,
+1912, the Territory of Arizona was admitted to the
+sisterhood of States, and George W. P. Hunt, its first
+elected governor, standing on the steps of the capitol,
+swung his hat in the air and called on the assembled
+crowd for three cheers as a ball of bunting ran up the
+staff and broke out into a flag with eight-and-forty
+stars.</p>
+
+<p>Notwithstanding the fact that the area of Arizona<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_80"></a>[80]</span>
+is greater than that of Italy, there are only three
+communities in the State—Phœnix, Tucson, and Prescott—which
+by any stretch of the census taker’s
+figures are entitled to be called cities. They are, however,
+as far removed from the whoop-and-hurrah, let-her-go-Gallegher
+cow-towns which most outlanders
+associate with the Southwest as a young, attractive,
+and well-poised college girl is from a wild-eyed and
+dishevelled, militant suffragette. Phœnix, the capital,
+I had pictured as consisting of a broad and very dusty
+main street bordered by houses of adobe and unpainted
+wooden shacks, its sidewalks of yellow pine shaded
+by wooden awnings, with cow-ponies tied to the railings
+and with every other place a temple to the goddesses
+of Alcohol or Chance. I was—I admit it with
+shame—as ignorant as all that, and this is my medium
+of apology. As a matter of fact, Phœnix is as modern
+and up-to-the-minute as a girl just back from Paris.
+Its streets are paved so far into the country that you
+wonder if the Venezuelan asphalt beds are likely to
+hold out. Its leading hotels are as liberally bathtubised
+as those of Broadway, and the head waiter in
+the Adams House café will hand you a menu which
+contains every gastronomic delicacy from caviare
+d’Astrachan to fromage de Brie. Gambling is as unfashionable
+as it is at Lake Mohonk, the municipal
+regulations being so stringent that such innocent affairs
+as raffles, church fairs, and grab-bags are practically
+prohibited, while the charge for a liquor licence has been
+placed at such a prohibitive figure that gentlemen<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_81"></a>[81]</span>
+with dry throats are compelled to walk several blocks
+before they can find a place with swinging doors.
+Tucson, on the other hand, still retains many of its
+Mexican characteristics. It is a town of broad and
+sometimes abominably dusty streets lined with many
+buildings of staring white adobe, the sidewalks along
+its principal business thoroughfares being shaded by
+hospitable wooden awnings, which are a godsend to
+the pedestrian during the fierce heat of midsummer.
+It is a picturesque and interesting town, is Tucson, and,
+as the guide-book writers put it, will well repay a
+visit—provided the weather is not too hot and the
+visit is not too long. Prescott, magnificently situated
+on a mountainside in the Black Hills, is the centre of
+an incredibly rich mining region—did you happen to
+know that Arizona is the greatest producer of copper
+in the world, its output exceeding that of Montana or
+Michigan or Mexico? The feature of Prescott that I
+remember most distinctly is the “Stope” room in the
+Yavapai Club, an architectural conceit which produces
+the effect of a stope, or gallery in a mine—fitting
+tribute of the citizens of a mining town to the industry
+which gives it being.</p>
+
+<p>Should you ever find yourself on the Santa Fé,
+Prescott &amp; Phœnix Railway, which is the only north-and-south
+line in the State, forming a link between the
+Santa Fé and Southern Pacific systems, I hope that
+you will tell the conductor to let you off at Hot Springs
+Junction, which is the station for Castle Hot Springs,
+which lie a score or so of miles beyond the sound of<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_82"></a>[82]</span>
+the locomotive’s raucous shriek, in a cañon of the
+Bradshaw Mountains. It is a <i>dolce far niente</i> spot—a
+peaceful backwater of the tumultuous stream of life.
+Hemmed in on every side by precipitous walls of rock
+is a toy valley carpeted with lush, green grass and
+dotted with palms and fig trees and innumerable varieties
+of cacti and clumps of giant cane. A mountain
+stream meanders through it, and on the hillside above
+the scattered buildings of the hotel, whose low roofs and
+deep, cool verandas, taken in conjunction with the
+subtropic vegetation, vividly recall the dak-bungalows
+in the Indian hills, are three great pools screened by
+hedges of bamboo, in which one can go a-swimming in
+midwinter without having any preliminary shivers, as
+the temperature of the water ranges from 115 to 122
+degrees.</p>
+
+<p>When I was at Castle Hot Springs I struck up an
+acquaintance with an old-time prospector who asserted
+that he was the original discoverer of the place.</p>
+
+<p>“It was nigh on forty year ago,” he began, reminiscently.
+“I’d been prospectin’ up on the headwaters
+of the Verde. One day, while I was ridin’
+through the foot-hills west o’ here a war party of
+’Paches struck my trail, an’ the fust thing I knowed
+the hull blamed bunch was after me lickety-split as
+fast as their ponies could lay foot to ground. I was
+ridin’ a pinto that could run like hell let loose in a
+rainstorm, and as she was middlin’ fresh I reckoned I
+wouldn’t have much trouble gettin’ away from ’em, an’
+I wouldn’t, neither, if I’d been tol’rable familiar with<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_83"></a>[83]</span>
+the country hereabouts. But I warn’t; and by gum,
+friend, if I didn’t ride plumb into this very cañon!
+Yes, sirree, that’s just what I went an’ done! Its
+walls rose up as steep an’ smooth as the side of a house
+in front o’ me an’ to the right o’ me an’ to the left o’
+me—an’ behind me were the Injuns, yellin’ an’ whoopin’
+like the red devils that they were. I seen that it was
+all over but the shoutin’, for there warn’t no possible
+chanct to escape—not one!”</p>
+
+<p>“And what happened to you?” interrupted an
+excited listener.</p>
+
+<p>“What happened to me?” was the withering answer.
+“Hell, what could happen? They killed me,
+damn ’em; <i>they killed me!</i>”</p>
+
+<p class="tb">From a climatic standpoint Arizona is really a
+tropic country modified in the north by its elevation.
+It has no summer or winter in the generally accepted
+sense, but instead a short rainy season in July and
+August and a dry one the rest of the year. In the
+spring and fall dust-storms are frequent—and if you
+have never experienced an Arizona dust-storm you
+have something to be thankful for—while in the summer
+it gets so hot that I have seen them cover the skylight
+of the Hotel Adams in Phœnix with canvas and
+keep a stream of water playing on it from sunup to
+sundown. The warmest part of the State, and, in
+fact, the warmest place north of the lowlands of the
+Isthmus—barring Death Valley—is the valley of the
+lower Gila in the neighbourhood of Yuma, where<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_84"></a>[84]</span>
+the mercury in a shaded thermometer not infrequently
+climbs to the 130 mark. It should be said, however,
+that, owing to the extreme dryness of the air, evaporation
+from moist surfaces is very rapid, so that the high
+temperatures of southern Arizona are decidedly less
+oppressive than much lower temperatures in a humid
+atmosphere. As a result of this dryness and of the
+all-pervading sunshine, Arizona has in recent years
+come to be looked upon as a great natural sanitarium,
+and to it flock thousands of sufferers from catarrhal
+and tubercular diseases. Everything considered, however,
+I do not believe that Arizona is by any means an
+ideal sick-man’s country; for, particularly in advanced
+stages of tuberculosis, there is always the danger of
+overstimulation, the patient, buoyed up by the champagne-like
+quality of the air, feeling well before he is
+well and overexerting himself in consequence.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps the innate politeness of the Arizonians was
+never put to a severer test than it was a few years
+ago, when Mr. Chauncey Depew, then at the height
+of his fame as a speaker, utilised the opportunity
+afforded by changing engines at Yuma to address a
+few remarks to the assembled citizens of the place
+from the platform of his private car. Now Yuma, as
+I have already remarked, has the reputation of being
+the red-hottest spot north of Panama, and its residents
+are correspondingly touchy when any illusion is made
+to the torridness of their climate. Imagine their feelings,
+then, when Mr. Depew, in the course of his remarks,
+dragged in the bewhiskered story of the soldier<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_85"></a>[85]</span>
+who died at Fort Yuma from a combination of sunstroke
+and delirium tremens. The following night his
+bunkie received a spirit message from the departed.
+“Dear Bill,” it ran, “please send down my blankets.”
+Now that story is hoary with antiquity. I have heard
+it told in the officers’ mess at Aden, and at Bahrein
+at the head of the Persian Gulf, and on the terrace of
+the club in Zanzibar, with its locale laid in each of
+those places, and I haven’t the least doubt in the
+world but that it evoked a yawn from King Rameses
+when it was told to him in Thebes. Yet the inhabitants
+of Yuma, with a politeness truly Chesterfieldian,
+not only did not yawn or groan or hiss when Mr.
+Depew saddled the ancient libel upon their town, but
+it is said that one or two of them even laughed hoarsely.
+The Arizonian heat is not of the sunstroke variety,
+however, and the thrasher gangs work right through it
+all summer from ten to fourteen hours a day; and this,
+remember, is only in the desert half of the State—the
+mountain half is as high and cool as you could wish,
+with snow-capped mountains and green grass and
+running water and fish and game everywhere.</p>
+
+<p>Speaking of game, certain portions of Arizona still
+offer opportunities aplenty for the sportsman who
+knows how to ride and can stand fatigue. In the foot-hills
+of the Catalina Range mountain-lions are almost
+as common as are back-yard cats in Brooklyn. Patience,
+perseverance, and a pack of well-trained “b’ar
+dogs” rarely fail to provide the hunter with an opportunity
+to swing his front sights onto a black bear or a<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_86"></a>[86]</span>
+cinnamon on the Mogollon Plateau. Spotted leopards,
+or jaguars, frequently make their way into the southern
+counties from Mexico and serve to furnish handsome
+rugs for the ranch-houses of the region. Though
+small herds of antelope are still occasionally seen, the
+law has stepped in at the eleventh hour and fifty-ninth
+minute and prevented their complete extermination.
+But if you want an experience to relate over
+the coffee and cigars that will make your friends’
+stories of bear hunting in British Columbia and moose
+hunting in Maine sound as tame and commonplace as
+woodchuck shooting on the farm, why don’t you run
+down to that portion of Arizona lying along the Mexican
+border and hunt wild camels? I’m perfectly serious—there
+<i>are</i> wild camels there. They came about in
+this fashion: Along in the late seventies, if I am not
+mistaken, the Department of Agriculture, thinking to
+confer an inestimable boon on the struggling settlers
+of the arid Southwest, imported several hundred head
+of camels from Egypt, arguing that if they could carry
+heavy burdens over great stretches of waterless and
+pastureless desert in Africa, there was no reason why
+they could not do the same thing in Arizona, where
+almost identically the same conditions prevailed. But
+the paternalistic officials in Washington failed to take
+into account the prejudices of the packers. Now, the
+camel is a supercilious and ill-natured beast, quite
+different from the patient and uncomplaining burro,
+but the Arabs, who have grown up with him, as it were,
+make allowance for the peculiarities of his disposition<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_87"></a>[87]</span>
+and get along with him accordingly. Not so the
+Arizona packer. He took a hearty dislike to the ship
+of the desert from the first and never let pass an opportunity
+to do it harm. As a result of this hostility
+and abuse, many of the poor beasts died and the remainder
+were finally turned loose in the desert to
+shift for themselves. If they have not multiplied
+they at least have not decreased and are still to be
+found in those uninhabited stretches of desert which
+lie along the Mexican frontier. They are not protected
+by law and are wild enough and speedy enough to
+require some hunting; so if you want to add to your
+collection of trophies a head that, as a cowboy acquaintance
+of mine put it, is really “rayshayshay,” you can’t
+do better than to go into the desert and bag a dromedary.</p>
+
+<p class="tb">In speaking of Arizona it must be borne in mind
+that the State consists of two distinct regions, as dissimilar
+in climate and physiography as Florida and
+Maine. Theirs is the difference between plateau and
+plain, between sandstone and sand, between pine
+and palm. If you will take a pencil and ruler and draw
+a line diagonally across the map of the State, from
+Mojave City on the Colorado, to Bisbee on the Mexican
+border, you will have a rough idea of the extent
+of these two zones. That portion of the State lying to
+the north of this imaginary line is a six-thousand-foot-high
+plateau, mountainous and heavily forested, with
+green grass and running water and cold, dry winters,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_88"></a>[88]</span>
+and an annual rainfall which frequently exceeds thirty
+inches. To the south of this quartering line lies a tremendous
+stretch of arid but fertile land, broken at
+intervals by hills and mountain ranges, with a sparse
+vegetation and an annual rainfall which, particularly
+in the vicinity of the Colorado, often does not exceed
+three inches. It is in this southern portion, however,
+that the future of Arizona lies, for the success of the
+great irrigation projects at Roosevelt and Laguna (and
+which will doubtless be followed in the not far distant
+future by similar undertakings on the Santa Cruz,
+the San Pedro, the Agua Frio, the Verde, the Little
+Colorado, and the lower Gila) have given convincing
+proof that all that its arid soil requires is water to transform
+it into a land of farms and orchards and gardens,
+in which the energetic man of modest means—and it
+is such men who form the backbone of every country—can
+find a generous living and a delightful home.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp50" id="illus16" style="max-width: 31.25em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus16.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><p>THE TRAIL OF A THOUSAND THRILLS.</p>
+  <p>The road from Phœnix to the Roosevelt Dam—“its right angle corners and
+  hairpin turns are calculated to make the hair of the motorist permanently
+  pompadour.”</p></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>A grave injustice has been done to the people of
+the State by those fiction writers who have depicted
+Arizona society as consisting of cow-punchers, faro
+dealers, and bad men. The pictures they still persist
+in drawing of towns shot up by drunken cowboys, of
+saloons and poker palaces running at full blast, of
+stage-coaches and mail-trains held up and robbed, are
+as much out of date, if the reading public only knew it,
+as crinoline skirts and flowered satin vests. As a matter
+of fact, Arizona claims the most law-abiding population
+in the United States, and the claim is copper-riveted
+by the criminal records. The gambler and the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_89"></a>[89]</span>
+gun fighter have disappeared, driven out by the force
+of public disapproval. The Arizona Rangers, that
+picturesque body of constabulary which policed the
+country in territorial days, have been disbanded because
+there is no longer work for them to do. While
+it is not to be denied that a large number of the citizens,
+particularly in the range country, still carry
+firearms, it must not be inferred that crime is winked
+at or that murder is regarded with a whit more tolerance
+than it is in the East. The sheriffs and marshals
+of Arizona are famous as “go-gitters” and a very
+large proportion of the gentry whom they have gone
+for and gotten are promptly given free board and
+lodging in a large stone building at Florence, on the
+outer walls of which men pace up and down with
+Winchesters over the shoulders. The Arizona State
+Penitentiary at Florence is one of the most modern
+and humanely conducted penal institutions in the
+United States, being under the direct supervision of
+Governor Hunt, who is one of the foremost advocates
+of prison reform in the country. When I visited the
+penitentiary with the governor, instead of spending the
+night at the residence of the warden, he insisted on
+occupying a cell in “murderer’s row.” His experiment
+in introducing the honour system in the Arizona prisons
+has met with such pronounced success that roads
+and bridges are now being constructed throughout the
+State by gangs of prisoners in charge of unarmed
+wardens. In this connection they tell an amusing
+story of an English tourist who was getting his first<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_90"></a>[90]</span>
+view of Arizona from the observation platform of a
+Pullman. As the train tore westward his attention was
+attracted by the conspicuous suits worn by a force of
+men engaged in building a bridge.</p>
+
+<p>“I say,” he inquired, screwing a monocle into his
+eye and addressing himself to the Irish brakeman,
+“who are the johnnies in the striped clothing?”</p>
+
+<p>“Thim’s som uv Guv’nor Hunt’s pets from th’
+Sthate prison,” was the answer. “Most av thim’s
+murtherers too.”</p>
+
+<p>“My word!” exclaimed the Briton, staring the
+harder. “Isn’t it jolly dangerous to have murderers
+running loose about the country like that? What?”</p>
+
+<p>“Not at all,” the brakeman answered carelessly;
+“yez see, sorr, in most cases there was exterminating
+circumstances.”</p>
+
+<p class="tb">The other day, when the promoters of Phœnix’s
+annual carnival wished to obtain a stage-coach to use
+in the street pageants, they could not find one in the
+State; they had all been bought by the moving-picture
+concerns. A stage still runs over the mountains from
+Phœnix to Globe, driven by a gentleman who chews
+tobacco and wears a broad-brimmed hat, but it has
+sixty-horse-power engines under it and the fashion in
+which the driver takes the giddy turns—he assured
+me that he went round them on two wheels so as to
+save rubber—is calculated to make the passengers’
+hair permanently pompadour. Out in the back
+country, where the roads run out and the trails begin,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_91"></a>[91]</span>
+the cow-puncher is still to be found, but he, like the
+longhorns which he herds, is rapidly retreating before
+civilisation’s implacable advance.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus17" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus17.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><p class="attr"><i>From a photograph by H. A.
+  Erickson, Coronado, Cal.</i></p>
+  <p>THROWING THE DIAMOND HITCH.</p>
+  <p>“Out in the back country ... the old, picturesque life of the frontier is
+  still to be found.”</p></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p class="tb">The history of Arizona divides itself into three
+epochs—the aboriginal, the exploratory, and the reclamatory,
+or, if you prefer, the Indian, the Spanish,
+and the American—and each of these epochs is typified
+by a remarkable and wholly characteristic structure:
+the ruins of Casa Grande, the Mission of San
+Xavier del Bac, and the Roosevelt Dam. Casa Grande—“the
+Great House”—or Chichitilaca, to give it its
+Aztec name, which rises from the desert some sixty
+miles southeast of Phœnix, is the most remarkable
+plain ruin in the whole Southwest and the only one of
+its kind in the United States. It is a four-storied house
+of sun-dried puddled clay, forming, with its cyclopean
+walls, its low doorways so designed that any enemy
+would have to enter on hands and knees, and its labyrinth
+of rooms, courtyards, and corridors, a striking
+and significant relic of a forgotten people. Already a
+ruin when discovered, in 1694, by the Jesuit Father
+Kino, how old it is or who built it even the archæologists
+have been unable to decide. Its crumbling ruins
+are emblematic of a race of sturdy red men, growers of
+grain and breeders of cattle, whose energy and resource
+wrested this region from the desert, and who were
+driven out of it by the greed of a stronger and more
+warlike people.</p>
+
+<p>In the shadow of the foot-hills, where the Santa<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_92"></a>[92]</span>
+Rita Mountains sweep down to meet the desert half a
+dozen miles outside Tucson, stands the white Mission
+of San Xavier del Bac. It is the sole survivor of that
+chain of outposts of the church which the friars of the
+Spanish orders stretched across Arizona in their campaign
+of proselytism three centuries ago. I saw it for
+the first time at sunset, its splendid, carved façade
+rose-tinted by the magic radiance of twilight, its domes
+and towers and minarets silhouetted against the purple
+of the mountains as though carved from ivory.
+Perhaps it is the dramatic effect produced as, swinging
+sharply around the corner of the foot-hills, one comes
+upon it suddenly, standing white and solitary and
+lovely between the desert and the sky, but I shall
+always rank it with the Taj Mahal, the Alhambra,
+and the Mosque of Sultan Hassan as one of the most
+beautiful buildings I have ever seen. If California had
+that mission she would advertise and exploit it to the
+skies, but they don’t seem to pay much attention to it
+in Arizona, being too much occupied, I suppose, with
+other and more important things. In fact, I had to
+inquire of three people in the hotel at Tucson before I
+could learn just where it was. Although the patter of
+monastic sandals upon its flagged floors has ceased
+these many years, San Xavier is neither deserted nor
+run down, for the sonorous phrases of the mass are still
+heard daily from its altar, serene and smiling nuns
+conduct a school for Indian children within the precincts
+of its white-walled cloisters, and at twilight
+the angelus-bell still booms its brazen summons and<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_93"></a>[93]</span>
+the red men from the adjacent reservation come trooping
+in for evening prayer. The last of the Arizona
+missions, it stands as a fitting memorial to the courageous
+<i>padres</i> who first brought Christianity to Arizona,
+many of them at the cost of their lives.</p>
+
+<p>Eighty miles north of Phœnix, at the back of the
+Superstition Mountains and almost under the shadow
+of the Four Peaks, is the great Roosevelt Dam—the
+last word, as it were, in the American chapter of Arizona’s
+history. Those who know whereof they speak
+have estimated that four fifths of the State is fitted, so
+far as the potentialities of the soil is concerned, for
+agriculture, but hitherto the lack of rainfall has reduced
+the available area to that which lay within the
+capabilities of the somewhat meagre streams to irrigate.
+This was particularly true of the region of which
+Phœnix is the centre. Came then quiet, efficient men
+who proceeded to perform a modern version of the
+miracle of Moses, for, behold, they smote the rock and
+where there had been no water before there was now
+water and to spare. Across a narrow cañon in the
+mountains they built a Gargantuan dam of sandstone
+and cement to hold in check and to conserve for use in
+the dry season the waters of the river which swirled
+through it. The great artificial lake, twenty-five square
+miles in area, thus created, holds water enough to
+cover more than a million and a quarter acres with a
+foot of water and assures a permanent supply to the
+two hundred and forty thousand acres included in the
+project. The farmers of the Salt River valley, which<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_94"></a>[94]</span>
+comprises the territory under irrigation, forming
+themselves into an association, entered into a contract
+with the government to repay the cost of the dam in
+ten years, whereupon it will become the property of
+the landowners themselves; the water, under the terms
+of the agreement, becoming appurtenant to the land.
+Just as the crumbling ruins at Casa Grande serve as a
+reminder of a race long since dead and gone, and as
+the white mission at Tucson is a memorial to the
+Spaniards who came after them, so is the mighty dam
+at Roosevelt, together with its accompanying prosperity,
+a monument to the courage, daring, and resource
+of the American. It is a very wonderful work
+that is being done down there in Arizona, and to the
+toil-hardened, sun-tanned men who are doing it I am
+proud to raise my hat. Such men are pioneers of
+progress, carpenters of empire, and they are chopping
+a path for you and me, my friends, “to To-morrow
+from the land of Yesterday.”</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_95"></a>[95]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="IV">IV<br>
+<span class="smaller">THE LAND OF DREAMS-COME-TRUE</span></h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_96"></a>[96]</span></p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">“It lies where God hath spread it,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">In the gladness of His eyes,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Like a flame of jewelled tapestry</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Beneath His shining skies;</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">With the green of woven meadows,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">And the hills in golden chains,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">The light of leaping rivers,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">And the flash of poppied plains.</div>
+  </div>
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="center">...</div>
+  </div>
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">Sun and dews that kiss it,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Balmy winds that blow,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">The stars in clustered diadems</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Upon its peaks of snow;</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">The mighty mountains o’er it,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Below, the white seas swirled—</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Just California stretching down</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">The middle of the world.”</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_97"></a>[97]</span></p>
+
+<h3>IV<br>
+<span class="smaller">THE LAND OF DREAMS-COME-TRUE</span></h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>Because it is at the very bottom of the map and
+almost athwart the imaginary line which separates
+the Land of Mañana from the Land of Do-It-Now,
+the Imperial Valley seems the logical place to begin a
+journey through southern California. The term
+“southern California,” let me add, is usually applied
+to that portion of the State lying south of the Tehachapis,
+which would probably form the boundary in
+the event of California splitting into two States—an
+event which is by no means as unlikely as most outsiders
+suppose. No romance of the West—and that is
+where most of the present-day romances, newspaper,
+magazine, book, and film, come from—excels that of
+the Imperial Valley. These half a million sun-scorched
+acres which snuggle up against the Mexican boundary,
+midway between San Diego and Yuma, have proven
+themselves successors of the gold-fields as producers
+of sudden wealth; they are an agricultural Cave of
+Al-ed-Din. Now, the trouble with writing about the
+Imperial Valley is that if you tell the truth you will be
+accused of being a booster. But, to paraphrase Davy
+Crockett: “Be sure your facts are right, then go
+ahead.” And I am sure of my facts. You may believe
+them or not, just as you please.</p>
+
+<p>Not much more than a decade ago two brothers,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_98"></a>[98]</span>
+freighting across the Colorado Desert from Yuma to
+San Diego, stumbled upon twelve human skeletons,
+white-bleached, upon the sand—grim tokens of a
+prospecting party which had perished from thirst.
+To-day the Colorado Desert is no more. Almost on
+the spot where those distorted skeletons were found a
+city has risen—a city with cement sidewalks and
+asphalted streets and electric lights and concrete
+office-buildings and an Elks’ Hall and moving-picture
+houses; a city whose municipal council recently passed
+an ordinance prohibiting the hitching of teams on the
+main business thoroughfare, “to prevent congestion
+of traffic,” as a local paper explained in breaking the
+news to the farmers. About the time that we changed
+the date-lines on our business stationery from 189- to
+190- this was as desolate, arid, and hopeless-looking
+a region as you could have found between the oceans—and
+I’m not specifying which oceans either. Even the
+coyotes, as some one has remarked, used to make their
+last will and testament before venturing to cross it.
+In 1902 the United States Department of Agriculture
+sent one of its soil experts—at least he was called an
+expert—to this region to investigate its agricultural
+possibilities. Here is what he reported: “Aside from
+the alkali, which renders part of the soil practically
+worthless, some of the land is so rough from gullies or
+sand-dunes that the expense of levelling it is greater
+than warranted by its value. In the one hundred and
+eight thousand acres surveyed, 27.4 per cent are sand-dunes
+or rough land.... The remainder of the level<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_99"></a>[99]</span>
+land contains too much alkali to be safe, except for
+resistant crops. One hundred and twenty-five thousand
+acres have already been taken up by prospective
+settlers, many of whom talk of planting crops which
+it will be absolutely impossible to grow. They must
+early find that it is useless to attempt their growth.”
+If the sun-bronzed settlers had followed this cock-sure
+advice, the Imperial would still be a waste of sun-swept
+sand. But pioneers are not made that way.
+Instead of becoming discouraged and moving away
+after reading the report of the government expert,
+they merely grinned confidently and went on clearing
+the sage-brush from their land—for sixty miles to the
+eastward, across a country as flat as a hotel piazza,
+the Colorado River, with its wealth of water, rolled
+down to the sea. And water was all that was needed
+to turn these thirsty sands into pastures and orchards
+and gardens. The government curtly declining to
+lend its aid, the settlers went ahead and brought the
+water in themselves. It took determination and perspiration,
+a lot of both, to dig a diversion canal across
+those threescore miles of burning desert, but by the
+end of 1902 the work was done, the valley was introduced
+to its first drink of water, and the first crops were
+begun. To-day the Imperial Valley, with its seven
+hundred miles of canals, is the greatest body of irrigated
+land in the world. In 1900 the government was
+offering land there for a dollar and a quarter an acre.
+In 1914 land was selling (<i>selling</i>, mind you, not merely
+being offered) for <i>just a thousand times that sum</i>.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp50" id="illus18" style="max-width: 31.25em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus18.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><p>How Mr. and Mrs. Powell saw Arizona.</p>
+  <p>“One comes upon it suddenly, standing white and solitary and lovely
+  between the desert and the sky.”</p>
+  <p>SCENES IN THE MOTOR JOURNEY THROUGH ARIZONA.</p></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_100"></a>[100]</span></p>
+
+<p>Its soil is, I suppose, everything considered, the
+most fertile and versatile in the world. Its one hundred
+and twenty-five thousand acres of alfalfa yield twelve
+crops a year. I was shown a patch of thirty-three
+acres from which forty-five head of cattle are fed the
+year round. Later on another proud and prosperous
+husbandman showed me some land which had produced
+two and a half bales of long-staple cotton to the
+acre. Early in February the valley growers begin to
+export fresh asparagus; their shipments cease in April,
+when districts farther north begin to produce, and
+start again in the fall when asparagus has once more
+become a luxury. Pears ripen in December; figs are
+being picked at Christmas; grapes are sent out by the
+car-load in early June, six weeks before they ripen elsewhere
+save under glass. The valley is famous for its
+cantaloups, which are protected during their early
+growth by paper drinking cups. It would seem,
+indeed, as though Nature was trying to recompense
+the Imperial Valley for the unhappiness of her earlier
+years by giving her the earliest and the latest crops.
+A restricted region in the northeastern part of the
+valley is the only spot in the New World in which the
+Deglet Noor date—a variety so jealously guarded by
+the Arabs that few samples of it have ever been smuggled
+out of the remote Saharan oases of which it is a
+native—matures and can be commercially grown.</p>
+
+<p>Barely a dozen years have slipped by since the
+Imperial Valley was wedded to the Colorado River.
+From that union have sprung five towns which are<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_101"></a>[101]</span>
+now large enough to wear long pants—Imperial, El
+Centre, Calexico, Holtville, and Brawley—while several
+other communities are in the knickerbocker stage of
+development. Though scarcely a decade separates
+them from the yellow desert, they resemble frontier
+towns about as much as does Gary, Ind. The wooden
+shacks and corrugated-iron huts so characteristic of
+most new Western towns are wholly lacking in their
+business districts. The buildings are for the most part
+of concrete in the appropriate Spanish mission style;
+every building is designed to harmonise with its neighbours
+on either side; every building has its <i>portales</i>, or
+porticoed arcade, over the sidewalk, thus providing pedestrians
+with a welcome protection from the sun; for,
+though the valley boosters never cease to emphasise the
+fact that there is practically no humidity, they forget
+to add that in summer the air is like a blast from an
+open furnace door.</p>
+
+<p>When I was in the valley I dined with a friend
+one night on the terrace of the very beautiful country
+club of El Centro. Pink-shaded candles cast a rosy
+glow upon the faultless napery and silver of our table
+and all about us were similar tables at which sat sun-tanned,
+prosperous-looking men in white flannels and
+women in filmy gowns. Silent-footed Orientals slipped
+to and fro like ghosts, bearing chafing-dishes and gaily
+coloured ices and tall, thin glasses with ice tinkling in
+them. When the coffee had been set beside us we
+lighted our cigars and, leaning back in great contentment,
+looked meditatively out upon the moonlit countryside.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_102"></a>[102]</span>
+Amid the dark patches of alfalfa and the
+shadow-dappled plots which I knew to be truck-gardens;
+through the ghostly branches of the eucalyptus,
+whose leaves stirred ever so gently in the night breeze,
+gleamed the cheerful lights of many bungalows.</p>
+
+<p>“A dozen years ago,” said my host impressively,
+“that country out there was a howling wilderness.
+Its only products were cactus and sage-brush. Its only
+inhabitants were the coyote, the lizard, and the snake.
+The man who ventured into it carried his life in his
+hands. Look at it now—one of the garden spots of
+the world! It’s one of God’s own miracles, isn’t it?”</p>
+
+<p>And I agreed with him that it was.</p>
+
+<p class="tb">From El Centro to San Diego is something over
+a hundred miles, but until very recently it might as
+well have been three hundred, so far as freight or
+passenger traffic between the two places was concerned,
+that being the approximate distance by the roundabout
+railway route. Though a railway is now in course of
+construction which will eventually give the valley towns
+direct communication with Yuma and San Diego, the
+enterprising merchants of the latter city had no intention
+of waiting for the completion of the railway to
+get the rich valley trade. So they raised a quarter of
+a million dollars and with that money they proceeded
+to build a highway into the Imperial Valley. Over
+that highway, which is as good as any one would ask
+to ride on, rolls an unending procession of motor-trucks,
+bearing seeds and harness and farming implements<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_103"></a>[103]</span>
+and phonographs and pianos and brass
+beds from San Diego stores to Imperial Valley ranches,
+and poultry and early fruit and grain from those
+ranches back to San Diego. That illustrates the sort
+of people that the San Diegans are. It is almost unnecessary
+to add that the road has already paid for
+itself with interest.</p>
+
+<p>To understand the peculiar geography of San
+Diego, and of its joyous little sister Coronado, you
+must picture in your mind a U-shaped harbour containing
+twenty square miles of the bluest water you will
+find anywhere outside a bathtub. Strewn upon the
+gently sloping hillsides which form the bottom of the
+U are the chalk-white buildings and tree-lined, flower-banked
+boulevards which make San Diego look like
+one of those imaginary cities which scene-painters are
+so fond of painting for back-drops of comic operas.
+The right-hand horn of the U corresponds to the rocky
+headland known as Point Loma, where Madame
+Tingley and her disciples of the Universal Brotherhood
+theosophise under domes of violet glass; and in the
+very middle of the U, or, in other words, in the middle
+of San Diego harbor, on an almost-island whose sandy
+surface has been lawned and flower-bedded and
+landscaped into one of the beauty-spots of the world,
+is Coronado.</p>
+
+<p>Coronado isn’t really an island, you understand,
+for it is connected with the mainland by a sandy
+shoe-string a dozen miles long and so narrow that even
+a duffer could drive a golf-ball across it. There is nothing<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_104"></a>[104]</span>
+quite like Coronado anywhere. It may convey
+something to you if I say that it is a combination of
+Luxor, Sorrento, and Palm Beach. And then some.
+It is one of those places where, unless you have on a
+Panama hat and white shoes and flannel trousers (in
+the case of ladies I don’t insist on the trousers, of
+course), you feel awkward and ill-dressed and out of
+the picture. You know the sort of thing I mean.
+There are miles of curving, asphalted parkways, bordered
+by acres of green-plush lawns; and set down on
+the lawns are quaint stone-and-shingle bungalows with
+roses clambering over them, and near-Tudor mansions
+of beam and plaster, and the most beautiful villas of
+white stucco with green-tiled roofs, which look as if
+they had been brought over entire from Fiesole or the
+Lake of Como. Over near the shore is the Polo Club,
+which does not confine its activities to polo, as its
+name would imply, but, like the Sporting Club of
+Cairo, caters to the golfer and the tennis player, and
+the racing enthusiast as well. Every afternoon during
+the polo season <i>tout le monde</i> goes pouring out to the
+Polo Club in motors and carriages, on horseback, on
+street-cars, and afoot, to gossip along the side lines and
+swagger about in the saddling paddock and cheer
+themselves hoarse when eight young gentlemen in
+vivid silk shirts and white breeches and tan boots,
+and hailing from London or New York or San Francisco
+or Honolulu or Calgary, as the case may be, go
+streaking down the field in a maelstrom of dust and
+colour and waving mallets and flying hoofs. After it is<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_105"></a>[105]</span>
+all over and the colours of the winning team have been
+hoisted to the top of the flagstaff and the losers have
+drunk the health of the victors from a Gargantuan
+loving-cup, every one goes piling back to the great
+hostelry, whose red-roofed towers and domes and gables
+rising above the palm groves form a picture which is
+almost Oriental as they silhouette themselves, black,
+fantastic, and alluring, against the kaleidoscopic
+evening sky.</p>
+
+<p>There are certain hotels which, because of the surpassing
+beauty of their situation or their historic or
+literary associations or the traditions connected with
+them, have come to be looked upon as institutions,
+rather than mere caravansaries, which it is the duty of
+every traveller to see, just as he should see Les Invalides
+and the Pantheon and the Alcazar, and, if
+his purse will permit, to stop at. In such a class I put
+Shepheard’s in Cairo, the Hermitage at Monte Carlo,
+the Danieli in Venice, the Bristol in Paris, the Lord
+Warden at Dover, the Mount Nelson at Cape Town,
+Raffles’s at Singapore, the Waldorf-Astoria in New
+York, the Mission Inn at Riverside, the Hotel del
+Monte at Monterey, and the Hotel del Coronado. It
+is by no means new, is the Coronado, nor is it particularly
+up-to-date, and from an architectural standpoint
+it leaves much to be desired, but it shares with
+the other famous hotels I have mentioned that indefinable
+something called “atmosphere” and it stands
+at one of those crossways where the routes of tourist
+travel meet. To find anything to equal the brilliant<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_106"></a>[106]</span>
+scene for which its great lobby is the stage you will
+have to go to the east coast of Florida or Egypt or the
+Riviera. From New Year’s to Easter its spacious
+corridors and broad verandas are thronged with more
+interesting types of people than any place I know save
+only Monte Carlo. Suppose we sit down for a few
+minutes, you and I, and watch the passing show.
+There are slim, white-shouldered women whose gowns
+bespeak the Rue de la Paix as unmistakably as though
+you could read their labels, and other women whose
+gowns are just as unmistakably the products of dressmakers
+in Schenectady and Sioux City and Terre
+Haute. There are well-groomed young men, well-groomed
+old men, and overgroomed men of all ages;
+men bearing famous names and men whose names are
+notorious rather than famous. There are big-game
+hunters, polo players, professional gamblers, adventurers,
+explorers, novelists, mine owners, bankers, landowners
+who reckon their acres by the million, and
+cattlemen who count their longhorns by the tens of
+thousands. There are English earls, and French marquises,
+and German counts; there are women of
+Society, of society, and of near-society; men and women
+whose features the newspapers and bill-boards have
+made as familiar as the faces of Dr. Woodbury and
+Mr. Gillette, and, mingling with all the rest, plain,
+every-day folk hailing from pretty much everywhere
+between Portland, Ore., and Portland, Me., and
+whose money it is, when all is said and done, which
+makes this sort of thing possible. They come here<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_107"></a>[107]</span>
+for rest, so they take pains to assure you, but they
+are never idle. They bathe in the booming breakers
+when the people beyond the Sierras are shivering before
+their bathtubs; they play golf and tennis as regularly
+as they take their meals; they gallop their ponies
+madly along the yellow beach in the early morning;
+they fish off the coast for tuna and jewfish and barracuda;
+they take launches across the bay to see the
+flying men swoop and circle above the army aviation
+school; they watch the submarines dive and gambol
+like giant porpoises in the placid waters of the harbour;
+they play auction bridge on the sun-swept verandas
+or poker in the seclusion of the smoking-room;
+and after dinner they tango and hesitate and one-step
+in the big ballroom until the orchestra puts up its instruments
+from sheer exhaustion. At Coronado no
+one ever lets business interfere with pleasure. If you
+want to talk business you had better take the ferryboat
+across the bay to San Diego.</p>
+
+<p>San Diego’s history stretches back into the past
+for close on four hundred years. Her harbour was the
+first on all that devious coast-line which reaches from
+Cape San Lucas to the Straits of Juan de Fuca in which
+a white man’s anchor rumbled down and a white man’s
+sails were furled. In her soil were planted the first
+vine and the first olive tree. The first cross was raised
+here, and the first church built, and beneath the palms
+which were planted by the <i>padres</i> in the valley that
+nestles just back of the hill on which the city sits the
+first lessons in Christianity were taught to the primitive<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_108"></a>[108]</span>
+people who inhabited this region when the paleface
+came. Here began that remarkable chain of outposts
+of the church which Father Junipero Serra and
+his indomitable Franciscans stretched northward to
+Sonoma, six hundred miles away. And here likewise
+began El Camino Real, the King’s Highway, which
+linked together the one-and-twenty missions and which
+forms to-day the longest continuous highway in the
+world, and, without exaggeration, the most beautiful,
+the most varied, and the most interesting.</p>
+
+<p>I don’t know the population of San Diego, because
+a census taken yesterday would be much too low to-morrow.
+The San Diegans claim that they arrive at
+the number of the city’s inhabitants by the simple
+method of having the census enumerators meet the
+trains to count the people when they get off. For, as
+they ingenuously argue, any one who once comes to
+San Diego never goes away again, unless it be to hurry
+back home and pack his things. In a country where
+both population and property values have increased
+like guinea-pigs, the growth of San Diego is spoken of
+with something akin to awe. In the year that Grant
+was elected President, a second-hand furniture dealer
+named Alonzo Horton closed his little shop in San
+Francisco and with the savings of a lifetime—some say
+two hundred and sixty dollars, some eight hundred—in
+a belt about his waist, took passage on a steamer down
+the Californian coast. With this money he bought, at
+twenty-six cents an acre, most of what is now San
+Diego. Some of those lots which the shrewd old<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_109"></a>[109]</span>
+furniture dealer thus acquired could not now be bought
+for less than a cool half million! Two decades later
+came John D. Spreckels, bringing with him the millions
+he had amassed in sugar, and gave to San Diego
+a street-railway, electric lights, a water-system, one of
+the most beautiful theatres on the continent, and a
+solid mile of steel-and-concrete office-buildings of
+uniform height and harmonious design.</p>
+
+<p>The people of San Diego are adamantine in their
+conviction that theirs is a city of destiny. They assert
+that within a single decade the name of San Diego will
+be as familiar on maps, and newspapers and bills of
+lading as New Orleans or Genoa or Yokohama or Calcutta
+or Marseilles. And they have some copper-riveted
+facts with which to back up their assertions.
+In the first place, so they will tell you, they have the
+harbour; sixteen miles long, forty to sixty feet deep,
+and protected from storms or a hostile fleet by a four-hundred-foot
+wall of rock. When the fortifications
+now in course of construction are completed San
+Diego will be as safe from attack by sea as though it
+were on the Erie Canal. Secondly, San Diego is the
+first American port of call for westbound vessels passing
+through the Panama Canal, and one of these days,
+unless the plans of the Naval Board of Strategy miscarry,
+it will become a great fortified coaling station
+and naval base, for it is within easy striking distance
+of the trans-Pacific lanes of commerce. Thirdly, it is
+the logical outlet for the newly developed sections of
+the Southwest, the grade between Houston and San<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_110"></a>[110]</span>
+Diego, for example, being the lowest on the continent—and
+commerce follows the lines of least resistance.
+Fourthly (this sounds like a Presbyterian sermon,
+doesn’t it?), San Diego will soon have a rich and
+prosperous hinterland, without which all her other
+advantages would go for nothing, to supply and to
+draw from. Experts on agricultural development have
+assured me that the day is coming when the Imperial
+Valley, of which San Diego is already the recognised
+<i>entrepôt</i>, will support as many inhabitants as the Valley
+of the Nile. Nor is this assertion nearly as visionary
+as it sounds, for the zone of cultivation in the Nile
+country is, remember, only a few miles wide. Beyond
+the Imperial Valley lie the constantly spreading
+orchards and alfalfa fields which are the result of the
+Yuma and Gila River projects. East of Yuma is the
+great region, of which Phœnix is the centre, which acquired
+prosperity almost in a single night from the
+Roosevelt Dam. East of Phœnix again the Casa
+Grande irrigation scheme is converting good-for-nothing
+desert into good-for-anything loam. Beyond
+Casa Grande the great corporation known as Tucson
+Farms is redeeming a large area by means of its canals
+and ditches, while still farther eastward the titanic dam
+at Elephant Butte, which the government is building
+to conserve the waters of the Rio Grande, will snatch
+from the clutches of the New Mexican desert a region
+as large as a New England State. And these are not
+paper projects, mind you. Some of them are completed
+and in full swing; others are in course of construction,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_111"></a>[111]</span>
+so that by 1920 an almost continuous zone of
+irrigated, cultivated, and highly productive land will
+stretch from San Diego as far eastward as the Rio
+Grande. And, as the San Diegans gleefully point out,
+the settlers on these new lands will find San Diego
+nearer by from one hundred to two hundred miles than
+any other port on the Pacific Coast as a place to ship
+their products and to do their shopping. But the people
+of San Diego are such notorious boosters that before
+swallowing the things they told me I sprinkled
+them quite liberally with salt. In fact, I wasn’t really
+convinced of the genuineness of San Diego’s prospects
+until I happened to meet one evening on a hotel terrace
+a member of America’s greatest banking-house—a
+house whose credit and prestige are so unquestioned
+that its support is a hall-mark of financial worth.</p>
+
+<p>“What do you think about this San Diego proposition?”
+I asked him carelessly, as we sat over our
+cigars. “Is it another Egyptian bubble which will
+shortly burst?”</p>
+
+<p>“That was what I thought it was when I came out
+here,” he answered, “but since investigating conditions
+I have changed my mind. It looks so good to us, in
+fact, that we intend to back up our judgment by investing
+several millions.”</p>
+
+<p>So far as attracting visitors is concerned, San
+Diego’s most valuable asset is her climate. Though
+the southernmost of our Pacific ports and in the same
+latitude as Syria and the North African littoral, it
+has the most equable climate on the continent, the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_112"></a>[112]</span>
+records of the United States Weather Bureau showing
+less than one hour a year when the mercury is above
+90 or below 32. According to these same official
+records, the sun shines on three hundred and fifty-six
+days out of the three hundred and sixty-five, so that
+rain is literally a nine days’ wonder. San Diego’s
+climate is that of Alaska in summer and of Arabia in
+winter, and, if you don’t believe it, the San Diegans
+will prove it by means of a temperature chart, zigzagging
+across which are two lines, one bright red, the other
+blue, which denote summer and winter climates circling
+the globe and which converge at only one point
+on it—San Diego. As a result of these unique climatic
+conditions, San Diego, unlike most resort cities, has
+two seasons instead of one. The Eastern tourists
+have hardly taken their departure in the spring before
+the hotels and boarding-houses begin to fill up with
+people who have come here to escape the torrid heat
+of a Southwestern summer. Many of these summer
+visitors are small ranchers from Arizona, New Mexico,
+and Utah, and from across the line in Chihuahua and
+Sonora, to whom the rates charged at the hotels would
+be prohibitive. To accommodate this class of visitors
+there has sprung into being on the beach at Coronado
+a “tent city.” The “tents” consist for the most part
+of one or two room bungalows with palm-thatched
+roofs and walls and wooden floors and equipped with
+running water, sanitary arrangements, and cooking
+appliances. The Coronado Tent City contains nearly
+two thousand of these dwellings which can be rented<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_113"></a>[113]</span>
+at absurdly low figures. For those who do not care to
+do their own cooking the management has provided
+a restaurant where simple but well-cooked meals can
+be had at nominal prices; there is a dancing pavilion
+for the young people, a casino on whose verandas the
+mothers can gossip and sew and at the same time keep
+an eye on their children playing on the sand, and a
+club house with pool-tables and reading-matter for the
+men. The place is kept scrupulously clean, it is thoroughly
+policed, hoodlumism is not tolerated, and,
+everything considered, it seemed to me a most admirable
+and inexpensive solution of the perennial summer-vacation
+problem for people of modest means.</p>
+
+<p class="tb">Because I wanted to see something more than that
+narrow coastwise zone which comprises all that the
+average winter tourist ever sees of California; because
+I wanted to obtain a more intimate knowledge of the
+country and its people than comes from a car-window
+point of view; because I wanted to penetrate into
+those portions of the back country still undisturbed
+by the locomotive’s raucous shriek and eat at quaint
+inns and sleep in ranch-houses and stop when and
+where I pleased to converse with all manner of interesting
+people, I decided to do my travelling by motor-car.
+And so, on a winter’s sunny morning, when the
+flower vendors in the plaza of San Diego were selling
+roses at ten cents a bunch and the unfortunates who
+dwelt beyond the Sierras, rim were begging their
+janitors for goodness’ sake to turn on more steam, I<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_114"></a>[114]</span>
+turned the nose of my car northward and stepped on
+her tail, and with a rush and roar we were off on a
+journey which was to end only at the borders of Alaska.
+As, with engines purring sweet music, the car breasted
+the summit of the Linda Vista grade our breath was
+almost taken away by the startling grandeur of the
+panorama which suddenly unrolled itself before us.
+At our backs rose the mountains of Mexico, purple,
+mysterious, forbidding, grim. Spread below us, like
+a map in bas-relief, lay the orchard-covered plains of
+California; to the left the Pacific heaved lazily beneath
+the sun; to the right the snow-crowned Cuyamacas
+swept grandly up to meet the sky, and before
+us the beckoning yellow road stretched away ...
+away ... away.</p>
+
+<p>I have never been able to resist the summons of
+the open road. I always want to find out what is at
+the other end. It goes somewhere, you see, and I
+always have the feeling that, far off in the distance,
+where it swerves suddenly behind a wood or disappears
+in the depths of a rock-walled cañon or drops out of
+sight quite unexpectedly behind a hill, there is something
+mysterious and magical waiting to be found.
+About the road there is something primitive and
+imperishable. Did it ever occur to you that it has
+been the greatest factor in the making of history, in
+the spread of Christianity, in the march of progress?
+Some one has said, and truly, that the rate and direction
+of human progress has always been determined
+by the roads of a people. For a time the marvel of<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_115"></a>[115]</span>
+modern inventions caused the road to be forgotten.
+The steamship sailed majestically away in contempt
+of the road upon the shore and the locomotive sounded
+its jeering screech at every crossing along its right
+of way. But still the road stayed on. But now the
+miracle of the motor-car has brought the road into
+its own again and started me ajourneying in the
+latest product of twentieth-century civilisation, with
+the strength of threescore horses beneath its throbbing
+hood, up that historic highway which has been
+travelled in turn by Don Vasquez del Coronado and
+his steel-clad men-at-arms, by Padre Serra in his
+sandals and woollen robe, by Jedediah Smith, the first
+American to find his way across the ranges, by Frémont
+the Pathfinder, by the Argonauts, by Spanish <i>caballeros</i>
+and Mexican <i>vaqueros</i> and American pioneers, by
+priests afoot and soldiers on horseback and peasants
+on the backs of patient burros, by lumbering ox-carts
+and white-topped prairie-schooners and six-horse Concord
+stages—and now by automobiles. In El Camino
+Real is epitomised the history and romance of the
+West. It is to western America what the Via Appia
+was to Rome, the Great North Road to England.
+It has been in turn a trail of torture, a course of conquest,
+a road of religion, a route to riches, a path of
+progress, a highway to happiness. He who can traverse
+it with no thought for anything save the number
+of miles which his indicator shows and for the comforts
+of the hotel ahead; who is so lacking in imagination
+that he cannot see the countless phantom shadows<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_116"></a>[116]</span>
+who charge it with their unseen presence; who is incapable
+of appreciating that in it are all the panorama
+and procession of the West, had much better stay at
+home. The only thing that such a person would understand
+would be a danger-signal or a traffic policeman’s
+club.</p>
+
+<p>I am convinced that if the several thousand
+Americans who go on annual motor trips through
+Europe, either taking their cars with them or hiring
+them on the other side, could only be made to realise
+that on the edge of the Western ocean they can find
+roads as smooth and well built as the English highways
+or the <i>routes nationales</i> of France, and mountains
+as high and sublimely beautiful as the Alps or the
+Pyrenees, and scenery more varied and lovely than is
+to be found between Christiania and Capri, and vegetation
+as luxuriant and hotels more luxurious than on
+the Côte d’Azur, and a milder, sunnier, more equable
+climate than anywhere else on the globe, they would
+come pouring out in such numbers that there wouldn’t
+be garages enough to hold their cars. In 1913 the
+legislature of California voted eighteen millions of
+dollars for the improvement of the roads, and that great
+sum is being so judiciously expended in conjunction
+with the appropriations made by the other coast states
+that by early in 1915 a motorist can start from the
+Mexican border and drive northward to Vancouver—a
+distance considerably greater than from Cherbourg to
+Constantinople—with as good a road as any one could
+ask for beneath his tires all the way.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_117"></a>[117]</span></p>
+
+<p>It is very close to one hundred and forty miles
+from San Diego to Riverside if you take the route
+which passes the rambling, red-tiled, adobe ranch-house
+famous as the home of <i>Ramona</i>; dips down into
+Mission Valley, where from behind its screen of palms
+and eucalyptus peers the crumbling and dilapidated
+façade of the first of the Californian missions; swirls
+through La Jolla with its enchanted ocean caverns;
+climbs upward in long sweeps and zigzags through the
+live-oak groves behind Del Mar; pauses for a moment
+at Oceanside for a farewell look at the lazy turquoise
+sea, and then suddenly swings inland past Mission
+San Luis Rey and the mission chapel of Pala and the
+Lake of Elsinore. That is the route that we took and,
+though it is not the shortest, it is incomparably the
+most beautiful and the most interesting. We found
+by experience that one hundred and forty miles is
+about as long a day’s run as one can make with comfort
+and still permit of ample time for meals and for
+leisurely pauses at places of interest along the way.
+Once, in the French Midi, I motored with a friend
+who had chartered a car by the month with the agreement
+that he was to be permitted to run four hundred
+kilometres a day. It mattered not at all how fascinating
+or historically interesting was the region we were
+traversing, we must needs tear through it as though
+the devil were at our wheels. We couldn’t stop anywhere,
+my host explained, because if we did he wouldn’t
+be able to get the full allowance of mileage to which he
+was entitled. Some day, however, I’m going through<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_118"></a>[118]</span>
+that same country again and see the things I missed.
+Next time I think that I shall go on a bicycle. With
+highways as smooth as the promenade-deck of an
+ocean liner it is a temptation to burn up the road, of
+course, particularly if your car has plenty of power
+and your driver knows how to keep his wits about
+him. But that sort of thing, especially in a country
+which has so many sights worth seeing as California,
+smacks altogether too much of those impossible persons
+who boast of having “done” the Louvre or the
+Pitti in an hour. Half the pleasure of motoring, to my
+way of thinking, is in being able to stop when and
+where you please—<i>and stopping</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Between San Diego and Oceanside the road hugs
+the coast as though it were a long-lost brother. It is
+wide and smooth and for long stretches led through
+acres and acres of yellow mustard. This, with the
+vivid blue of the sea on one side and the emerald green
+of the wooded hillsides on the other, made the country
+we were traversing resemble the flag of some Central
+American republic. I think that the most beautiful
+of the little coast towns through which the road winds
+is Del Mar, perched high on a cypress-covered hill
+looking westward to Cathay. This is the home of the
+Torrey pine, which is found nowhere else in the world.
+In the springtime the mesas above the sea are all
+aflame with yellow dahlias and the hillsides at the back
+are as gay with wild flowers as a woman’s Easter bonnet.
+Del Mar is an interesting example of the rehabilitation
+of a down-and-out town. A few years ago it was little<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_119"></a>[119]</span>
+more than a straggling, grass-grown street lined with
+decrepit, weather-beaten houses. A far-sighted corporation
+discovered the ramshackle little hamlet,
+bought it, subdivided it, laid out miles of contour
+drives and a golf course, and built a little gem of a
+hostelry, modelled and named after the inn at Stratford-on-Avon,
+on the hill above the sea. Now the
+place is awake, animated, prosperous. Bathers dot
+its ten-mile crescent of silver sand; artists pitch their
+easels beneath the shadow of the friendly live-oaks; on
+the flower-carpeted hill slopes have sprung up the
+villas and bungalows of the rich. A few miles farther
+up the coast you can lunch beneath the vine-hung
+pergolas of the quaint Miramar at Oceanside, nor
+does it require an elastic imagination to pretend that
+the hills behind, grey-green with olive groves, are those
+of Amalfi and that the lazy, sun-kissed sea below you
+is the Mediterranean instead of the Pacific.</p>
+
+<p>Four miles inland from Oceanside, in a swale
+between low hills, stands all that is left of the Mission
+of San Luis, Rey de Francia, which, as its name denotes,
+is dedicated to Saint Louis, King of France.
+Begun when Washington was President of the United
+States and Alta California was still a province of New
+Spain, completed when the nineteenth century was
+but a two-year-old, and secularised by the Mexican
+authorities after the expulsion of the Spaniards in
+1834, the historic mission has once again passed into
+the hands of the Franciscan Order which built it and
+is now a training-school for priests who wish to carry<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_120"></a>[120]</span>
+the cross into foreign lands. The ruins of the mission—which,
+thanks to the indefatigable efforts of the priest
+in charge, are being restored to a semblance of their
+original condition as fast as he is able to raise the
+money—are among the most picturesque in California.
+We stopped there on a golden afternoon, when the
+sunlight, sifted and softened by the interlacing branches
+of the ancient olive trees, cast a veil of yellow radiance
+upon the crumbling, weather-worn façade and filtered
+through the arches of those cloistered corridors where
+the cowled and cassocked brethren of Saint Francis were
+wont to pace up and down in silent meditation, telling
+their beads and muttering their prayers.</p>
+
+<p>Nestling in a hollow of the hills, twenty miles
+northeast of San Luis Rey, over a road which is comparatively
+little travelled and only indifferently smooth,
+is the <i>asistencia</i> or mission chapel of San Antonio de
+Pala. Even though it were not on the road to Riverside,
+it would be well worth going out of one’s way to
+see because of its picturesque <i>campanario</i>, with a
+cactus sprouting from its top, and the adjacent Indian
+village with its curious burial-ground. The little town,
+which centres, of course, about the chapel, the agency,
+and the trader’s, stands on the banks of the San Luis
+Rey River, with high mountains rising abruptly all
+around. Here, in sheet-iron huts provided by a paternal
+government and brought bodily from the East and set
+up in this secluded valley, dwell all that is left of the
+Palatingwa tribe—a living refutation of our boast
+that we have given a square deal to the Indian. Once<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_121"></a>[121]</span>
+each year the Palatingwas are visited by their friends
+of neighbouring tribes, and for a brief time the mountain
+valley resounds to the barbaric clamour of the tom-toms
+and to the plaintive, pagan chants which were
+heard in this land before the paleface came. The
+mission chapel, after standing empty for many years,
+once more has a priest, and at sunset the bell in the
+ancient campanile sends its mellow summons booming
+across the surrounding olive groves and the copper-coloured
+villagers, just as did their fathers in Padre
+Serra’s time, come trooping in for evening prayer.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus19" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus19.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><table><tr>
+  <td class="td2"><p class="attr"><i>From a photograph by Avery Edwin Field.</i></p></td>
+  <td class="td2"><p class="attr"><i>From a photograph by Avery Edwin Field.</i></p></td>
+  </tr></table>
+  <p>NOT IN CATALONIA BUT IN CALIFORNIA.</p>
+  <p>“A great hotel which combines the architectural features of the Californian
+  missions—cloisters, patios, brick-paved corridors, bell-hung campaniles,
+  ivy-covered buttresses—with an Old World atmosphere and charm.”</p>
+</figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>But of all the California missions, from San Diego
+in the south to Sonoma in the north, the one I like the
+best is the Mission Miller at Riverside—and any one
+who has ever stopped there will unhesitatingly agree
+with me. Its real name, you must understand, is the
+Mission Inn, and there is no hostelry like it anywhere
+else in the world. At least I, who am tolerably familiar
+with the hotels of five-score countries, know of none.
+In it Frank Miller, the Master of the Inn, as he loves to
+be called, has succeeded in commercialising romance
+to an extraordinary degree. He might be said, indeed,
+to have taken the cent from sentiment. In other
+words, he has built a great hotel which combines the
+architectural features of the most interesting of the
+Californian missions—cloisters, patios, quadrangles,
+brick-paved corridors, bell-hung campaniles, ivy-covered
+buttresses, slender date-palms with flaming macaws
+screeching in them—with an Old World atmosphere
+and charm, and in such a setting he dispenses the same<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_122"></a>[122]</span>
+genial and personal hospitality which was a characteristic
+of the Spanish <i>padres</i> in the days when the
+travellers along El Camino Real depended on the
+missions for food and shelter.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_123"></a>[123]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="V">V<br>
+<span class="smaller">WHERE GOLD GROWS ON TREES</span></h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_124"></a>[124]</span></p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">“Dost thou know that sweet land where the orange flowers grow?</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Where the fruits are like gold and the red roses blow?”</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_125"></a>[125]</span></p>
+
+<h3>V<br>
+<span class="smaller">WHERE GOLD GROWS ON TREES</span></h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>It was in the heyday of the Second Empire. The
+French army was at its autumn manœuvres and the
+country round about Rheims was aswarm with troopers
+in brass helmets and infantry in baggy red breeches.
+Louis Napoleon was directing the operations in person.
+Riding one day through a vineyard at the head of a
+brigade, he suddenly pulled up his horse and turned
+in his saddle.</p>
+
+<p>“Halt!” he ordered. “Column right into line!
+Attention! Present ... arms!”</p>
+
+<p>“But who are you saluting, sire?” inquired one
+of his generals in astonishment, spurring alongside.</p>
+
+<p>“The grapes, <i>mon général</i>,” replied the Emperor;
+“for do they not represent the wealth and prosperity
+of France?”</p>
+
+<p class="tb">It was the astonishing prosperity of the orange
+belt which brought the incident to mind. For an
+entire morning we had been motoring among the
+orange groves which make of Riverside an island in an
+emerald sea. The endless orchards whose shiny-leaved
+trees drooped under their burden of pumpkin-coloured
+fruit; the chalk-white villas and the blossom-smothered
+bungalows of which we caught fleeting<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_126"></a>[126]</span>
+glimpses between the ordered rows; the oiled roads,
+so smooth and level that no child could look on them
+without longing for roller-skates; the motor-cars
+standing at almost every doorstep—all these things
+spelled prosperity in capital letters.</p>
+
+<p>“It seems to me,” I remarked to the gentleman
+who was acting as our guide (these same orange groves
+had made him a millionaire in less than a decade),
+“that it would not be unbefitting if the people of
+Riverside followed the example of Louis Napoleon
+when he saluted the grapes”; and I told him the story
+of the Emperor in the vineyard.</p>
+
+<p>“You are quite right,” said he. “Would you
+mind stopping the car?” and, standing in the tonneau
+very erect and soldierly, he lifted his hat.</p>
+
+<p>“My Lady Citrona,” he said gravely, “I have the
+honour to salute you, for it is to you that the prosperity
+of southern California is chiefly due.”</p>
+
+<p class="tb">What its harbour has done for San Diego, what its
+climate has done for Santa Barbara, its oranges have
+done for Riverside. Thirty years ago you could not
+have found it on the map. To-day it is the richest
+community <i>per caput</i>—which is the Latin for inhabitant—between
+the ice-floes of the Arctic and the Gatun
+Dam. At least that is what Mr. Bradstreet—the
+gentleman, you know, who publishes the large green
+volume which tells you whether the people you meet are
+worth cultivating—says, and he ought to know what
+he is talking about. Though it can boast few if any<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_127"></a>[127]</span>
+“show-places” such as are proudly pointed out to the
+open-mouthed tourist in Pasadena and Santa Barbara,
+it is a pleasant place in which to dwell, is this happy,
+sunny, easy-going capital of the citrus kingdom. It
+is as substantial-looking as a retired banker; it is as
+spick and span as a ward in a hospital; it is as satisfying
+as a certified cheque—and, incidentally, it is as
+dry as the desert of Sahara. You are regarded with
+suspicion if you are overheard asking the druggist for
+alcohol for a spirit-lamp. It is, moreover, the only
+place I know that has foiled the exaggeratory tendencies
+of the picture post-card makers. Its oranges
+are so glaringly yellow, its trees so vividly green, its
+poinsettias so flamingly red, its snow-topped mountains
+so snowily white, its skies so bright a blue that the post-card
+artists have had to be truthful in spite of themselves.</p>
+
+<p>I think that the spirit of Riverside is epitomised
+by two great wrought-iron baskets which flank the
+entrance to the dining-room of its famous hostelry, the
+Mission Inn. One of them is filled with oranges, the
+other with flowers. And you are expected to help yourself;
+not merely to take one as a souvenir, you understand,
+but to fill your pockets, fill your arms. “That’s
+what they’re there for,” the Master of the Inn will tell
+you. That little touch does more than anything else
+to make you feel that southern California really is a
+land of fruit and flowers and that they are not hidden
+behind the garden walls of the rich but can be enjoyed
+by everyone. It goes far toward counteracting the unfavourable<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_128"></a>[128]</span>
+impression a stranger receives in a certain
+ornate hotel in Los Angeles where he is charged forty
+cents for a sliced orange!</p>
+
+<p>Ciceroned by the orange millionaire, we motored
+up a zigzag boulevard, with many horseshoe bends
+and hairpin turns, to the summit of Mount Rubidoux,
+a domesticated and highly landscaped mountainette
+within the city limits. Moses and his footsore Israelites,
+looking down upon the Promised Land, could
+have seen nothing fairer than the view which greeted
+us on that winter’s Sunday morning. I doubt if there
+has been anything more peacefully enchanting than a
+Sunday morning in southern California in the orange
+season since a “To Let” sign was nailed to the gates
+of the Garden of Eden. It suggests, without in any
+way resembling, such a number of things: a stained-glass
+window in a church, for example; an Easter
+wedding; Italy in the springtime ... but perhaps
+you don’t grasp just what I mean.</p>
+
+<p>From Rubidoux’s rocky base the furrowed orange
+groves, looking exactly like quilted comforters of
+bright-green silk, stretch away, away, until they meet
+just such a yellow arid desert as Riverside used to be
+before the water came, and the desert sweeps up to
+meet tawny foot-hills, and the foot-hills blend into
+amethystine mountain ranges and these rise into snowy
+peaks which gleam and sparkle against a sapphire sky.
+And from the orange groves rises that same subtle,
+intoxicating fragrance (for you know, no doubt, that
+orange-trees bear blossoms and fruit at the same time)<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_129"></a>[129]</span>
+that you get when the organist strikes up the march
+from “Lohengrin” and the bride floats up the aisle.
+The significant thing about it all, however, is not the
+surpassing beauty and extraordinary luxuriance of the
+vegetation, but the fact that there is any vegetation
+here at all. No longer ago than when women wore
+bustles this region was a second cousin to the Sahara,
+dry as a treatise on mathematics, dusty as a country
+pike on circus day, but which now, thanks to the
+faith, patience, energy, and courage of a handful of
+horticulturists, has been transformed into a land which
+is a cross between a back-drop at a theatre and a
+fruit-store window.</p>
+
+<p class="tb">Once each year, toward the close of the fasting
+month of Ramazan, the Arabs of the Sahara make a pilgrimage
+to a spot in the desert near Biskra, in southern
+Algeria. From a thousand miles around they come—by
+horse and by camel and on the backs of asses—for
+the sake of a prayer in the yellow desert at break of
+day. This “Great Prayer,” as it is called, is one of
+the most impressive ceremonies that I have ever witnessed,
+and I little thought that I should ever see its
+like again—certainly not in my own land and among
+my own people. Once each year the people of Riverside
+and the surrounding country also make a pilgrimage.
+They set out in the darkness of early Easter
+morning, afoot, ahorseback, in carriages, and in
+panting motor-cars, and assemble on the summit of
+Mount Rubidoux in the first faint light of dawn. They<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_130"></a>[130]</span>
+group themselves, fittingly enough, about the cross
+which has been erected in memory of Padre Junipero
+Serra, that indomitable friar who first brought Christianity
+to the Californias, and who, on his weary
+journeys between the missions which he founded, not
+infrequently spread his blankets for the night at the
+foot of this same hill. Last year upward of six thousand
+people gathered under the shadow of the Serra cross
+to greet the Easter morn. As sunrise approached, a
+group of girls from the Indian School, standing on a
+rocky eminence, sang “He Is Risen,” and then, as a
+red glow in the east heralded the coming of the sun,
+the sweet, clear notes of a cornet rang out upon the
+morning air in the splendid bars of “The Holy City.”
+Just as the last notes died away a spark of light—brighter
+than the arc-lamps which still glared in the
+streets of the city below—appeared above the San
+Bernardino’s topmost rim and a moment later the
+full orb of the sun burst forth in all its dazzling glory,
+turning the purple mountains into peaks of glowing
+amethyst and the sombre valleys into emerald islands
+swimming in a sea of lavender haze. “Lord, Thou
+hast been my dwelling-place in all generations.... I
+will lift up mine eyes to the hills from whence cometh
+my help,” chanted the people in solemn unison. And
+then Dr. Henry van Dyke, fittingly garbed in a Norfolk
+jacket and knickerbockers, with a mammoth
+boulder for a pulpit, read his “God of the Open Air.”
+With the Amen of the benediction there ended the
+most significant and impressive service that I have<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_131"></a>[131]</span>
+ever heard under the open sky and one which sharply
+refutes the frequent assertion that America is lacking
+in those quaint ceremonies and picturesque observances
+which make Europe so attractive to the traveller.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus20" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus20.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><p>A MODERN VERSION OF THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT.</p>
+  <p>The Easter sunrise service on Mount Rubidoux, near Riverside, “sharply
+  refutes the frequent assertion that America is lacking in those quaint
+  ceremonies and picturesque observances which make Europe so attractive
+  to the traveller.”</p></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>It is threescore miles from Riverside to Pasadena,
+provided you go via Redlands, Smiley Heights, and
+San Bernardino, and it is flowers and fruit-trees all
+the way. Just as every visitor to London asks to be
+directed to Kew Gardens, so every visitor to the orange
+belt asks to be shown Smiley Heights. Its late owner
+was a hotel proprietor of national fame who amassed
+a fortune by running his great summer hostelries at
+Lake Mohonk, N. Y., in conformance with the discipline
+of the Methodist Church, among the rules which
+the guests are required to observe being one which
+states that “visitors are not expected to arrive or
+depart on the Sabbath.” Smiley Heights is a remarkable
+object-lesson in the horticultural miracles which
+can be performed in California with water and patience.
+When bought by Mr. Smiley it was a barren, bone-dry
+mesa, whose entire six hundred acres did not have
+sufficient vegetation to support a goat, but which, by
+the lavish use of water, and fertilisers, and the employment
+of a small army of landscape architects and
+gardeners, has been transformed into a beauty-spot
+which is worth using several gallons of gasoline to see.
+In Cañon’s Crest, to give the place the name bestowed
+by its owner, is epitomised the story of all southern
+California, for on every side of this semitropic garden<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_132"></a>[132]</span>
+of pines, palms, peppers, oranges, olives, lemons, figs,
+acacias, bamboos, deodars, and roses, roses, roses,
+stretches the sage-brush-covered desert from which it
+was snatched and to which, were it deprived of care
+and water, it would quickly return. If you will look
+from the right-hand window of your north-bound train,
+just before it reaches Redlands, you can see it for yourself:
+a flower-smothered, tree-covered table-land rising
+abruptly from an arid plain.</p>
+
+<p>I wonder if other motorists get as much enjoyment
+from the signs along the way as I do. The notices
+along the Californian roads struck me as being
+more original and amusing than any that I had ever
+seen. Most of them were worded with an after-you-my-dear-Alphonse
+politeness which made acquiescence
+with their courteous requests a pleasure, though occasionally
+we were confronted with a warning couched
+in such threatening terms that it seemed to shake a
+metaphorical fist in our faces. Who, I ask you, would
+not cheerfully slow down to lawful speed in the face
+of the stereotyped request which is used on the roads
+between Riverside and Pasadena: “Speed limit thirty
+miles an hour—a reasonable compliance with this
+request will be deeply appreciated”? Another time,
+however, as we were humming along one of those
+stretches of oiled delight which make the speedometer
+needle flutter like a lover’s heart, we were greeted, as
+we swept into the outskirts of some Orangeburg or
+Citronville, by a great brusque placard which menaced
+us in staring black letters with the threat: “Fifty dollars<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_133"></a>[133]</span>
+fine for exceeding the speed limit.” As a result we
+crept through the town as sedately as though we were
+following a hearse, which was, I suppose, the very effect
+the city fathers aimed to produce, but as we left the
+limits of the municipality our resentment was dispelled
+by a sign so placed as to catch the eye of the departing
+motorist. It read: “So long, friend! Come again.”</p>
+
+<p>There is one word that you should never, <i>never</i>
+mention in the orange belt and that is—frost. That
+severe frosts are few and far between is perfectly true,
+as is attested by the fact that the road from Riverside
+to Pasadena runs through a vast forest of treasure-bearing
+trees. That there is another and less joyous
+side to the business of raising breakfast-table fruit
+was brought sharply home to me, however, by noting
+that the orchards I passed were dotted with hundreds,
+yes, thousands, of little cylindrical oil-stoves—the
+kind that they use in New England farmhouses to
+heat the bedroom enough to take a bath in on Sunday
+mornings. When the weather observer in Los Angeles
+flashes to the orange-growing centres a warning of an
+impending frost, the countryside turns out <i>en masse</i> as
+though to repel an invader, and soon the groves are
+dotted with myriad pin-points of flame as the orchardists
+wage their desperate battle with the cold, with
+stoves, braziers, smudge-pots, and bonfires for their
+weapons. Though at long intervals a frost comes
+which does wide-spread and incalculable damage, as
+in 1913, that they <i>are</i> infrequent is best proved by the
+fact that automobile, phonograph, and encyclopedia<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_134"></a>[134]</span>
+salesmen find their most profitable markets in the
+orange belt.</p>
+
+<p>The cultivation of citrus fruits has been so systematised
+of recent years that nowadays, if one is to
+believe the alluringly worded prospectuses issued by
+the concerns engaged in selling citrus lands, all the
+owner of an orange grove has to do is to sit in a rocking-chair
+on his veranda, watch his trees grow and his
+fruit ripen, have it picked, packed, and marketed by
+proxy, and pocket the money which comes rolling in.
+According to the specious arguments of the realty
+dealers, it is as simple as taking candy from children.
+You simply can’t lose. According to them, it works
+out something after this fashion. Prof. Nathaniel
+Nutt, principal of a school at Skaneateles, N.Y., decides
+that when his teaching days are over he would like
+to spend his carpet-slipper years on an orange grove
+under California’s sunny skies. Lured by the glowing
+advertisements, he invests in ten acres of land planted
+to young trees and piped for water. The price is five
+hundred dollars an acre, of which he pays one fifth
+down and the balance in four annual instalments.
+By the time that his grove is old enough to bear,
+therefore, it will be fully paid for. In its fifth year—according
+to the dealer, at least—Mr. Nutt’s grove
+will yield him fruit to the value of five hundred dollars
+an acre, so that it will pay for itself the very first year
+after it comes into bearing. Moreover, during the five
+years that must of necessity intervene before the
+trees can be expected to droop under their golden crop,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_135"></a>[135]</span>
+there is no real necessity for Mr. Nutt’s coming to
+California, for, by the payment of a purely nominal
+sum, he can have his grove cultivated, irrigated, and
+cared for under the direction of expert horticulturists
+while he continues to teach the Skaneateles youngsters
+their three R’s. As soon as the grove comes into
+bearing he will be notified, whereupon he will send in
+his resignation to the School Board, pack his grip,
+buy a ticket to California, and settle down as an orange
+grower with an assured income of five thousand dollars
+a year (ten acres multiplied by five hundred dollars,
+you see) for life. Simple, isn’t it? But let us suppose,
+just for the sake of argument, that about the time
+that Prof. Nutt’s trees come into bearing a devastating
+frost comes along and in a single night wipes his orchard
+out. Is it likely that he will be able to stand the
+financial strain of setting out another grove and irrigating
+it and fertilising it and caring for it for another
+five years? All of which goes to prove that orange growing
+is no business for people of limited means. Like
+speculating in Wall Street, it is an occupation which
+should only be followed by those who have sufficient
+resources to tide them over serious reverses and long
+periods of waiting. For such as those, however, there
+is no denying that gold grows on orange-trees.</p>
+
+<p>Citrus growing, as I have already remarked, has
+been greatly simplified of late by the organisation of
+growers’ unions. These unions are a result of the
+long and bitter struggle the citrus growers have waged
+to oust the intrenched middlemen and speculators.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_136"></a>[136]</span>
+A few years ago the growers found themselves facing
+the alternatives of organisation or bankruptcy. They
+chose the former. The first to organise were the
+Riverside growers, who built a common packing-house,
+put a general manager in charge, and sent their fruit
+to it to be inspected, packed, sold, and shipped. So
+successful did the experiment prove that other districts
+soon followed Riverside’s example, until to-day there
+is no orange-growing section in the State that does
+not have its own packing-house. But the growers did
+not stop there. They soon found that, if they were to
+get the top-of-the-market prices for their fruit, some
+system must be devised for getting market quotations
+at the eleventh hour and fifty-ninth minute and then
+diverting their shipments to the highest market. Here
+is an example: a car-load of oranges from Redlands
+might arrive in the Milwaukee freight yards the same
+day as a car-load from San Bernardino, in which case
+the Milwaukee market would be glutted, while in Saint
+Paul there might be a shortage of the golden fruit.
+To meet this necessity the local packing-houses grouped
+themselves together in shipping exchanges, of which
+there are now in the neighbourhood of a hundred and
+thirty, handling sixty per cent of California’s citrus
+crop. But, as the industry grew, still another organisation
+was needed: a big central fruit exchange to handle
+problems of transportation, to gather information about
+the markets, and to supply daily quotations, and legal,
+technical, and scientific information. Thus there came
+into being the big central exchange, as a result of<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_137"></a>[137]</span>
+which the growers have been enabled to market their
+own fruit regardless of the speculators. This central
+exchange keeps a salaried agent on every important
+market in the country. No commissions and no
+dividends are paid; there is no profit feature whatsoever.
+Against each box of fruit passing through
+the exchange is assessed the exact expense of handling,
+and the entire proceeds, less only this expense, are
+remitted to the grower. The local packing-house
+unions exist solely to pick, pack, and ship; the district
+unions exist solely to handle the local problems
+of the association; the central union exists for the
+purpose of gathering and supplying quotations and
+other information. Each of these unions is duly incorporated
+and has a board of directors, the growers
+electing the directors of the district union and these
+in turn electing the directors of the central union.
+Each union is a pure democracy—one vote a man,
+independent of his financial status or his acreage.</p>
+
+<p>Few outsiders appreciate the enormous proportions
+to which California’s citrus industry has grown.
+Three of every four oranges grown in the United
+States come from Californian groves, which yield a
+fifth of the entire citrus production of the world. The
+orange and lemon groves of California now amount to
+approximately a quarter of a million acres and are
+increasing at the rate of twenty-five thousand acres
+a year, for, as it takes a grove five years to come into
+bearing and nine years to reach maturity, population
+multiplies faster than the groves can grow. Notwithstanding<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_138"></a>[138]</span>
+this formidable array of facts and figures,
+it is open to grave doubt whether an orange grove is a
+safe investment for a person of modest means. Though
+a great deal of money has unquestionably been made in
+citrus growing, there is no denying the fact that it is
+a good deal of a gamble. One of the largest and most
+successful growers in California, a pioneer in the industry,
+said to me not long ago: “If the best friend I
+have in the world sent me a cheque for ten thousand
+dollars and asked me to invest it for him in citrus
+property, I would send it back to him unless I knew that
+there was plenty of money where that came from. I
+have made money in orange growing, it is true, but
+only because there has never been a time that I have not
+had ample resources to fall back on.” And here is
+the other side of the shield. We stopped for lunch one
+day at the rose-covered bungalow of a young widow
+whose husband had died a few years before, leaving
+her with two small children and twenty acres of oranges.</p>
+
+<p>“These twenty acres,” she told me, as we sat on
+the terrace over the coffee, “pay for the maintenance
+of this house, for the education of my two youngsters,
+for the up-keep of my little motor-car, and for my
+annual trips back East. And I don’t have to economise
+by wearing cotton stockings, either.”</p>
+
+<p>I have shown you both sides of the orange question;
+you can decide it for yourself.</p>
+
+<p class="tb">Some one with a poetic fancy and an imagination
+that worked overtime has asserted that Pasadena<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_139"></a>[139]</span>
+means “the Pass to Eden.” Though this is, to say the
+least, a decidedly free translation, it is, nevertheless,
+a peculiarly fitting one, for I doubt if there is any spot
+on earth where Adam and Eve would feel more at
+home than in the enchanting region of oak-studded
+foot-hills and poppy-carpeted valleys to which Pasadena
+is the gateway. What Cannes and Mentone
+and Nice are to Europe, Pasadena is to America: a
+place where the fortunate ones who can afford it can
+idle away their winters amid the same luxurious surroundings
+and under the same <i>cielo sereno</i> that they
+would find on the Côte d’Azur. Enclosed on three
+sides by a mountain wall which effectually protects it
+from the cold land winds, Pasadena nestles amid its
+subtropical gardens on the level floor of the San Gabriel
+Valley, ten miles from <i>La Puebla de Nuestra
+Señora la Reina de Los Angeles</i>, to give the second city
+of California its full name. It is said, by the way,
+that the people of Los Angeles have twenty-three
+distinct ways of pronouncing the name of their city.
+Mr. Charles Lummis, the author, who is a recognised
+authority on the Southwest, has attempted to secure
+a correct and uniform pronunciation of the city’s
+name by distributing among his friends the following:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">“My Lady would remind you, please,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Her name is not ‘Lost Angy Lees’</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Nor Angy anything whatever.</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">She trusts her friend will be so clever</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">To share her fit historic pride,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">The <i>g</i> should not be jellified;</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Long <i>o</i>, <i>g</i> hard and rhyme with ‘yes’</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">And all about Los Angeles.”</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_140"></a>[140]</span></p>
+<p>It is a Spotless Town in real life, is Pasadena. It
+is as methodically laid out as a Nuremburg toy village;
+it is as immaculate as a new pair of white kid gloves.
+At the height of the season, which begins immediately
+after New York’s tin-horn-and-champagne debauch
+on New-Year’s Eve and lasts until Fifth Avenue is
+ablaze with Easter millinery, you can find more private
+cars side-tracked in Pasadena railway yards and more
+high-powered automobiles on its boulevards than at
+any pleasure resort in the world. It is much frequented
+by the less spectacular class of millionaires, to whom
+the frivolity of the Palm Beach life does not appeal,
+and more than once I have seen on the terrace of the
+Hotel Green enough men whose names are household
+words to form a quorum of the board of directors of
+the Steel Trust. Though dedicated to pleasure, Pasadena
+has an extraordinary number of large and beautiful
+churches, and, as their pulpits are frequently occupied
+by divines of international reputation, they
+are generally filled to the doors. In fact, I have
+counted upward of three hundred motor-cars parked
+in front of two fashionable churches in Colorado Street.</p>
+
+<p>Just as the Eastern visitor to San Francisco is
+invariably shown three “sights”—Chinatown, Golden
+Gate Park, and the Cliff House, so, when he goes to
+Pasadena, he is shown Orange Grove Avenue, taken
+through the Busch Gardens, and hauled up Mount
+Lowe. Orange Grove Avenue is a mile-long, hundred-foot-wide
+stretch of asphalt bordered throughout its
+entire length by palms, pepper-trees, and plutocrats.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_141"></a>[141]</span>
+We drove along it quite slowly, taking a resident with
+us to point out the houses and retail any odds and ends
+of gossip about the people who lived in them, like the
+lecturers on the rubberneck coaches. It was almost as
+interesting as reading the advertising pages in the
+magazines, for most of the names he mentioned were
+familiar ones: we had seen them hundreds of times on
+soap and tooth-powder and ham and corsets and
+safety-razors. Then we motored over to the Busch
+Gardens, which were the hobby of the late St. Louis
+brewer and on which he lavished the profits of goodness
+knows how many kegs of beer. Though exceedingly
+beautiful in spots, they are too much of a horticultural
+<i>pousse-café</i> to be wholly satisfying. Roses
+and orchids and pansies and morning-glories and
+geraniums and asters are exquisite by themselves, but
+they don’t look particularly well crowded into the
+same vase. That is the trouble with the Busch Gardens.
+The profusion of subtropical vegetation is
+characteristically Californian; the sweeping greensward,
+overshadowed by gnarled and hoary live-oaks,
+recalls the manor parks of England; the prim, clipped
+hedges and the <i>jets d’eau</i> suggest Versailles; the
+gravelled promenades, bordered by marble seats and
+rows of stately cypress, bear the unmistakable stamp
+of Italy; while the cast-iron dogs and deer and gnomes
+which are scattered about in the most unexpected
+places could have come from nowhere on earth save
+the Rhineland.</p>
+
+<p>The climax of a stay in Pasadena is the trip up<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_142"></a>[142]</span>
+Mount Lowe. You can no more escape it and preserve
+your self-respect than you can go to Lucerne and escape
+going up the Rigi. From Rubio Cañon, near the city
+limits, a cable incline which in Switzerland would be
+called a funicular, climbs up the mountainside at a
+perfectly appalling grade. All the way up you speculate
+as to what would happen if the cable <i>should</i> break.
+When two thirds of the way to the summit the passengers
+are transferred to an electric car which, alternately
+clinging like a spider to the mountain’s precipitous
+face or creeping across giddy cañons by means of cobweb
+bridges, twists and turns its hair-raising way
+upward to the Alpine Tavern, a mile above the level
+of the valley floor. The far-flung orange groves with
+the sun shining upon them, the white villas of Pasadena
+and Altadena peeping coquettishly from amid
+the live-oaks, the rounded, moleskin-coloured foot-hills
+splotched with yellow poppies, the double rows of
+blue-grey eucalyptus (in Australia they call them blue-gums)
+and the white highways which run between
+them, in the distance the towering sky-line of Los
+Angeles beneath its pall of smoke, and, farther still,
+the islands of San Clemente and Santa Catalina rising,
+violet and alluring, from the sun-flecked sea, combine
+to form a picture the Great Artist has but rarely
+equalled.</p>
+
+<p>Different people, different tastes. Those who prefer
+the whoop-and-hurrah of popular seaside resorts can
+gratify their tastes to the limit at any one of the long
+and beautiful beaches—Long Beach, Redondo, Santa<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_143"></a>[143]</span>
+Monica, Venice—which adjoin Los Angeles. Here the
+amusements which await the visitor are limited only
+by his pocketbook and his endurance. The scenes
+along this coast of joy in summer beggar description.
+The splendid sands are alive with bathers; the promenades,
+lined with all the peripatetic shows of a popular
+seaside resort, swarm with good-natured, jostling,
+happy-go-lucky crowds. There is no rowdyism, as is
+the rule rather than the exception at similar resorts in
+the East, and there is amazingly little vulgarity, the
+boisterous element which prevails, say, at Coney
+Island, being totally lacking, this being due, no doubt,
+to the fact that several of the beaches have “gone dry.”
+At Long Beach the really beautiful Virginia, than which
+there are not half a dozen finer seaside hotels in the
+United States, provides accommodation for those who
+wish to combine the hurly-burly of Manhattan Beach
+with the more sedate pleasures of Marblehead or
+Narragansett. At Redondo you can risk your neck
+on the largest scenic railway in the world (they called
+them roller-coasters when I was a boy), or you can
+bathe in the largest indoor swimming pool in the
+world, or you can go down on the beach and disport
+yourself in the surf of the largest ocean in the world,
+though it is only fair to add that this last is not the
+exclusive property of Redondo. At Santa Monica
+you can sit on a terrace overlooking the sea and eat
+fried sand-dabs—a fish for which this portion of the
+Californian littoral is famous and which is as delicious
+as the pompano of New Orleans. At Venice you can<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_144"></a>[144]</span>
+lean back in a gondola, while a gentleman of Italian
+extraction in white ducks and a red sash pilots you
+through a series of lagoons and canals, and, if you have
+a sufficiently vigorous imagination, you may be able
+to make yourself believe that you are in the city
+of the Doges. Though somewhat noisy and nearly
+always crowded—which is, of course, precisely what
+their promoters want—the Los Angeles beaches provide
+the cleanest amusements and the most wholesome
+atmosphere of any places of their kind that I
+know.</p>
+
+<p>Though Los Angeles is fifteen miles from the sea
+as the aeroplane flies, and considerably farther by the
+shortest railway route, the Angelenos have done their
+best to mitigate this unfortunate circumstance by
+attempting to convert the indifferent harbour of San
+Pedro, twenty miles away, into a great artificial seaport.
+Everything that money can do has been done.
+The national government has dredged and improved
+the harbour and built a huge breakwater at enormous
+cost, and Los Angeles, which has extended her municipal
+limits so as to include San Pedro, has spent millions
+more in the construction of several miles of concrete
+quays and the installation of the most powerful and
+modern electric loading machinery. There is even
+under serious consideration a plan for digging a ship-canal
+from San Pedro to Los Angeles so that seagoing
+vessels can discharge and take on cargo in the heart
+of the commercial district. Though in time, as a result
+of the impetus provided by the completion of the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_145"></a>[145]</span>
+Panama Canal and the astounding growth of Los
+Angeles, which now has a population of considerably
+over half a million (in 1890 it had only fifty thousand),
+San Pedro will doubtless develop into a port of considerable
+importance for coastwise commerce, its limitations
+are not likely to permit of its ever becoming a
+dangerous rival of its great sister ports of San Francisco
+and San Diego. The attitude of the San Franciscans
+toward the laudable efforts of Los Angeles to
+get a harbour of her own is amusingly illustrated by
+a story they tell upon the coast. When the big breakwater
+was completed and San Pedro was ready to do
+business, Los Angeles celebrated the great event with
+a banquet, among the guests of honour being a gentleman
+prominent in the civic life of San Francisco.
+Toward the close of an evening of self-congratulation
+and of fervid oratory on Los Angeles’s dazzling future
+as one of the great seaports of the world, the San
+Franciscan was called upon to respond to a toast.</p>
+
+<p>“I have listened with the deepest interest, gentlemen,”
+he began, “to what the speakers of the evening
+have had to say regarding your new harbour at
+San Pedro, and I have been impressed with a feeling
+of regret that this magnificent harbour, which you
+have constructed at so great an expenditure of money
+and effort, is not more easy of access from your
+beautiful city. Now it strikes me, gentlemen, that
+you could overcome this unfortunate circumstance by
+laying a pipe-line from Los Angeles to San Pedro.
+Then, if you would suck as hard as you have been<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_146"></a>[146]</span>
+blowing this evening, you would soon have the Pacific
+Ocean at your front door.”</p>
+
+<p class="tb">Strung along the coast of California, from Point
+Loma to Point Concepcion, are the Channel Islands.
+Counting only the larger ones, they number twelve:
+three Coronados, four Santa Catalinas, and five in
+the Santa Barbara group; but if you include them all,
+small as well as large, there are thirty-five distinct
+links in the island chain which stretches from wind-swept
+San Miguel to the Coronados. What the Azores,
+Madeira, and the Canaries are to Europe, these enchanted
+isles are to the Pacific Coast. They have
+the climatic charm of the Riviera without its summer
+heat; the delights of its winters without the raw, cold
+winds which sweep down from the Maritime Alps.
+With their palms and semitropic verdure they have all
+the appearance of the tropics, yet they have not a
+tropical climate, the winters having the crispness of
+an Eastern October and the summers being cooler
+than any portion of the Atlantic seaboard south of
+Nova Scotia.</p>
+
+<p>Southernmost of the chain and not more than
+ten miles southwest from San Diego as the sea-gull
+flies is the group of rock-bound islets known as Los
+Coronados, which belong to Mexico. Though uninhabited
+and extremely rough, they are surrounded by
+forests of kelp and form famous fishing grounds for the
+big game of the deep. About a hundred miles to the
+northward, off the coast of Los Angeles County, is<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_147"></a>[147]</span>
+the group of which Santa Catalina is the largest and
+the most famous. Though Santa Catalina is only
+twenty-seven miles from San Pedro, the port of Los
+Angeles, it takes the <i>Cabrillo</i>, owing to her tipsy
+gait and the choppy sea which generally prevails in
+the channel, nearly three hours to make the passage,
+which is as notorious for producing <i>mal de mer</i> as that
+across the Straits of Dover.</p>
+
+<p>The prehistoric people who inhabited Santa Catalina
+during the Stone Age, and of whom many traces
+have been found in the kitchen-middens which dot
+the island, were first awakened to the fact that the
+world contained others than themselves when the
+Spanish sea-adventurer Cabrillo dropped the anchors
+of his caravels off their shores. Nearly a century passed
+away and then Philip III gave the island to one of his
+generals as a present. Some two hundred years were
+gathered into the past before Pio Pico, the Mexican
+governor of Alta California, sold the island for the price
+of a horse and saddle. In later years various other
+transfers took place from time to time, James Lick,
+who lies buried under his great telescope on Mount
+Hamilton, being for a period lord of the island. Later
+it was purchased as a prospective silver mine by an
+English syndicate, but the ore ran out and the disgusted
+Britishers were glad to dispose of it to the
+Banning Company, which is the present owner.</p>
+
+<p>Santa Catalina, which is about twenty-seven
+miles long, is shaped, with great appropriateness, like
+a fish, the smaller portion, which corresponds to the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_148"></a>[148]</span>
+tail, being connected with the main body of the island
+by a sandy isthmus. The island is surrounded on all
+sides by a dense jungle of kelp and other marine plants,
+whose wonders visitors are able to view from glass-bottomed
+boats. The topography of the island is
+scarcely less striking than the sea gardens which surround
+it. From the mountain peaks which rise to a
+height of two thousand feet or more, V-shaped cañons,
+their ridges pitched like the roof of a Swiss chalet,
+sweep down, ever widening, to the silver beaches of the
+sea. On the southern slopes cactus and sage-brush,
+grim offspring of the desert, cling to the naked, sun-baked
+rocks; on the other, the cooler side, dense,
+growths of mountain lilac, manzanita, chaparral, elder
+and other flowering shrubs form a striking contrast.
+Most of the vast acreage of the island is a sheep ranch
+and wild-goat range, but one cañon at the eastern end is
+devoted to the visitor and filled by the charming town
+of Avalon with a winter population of seven or eight
+hundred, which in summer increases to that many
+thousand. Avalon is unlike any other place that I
+know. It is built on the shore of a crescent-shaped bay
+at the mouth of a deep cañon which almost bisects the
+island. At the upper end of this cañon a great wall
+formed by a mountain ridge protects the town from
+ocean winds and gives it what is probably the nearest
+approach in the world to the “perfect climate.” The
+quaint houses of the town, many of them of charming
+and distinctive design, cling to the rocky hillsides and
+dot the slopes of the cañons, adapting themselves, with<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_149"></a>[149]</span>
+characteristic Americanism, to circumstances and conditions.
+Along the water-front are the large hotels, a
+concert pavilion, and the aquarium—which, by the
+way, has a larger variety of marine animals than the
+famous aquarium at Naples; farther up the beach is
+a large and handsome bath-house where hundreds
+bathe daily, and in the cañon at the back of the town
+are the picturesque and sporting golf-links and the
+tennis-courts. Though the island offers the visitor
+an extraordinary diversity of amusements, Avalon’s
+<i>raison d’être</i> is angling with rod and reel and everything
+is subservient to that. To it, as big-game hunters go to
+Africa, come fishermen from the farthermost corners
+of the world in quest of the big game of the sea. From
+the south side of the Bay of Avalon a long pier wades
+out into the water. Just as the bridge across the Arno
+in Florence is the resort of the gold and silver smiths,
+so this pier is the resort of the professional tuna boatmen.
+Along it, on either side, are ranged their booths
+or stands, each with its elaborate display of the paraphernalia
+of deep-sea fishing; a placard over each
+booth bears the owner’s name and his power-boat is
+anchored close by. At the end of the pier is a singular
+object which resembles a gallows. Beside it is a
+locked scales. On the gallows-like affair the great
+game-fish are hung and photographed, and on the
+scales all the fish taken in the tournaments are weighed
+by the official weighers of the Tuna Club.</p>
+
+<p>If you will glance to starboard as the <i>Cabrillo</i>
+steams slowly into Avalon Harbour, you will notice a<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_150"></a>[150]</span>
+modest, brown frame building, with a railed terrace
+dotted with armchairs, built on piles above the water.
+This is the Tuna Club, the most famous institution
+of its kind in the world. To become eligible to
+membership in this unique club one must take on a
+rod of not over sixteen ounces or under six feet and
+with a line of not more than twenty-four threads, a
+fish weighing over one hundred pounds. If elected one
+receives the coveted blue button, which is the angler’s
+Legion of Honour and to obtain which has cost many
+fishermen thousands of dollars and years of patience,
+while others have won it in a single day. The club
+holds organised tournaments throughout the fishing
+season, offering innumerable trophy cups and medals
+of gold, silver, and bronze for the largest tuna, albacore,
+sea-bass, yellowtail, and bonito caught by its members.
+I might mention, in passing, that the largest tuna ever
+taken was caught off Santa Catalina by Colonel C. P.
+Morehouse, of Pasadena, in 1899; when placed on the
+official scales the indicator registered two hundred and
+fifty-one pounds. I know of no more interesting way
+in which to pass an evening than to sit on the terrace
+of the Tuna Club, looking out across the moonlit bay,
+and listen to the tales told by these veterans of rod
+and reel: of Judge Beaman, who hooked a tuna off
+Avalon and was towed by the angry monster to
+Redondo, a distance of thirty miles, or of Mr. Wood,
+who played a fish for seven hours before it could be
+brought to gaff. I have yarned with professional elephant
+and lion hunters in the clubs at Mombasa and<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_151"></a>[151]</span>
+Zanzibar, and I give you my word that their stories
+were not a whit more fascinating than the tales of
+battles with marine monsters which I listened to on the
+terrace of the Tuna Club at Avalon.</p>
+
+<p>Santa Catalina’s nearest neighbour is San Clemente,
+twenty miles long, whose northern shore is a
+wonderland of grottoes, caves, and cliffs and on whose
+rolling upland pastures browse many thousand head of
+sheep. A hundred miles or so to the northward are the
+islands composing the Santa Barbara group: Anacapa,
+Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, and San Miguel. The coast of
+Anacapa—“the ever-changing”—is a maze of strange
+caverns gnawed from the rock by the hungry sea, one
+of them, of vast size, having once served as a retreat
+for the pirates who formerly plied their trade along
+this coast, and now for sea-lions and seals, a skipper
+from Santa Barbara doing a thriving business in capturing
+these animals and selling them for exhibition
+purposes, the seals of Santa Cruz being in demand by
+showmen all over the world because of their intelligence
+and willingness to learn. The island, which is arid
+and deserted, is a sheep ranch; the fact that there is
+little or no water on it apparently causing no discomfort
+to the sheep, as their coats become so soaked at
+night as a result of the dense fogs that by morning
+each animal is literally a walking sponge.</p>
+
+<p>Barring Santa Catalina, Santa Cruz is by far the
+most interesting and attractive of the Channel Islands,
+being worthy of a visit if for no other reason
+than to see its painted caves, which have been worn<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_152"></a>[152]</span>
+by the waves into the most fantastic shapes and dyed
+by the salts gorgeous and varied colors. Viewed from
+the sea, Santa Cruz appears to be but a jumble of lofty
+hills, sheer cliffs, and barren, purple mountains, gashed
+and scarred by cañons and gorges in all directions.
+But once you have crossed this rocky barrier which
+hems the island in, you find yourself in the loveliest
+Valley that the imagination could well conceive, with
+palms and oleanders and bananas growing everywhere
+and a climate as perfect and considerably milder than
+that of Avalon. The island is the property of the Caire
+estate; its proprietor is a Frenchman, and French and
+Italian labourers are employed exclusively on the ranch
+and in the vineyards which cover the interior of the
+island. When you set foot within the valley you leave
+America behind. The climate is that of southern
+France. The vineyard is a European vineyard. The
+brown-skinned folk who work in it speak the patois of
+the French or Italian peasantry. The ranch-houses, of
+plastered and whitewashed brick, with their iron balconies
+and their quaint and brilliant gardens, might have
+been transplanted bodily from Savoy, while the great
+flocks of sheep grazing contentedly upon the encircling
+hills complete the illusion that you are in the Old
+World instead of within a hundred miles of the newest
+metropolis in the New. There are two distinct seasons
+at Santa Cruz—the sheep-shearing and the vintage—when
+the French and Italian islanders are reinforced by
+large numbers of Barbareños, from Santa Barbara
+across the channel, who pick the grapes in September<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_153"></a>[153]</span>
+and twice yearly shear the sheep. Though the surface
+of the island is cut in every direction by cañons,
+gulches, and precipices, the Barbareño horsemen, who
+are descended from the old Mexican vaquero stock,
+mounted on the agile island ponies, in rounding up the
+sheep, ride at top speed down precipitous cliffs and
+along the brinks of giddy chasms which an ordinary
+mortal would hesitate to negotiate with hobnailed
+boots and an alpenstock. It is a thrilling and hair-raising
+exhibition of horsemanship and nerve and,
+should you ever happen to be along that coast at
+shearing time, I would advise you to obtain a permit
+from the Caire family and go over to Santa Cruz to
+see it.</p>
+
+<p>Sport in the Channel Islands is not confined to
+fishing, for there is excellent wild-goat shooting on
+Santa Catalina and wild-boar shooting on Santa Cruz.
+Though both goats and boars are doubtless descended
+from domestic animals introduced by the early Spaniards,
+they have lived so long in a state of freedom that
+they provide genuinely exciting sport. These wild pigs
+are dangerous beasts for an unmounted, unarmed man
+to meet, however, for they combine the staying qualities
+of a Georgia razor-back with the ferocity of a
+Moroccan boar and will charge a man without the
+slightest hesitation.</p>
+
+<p>Taking them by and large, the Channel Islands are,
+I believe, unique. Where else, pray, within a half
+day’s sail of a city of six hundred thousand people,
+can one explore pirates’ caves, pick bananas from<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_154"></a>[154]</span>
+the trees, shoot wild goat and wild boar, angle for
+the largest fish in existence, and, no matter what the
+season of the year, dwell in a climate of perpetual
+spring?</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_155"></a>[155]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="VI">VI<br>
+<span class="smaller">THE COAST OF FAIRYLAND</span></h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_156"></a>[156]</span></p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">“All in the golden weather, forth let us ride to-day,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">You and I together on the King’s Highway.</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">The blue skies above us, and below the shining sea;</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">There’s many a road to travel, but it’s this road for me.</div>
+  </div>
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="center">...</div>
+  </div>
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">It’s a long road and sunny, it’s a long road and old,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">And the brown <i>padres</i> made it for the flocks of the fold;</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">They made it for the sandals of the sinner folk that trod</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">From the fields in the open to the mission-house of God.</div>
+  </div>
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="center">...</div>
+  </div>
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">We will take the road together through the morning’s golden glow,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">And we’ll dream of those who trod it in the mellowed long ago;</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">We will stop at the Missions where the sleeping <i>padres</i> lay,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">And we’ll bend a knee above them for their souls’ sake to pray.</div>
+  </div>
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">We’ll ride through the valleys where the blossom’s on the tree,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Through the orchards and the meadows with the bird and the bee,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">And we’ll take the rising hills where the manzanitas grow,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Past the grey tails of waterfalls where blue violets blow.</div>
+  </div>
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">Old conquistadores, O brown priests and all,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Give us your ghosts for company when night begins to fall;</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">There’s many a road to travel, but it’s this road to-day,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">With the breath of God above us on the King’s Highway.”</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_157"></a>[157]</span></p>
+
+<h3>VI<br>
+<span class="smaller">THE COAST OF FAIRYLAND</span></h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>Following the example of the late J. Cæsar,
+Esquire, the well-known Roman politician, who
+districted Gaul into three parts, California might be
+divided into three provinces of pleasure: the Sierras,
+the Sequoias, and the Sands. Though nowhere separated
+by a journey of more than a single day at most,
+these three zones are as dissimilar in their physical
+and climatical characteristics and in the recreations
+they offer to the visitor as the coast of Brittany is
+from the Engadine, as the Black Forest is from the
+Italian Lakes, or, coming nearer home, as unlike each
+other as the White Mountains are unlike Atlantic
+City, as Muskoka is unlike Bar Harbour. Within the
+confines of a region five hundred miles long and barely
+two hundred wide may be found as many varieties of
+climate, scenery, and recreation as are provided by
+all the resorts of eastern America and Europe put
+together.</p>
+
+<p>That California’s summer climate is even more
+delightful than its whiter climate is a fact which not
+one outlander in a hundred seems able to comprehend.
+Because the paralysing cold of an Eastern winter is
+equalised by a correspondingly sweltering summer,
+your average Easterner, who has heard all his life of<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_158"></a>[158]</span>
+California’s winter climate, finds it impossible to disabuse
+himself of the conviction that a region which is
+so climatically blessed by Nature during one half of the
+year must, as a matter of course, be cursed with intolerable
+weather during the other half, so as to strike,
+as it were, an average. A climate which is equally
+inviting in January and in July is altogether beyond
+his comprehension. He fails to understand why
+Nature does not treat California as impartially as she
+does other regions, making her pay for balmy, cloudless
+winter days with summers marked by scorching
+heat and torrential rains. Summer in California is
+really equivalent to an Eastern June. The nights are
+always cool, and the blankets, instead of being packed
+away in moth balls, cover you to the chin. There is
+no humidity and the air, which in most summer climates
+is about as invigorating as lemonade, is as crisp
+and sparkling as dry champagne. Nor is there any
+rain. This is literal. There is, I repeat, no rain. Each
+August the Bohemian Club of San Francisco produces
+its famous Grove Play in a natural amphitheatre formed
+by the rocks and redwoods of the Californian forest.
+The cost of the production runs into many thousands
+of dollars and involves many months of effort, but the
+preparations are made with the absolute assurance that
+the performance will be unmarred by rain. In a quarter
+of a century the club members have not been disturbed
+by so much as a sprinkle. Did you ever plan a motor
+trip or a picnic or a fishing excursion during an Eastern
+summer only to be awakened on the morning of the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_159"></a>[159]</span>
+appointed day by the rain pattering on the roof? That
+sort of thing doesn’t happen in California any more
+than it does in Egypt. Pick out your midsummer day,
+no matter whether it is a week or a month or a year
+ahead, and on that morning you will find the weather
+waiting for you at the front door. This absence of
+rain is not an entirely unmitigated blessing, however,
+for it means dust. And such dust! I have never seen
+any region so intolerably dusty as is the Great Valley
+of California in midsummer except the Attic Plain.
+A jack-rabbit scurrying across the desert sends up a
+column of dust like an Indian signal-fire. Along the
+coast, however, the dust nuisance is ameliorated to
+some extent by the summer fogs which come rolling
+in from the sea at dawn, leaving the countryside as
+fresh and sparkling as though it had been sprinkled
+by a heavy dew. The farther up the coast you go, the
+heavier these fogs become, until, north of Monterey,
+they resemble the driving mists so characteristic of
+the Scottish highlands. For the benefit of golfers
+I might add that these moisture-laden fogs make possible
+the chain of splendid turf golf-links which begin
+at Monterey, the courses farther south, where there is
+but little moisture during the summer, being characterised
+by greens of oiled sand and fairways which
+during six months of the year are as dry and hard
+as a bone. Artists will tell you that the summer landscapes
+of California are far more beautiful than its
+winter ones, and I am inclined to believe that they
+are right, for in June the countryside, with its unnumbered<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_160"></a>[160]</span>
+<i>nuances</i> of green and purple, is transformed,
+as though by the wave of a magician’s wand, into a
+dazzling land of russets and burnt oranges and chromes
+and yellows.</p>
+
+<p>California may best be described as a great walled
+garden with one side facing on the sea. It is separated
+from those unfortunate regions which lie at the back
+of it by the most remarkable garden wall in all the
+world. This wall, which is, on an average, two miles
+high, is five hundred miles long, having Mount San
+Jacinto for its southern and Mount Shasta for its
+northern corner. At the back of the garden rises,
+peak on peak, range on range, the snow-clad Sierra
+Nevada. Gradually descending, the high peaks give
+way to lesser ones, the ranges dwindle to foot-hills, the
+foot-hills run out in cañons and grassy valleys, the
+valley slopes become clothed with forests, the forests
+merge into groves of gnarled, fantastic live-oaks, and
+these in turn to gorse-covered dunes which sweep down
+to meet the sea. The whole of this vast garden—mountain,
+forest, and shore—is dotted with accommodations
+for the visitor which are adapted to all tastes and to
+all purses and which range all the way from huge
+caravansaries which rival those of Ostend and Aix-les-Bains,
+of Narragansett and Lake Placid, to tented
+cities pitched beneath the whispering redwoods or
+beside the murmuring sea.</p>
+
+<p>Unless you have seen the Lago di Garda at its
+bluest, unless you have loitered beneath the palms
+which line the Promenade des Anglais at Nice, unless<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_161"></a>[161]</span>
+you have bathed on the white sands of Waikiki, unless
+you have motored along the Corniche Road, with the
+sun-flecked Mediterranean on the one hand and the
+dim blue outline of the Alps upon the other, you cannot
+picture with any degree of accuracy the beauties of
+this enchanted littoral. From Cannes, where the Mediterranean
+Riviera properly begins, to San Remo, where
+it ends, is barely one hundred miles, every foot of which
+is so built over with hotels and villas and straggling
+villages that you feel as though you were passing
+through a city, the impression being heightened by the
+gendarmes who stare at you suspiciously and by the
+admonitory notices which confront you at every turn.
+From Coronado, where the Californian Riviera begins,
+to the Golden Gate, where it ends, is six hundred miles,
+and every foot of that six hundred miles is through a
+veritable garden of the Lord. Along this coast date-palms
+and giant cacti give place to citrus groves ablaze
+with golden fruit and these, in turn, merge into the
+grey-green of the olive; the olive groves change to
+orchards of peach and apricot and prune, and these
+lose themselves in time in hillsides green with live-oaks,
+and the live-oaks turn to redwoods and the redwoods
+yield to pines. Bordering this historic coastal highway—El
+Camino Real, it is still called—are vast
+ranches whose hillsides are alive with grazing flocks
+and herds; great estates, triumphs of the landscape-gardener’s
+skill, with close-clipped hedges and velvet
+lawns from amid which rise Norman châteaux and
+Italian villas and Elizabethan manor-houses; quaint<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_162"></a>[162]</span>
+bungalows with deep, cool verandas, half hidden by
+blazing gardens; and, of course, hotels—dozens and
+dozens of them, with roses tumbling in cascades of
+colour over stucco walls and cool terraces shaded by
+red-striped awnings. It is indeed an enchanted coast,
+and I, who had always boasted to myself that I had
+seen too many of the world’s beauty-spots to give my
+allegiance to any one of them, have—I admit it
+frankly—fallen victim to its spell.</p>
+
+<p class="tb">Between Los Angeles and Ventura lies one of
+the most flourishing agricultural regions in the State,
+the districts through which we sped on the wings of
+the winter morning being variously noted for their
+production of hay, walnuts, olives, beets, and beans.
+Ventura is the railroad brakeman’s contraction of San
+Buenaventura—it is obvious that a trainman could
+not spare the time to enunciate so long a name—the
+picturesque coast town and county-seat owing its
+origin to the mission which the Franciscan <i>padres</i>
+founded here a year after the Battle of Yorktown and
+which is still in daily use. From Ventura we made a
+detour of fifteen miles or so for the purpose of visiting
+the Ojai Valley (it is pronounced “O-hi” if you please),
+a little place of surpassing beauty which not many
+people know about, like Thun in the Bernese Oberland,
+or Annecy, near Aix-les-Bains. The road to the Ojai
+strikes directly inland from the coast, following the
+devious course of the Matilija, climbing up and up
+and up, through forests of live-oaks and mountain<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_163"></a>[163]</span>
+meadows carpeted with wild flowers, until it suddenly
+debouches into the valley itself. Because the Ojai
+is so very beautiful, and is at the same time so simple
+and sylvan and unpretending, it is a little difficult to
+give an accurate idea of it in words. Though Mount
+Topotopo, the highest of the peaks which hem it in,
+is not much over six thousand feet, it can best be
+compared, I think, to some of the Alpine valleys, such
+as Andermatt, for example, or the one below Grindelwald.
+I do not particularly like the idea of continually
+dragging in Europe as a standard of comparison
+for things American, but so many of our people have
+come to know Europe better than they do their own
+country that it is the only means I have of making
+them realise the beauties and wonders on which, with
+the coming of each summer, they habitually turn their
+backs.</p>
+
+<p>To visualise the Ojai you must imagine a boat-shaped
+valley, ten miles long perhaps and a fifth of
+that in width, entirely surrounded by a wall of purple
+mountains. The floor of the valley is covered with
+lush green grass and dotted with thousands of gnarled
+and hoary live-oaks with venerable grey beards of
+Spanish moss. Through the trees peep the shingled,
+weather-beaten cottages of Nordhoff, which, with its
+leafy lanes, its shady blacksmith shop, its cosy inn,
+and its collection of country stores with the inevitable
+group of loungers chewing tobacco and whittling and
+settling the affairs of the nation in the shade of
+their wooden awnings, is as quaint and sleepy and<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_164"></a>[164]</span>
+unspoiled a hamlet as you can find west of Cape
+Cod. The annual tournaments of the Ojai Valley
+Tennis Club, which for nearly twenty years have
+been held each spring on the pretty oak-fringed
+courts behind the inn, attract the crack players of the
+coast, and here have been developed no less than six
+national champions. As you ascend the mountain
+slopes the character of the vegetation abruptly changes,
+the oak groves giving way to orchards of orange, lemon,
+fig, and olive, which, taken in conjunction with the
+palms and the veritable riot of flowers, give to the sides
+of the valley an almost tropical appearance. The
+Ojai is said to have more varieties of birds and flowers
+than any place in the United States, and I think that
+the statement is doubtless true. It is like an aviary in a
+botanical garden. Snuggled away in the mountains at
+the back of the Ojai are two equally enchanting but
+much less frequented valleys: the Matilija and the
+Sespe—the latter accessible only on a sure-footed horse
+along a mountain trail which is precipitous in places
+and nowhere overwide. In the spring and summer
+the streams which tumble through these mountain
+valleys are alive with trout jumping-hungry for the
+fly. If you can accommodate yourself to simple accommodations
+and plain but wholesome fare you can eat
+and sleep and fish a very delightful vacation away at
+the rate of two dollars a day or ten a week.</p>
+
+<p>High on the slopes of the Ojai, its brown shingles
+almost hidden by the Gold of Ophir roses which clamber
+over it, is a little hotel called The Foot-hills. It is an<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_165"></a>[165]</span>
+unpretending little inn with perhaps forty rooms at
+most. But, shades of Lucullus and Mrs. Rorer, what
+meals they set before you! Brook-trout which that
+very morning were leaping in the Matilija, hot biscuits
+with honey from the Sespe, huge purple figs,
+grapefruit fresh-picked from the adjacent orchard,
+strawberries with lashings of thick yellow cream. I’ve
+never been able to decide which I like best about the
+Ojai, its scenery or its food. But as it becomes better
+known and more people begin to go there, I suppose
+the same thing will happen to it which happened to a
+dear little <i>albergo</i> in Venice which I once knew and
+loved. For many years it stood on the Guidecca,
+quite undiscovered by the tourist, and in their day had
+sheltered the Brownings and Carlyle. It was a sure
+refuge from the bustle and turmoil of the big hotels,
+and not infrequently I used to go there for a lunch of
+omelet and strawberries and Chianti served under a
+vine-clad pergola on the edge of the canal. The first
+time that I took Her to Venice, I said, as we were
+leaving the great caravansary where we were stopping:</p>
+
+<p>“I know a place where we will lunch. I haven’t
+been there for years and I don’t remember its name,
+but I think that I can find it,” and I described it in
+detail to Angelo, our gondolier.</p>
+
+<p>“<i>Si, si, signor</i>,” he assured me, and shoved off
+with his long oar.</p>
+
+<p>Four times we rowed up and down the Guidecca
+without my being able to locate my beloved little
+hotel.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_166"></a>[166]</span></p>
+
+<p>“This must have been the place you meant,
+signor,” Angelo said finally, pointing to a building
+which was rapidly being demolished and to a staring
+sign which read: “A new five-story hotel with hot and
+cold running water, electric lights, and all modern conveniences
+will shortly be erected on this site. Meals
+<i>prix fixe</i> or <i>à la carte</i>. Music every evening.”</p>
+
+<p>And that, I suppose, is what will happen to my
+little hotel in the Ojai when the world comes to learn
+about it. So I beg you who read this not to mention
+it to any one.</p>
+
+<p class="tb">Until quite recently the route from the Ojai to
+Santa Barbara led over the Casitas Pass by a precipice-bordered
+road so narrow and dangerous that the
+fear of it kept many motorists away. But now the
+Casitas is a thing of the past, for a highway has been
+built along the edge of the sea by what is known as the
+Rincon route, several miles of it lying over wooden
+causeways not unlike the viaducts for Mr. Flagler’s
+seagoing railway on the Florida keys. This portion
+of the coast is one long succession of <i>barrancas</i>, each
+with a rocky creek bed worn by the winter torrent at
+its bottom, so that the road builders had many obstacles
+with which to contend. It is a very beautiful
+highway, however, and reminds one at every turn of
+the Corniche Road along the Riviera, with the same
+lazy ocean on the one side and the same blue serrated
+mountains on the other. Through Carpinteria we ran,
+pausing in our flight just long enough to take a look at<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_167"></a>[167]</span>
+a grape-vine with a trunk eight feet in circumference,
+which has borne in a single season, so its guardian
+assured us, upward of ten tons of grapes; through
+Summerland, where the forest of derricks and the reek
+of petroleum suggest the hand of Rockefeller; past
+Miramar, as smothered in flowers as the heroine of
+d’Annunzio’s play; through Montecito, with its marble
+villas and red-roofed mansions rising above the groves
+of cypress and cedar; down the splendid Ocean Drive,
+where the great rollers from the Pacific come booming
+in to break in iridescent splendour on the silver strand;
+and so into Santa Barbara, the Newport of the West,
+where buildings of stone and concrete jostle elbows
+with picturesque hovels of adobe.</p>
+
+<p>Santa Barbara presents more curious contrasts, I
+suppose, than any place between the oceans. Drawn
+up beside the curb you will see a magnificent limousine,
+the very latest product of the automobile builder’s
+art, with the strength of fourscore horses beneath its
+sloping hood and as luxuriously fitted as a lady’s boudoir;
+a Mexican vaquero, sombreroed, flannel-shirted,
+his legs encased in high-heeled boots and fleecy chaps,
+fresh from the cattle-ranges on the other side of the
+mountains, will rein up his wiry mustang and dexterously
+roll a cigarette and ask the liveried chauffeur
+for a match—<i>Muchas gracias, Señor</i>. On State Street
+stands a huge concrete office-building, the very last
+word in urban architecture, with hydraulic elevators
+and cork-paved corridors and up-to-the-minute ventilating
+devices, and all the rest. A man can stand in<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_168"></a>[168]</span>
+front of that building and toss an orange into the <i>patio</i>
+of a long, low, deep-verandaed dwelling whose walls
+of crumbling adobe show that it dates from the period
+when this land was ruled from Madrid instead of
+Washington. Though there are plenty of buildings
+dating from the Spanish era left, the observing stranger
+will note that few if any of them retain their original
+roofs of hand-made, moss-grown tiles. Why? Because
+the old Spanish tiles will bring almost any price
+that is asked for them, being in great demand for
+roofing the houses of the rich. In fact, I know of one
+Santa Barbara mansion which is roofed with tiles
+brought from the old cathedral at Panama. Nor have
+I the least doubt in the world that these plutocratic
+philistines would strip the historic mission which is
+Santa Barbara’s chiefest asset of its tiles and bells and
+crosses if the monks could be induced to sell them.</p>
+
+<p>Over in the section known as the Old Town all
+the houses are Mexican in character, their walls tinted
+yellow, pink, bright blue. This, with the palm-trees
+and the cactus in the dusty, unkempt dooryards, the
+groups of brown-faced, black-eyed youngsters by the
+gates, and the Spanish names—Garcias, Ortegas,
+Oteros, Espinosas, De la Guerras—which one sees
+everywhere, makes one realise that Santa Barbara is
+still Latin in everything save cleanliness. Merely to
+read the street names—Cañon Perdido, Anapamu,
+Arellaga, Micheltorena, Pedragoso, Chapala, Salsipuedes—makes
+you feel that you are in some Castilian
+town and not in the United States of the twentieth<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_169"></a>[169]</span>
+century at all. Why on earth, while they were about it,
+they didn’t call the town’s main thoroughfare La Calle
+del Estado instead of prosaic State Street, I fail to
+understand. This glaring inconsistency in nomenclature
+is almost compensated for, however, by the
+little square down on the ocean front which is called
+the Plaza del Mar. Here barelegged youngsters,
+guarded by anxious nurses, gambol upon the sands;
+here the old folks doze contentedly upon the green
+benches and look out to sea and listen to the music of
+La Monica’s band; here lovers sit silently, clasping
+hands beneath the palms, just as other children, other
+old folk, other lovers are doing in other plazas in Old
+Spain.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp50" id="illus21" style="max-width: 31.25em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus21.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><p>“Even the imposing façade of the Arlington,
+  with its arches, cloisters, terraces, and <i>campanarios</i>, suggests a
+  Spanish monastery.”</p>
+  <p>“A long, low, deep-verandaed dwelling whose pottery roof and walls of
+  adobe show that it dates from the period when this land was ruled from
+  Madrid instead of Washington.”</p>
+  <p>SANTA BARBARA. A CITY OF CONTRASTS.</p></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>To understand the charm of Santa Barbara as a
+place of residence, you should stroll down State Street
+on a winter’s morning. Like Bellevue Avenue in Newport,
+it is the meeting-place for all the town. Youths
+in tweed jackets and flannel trousers stand beside the
+curbs chatting with pretty girls in rakish, vivid-coloured
+motor-cars. Dowagers descend from stately
+limousines and enter the shops to order sweetbreads
+and cotillion favours and the latest novels. Young
+men astride of mettlesome ponies trot by on their
+way to polo practice. Prosperous-looking, well-groomed
+men of years, who look as though they might be bank
+presidents and railway directors and financiers and
+probably are, pause to discuss the wretched weather
+prevailing in the East and to thank their lucky stars
+that they are out of it and to challenge each other to<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_170"></a>[170]</span>
+a game of golf. Slim young girls in riding-boots and
+beautifully cut breeches patronise the soda-fountains
+and hang over the fiction counters in the bookstore
+and chatter volubly about tennis and theatres and
+tango teas. It is one big reception, at which every one
+knows every one else and every one else’s business.
+Though there is a great deal of wealth and fashion in
+Santa Barbara, there is likewise a great deal of informality,
+which makes it a pleasant contrast to Pasadena,
+which is so painfully conscious of its millionaires
+that life there possesses about as much informality
+as a court ball.</p>
+
+<p>The ancient mission, which with the climate is
+Santa Barbara’s chief attraction, provides the <i>motif</i>
+for the city’s architecture, and the citizens have made
+a very commendable effort to live up to it, or rather
+to build up to it, even the imposing façade of the Arlington,
+with its arches, cloisters, terraces and <i>campanarios</i>,
+suggesting a Spanish monastery far more
+than a great tourist hotel. It is the monks themselves,
+however, who have been the most flagrant offenders
+against the canons of architectural good taste, for
+within a stone’s throw of their beautiful old mission
+they have erected a college which looks for all the
+world like a shoe factory surmounted by a cupola and
+a cross. No matter from what point upon the encircling
+hills you look down upon the city, that atrocious
+college, as angular, uncompromising, and out of the
+picture as a New England schoolmarm at a <i>thé dansant</i>,
+comes up and hits you in the eye.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp50" id="illus22" style="max-width: 28.125em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus22.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><p>THE MISSION OF SANTA BARBARA.</p>
+  <p>“The sunlight, sifted and softened by the interlacing branches of the
+  ancient sycamores, cast a veil of yellow radiance upon the crumbling,
+  weather-worn façade.”</p></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_171"></a>[171]</span></p>
+
+<p>Perhaps you were not aware that about one out
+of every ten plays which flicker before your fascinated
+eyes on the motion-picture screen were taken in or
+near Santa Barbara, for the country round about the
+town is a moving-picture producer’s paradise and
+several companies have built their studios there and
+make it their permanent headquarters. Within a
+five-mile radius of the Plaza del Mar are settings in
+which can be enacted scenes laid anywhere between
+Cancer and Capricorn. There are sandy beaches which
+might have been made expressly for shipwrecks and
+buccaneering exploits and similar “water stuff”; there
+are Greek and Spanish villas hidden away in subtropical
+gardens which would provide backgrounds for
+anything from the “Odyssey” to “The Orchid-Hunter”;
+and back of them are tawny foot-hill ranges where
+bands of cow-punchers, spectacularly garbed, pursue
+horse thieves or valorously defend wagon-trains attacked
+by Indians, taking good care, however, to keep
+within the focal radius of the camera.</p>
+
+<p>Of the many things in and about Santa Barbara
+which appeal to the imagination, I think that I liked
+best the miniature caravels which surmount the massive
+gate-posts at the entrance to the Arlington. To
+most visitors I suppose that they are only puppet
+vessels, quaintly rigged and strangely shaped, to be
+sure, but nothing more. But to me they stand for
+something very definite indeed, do those little carven
+craft. They represent the <i>San Salvador</i> and the <i>Vittoria</i>,
+the little caravels in which Juan Rodrigues Cabrillo,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_172"></a>[172]</span>
+the intrepid Portuguese sea adventurer who
+hired his sword and services to Spain, sailed up this
+storied coast upward of three centuries ago and whose
+anchors rumbled down off these very shores. From out
+the mist of fiction, romance, legend, and fairy-tale
+which beclouds the early history of California, the
+certain and authenticated voyage of this Portuguese
+sailor of fortune stands out sharp and clear as the one
+fact upon which we can rely. Though he never returned
+from the land which he discovered, though he has been
+overlooked by History and forgotten by Fame, his
+adventure has become immortal, for he put California
+on the map.</p>
+
+<p class="tb">Were you to turn your back on the Pacific at some
+point between Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo
+and strike due eastward, you would find athwart your
+path, shortly before reaching the Nevada line, the
+crudest and most forbidding of the earth’s waste
+places—Death Valley. At the very back of California,
+paralleling the eastern boundary of Inyo County,
+sandwiched between the great wall formed by the High
+Sierras and the burning sands of the Colorado Desert,
+this seventy-five-mile-long gash in the earth’s surface—the
+floor of the valley is two hundred and ten feet
+below the level of the sea—is one of the most extraordinary
+regions in the world. It is a place of contrasts
+and contradictions. Though in summer it is probably
+the hottest place on earth, in winter the cold becomes
+so great that the thermometer cannot record it. Its<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_173"></a>[173]</span>
+aridity is so extreme that men have died from lack of
+moisture with water at their lips. Though rain is
+virtually unknown, the lives of the inhabitants are
+frequently menaced by the floods which result from
+cloudbursts. A mountain range, whose rocks are of
+such incredibly vivid colours that even a scene-painter
+would hesitate to depict them as they are, is called the
+Funeral Range. Though nearly a score of lives were
+lost when the valley was christened, and though its
+history from that day to this has been one of hardship,
+peril, and death, with little to relieve its harshness, for
+fully half the year Death Valley is as healthy a spot
+as any on the continent. During the other half, however,
+it is a sample package of that fire-and-brimstone
+hell of which the old-time preachers were wont to warn
+us. Indeed, the hereafter could hold no terrors for a
+man who was able to survive a summer in Death
+Valley.</p>
+
+<p>The valley first became known by the tragedy
+which gave it its name. The year following the discovery
+of gold in California a party of thirty emigrants,
+losing their heads in their mad lust for the yellow
+metal, left the well-travelled Overland Trail and struck
+south through this region in the hope of finding a short
+cut to the gold-fields. But they found a short cut
+to death instead, for they lost their way in the valley
+and eighteen of them perished horribly from thirst.
+The valley, which runs almost due north and south, is
+about seventy-five miles long, and at its lowest point,
+where the climate is the worst, it is not over eight miles<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_174"></a>[174]</span>
+in width. To the west the Panamints reach their
+greatest altitude, while on the east the Funeral Range
+is practically one huge ridge, with almost a vertical
+precipice on the side next the valley. To the south
+another range, running east and west, shuts in the
+foot of the valley and turns it into a <i>cul-de-sac</i>. Seen
+from the summit of the Panamint Range, the valley
+looks for all the world like a huge grey snake marked
+with narrow bands of dirty white, which are the borax
+deposits. Far to the north, gleaming in the sunlight
+like a slender blade of steel, is the Amargosa River,
+while on either side of the valley the ranges rear themselves
+skyward in strata of such gorgeous colours that
+beside them the walls of the Grand Cañon would look
+cold and drab. The vegetation is scant, stunted, and
+unhappy; the thorny mesquite shrub takes on a sickly
+yellowish tinge; the sage-brush is the colour of ashes;
+even the cactus, which flourishes on the inhospitable
+steppes of the adjacent Mohave Desert, has given up
+the struggle to exist in Death Valley in despair. But,
+arid as the valley is, it has two streams running through
+it. One, the Amargosa, comes in at the north end,
+where it forms a wash that gives out volumes of sulphuretted
+hydrogen which poisons the air for miles
+around. The other is Furnace Creek, whose waters
+are drinkable though hot. Everything considered, it
+is not exactly a cheerful place, is Death Valley.</p>
+
+<p>Weather Bureau officials would tell you, should
+you ask them, that when there is ninety per cent of
+humidity in the air the weather is insufferably oppressive;<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_175"></a>[175]</span>
+that air with seventy per cent of humidity is about
+right; that sixty or fifty per cent, as when a room is
+overheated by a stove or furnace, will produce headaches;
+while, should the percentage be reduced to
+thirty, or even forty, the air would become positively
+dangerous to health. Imagine, then, what existence
+must be like in Death Valley in midsummer, when the
+air, raised to furnace heat by its passage over the
+deserts, is kiln-dried in the pit below sea-level until
+its percentage of moisture is <i>less than one half of one
+per cent</i>! Effects of this ultrararefied air are observed
+on every hand. Men employed in ditch digging
+on the borax company’s ranch were compelled to sleep
+in the running water with their heads on stones to keep
+their faces above the surface—and this was not in the
+hottest weather, either. Furniture built elsewhere is
+quickly and utterly ruined. Tables warp into fantastic
+shapes. Chairs split and fall apart. Water barrels
+incautiously left empty lose their hoops in an hour.
+Eggs are boiled hard in the sand. A handkerchief
+taken from the tub and held up in the sun will dry
+more quickly than it would before a red-hot stove.
+One end of a blanket that is being washed will dry
+while the other is still in the tub. Meat killed at night
+and cooked at six in the morning is spoiled by nine.
+A man cannot go without water for an hour without
+becoming insane. A thermometer, hung in the coolest
+place available, for forty-eight hours never dropped
+below 104, repeatedly registered 130, and occasionally
+climbed to 137. A borax driver died, canteen in hand,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_176"></a>[176]</span>
+atop his wagon. “He was that parched that his head
+cracked open over the top,” said a man who saw the
+body.</p>
+
+<p>But in October, strange as it may seem, Death
+Valley becomes a dreamy, balmy, <i>dolce far niente</i> land,
+the home of the Indian summer. Later in the season
+snow falls in the mountains to the west to a depth of
+three feet or more. At the Teels Marsh borax works
+the thermometer has registered 120 in the shade of the
+house in August and yet before the winter was over
+the mercury froze and the temperature dropped to
+50 below zero! There is no place on earth, so far as
+I am aware, where so wide a variation has been recorded.
+Though it rarely if ever rains in the valley,
+cloudbursts frequently occur amid the adjacent mountain
+tops—usually in the hottest weather and when
+least expected—and in the face of the roaring floods
+which follow the people in the valley fly to the foot-hills
+for their lives. More appalling than the floods, however,
+are the sand-storms which are a recognised
+feature of life (existence would be a better term) in
+Death Valley. A sand-storm sweeping down that vale
+of desolation is a never-to-be-forgotten sight. The
+wind shrieks by with the speed of an express train.
+A dense brown fog completely blots the landscape out.
+Sand augers rise like slender stems joining sand and
+sky, whirling madly hither and thither through the
+burning atmosphere like genii suddenly gone mad.
+The air is filled with flying pebbles, sand, and dust. It
+is like a Dakota blizzard with the grit of broken volcanic<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_177"></a>[177]</span>
+rock in place of snow. These sand-storms
+commonly last for three days; then they end as suddenly
+as they began, leaving the desert swooning
+amid its shifting waves of heat. Mirages raise up
+spectral cities, groves, tree-bordered rivers, lush, green
+fields as though by the sweep of a magician’s wand.
+In the rarefied air the ruins of an adobe hut are magnified
+into a sky-scraper; arrow weeds become stately
+palms; a crow walking on the ground appears to be a
+man on horseback.</p>
+
+<p>The borax deposits for which the valley is famous
+are exactly alike in their general appearance: a bowl-shaped
+depression hemmed in by barren hills and at
+the bottom of this bowl an expanse that looks like water
+or salt or dirty snow or chalk, according to the distance,
+but which is really the boracic efflorescence on
+the bed of a dried-up lake. Walking out upon the
+marsh, one finds it covered with a sandy-looking crust
+through which the feet generally break, clay or slime
+being found beneath. To reach the railway the borax
+has to be hauled half a hundred miles by wagon under
+a deadly sun. The wagons used are huge affairs with
+wheels seven feet in diameter and tires eight inches
+wide, each carrying ten tons. Two tremendous Percherons
+are harnessed to the pole and ahead of them,
+fastened by double-trees to a steel chain that stretches
+from the forward axle, are nine pairs of mules, the
+driver from his lofty seat controlling his twenty animals
+by means of a one-hundred-and-twenty-foot
+jerk line, a bucket of stones, and a complete assortment<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_178"></a>[178]</span>
+of objurgations. The next time, therefore, that
+you chance to see a package of borax, stop and think
+what it has cost—insufferable heat, bitter cold, sand-storms,
+agonizing thirst, sunstroke—yes, sometimes
+even death.</p>
+
+<p class="tb">From Santa Barbara, El Camino Real, ever glowing,
+ever luring, bids <i>adios</i> to the sea for a time and
+sweeps inland again through a land of oak groves and
+olive orchards and frequent outcroppings of rock,
+which, with the bleak purple mountains rising up
+behind it, bears so startling a resemblance to Andalusia
+that the homesick Spanish friars must have rubbed
+their eyes and wondered whether they were really in
+the New World after all. Our road, winding steadily
+upward under the shadow of giant oaks and sycamores,
+crossed the Santa Ynez Range by the Gaviota Pass
+(<i>gaviota</i>, I might note in passing, meaning sea-gull in
+the Spanish tongue), the car, its engines humming the
+monotone which is the motorist’s lullaby, taking the
+long, steep grades like a hunted cat on the top of a
+back-yard fence.</p>
+
+<p>From the summit of the pass we dropped down the
+brush-clothed flanks of the mountains by a zigzag
+road into a secluded river valley whose peace and
+pastoral loveliness were as grateful, after the stirring
+grandeur of the Gaviota, as is the five-o’clock whistle
+to the workman after a busy day. By this same pass
+the trail of the <i>padres</i> ran when, a century ago, they
+walked between the missions, so that it was with peculiar<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_179"></a>[179]</span>
+appropriateness that there rose before us, as we
+swung around a shoulder of the mountain, the Mission
+of Santa Ynez, its white colonnades gleaming like ivory
+in the morning sunlight, its pottery roof forming a
+splendid note of colour against the lush, green fields,
+its cross-surmounted campanile pointing heavenward,
+just as the fingers of its cassocked builders were wont
+to do. Thanks to the patience and perseverance of
+Padre Alejandro, the priest in charge, the famous mission,
+which was in a deplorable state of neglect when
+he came there a dozen years ago, has been reroofed
+and in a large measure restored, the south corridor,
+which runs the length of the <i>convento’s</i> front, where
+the brown-robed monks were wont to pace up and down
+in silent meditation, having been transformed into a
+sort of loggia, bright with sunshine and fragrant with
+flowers. It is a pleasing survival of the spirit of the
+old monastic days that no one, derelict, hobo, or tramp,
+who applies at the Mission Santa Ynez for food or
+shelter is ever turned away. I think the thing that
+brought home to me most vividly the hardships endured
+by the cowled and sandalled founders of these
+missions was a great umbrella of yellow silk, bordered
+with faded blue, which caught my attention in the
+sacristy.</p>
+
+<p>“What was this umbrella used for, father?” I inquired.</p>
+
+<p>“That, my son,” said Padre Alejandro, “was used
+by the <i>padres</i> to shield themselves from the sun on
+their journeys between the missions, for they were not<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_180"></a>[180]</span>
+permitted to ride but were compelled by their vows
+to go always afoot. Though Father Serra was lame,
+and every step that he took caused him the extremest
+anguish, he not once but many times walked the six
+hundred miles which lay between San Diego and his
+northernmost mission at Sonoma.”</p>
+
+<p>One would naturally suppose that the people of
+California would be inordinately proud of these crumbling
+missions which have played so great a part in
+the history of their State and would take steps to have
+them preserved as national monuments, just as the
+French Government preserves its historic châteaux.
+But, for some unexplainable reason, just the opposite
+is true, the priests in charge of several of the missions
+assuring me that they had the greatest difficulty in
+obtaining funds to effect even the most imperative repairs,
+depending very largely on the contributions of
+Eastern visitors. We Americans excuse ourselves for
+this unpardonable neglect by explaining that we are
+still a young people, which, of course, is true. It is
+equally true, however, that by the time we are old
+enough to appreciate their historic significance and
+value, there will be no missions left to preserve.</p>
+
+<p>Should you who read this follow in our tire tracks,
+you should not fail to stop for luncheon at a hamlet,
+not far from Santa Ynez, called, from the olive orchards
+which surround it, Los Olivos. There is a little inn
+there kept by a Frenchman named Mattei—a Basque
+he is, if I remember rightly—who will serve you just
+such a meal as you can get at one of those wayside<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_181"></a>[181]</span>
+<i>fondas</i> in the Pyrenees. The country adjacent to Los
+Olivos is noted for its fishing and shooting, so that instead
+of the roast-beef-mashed-potatoes-pie-and-coffee
+luncheon which the motorist learns to expect, we had set
+before us brook-trout fried in flour and bread-crumbs,
+ripe brown olives which had been soaked in garlic and
+oil, roast quail as plump as young chickens, an omelet
+<i>à la Espagnole</i>, and heaping bowls of wild strawberries,
+the whole washed down with a wine rarely seen in
+America—real white Chianti. It is the very unexpectedness
+of such meals which makes them stand out like
+white milestones along the gastronomical highway.</p>
+
+<p>More Spanish in character and atmosphere even
+than Santa Barbara is Monterey, three hundred miles
+farther up this enchanted coast. Careless of the
+changes which are being wrought about it, it lazes on
+its sun-kissed hillside, its head shaded by groves of
+palm and live-oak, its feet laved by the tepid waters
+of the bay. The town is built on the slopes of a natural
+amphitheatre, looking down upon a U-shaped harbour
+containing the bluest water you ever saw. Rising
+steeply behind the town is the hill where the Spanish
+<i>castillo</i> used to stand, which is now surmounted by
+grim, black coast-defence guns and by the yellow
+barracks which house the garrison. At the foot of
+Presidio Hill is the sheltered cove where Vizcaino
+landed to take possession of this region in the name of
+his Most Catholic Majesty of Spain, and where, years
+later, Padre Serra also landed to take possession of it
+in the name of a far mightier King. Here, on clear<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_182"></a>[182]</span>
+days, you can see on the harbour bottom the bleached
+and whitened bones of the frigate <i>Natalia</i>, on which
+Napoleon escaped from Elba. Down by the water-front,
+where the soiled and smelly fishing-boats with
+their queer lateen sails rub shoulders with the spotless,
+white-hulled yachts, the old custom-house stands in
+the shadow of a patriarchal cypress. It has looked on
+many strange and thrilling scenes, has this balconied
+building of whitewashed adobe; it has seen the high-prowed
+caravels swinging at anchor in this bay with
+the red-and-yellow flag of Spain drooping from their
+carven sterns; it has seen the swarthy Spanish governors
+reviewing their steel-capped and cuirassed
+soldiery in the sun-swept plaza; it has seen the <i>fiestas</i>
+and other merrymakings which marked the careless
+Mexican régime; and on that July day in 1846 it
+saw the marines in their leather chacoes and the blue-jackets
+in their jaunty hats land from the American
+frigates, saw them form in hollow square upon the
+plaza, saw their weapons held rigid in burnished lines
+of steel as a ball of bunting crept up the flagstaff, and
+heard the roar of cheers as it broke out into a flag of
+stripes and stars.</p>
+
+<p>In historic interest and significance this little
+town of Monterey is to the West what Boston is to
+the East. Here was planned the conquest of California;
+here the first American flag was raised upon
+the shores of the Pacific; here was the first capital and
+here was held the first constitutional convention of
+California. Follow Alvardo Street up the hill, between<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_183"></a>[183]</span>
+rows of adobe houses with pottery roofs and whitewashed
+walls set in gardens aglow with roses, fuchsias,
+and geraniums, to the group of historic buildings at
+the top. Here you will be shown the Larkin house,
+where dwelt the last American consul in California and
+in which were hatched the plots which led up to the
+American occupation; the picturesque home of the
+last Spanish governor of the Californias; Colton Hall,
+in which the first constitutional convention assembled
+on the day of California’s admission to the Union;
+the little one-roomed dwelling that Sherman and Halleck
+occupied when they were stationed here as young
+lieutenants and the other house where dwelt the beautiful
+señorita whom Sherman loved long years before
+he won imperishable fame beneath the eagles at Shiloh;
+and, by no means least in interest, the wretched dwelling
+where that immortal genius Robert Louis Stevenson
+lodged for a year or more, and the little restaurant
+where he took his meals, and the green pathways which
+he wandered.</p>
+
+<p>In the edge of the town stands the church of San
+Carlos, one of the best preserved mission churches of
+California, whose sacristy contains the most precious
+religious relics in the State; for here the priest in charge
+will reverently show you Father Serra’s own chasuble,
+cope, and dalmatics and the altar service of beaten
+silver which was brought out for him from Spain.
+The <i>padre-presidente</i> preferred Carmel over the hill
+to all his other missions, however, and it was there,
+where the Carmel River ripples down between the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_184"></a>[184]</span>
+silent willows to its mother, the sea, that he came back
+to die. There, beneath the altar of the ancient mission,
+his ashes lie buried in the land which his labours
+transformed from a savage wilderness to a vineyard
+of the Lord.</p>
+
+<p>From Monterey you may motor or drive or street-car
+or foot it to Del Monte, which is only a mile away.
+Whichever method you choose, I should take the longest
+way around if I were you, so as to approach the hotel
+through the glorious wild-wood by which it is enveloped.
+And after you have twisted and turned for a
+mile or more through a wilderness of bloom and foliage,
+like the children in the story-book in search of the enchanted
+castle, and after you have concluded that you
+have lost your way and are ready to abandon the quest,
+all unexpectedly you catch a glimpse of its red-roofed
+towers and spires and gables rising above the tree
+tops. Built in the Queen Anne style of thirty years
+ago, huge and rambling and not unpicturesque, surrounded
+by acres of lawn and the finest live-oaks I
+have ever seen, it bears a quite striking resemblance to
+the Gezireh Palace—now a hostelry for tourists—which
+the Khedive Ismail built on an island in the Nile. Del
+Monte suggests not one, but many places, however.
+Its lawns and live-oaks, the perfection of which is the
+result of more than a third of a century of care, in many
+respects recall the famous country-seats of England,
+though the vegetation, of course, is very different;
+the gardens, which offer a continual feast of colour,
+remind one of Cintra, outside of Lisbon, while the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_185"></a>[185]</span>
+cypress maze is a duplicate of that at Hampton Court.
+The artificial lake, surrounded by subtropical vegetation
+and approached by a palm-bordered esplanade,
+has about it a suggestion of a Damascus garden that
+I know, while from the golf-links—than which there are
+none better in the West—looking across the tree tops
+to where the white houses of Monterey overhang the
+bay, it is difficult to believe that you are not on the
+hill behind Mustapha Superieur, looking down upon
+the white buildings of Algiers. Although Del Monte
+is an enchanted garden at any time of the year, the
+“high season” is in July and August, when the golfing,
+polo-playing set flock down from Burlingame and San
+Mateo exactly as the corresponding section of society
+on the other side of the continent flocks to Newport
+and Bar Harbour. During these two months the polo
+field resounds to the thunder of galloping hoofs and the
+click of mallet and ball; the golf-links on the rolling
+downs above the sea are alive with players taking part
+in the great midsummer tournament which is the most
+important golfing fixture on the Pacific Coast; and in
+the evenings white-shouldered women and white-shirted
+men dip and whirl and glide to fervid music upon a
+glassy floor or stroll amid the gardens which the light
+of the summer moon and the fragrance of the flowers
+transform into a fairyland.</p>
+
+<p>The logical way to follow El Camino Real is from
+south to north, as we did, for that was the way of the
+<i>padres</i>; so it was quite natural that our next stop after
+leaving Monterey and its Mission of Carmel should be<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_186"></a>[186]</span>
+at the secluded and almost forgotten Mission of San
+Juan Bautista. San Juan Bautista—Saint John the
+Baptist—is just such a lazy, sleepy, pretty little hamlet
+as you can find at almost every turning of a Catalonian
+road. Along its lanes—they are too narrow and straggling
+to be dignified with the name of streets—stand
+quaint adobe houses smothered in jasmine and passion-vine,
+hedged in by fences of prickly pear, and shaded by
+cypress and untidy eucalyptus trees. Though the plaza
+up the hill, where the Spanish soldiery, and after them
+the Mexican, used to parade and where the <i>fiestas</i>
+used to be held, is weed-grown and lonely, it is not
+deserted, for the townsfolk still go flocking to mass in
+obedience to the summons of the mission bells, and,
+thanks to the renaissance of the rural districts caused
+by the ubiquitous motor-car, the dining-room of the
+hotel, once the barracks of the Mexican garrison, is
+nearly always filled with guests. Close by the hotel
+is the old adobe building which served as the headquarters
+of General Castro, the Mexican commander, and
+back of the town rises the hill known as the Hawk’s
+Nest, where Frémont and his handful of American
+frontiersmen fortified themselves and defied Castro
+and his soldiers to come and take them. San Juan
+Bautista is a place where I could have loitered for a
+week instead of a day, for who, with a spark of romance
+in his soul, could resist the appeal at the top of the hotel
+note-paper: “A relic of the distant past, when men
+played billiards on horseback and the trees bore human
+fruit”?</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_187"></a>[187]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="VII">VII<br>
+<span class="smaller">THE VALLEY OF HEART’S DELIGHT</span></h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_188"></a>[188]</span></p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">“He touched my eyes with gladness, with balm of morning dews,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">On the topmost rim He set me, ’mong the hills of Santa Cruz,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">And I saw the sunlit ocean sweep, I saw the vale below—</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">The Vale of Santa Clara in a sea of blossomed snow.”</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_189"></a>[189]</span></p>
+
+<h3>VII<br>
+<span class="smaller">THE VALLEY OF HEART’S DELIGHT</span></h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>I first heard about the place from the captain
+of a little coasting steamer in the Indian Ocean.
+It was moonlight, I remember, and we were leaning
+over the rail, watching the phosphorescent waves curl
+away from the vessel’s bow. We had both seen more
+than our shares of the world and we were exchanging
+opinions of what we had seen over the captain’s Trichinopoli
+cheroots. Perhaps it was the effect of the
+moonlight on the silent waters, but I am more inclined
+to think it was the brandy which his silent-footed
+Swahili steward had just served us, which caused him
+to grow confidential.</p>
+
+<p>“A few more voyages and I’m going to quit the
+sea,” he remarked.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes?” said I interrogatively. “And what will
+you do then? Get a berth as harbour master at
+Shanghai or port captain at Suez or somewhere?”</p>
+
+<p>“No,” said he, “I’m going to build a house for
+myself and the missis in a valley that I know; a house
+painted white with green blinds and with a porch as
+broad as a ship’s deck, and I’m going to have a fruit
+orchard and a flower garden with red geraniums in it,
+and I’m going to raise chickens—white Wyandottes,
+I think, but I’m not quite certain.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_190"></a>[190]</span></p>
+
+<p>“Of all things!” I ejaculated. “My imagination
+isn’t elastic enough for me to picture an old sea-dog
+like you settled down in a white farmhouse raising
+fruit and chickens. Where is all this going to be?”</p>
+
+<p>“In the Santa Clara,” said he.</p>
+
+<p>“It sounds like the name of a Pullman car or a
+tune in the hymn-book,” said I.</p>
+
+<p>“It’s neither,” said he; “it’s a valley in California.”</p>
+
+<p>“Tell me about it,” I suggested.</p>
+
+<p>“I can’t,” said he. “It’s too beautiful—in the
+spring the whole valley is a sea of blossoms, like cherry
+season in Japan; and beyond are green hillsides that
+might be those of Devonshire; and looming up back
+of the hills are great brown-and-purple mountains that
+look like those at the back of Cintra, in Portugal (that’s
+some place, too, believe <i>me</i>); and there is always the
+smell of flowers in the air, such as you get in Bulgaria
+in the attar-of-rose season; and I’ve never seen a sky
+as blue anywhere else except in the Ægean; and——”</p>
+
+<p>“That’s enough,” I interrupted. “That’s where
+I’m going next. Any place that will make a hardened
+old sea captain become poetical must be worth seeing.”</p>
+
+<p class="tb">Months later, in Algiers, I found myself sitting
+at a small iron table on a sun-bathed terrace overlooking
+the orange-and-olive-and-palm-fringed shores of
+the Mediterranean. There are only five views to equal
+it in all the world. As I sat gazing out across the
+waters toward France a fellow countryman strolled up<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_191"></a>[191]</span>
+and dropped into the seat beside me. I knew that he
+was an American by the width of his hat brim and
+because he didn’t wait for an introduction.</p>
+
+<p>“Fine morning,” I remarked pleasantly. “Wonderful
+view from this terrace, isn’t it? And the sunshine
+is very warm and cheering.”</p>
+
+<p>“Pretty fair,” he assented gloomily; “pretty fair
+for this place. But in the part of the world I come
+from fine mornings and wonderful views and sunshine
+are so darned common that it never occurs to us to
+mention them.”</p>
+
+<p>“Where is your home, may I ask?” I inquired,
+for want of anything better to say.</p>
+
+<p>“In the Santa Clara Valley of California,” he
+answered proudly. “God’s favourite country, sir! He
+took more pains with it than any place he ever made,
+not even barring the original Eden. This is a very
+pleasing little view, I admit; a very pleasing one, but
+I wish I could take you up on the slopes of Mount Hamilton
+just before sunset and let you look across the
+valley to Los Gatos when the prune orchards are in
+blossom. As for the climate, why, say, my friend——”</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, yes, I know,” I said soothingly, for when a
+man gets a lump in his throat while talking about his
+native land it’s time to change the topic of conversation.
+“I know; I’ve heard all about it before. Fact
+is, I’m on my way there now.”</p>
+
+<p>“You <i>are</i>?” he exclaimed incredulously, and,
+leaning back in his chair, he clapped his hands until
+the Arab waiter came running. “Garsong,” said he,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_192"></a>[192]</span>
+“bring us a bottle of the best wine you’ve got.” When
+the amber fluid was level with the rims we touched
+our glasses:</p>
+
+<p>“It’s poor stuff compared with the wine we make
+in California,” he said, “but it’ll do to drink a toast
+in.” He stood up, bareheaded and very straight, as
+British officers do when they drink to the king.</p>
+
+<p>“Friend,” said he, and his voice was husky, “here’s
+to God’s favourite valley—here’s to the Santa Clara.”</p>
+
+<p class="tb">If you go to the Santa Clara when I did, which
+was in March, when the unfortunates who live beyond
+the Sierra Nevada are still waking up to find ice in
+their water-pitchers, you will find that the people of
+the valley are celebrating the Feast of the Blossoms.
+It is a very beautiful festival, in which every man,
+woman, and child in this fifty-mile-long garden of
+fruit and flowers takes part, but you cannot appreciate
+its true significance until you have climbed to a point
+on the slopes of the mountains which form the garden
+wall, where the whole enchanting panorama lies before
+you. Did you ever see one hundred and twenty-five
+square miles of trees in snow-white blossom at one time?
+No, of course not, for nowhere else in all the world can
+such a sight be seen. I, who have listened to the voice
+of spring on five continents and in more than five-score
+countries, assure you that it is worth the seeing.</p>
+
+<p>Personally, I shall always think of the Santa
+Clara as a sleeping maiden, fragrant with perfume and
+intoxicatingly beautiful, lying in a carven bed formed<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_193"></a>[193]</span>
+by the mountains of Santa Cruz, curtained by fleecy
+clouds, her coverlet of eiderdown tinted with rose,
+quilted with green, edged with yellow; her pillow the
+sun-kissed waters of San Francisco Bay. When you
+come closer, however, you find that the coverlet which
+conceals her gracious form is in reality an expanse of
+fragrant blossoms; that the green tufts are the live-oaks
+which rise at intervals above the orchards of cherry,
+peach, and prune; and that the yellow edging is the
+California poppies which clothe the encircling hills.</p>
+
+<p>Sentimentally and commercially it is fitting that
+the people of the Santa Clara Valley should celebrate
+the coming of the blossoms, for they are at once its
+chief beauty and its chief wealth. In a single season
+these white and fragrant blossoms have provided the
+breakfast tables of the world with one hundred and
+thirty million pounds of prunes, to say nothing of those
+luscious pears, peaches, cherries, and apricots which
+beckon temptingly from grocers’ windows and hotel
+buffets from Salt Lake City around to Shanghai. No
+other single fruit of any region, not even the fig of
+Smyrna, the date of Tunis, the olive of Spain, or the
+currant of Greece, is so widely distributed as the prune
+of the Santa Clara Valley. The people of the valley
+will assure you very earnestly that the reason their
+wives and daughters have such lovely complexions is
+because they make it a point to eat prunes every morning
+for breakfast. Whether due to the prunes or not,
+I can vouch for the complexions.</p>
+
+<p>Barring the coast of Tripolitania, where it is<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_194"></a>[194]</span>
+harvest time all the year round, but where the Arabs
+are offering no inducements to settlers, and the Imperial
+Valley, whose summer heat makes it undesirable as a
+place of permanent residence, the Santa Clara Valley
+has more crops, through more months of the year, than
+any place I know. Ceres makes her annual appearance
+in February with artichokes—the ones that are
+priced at a dollar a portion on the menus of New
+York’s fashionable hotels; in March the people of
+the valley are having spring peas with their lamb
+chops; April brings strawberries, although, as a matter
+of fact, they are to be had almost every month of the
+year; in May the cherry pickers are at work; the local
+churches hold peaches-and-cream sociables in June; by
+the ides of July the valley roads are alive with teams
+hauling cases of pears, plums, and apricots to the
+railway stations; August, being the month of prunes,
+is marked with red on the Santa Clara calendars;
+September finds the presses working overtime turning
+grapes into wine, and the prohibitionists likewise working
+overtime trying to turn “wet” communities into
+“dry” ones; in October the men are at work in the
+orchards picking apples and the women are at work
+in the kitchens baking apple pies; the huge English
+walnuts which wind up dinners half the world around
+are harvested in November; while in December and
+January the prodigal goddess interrupts her bounty
+just long enough to let the fortunate worshippers
+at her shrine observe the midwinter holidays. After
+such a recital it is almost needless to add that the valley<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_195"></a>[195]</span>
+boasts both the largest fruit-drying houses and the
+largest fruit canneries in the world, for in the Santa
+Clara they dry what they can and can what they can’t.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>chef-lieu</i> of the valley is San José. It may
+interest Easterners to know that Don Caspar de
+Portola and his men, marching up from the south in
+their search for the lost Bay of Monterey, had looked
+down from the valley’s mountain rim upon the spot
+where the city now stands four years before the Boston
+Tea Party; while that indomitable Franciscan, Father
+Junipero Serra, had established the great Mission San
+José, and was hard at work Christianising and teaching
+the Indians of this region before the ink was fairly
+dry on the Declaration of Independence and while
+the three thousand miles of country which lies between
+the valley of the Santa Clara and the valley of the Connecticut
+was still an unexplored wilderness. The last
+time that the gentlemen with the census books knocked
+at San José’s front doors they reported that the city
+had forty thousand people, and it keeps agrowing and
+agrowing. It has about four times as many stores as
+any place of its size that I can recall, but that is because
+the local merchants depend on the trade of the
+rural rather than the urban population, for the hardy
+frontiersmen who rough it in this portion of the West
+run in to do their shopping by automobile or trolley-car
+or else give their orders over the telephone. There
+are two things about the city which I shall remember.
+One is the street-cars, which have open decks forward
+and aft, with seats running along them lengthwise,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_196"></a>[196]</span>
+on which the passengers sit with their feet hanging
+over the side, as though on an Irish jaunting-car.
+In pleasant weather the display of ankles on the street-car
+makes them look, from the sidewalks, like moving
+hosiery advertisements. The other municipal feature
+which riveted my attention was a sort of attenuated
+Eiffel Tower, sliced off about half-way up, which straddles
+the two main streets of the city at their intersection,
+and from the top of which a powerful search-light
+signals to the traveller on the valley highroads, to the
+shepherd on the mountains, to the fisherman on San
+Francisco Bay: “Here is San José.”</p>
+
+<p>If there is anywhere a royal road to learning, it is
+the fifty-mile-long one which meanders up the Santa
+Clara Valley, for there are more schoolhouses scattered
+along it than there are milestones, and they’re
+not the little red schoolhouses of which our grandfathers
+brag, either. Every time our motor-car swung
+around the corner of a prune orchard we were pretty
+certain to find a schoolhouse of concrete, usually in
+the overworked mission style of architecture, with
+roses and honeysuckle and wistaria clambering over
+the door. The youngster who wants to travel the royal
+road to knowledge can commence his journey in one of
+the concrete schoolhouses at Gilroy, which is at the
+southern portal of the valley; the second stage will
+take him up to the great high school at San José,
+which is so extensive and handsome and completely
+equipped that it would make certain famous Eastern
+colleges feel shamefaced and embarrassed; the final<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_197"></a>[197]</span>
+stage along this intellectual highway is only eighteen
+miles in length and ends at Palo Alto, amid whose live-oaks
+rise the yellow towers and red-tiled roofs of that
+great university which Leland Stanford, statesman and
+railway builder, founded in memory of the son he lost,
+and which he endowed with the whole of his enormous
+fortune. He gave the eight thousand acres of his
+famous stock-farm for the purpose, and to-day white-gowned
+“co-eds” wander, book in hand, where the
+paddocks once stood, and spike-shod sprinters dash
+down the track, where the great mare Sunol used to
+put close on half a mile a minute behind her spinning
+sulky wheels. It is one of the great universities of
+the world, is Leland Stanford, Jr., and, with its cloistered
+quadrangles, its wonderful mosaic façades, and
+its semitropical surroundings, certainly one of the
+most beautiful. It stands, fittingly enough, at the
+valley’s northern gateway and at the end, both literally
+and metaphorically, of the royal road to learning;
+so that the valley-bred youth who passes through its
+doors with his sheepskin in his pocket finds himself
+on the threshold of that great outside world for which,
+without leaving his native valley, he has been admirably
+prepared.</p>
+
+<p>Speaking of roads, they have built one running
+the length of the State and, therefore, of the Santa
+Clara Valley, which would cause Mr. John MacAdam,
+were he still in the land of the living, to lift his hat in
+admiration. It is really a restoration of El Camino
+Real, that historic highway which the Spanish conquistadores<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_198"></a>[198]</span>
+built, close on a century and a half ago,
+for the purpose of linking up the one-and-twenty missions
+which the indefatigable Padre Serra flung the
+length of California as outposts of the church, and which
+did more to open up the Pacific Coast to civilisation
+and colonisation and commerce than any undertaking
+save the construction of the Southern Pacific. Were
+this highway in the East I am perfectly sure that they
+would cheapen it by calling it the Shore Road or the
+State Pike, but it speaks well for California’s appreciation
+of the picturesque and the appropriate that she
+has decided to cling to the historic name of El Camino
+Real—the Royal Road—the King’s Highway.</p>
+
+<p>Although the Santa Clara Valley, properly speaking,
+ends at Palo Alto, the ultrafashionable colonies
+of Burlingame, San Mateo, and Hillsboro may, for the
+purposes of this chapter, at least, be considered as
+within its compass. These are to the Pacific Coast
+what Lenox and Tuxedo are to the Eastern world of
+fashion: places where the rich dwell in great country
+houses set far back in splendid parks, with none but
+their fellow millionaires for neighbours and with every
+convenience for sport close at hand. Full of colour and
+animation are the scenes at their ivy-covered stations
+when the afternoon trains from San Francisco pull in;
+for here, at least, the motor-car has not ousted the
+horse from his old-time popularity, and the gravelled
+driveways are alive with tandem carts and runabouts
+and spider phaetons, with smart grooms in whipcord
+liveries and leather gaiters standing rigidly at the heads<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_199"></a>[199]</span>
+of the horses. Probably the finest examples of architecture
+in California are to be seen in the neighbourhood
+of Burlingame and San Mateo, the only other communities
+which can rival them in this respect being Montecito,
+near Santa Barbara, Oak Knoll, outside of Pasadena,
+and Hollywood, a suburb of Los Angeles.</p>
+
+<p>The East and, for that matter, all of the rest of
+America owe California a debt of gratitude for her development
+of a native domestic architecture. The first
+true homes for folk of real culture but moderate incomes
+were produced on the Pacific Coast. In the type of
+house that abounds to-day in California comfort, tradition,
+and art have been skilfully and interestingly combined.
+Based on the old missions, which in their turn
+drew inspiration from the ideals of the Spaniard and
+the Moor, modern Californian architecture has nevertheless
+made servants, not masters, of those traditions.
+Though drawing from the romantic background of the
+conquistadores and the <i>padres</i> the sturdy spirit, the
+simple lines, and the practical details of the old frontier
+buildings, the main virtue of these Californian homes
+is that they possess a definite relation to the soil and
+climate and the habits of the people. But, though
+back of each design lurks the motive of the Spanish
+missions, there is no monotony, no sameness; but, on
+the contrary, a remarkable variety of design. Each
+possesses the characteristic features of the Californian
+home: the low, wide-spreading roof lines, the solid
+walls, generally of concrete or plaster, the frank use
+of structural beams, the luxurious spaces of veranda<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_200"></a>[200]</span>
+and balcony, the tiled terraces and pottery roofs, the
+cool, inviting patios, and the quiet loveliness of the
+interiors. It is true, of course, that many house-builders
+have been unable to resist the temptation of
+Colonial, Norman, Dutch, and Tudor, but, as their
+culture increases, Californians are fast realising that
+an architecture designed for inhospitable climates is
+utterly incongruous in California’s semitropical surroundings.</p>
+
+<p>It rained one of the days that I spent in San José,
+and my genial host was so apologetic about it that I
+actually felt sorry for him. Though rain is seldom
+unwelcome in a horticultural country, the residents
+don’t like to have it come down in bucketfuls when
+visitors whom they are anxious to impress with the
+perfection of their climate are around. They are as
+proud of their climate in the Santa Clara Valley as a
+boy is of “his first long pants,” and to back up their
+boasts the residents carry in their pockets the blue
+slips of the Government Weather Bureau’s monthly reports
+to show the stranger. I’m not fond of figures, unless
+they happen to be on cheques drawn in my favour,
+but I was impressed by the fact, nevertheless, that
+in 1913 the valley had only fifty-eight cloudy days,
+sixty-four which were overcast, and two hundred and
+thirty-four in which there was not a cloud to dim the
+turquoise of the sky. Carrying my investigations a
+little further, I found that during the greater part of
+February, which is the coldest month of the year, the
+mercury remained above 55, only four times dropping<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_201"></a>[201]</span>
+as low as 33, while there were only four days in August
+when the thermometer needle crept up to 79, and
+once in the same month it fell as low as 42, thus giving
+a solar-plexus blow to the idea stubbornly held by most
+Easterners that in summer California is an anteroom
+to Hades.</p>
+
+<p>To this unvarying geniality of the climate and to
+the careless, happy-go-lucky, pleasure-loving strain
+handed down from the Spanish and Argonaut pioneers
+are due the invincible gaiety and the passionate love
+for the out-of-doors which are among the most likeable
+characteristics of the Californians. One of the first
+things that strikes an Eastern visitor is the fact that
+the Californians can always find time for amusement,
+and they enter into those amusements with the enthusiasm
+and the whole-souled gaiety of children. On
+the Pacific Coast recreation is considered quite as
+important as business—and business does not suffer,
+either. There is about these Californian merrymakings
+an abandon, a joyousness, a childlike freedom from
+restraint which is in striking contrast to the restrained,
+self-conscious pleasures of the older, colder East. To
+the colourful <i>fiestas</i> of the Spanish and Mexican eras
+may be traced the out-of-door festivities which play so
+large a part in the life of the people on the Pacific
+Coast, such as the midwinter Tournament of Roses at
+Pasadena, the Portola Festival with which the San
+Franciscans celebrate the discovery of San Francisco
+Bay, the Feast of the Blossoms held each spring in
+the Santa Clara Valley, the Battle of Flowers which,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_202"></a>[202]</span>
+until very recently, was a feature of life at Santa
+Barbara, but which, for some unexplainable reason, has
+been abandoned, the Rose Festival at Portland, the
+Potlatch at Seattle. Under much the same category
+are the classic plays given in the wonderful Greek Theatre
+at the University of California, the sylvan masks
+produced by the colony of authors and artists at Carmel-by-the-Sea,
+and the Bohemian Club’s celebrated Grove
+Play.</p>
+
+<p>No account of Californian festivals is in any way
+complete without at least a brief description of the
+last named, which is characterised by a beauty of
+production and a dignity of treatment that make it
+in many respects an American Bayreuth. For forty
+years the Bohemian Club of San Francisco has gone
+into the California redwoods each summer for a
+fortnight’s outing. This famous club, founded in 1872
+by a coterie of actors, newspaper men, and artists, now
+has a membership of upward of thirteen hundred,
+representing all that is best in the art, music, literature,
+drama, and science of the West. No one may become
+a member who has not achieved a distinction of sorts
+in one of these fields, the anticommercial spirit which
+animates the club being aptly expressed by the quotation
+at the top of its note-paper: “Weaving spiders
+come not here.” The Bohemian Grove, which consists
+of about three hundred acres of forest and contains
+some of the finest redwood giants in California, stands
+on the banks of the Russian River, ninety miles to the
+north of San Francisco. The stately redwoods stand<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_203"></a>[203]</span>
+in a gentle ravine whose floor and slopes in the rainless
+midsummer are bright with the canvas of the club
+encampment, which resembles a sort of sylvan Durbar;
+for the camps, many of which are elaborately arranged
+and furnished, are made of canvas in the gayest colours—scarlet
+and white, green and white, blue and yellow—with
+flags and banners and gorgeous Oriental lanterns
+everywhere. Here, during the first two weeks in every
+August, congregate close on a thousand men who have
+done things—authors of “best sellers,” builders of
+bridges and dams and lighthouses and aqueducts,
+painters whose pictures hang on the line at the Paris
+Salon or on the walls of the Luxembourg, composers
+of famous operas, writers of plays which have made a
+hit on Broadway, presidents of transcontinental railway
+systems, celebrated singers, men who have penetrated
+to the remotest corners of the earth—wearing
+the dress of the woods, calling each other “Bill” or
+“Jim” or “Harry” as the case may be, and becoming,
+for the time being, boys once more. A steep side of
+the ravine forms the “back-drop” of the forest stage,
+the spectators—no woman has ever taken part in the
+play or witnessed an original performance—sitting
+on redwood logs under the stars. The Grove Play is an
+evolution from a simpler programme, which was originally
+known as “High Jinks.” It is now a serious composition,
+with music, largely symbolical in character,
+created entirely by members of the club, in which
+many artists of international fame have taken part,
+always in the amateur spirit.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_204"></a>[204]</span></p>
+
+<p>But to return to our Valley of the Santa Clara.
+In the Panhandle of Texas a ranch usually means anywhere
+from five thousand acres upward of uncultivated
+land; in the Santa Clara a ranch means anywhere from
+five acres upward of the most highly cultivated soil
+in the world. East of the Sierra Nevada, where
+scientific fertilisation and intensive cultivation are still
+wearing short dresses, five acres are scarcely worth considering,
+but five acres in California, properly planted
+and cared for, ofttimes supports a family in something
+akin to luxury. I had pointed out to me in the Santa
+Clara Valley at least a score of small holdings which
+yield their owners annually in the neighbourhood of
+five hundred dollars an acre. All of these hardy pioneers
+have telephones and electric lights and electric
+power for pumping and daily newspaper and mail
+deliveries. When they have any business in town,
+instead of going down to the corral and roping a bronco,
+they either stroll through the orchard and hail an
+electric car or they crank up the family automobile.</p>
+
+<p>While I was in the Santa Clara Valley I asked a
+number of those questions to which every prospective
+home seeker wants to know the answers. I found that
+improved land, planted to prune, apricot, or peach
+trees old enough to bear, can be had all the way from
+four hundred to seven hundred dollars an acre, according
+to its location. At a conservative estimate this
+land, so I was told by a banker whose business it is to
+lend money on it (and you can trust a banker for never
+being oversanguine), can be depended upon to yield<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_205"></a>[205]</span>
+an income of from one hundred to three hundred dollars
+an acre, it being by no means an unusual thing for
+a well-managed ranch to pay for itself in two or three
+years. I found that a ten-acre orchard—which is
+quite large enough for one man to handle—could be
+had for five thousand dollars, the purchaser paying,
+say, two thousand dollars down and carrying the
+balance on a mortgage at seven per cent, which is the
+legal rate of interest in California. The local building
+and loan associations would lend him two thousand
+dollars to build with, which he could repay, at the rate
+of twenty-four dollars a month, in ten years. Two
+thousand dollars, I might add, will build an extremely
+attractive and comfortable six-room bungalow, for the
+two chief sources of expense to the Eastern home
+builder—cellars and furnaces—are not necessary in
+California. Such a place, provided its owner has
+horse sense, is not afraid of work, and knows good
+advice when he hears it, should yield from fifteen
+hundred to two thousand dollars a year, in addition to
+which the whole family can find ready employment,
+at excellent wages, in the orchards or packing-houses
+during the fruit season. For this work a man receives
+from two dollars to two dollars and a half a day and
+can count on fairly steady employment through at
+least eight months of the year, while many women and
+girls, whose deft fingers make them particularly valuable
+in the work of wrapping and packing the finer
+grades of fruit, can earn as high as twenty dollars a
+week during the busy season. This work, I might add,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_206"></a>[206]</span>
+attracts an altogether exceptional class of people, for
+university and high-school students and the wives and
+daughters of small ranchers eagerly avail themselves
+of this opportunity to add to their incomes, the fruit
+orchards, during the picking season, looking less like
+a hive of workers than like a gigantic picnic among the
+shaded orchard rows, in which the whole countryside
+is taking part.</p>
+
+<p>The air in the Santa Clara Valley is said to be
+the clearest in the world, though they tell you exactly
+the same thing at Colorado Springs, and in the
+Grand Cañon of Arizona, and at Las Vegas, N. Mex.
+The Santa Clara air is clear enough, however, for all
+practical purposes. In fact, its extraordinary clarity
+sometimes lends itself to extraordinary uses. I have a
+friend whose residence is set on a hillside high on the
+valley’s eastern rim. One day, idly scanning the distant
+landscape through his field-glasses, he noted that
+the field hands employed on the ranch of a neighbour
+on the opposite hillside, twenty odd miles away,
+knowing that they could not be observed by their
+employer, were loafing in the shade instead of working.
+My friend called up his neighbour by telephone and
+told him that his men were soldiering, whereupon
+that gentleman rode up the hillside and gave his
+astonished employees such a tongue-lashing that when
+the six-o’clock whistle blew that night they had blisters
+on their hands.</p>
+
+<p>Lack of labour is one of the most serious problems
+with which the fruit-growers of California have had to<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_207"></a>[207]</span>
+contend, though it is believed that this will be remedied,
+in some measure at least, by the flood of European
+immigration which will pour through the Panama Canal.
+Twenty years ago the labour problem was solved by
+the Chinaman, who was the most industrious and
+dependable labourer California has ever had, but with
+the agitation which resulted in closing our doors to
+the Celestial most of the Chinese in California entered
+domestic service and now command such high wages—fifty
+dollars a month is the average wage of a Chinese
+house boy or cook—that only the well-to-do can afford
+to employ them. Time and again I have heard clear-headed
+Californians of all classes assert that the admission,
+under certain restrictions, of a hundred
+thousand selected Chinese would prove an unqualified
+blessing for California. The relentless war waged by
+California—or, rather, by the labour element of California—against
+the admission of Chinese immigrants
+was based on the difference in the standard of living.
+The yellow man could live in something very akin to
+luxury on about a tenth of the ration required for a
+white man’s support. In other words, the Chinaman
+could outstarve the white man; therefore the Chinaman
+must go. And there has never been any one to
+take his place.</p>
+
+<p>Outside of the Pacific Coast the impression seems
+to prevail that the Chinaman’s place has been taken
+by the Japanese. This is not so. To begin with, Japanese
+labour is not cheap labour. The Japanese do
+not work for less pay than white men, unless it be temporarily,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_208"></a>[208]</span>
+so as to obtain the white man’s job. Japanese
+house cleaners and gardeners demand and receive a
+minimum wage of thirty-five cents an hour, and in
+California, where most people of modest means are
+compelled to do their own housework because of the
+scarcity of and exorbitant wages demanded by domestic
+servants, housewives are thankful to get Japanese by
+the day at any price. Their standard of living is as
+high as that of other nationalities; much higher, in
+fact, than that of peoples from southern Europe.
+There is no pauperism among them and astonishingly
+little crime. They dress well, eat well, spend money
+lavishly for entertainment. But the Jap, unlike the
+Chinaman, “talks back.” He is not in the least impressed
+by the American’s claim of racial superiority.
+In fact, he considers himself very much better than the
+white man and, if the opportunity presents itself,
+does not hesitate to say so. He is patronising instead
+of patronised. He has proved that he is the white
+man’s equal in every line of industry and in some his
+superior. Three times in succession a Japanese grower
+has virtually cornered the potato crop of the Pacific
+Coast. The Japanese has driven the Greek and the
+Portuguese out of the fishing industry, in which they
+believed that they were impregnably intrenched. As
+a result of these things he steps off the sidewalk for no
+one. He knows that back of him stands a great empire,
+with a powerful fleet and one of the most efficient
+armies in existence, and he takes no pains to disguise
+this knowledge in his relations with the white man.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_209"></a>[209]</span></p>
+
+<p>To tell the truth, the prohibition of land ownership,
+the segregation of school children are but pretexts
+put forward by a jealous and resentful white
+population to teach the yellow man his place. The
+assertion that Japanese ownership of land is a menace
+to white domination is the veriest nonsense, and every
+Californian knows it. There are ninety-nine million
+acres in California and of this area the Japanese own or
+lease barely thirty thousand acres, or <i>twelve hundredths
+of one per cent</i>. The fifty-eight thousand Japanese in
+California form but two and one half per cent of the
+total population. These figures, which are authoritative,
+are not very menacing, are they? The bulk
+of the Japanese reside in Los Angeles County and in
+the delta of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers,
+where they work gigantic potato fields and truck-gardens
+and asparagus beds. Now, Los Angeles, mind
+you, has never demanded Japanese exclusion. Protests
+poured into Sacramento from the white settlers
+of the delta country against the passage of the anti-alien
+land laws. Why, then, you ask, does the entire
+Pacific Coast, including British Columbia, exhibit such
+intense dislike for the Jap? Because, as I have said,
+he has shown that he can beat the white man at his own
+game; because he is not in the least meek and humble
+as befits an alien and “inferior” race; because he
+believes in his heart that in an armed conflict Nippon
+could whip the United States as thoroughly as she
+whipped China and Russia; because, as a result of
+this belief, he perpetually swaggers about with his<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_210"></a>[210]</span>
+hat cocked on one side and a chip perched invitingly
+on his shoulder; because, in short, his very manner is
+a constant irritation to the Californians. And until
+the status of the Japanese upon the Pacific Coast
+is definitely and finally established by international
+treaty this irritation may be expected to continue
+and to increase.</p>
+
+<p class="tb">I wonder if sometimes, at that sunset hour when
+the lengthening shadows of the hills fall athwart the
+blossoming orchards, there do not wander through
+the Santa Clara those whom the eyes of mortals cannot
+see—Portola, swart of face under his steel cap,
+come back to feast his eyes once more, from the top
+of yonder hill, on that fertile valley which he was the
+first white man to see; Father Serra, mild-mannered
+and gentle-voiced, trudging the dusty highroad in his
+sandals and woollen robe, pausing to kneel in prayer
+as the bells boom out the Angelus from that mission
+which he founded; Captain Jedediah Smith, the first
+of the pathfinders, a strange and romantic figure in
+his garb of fringed buckskin, leaning on his long rifle
+as he looks down on the homesteads of the thousands
+who followed by the trail he blazed across the ranges;
+Stanford, who linked the oceans with twin lines of
+steel, pacing the campus of that great seat of learning
+which he conceived and built—guardian spirits, all,
+of that valley for which they did so much and which
+they loved so well.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_211"></a>[211]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="VIII">VIII<br>
+<span class="smaller">THE MODERN ARGONAUTS</span></h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_212"></a>[212]</span></p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">“For once you’ve panned the speckled sand and seen the bonny dust,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Its peerless brightness blinds you like a spell;</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">It’s little else you care about; you go because you must,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">And you feel that you could follow it to hell.</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">You’d follow it in hunger, and you’d follow it in cold;</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">You’d follow it in solitude and pain;</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">And when you’re stiff and battened down let some one whisper ‘Gold,’</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">You’re lief to rise and follow it again.”</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_213"></a>[213]</span></p>
+
+<h3>VIII<br>
+<span class="smaller">THE MODERN ARGONAUTS</span></h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>I once knew an Englishman and his wife who were
+possessed with a mania for things Egyptian.
+Some people were unkind enough to say that they were
+“dotty” on the subject, but that was an exaggeration.
+They knew all there was to know about Egyptian
+customs from the days of Amenhotep to those of Abbas
+Hilmi; they had delved in the sand-smothered ruins
+across the river from Luxor; they could converse as
+fluently in the degraded patois of the native coffee-houses
+as in the classic Arabic spoken at the University
+of El Azhar. Their chief regret in life was that
+they had not been born Egyptians. Their names were—but
+never mind; it is enough to say that they had
+coronets on their visiting cards and owned more fertile
+acres in Devonshire than an absentee landlord has
+any right to possess. Whenever they came to Cairo,
+which they did regularly at the beginning of the
+cold weather, they could never be induced to take
+the comfortable motor-bus which the management of
+Shepheard’s Hotel thoughtfully provides for its guests—at
+ten piastres the trip. Instead, they would wire
+ahead to have a couple of camels meet them at the
+station, and, perched atop of these ungainly and uncomfortable<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_214"></a>[214]</span>
+beasts, would amble down the Sharia
+Kamel, which is the Fifth Avenue of Cairo, and dismount
+with great pomp and ceremony in front of
+their hotel to the delectation of the tourists assembled
+upon its terrace. I once asked them why they chose
+this outlandish mode of conveyance when there were a
+score or so of perfectly good taxicabs whose vociferously
+importunate drivers were only awaiting a signal
+to push down their little red flags and set their taximeters
+whirring.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, it’s this way,” was the answer. “We’re
+jolly fond of everything Egyptian, y’ know. Sort of
+steeped ourselves, as you might say, in the country’s
+history and politics and customs and language and all
+that sort of thing. This city is so romantic and picturesque
+that a motor-car seems to be inappropriate
+and unfitting—like wearing a top hat in the country,
+y’ know. So we always have the camels meet us—yes.
+All bally nonsense, I suppose, but it sort of keeps us
+in the spirit of the place—makes us feel as though we
+were living in the good old days before the tourist
+Johnnies came and spoiled it all. Same idea that
+Vanderbilt has in driving his coach from London down
+to Brighton. You can make the trip by train in half
+the time and for half the money and much more comfortably,
+but you lose the spirit of the old coaching
+days—the atmosphere, as the painter fellows call it.
+Rum sort of an idea to use camels instead of taxis,
+perhaps, but we like it and that’s the chief thing after
+all, isn’t it? What?”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_215"></a>[215]</span></p>
+
+<p>That was precisely the frame of mind which caused
+us to disregard the one hundred and twenty-five miles
+of oiled highway which reaches, like a strip of hotel
+linoleum, from San Francisco to the Californian
+capital, and load ourselves, together with our six-cylindered
+Pegasus, aboard the stern-wheel river boat
+which leaves the Pacific Street wharf for Sacramento
+at half past eight on every week-day morning. That
+section of our Mexico-to-Alaska journey which lay
+immediately before us, you must understand, led
+through a region which is indelibly associated with
+“the days of old, the days of gold, the days of ’Forty-Nine,”
+and to storm through it in a prosaic, panting
+motor-car seemed to us as incompatible with the spirit
+of romance which enshrouds it as it would to race
+through the canals of Venice in a gasoline launch.
+Feeling as we did about it, the consistent thing, I
+suppose, would have been to have hired a creaking
+prairie-schooner and plodded overland to the mines in
+true emigrant fashion, but as the few prairie-schooners
+still extant in California have fallen into the hands of
+the moving-picture concerns, who work them overtime,
+we compromised by journeying up to the gold country
+by river boat, just as the Argonauts who came round
+the Horn to San Francisco were wont to do.</p>
+
+<p>Whoever was responsible for dubbing the Sacramento
+River trip “the Netherlands Route” could have
+had but a bowing acquaintance with Holland. I don’t
+like to shatter illusions, but, to be quite truthful, the
+banks of the Sacramento are as unlike the Low Countries<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_216"></a>[216]</span>
+as anything well could be. The only thing they
+have in common are the dikes or levees which border
+the streams and the truck-gardens which form a
+patchwork quilt of vegetation behind them. The Dutch
+waterways are, for the most part, small, insignificant
+affairs, third or fourth cousins to the Erie Canal, and
+so narrow that you can sling your hat across them.
+The Sacramento River, on the contrary, is a great
+maritime thoroughfare four hundred miles in length
+and navigable for three quarters of that distance,
+being fourth among the rivers of the United States in
+tonnage carried. From the deck of a Dutch canal-boat
+you cannot see a mountain, or anything which
+could be called a mountain by courtesy, with a telescope.
+Look in whichever direction you will from a
+Sacramento River boat and you cannot escape them.
+Even at night you can descry the great walls of the
+Coast and Sierra Nevada Ranges looming black
+against a purple-velvet sky. And the racing windmills
+with their weather-beaten sails—the most characteristic
+note in a Dutch landscape—are not there at all.
+It’s rather a pity, it seems to me, that Californians
+persist in this slap-dash custom of labelling the natural
+beauties for which their State is famous with European
+tags. Why, in the name of heaven, should that enchanted
+littoral which stretches from Coronado to
+Monterey be called “Our Italy”? Why should the
+seaward slopes of the Santa Ynez Range, at the back of
+Santa Barbara—a region which is Spanish in history,
+language, and tradition—be dubbed “the Riviera”?<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_217"></a>[217]</span>
+Why should Santa Barbara itself, for that matter, be
+called “the American Mentone”? Is there a single
+sound reason why the majestic grandeur of the Sierra
+Nevada should be cheapened by labelling it “the
+American Alps”? No, not one. And it seems to me,
+as a visitor, a travesty to nickname the Sacramento, a
+river as long and as commercially important as the
+Seine and draining the greatest agricultural valley in
+the world, “the Netherlands Route”—because, forsooth
+portions of its banks are protected against
+overflow by levees. Compare the wonders of California
+to those of Europe by all means, if you will,
+and nine times out of ten they will emerge victorious
+from the comparison; but for goodness’ sake don’t
+saddle them with names which in themselves imply
+secondariness.</p>
+
+<p>The Sacramento is a river of romance. To those
+conversant with the stirring story of early California,
+its every bend and reach and landing-place recalls
+some episode of those mad days when the news that a
+man had discovered yellow gravel in a Sierran mill-race
+spread like a forest-fire across the land, and the
+needy, the desperate, and the adventurous came pouring
+into California by boat and wagon-train. About
+it still hover memories of the days when this river of
+dikes ran between high banks; when the great valley
+to which it gives its name was as unsettled and unknown
+as the basin of the Upper Congo; when Sacramento,
+then but a cluster of tents about a log stockade,
+was an outpost on the firing-line of civilisation. This<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_218"></a>[218]</span>
+winding stream was the last stage in the long journey
+of those gold hunters who came round the Horn in
+their stampede to the mines. The river voyage was
+one of dreams and doubts, of hopes and fears. At
+every landing where the steamer touched were heard
+reports of new bonanzas found in the Sierran gulches,
+of gold strikes on the river bars, of mountain brooks
+whose beds were aglitter with the precious ore. Returning
+down this same river, as time went on, were
+the booted, bearded, brown-faced men who were going
+home—ah, happy word!—after having “made their
+pile” and those others who had staked and lost their
+all.</p>
+
+<p>The river trip of to-day gives graphic proof of
+the changes which threescore years have wrought; it
+shows that agriculture, not mining, is now the basis
+of the State’s prosperity, just as it must be the basis
+of every civilisation which is to endure. The interest
+commenced at the journey’s very start. Swinging
+out from the unending procession of ferries which
+form, as it were, a Brooklyn Bridge between Oakland
+and San Francisco, we churned our way under the
+cliffs of Alcatraz, the white-walled prison perched upon
+its summit looking for all the world like the sea-fowl for
+which this penal isle is named. Though Alcatraz may
+lack the legendary interest which attaches to the Château
+d’If, that rocky islet in the harbour of Marseilles
+where the Count of Monte Cristo was imprisoned, it
+is no less picturesque, particularly at sunset, when the
+expiring rays of the drowning sun, striking through<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_219"></a>[219]</span>
+the portals of the Golden Gate, transform it into a
+lump of rosy coral rising from a peacock sea. Off our
+port bow Tamalpais, a weary colossus wrapped in a
+cape of shaggy green, looked meditatively down upon
+the heedless city as, seated upon the hills, he laved his
+feet—the Marin and Tiburon Peninsulas—in the cooling
+waters of the bay. Keeping well to the eastern
+shore, where the lead shows seven fathoms clear, we
+skirted the city’s shipping front, where fishing-boats,
+their hulls painted the bright hues the Latins love, and
+some—the Greek-owned ones—with great goggle eyes
+at their bows (the better to detect the fish, of course),
+were slipping seaward like mallards on the wing. To
+starboard lay the shores of Contra Costa County
+(meaning, as you doubtless surmise, “the opposite
+coast”), the long brown fingers of its innumerable
+wharfs reaching out into the bay as though beckoning
+to the merchantmen to come alongside and take
+aboard the cargoes—oil, wine, lumber, grain, cheese,
+fruit—which had been produced in the chimneyed
+factories that fringe this coast or raised in the fertile
+valleys which form its hinterland. Crossing over to
+the port rail as our steamer poked its stubby nose into
+the narrow Straits of Carquinez, we could make out
+Mare Island Navy Yard with the fighting craft in
+their coats of elephant grey riding lazily at anchor in
+front of it, while against the hill slopes at the back
+snuggled the white houses of Vallejo, the former capital.
+Our first stop was at Benicia, on the right bank
+of the Carquinez Straits, which lie directly athwart<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_220"></a>[220]</span>
+the Overland Route to the East and are familiar to
+transcontinental travellers as the place where their
+entire train, from engine to observation-car, is loaded
+on a titanic ferry. This was the home of Heenan, the
+“Benicia Boy,” the blacksmith who fought his way
+upward to the heavyweight championship of the
+world, and the forge hammer he used is still proudly
+preserved here as a memento of the brawny youngster
+who linked the drowsy village with a certain brand of
+fame. Benicia succeeded Vallejo as the capital of
+California, and the old State House where the Argonaut
+lawmakers held their uproarious sessions still
+stands as a monument to the town’s one-time importance,
+which departed when its parvenu neighbour,
+Sacramento, offered the State a cool million in gold for
+the honour of being its capital.</p>
+
+<p>Leaving sleepy Benicia, with its memories of prize-fighters
+and lawmakers, in our wake, we debouched
+quite suddenly into Suisun Bay (suggestive of Japan
+and the geisha girls, isn’t it?) with the Suisun marshes
+just beyond. You will have to journey north to Great
+Central Lake, in the heart of Vancouver Island, or
+south to Lake Chapala, in the Mexican State of Jalisco,
+to get wild-fowl shooting to equal that on these grey
+marshes, for here, in what Easterners call winter-time
+but which Californians designate duck time, or the
+season of the rains, come mallard, teal, sprig, and
+canvasback, plover, snipe, and brant, in flocks which
+literally darken the sky. In the waters hereabouts is
+centred the fishing industry of the Sacramento River,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_221"></a>[221]</span>
+which has been monopolised by swarthy, red-sashed
+fellows who speak the patois of Sicily or Calabria or
+the Greek of the Ægean Isles. No wonder that these
+sons of the south look on California as a land of gold,
+for an industrious fisherman, who will attend to his
+nets and leave alone the brandy and red wine of which
+they are all so fond, can earn twenty-five dollars a
+week without any danger of contracting heart disease;
+his brother in Palermo or the Piræus would consider
+himself an Andrew Carnegie if his weekly earnings
+amounted to that many <i>lire</i> or <i>drachmæ</i>. If one is in
+quest of colour and picturesqueness he can steep himself
+in them both by taking up his residence for a time
+among these fisherfolk of Suisun Bay, but if he does
+so he had better take the precaution of keeping a
+serviceable revolver in his coat pocket and leaving his
+address with the river police.</p>
+
+<p>The delta formed by the Sacramento and San
+Joaquin Rivers, which, after paying toll to the fruitful
+valleys through which they pass, clasp hands near
+Suisun Bay and wander together toward the sea, bears
+a striking resemblance to the maze of islands and lagoons
+and weed-grown waterways at the mouth of the
+Nile. Some of these low-lying islands are but camping
+grounds for migrating armies of wild fowl; on others,
+whose rich fields are guarded by high dikes such as
+you see along the Scheldt, are the truck-gardens,
+tended with the painstaking care that makes the
+Oriental so dangerous a competitor of the Caucasian.
+It is these river gardens which make it possible for the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_222"></a>[222]</span>
+San Franciscan to have asparagus, peas, artichokes,
+alligator pears, and strawberries on his table from
+Christmas eve around to Christmas morning, and more
+cheaply than the New Yorker can get the same things
+in cans. Indeed, a quarter of the asparagus crop of
+the United States comes from these levee-shielded tule
+lands along the Sacramento. That, I suppose, is why
+it is so hard for an Eastern <i>bon vivant</i> to impress a
+Californian. The New Yorker, thinking to give his San
+Franciscan friend a real treat, takes him to Sherry’s
+or the Plaza and, shutting his eyes to the prices on the
+menu, orders a meal in which such out-of-the-season
+delicacies as asparagus figure largely.</p>
+
+<p>“Quite like home,” remarks the Californian carelessly.
+“My wife writes that she is getting asparagus
+from our own garden every day now and that strawberries
+are selling in the market for fifteen cents a box.
+Alligator-pear salad? Not any, thanks. The chef at
+the club insists on giving it to us about four times a
+week, so I’m rather tired of it. If it’s all the same to
+you I think I’d like some pumpkin pie and milk.”</p>
+
+<p>Hanging over the rail, I took huge delight in watching
+the stream of traffic which turned the river into a
+maritime Broadway: stern-wheel passenger steamers,
+ploughing straight ahead, with never a glance to right
+or left, like a preoccupied business man going to his
+office; busy little launches, teuf-teuffing here and there
+as importantly as district messenger boys; panting
+freighters with strings of grain-laden barges in tow;
+ugly, ill-smelling tank-steamers carrying Mr. Rockefeller’s<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_223"></a>[223]</span>
+petroleum to far-off, outlandish ports; scow-schooners,
+full sisters of those broad-beamed, huge-sailed
+lumbering craft which bring the products of the
+Seine banks down to the Paris markets; big black
+dredgers, mud-stained and grimy, like the labourers
+they are, hard at work reinforcing the dikes against
+the winter floods; tide-working ferries, lazy, ingenious,
+resourceful craft which swing across the river, up-stream
+or down, making the current or the tide or both
+do their work for them.</p>
+
+<p>After Isleton is passed the river settles down to
+an even width of sixscore yards, flowing contentedly
+between banks festooned with wild grape-vines and
+shaded by oaks and walnuts, sycamore and willows,
+between which we caught fleeting glimpses of prosperous
+homes whose splendid trees and ordered gardens
+reminded us of country places we knew along the
+Thames. This is the most beautiful part of the river
+by far. Every now and again we glimpsed the mouth
+of a leafy bayou which seemed to invite us to explore
+its alluring recesses in a canoe. A moment later a
+little bay would disclose a fine old house with stately
+white columns and a mansard roof—the result, most
+probably, of the owner’s success in the gold-fields
+sixty years ago. These homes along the Sacramento
+have none of the <i>nouveau riche</i> magnificence of the
+mansions at Pasadena and Montecito, but they are
+for the most part dignified and characteristic of that
+formative and romantic period in which they were
+built. Clarksburg, one hundred and ten miles from<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_224"></a>[224]</span>
+San Francisco, is the last stop before Sacramento,
+ten miles farther on. Here the river banks become
+more busy. Steam, motor, and electric lines focalise
+upon the capital. We passed a colony of house-boats,
+not the floating mansions one sees at Henley, but
+simple, unpretentious craft which admirably answer
+their purpose of passing a summer holiday. Wharfs
+began to appear. A great black drawbridge, thrusting
+its unlovely length across the river, parted sullenly
+for us to pass. Above a cluster of palms and blossoming
+magnolias the dome of the capitol appeared, the
+last rays of the setting sun striking upon its gilded
+surface and turning it into a flaming orb. The air was
+heavy with the fragrance of camellias. A bell tinkled
+sharply in the engine room, the great stern wheel
+churned the water frantically for a moment and then
+stopped, the boat glided deftly alongside the wharf,
+the gang-plank rumbled out. “All ashore!” bawled
+some one. “All ashore! Sacramento!”</p>
+
+<p>In the gold-rush days Sacramento was to the mining
+region what Johannesburg is to the Rand—a base
+of supplies, a place of amusement, where the miners
+were wont to come to squander their gold-dust over the
+polished bars of the saloons and dance halls or on
+the green tables of the gambling-houses. Those were
+the free-and-easy days when anything costing less
+than a dollar was priced in “bits,” a bit having no
+arbitrary value but being equivalent to the amount
+of gold-dust which could be held between the thumb
+and forefinger. In the days when placer mining was<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_225"></a>[225]</span>
+in its glory, debts were discharged in gold-dust instead
+of coin, and it often happened when a man was paying
+a small grocery bill, or more particularly when he was
+buying a drink, the bartender, instead of taking the
+trouble to weigh the dust, would insert his thumb
+and forefinger in the miner’s buckskin “poke” and
+lift a pinch of gold-dust. So it came to pass that when
+a man applied for a job as bartender his ability to fill
+the position would be tested by the proprietor asking,
+“How much can you raise at a pinch?” whence the
+familiar colloquialism of the present day. The more
+that he could raise, of course, the more valuable he
+would be as an employee, the chief requisite for a successful
+bartender being, therefore, that he should have
+splay fingers. In gold-rush times steamers ran daily
+from San Francisco to Sacramento, just as they do to-day,
+for the river provided the quickest and easiest
+means of reaching the mines from the coast, while six-horsed
+Concord coaches, the names of whose drivers
+were synonyms for reckless daring, tore along the roads
+to Marysville, Stockton, and Nevada City as fast as
+the horses could lay foot to ground.</p>
+
+<p>To fully appreciate the miracle of reclamation,
+whereby the banks of the Sacramento have been transformed
+from worthless drowned lands into the richest
+gardens in the world, you should motor down the
+splendid boulevard which for a dozen miles or more
+parallels the river. The miners along the Sacramento
+early found that the easiest and cheapest method of
+getting gold was to direct a powerful stream of water<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_226"></a>[226]</span>
+against the hillsides, washing the hills away and diverting
+the resultant mud into long sluice-boxes, in
+which the gold was collected. The residue of mud and
+water was then turned back into the streams again and
+was carried down and deposited in the bed of the
+Sacramento River, gradually decreasing its capacity
+for carrying off flood waters and making its navigation
+impossible for large boats. Hence, when the spring
+freshets came the swollen river overflowed and devastated
+the farms and orchards along its banks. For
+forty years this sort of thing continued, the protests
+of the farmers and fruit growers being ignored, for
+in those days the miners virtually ruled the land.
+But as time wore on, mining gradually decreased in
+importance and agriculture grew, until, in 1893, the
+farming interests became powerful enough to induce
+Congress to stop all hydraulic mining and to put all
+mining operations on streams in the San Joaquin and
+Sacramento Valleys under the control of the California
+Debris Commission. Once rid of the bugaboo of the
+hydraulic nozzle and its resultant obstruction of the
+river channels, the farmers along the Sacramento got
+together and purchased a number of clam-shell dredgers
+and set to work to build new levees and to repair the
+old ones. If you will follow the course of the Sacramento
+for a few miles outside the capital, either by
+road or river, you will see them at work. It is very
+interesting. A great arm, ending in a sort of hand like
+two clam-shells, reaches out over the river and the
+hand plunges into the stream. When the hand, which<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_227"></a>[227]</span>
+is in reality a huge steel scoop with hinged jaws, emerges
+from its gropings at the river-bottom it is filled with
+sand, whereupon the arm carries it over and empties
+it upon the bank. This is the way in which the dikes
+which border the Sacramento are constructed, one
+clam-shell dredger doing as much work in a day as
+five hundred men. As a result of this ingenious contrivance
+you can make the circuit of Grand Island on
+an oiled road, forty feet wide, which has been built
+on top of the dikes. Below you on one side is the river;
+on the other orchards and gardens from which come
+annually a quarter of the world’s asparagus crop, the
+earliest cherries in the United States, and a million
+boxes of pears.</p>
+
+<p>I think that the most significant thing that I saw
+in Sacramento was Sutter’s Fort, or, to be quite accurate,
+the restored remnants of it. Three quarters
+of a century ago this little rectangular fortification was
+the westernmost outpost of American civilisation.
+In 1839 a Swiss soldier of fortune named John Augustus
+Sutter obtained from the Mexican Government a
+grant of eleven square leagues of land on the banks of
+the Sacramento River and permission to erect a stockade
+as a protection against the encroachments of the
+Indians. The stockade, however, quickly grew into
+something closely resembling a fort, with walls loopholed
+for musketry and capable of resisting any attack
+unsupported by artillery. Sutter’s Fort, or “New
+Helvetia,” as the owner called his little kingdom, was
+on the direct line of overland immigration from the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_228"></a>[228]</span>
+East, and as a result of the strategic position he occupied
+and of his influence with the Mexican authorities,
+Sutter soon became the virtual ruler of all this Sierran
+region. During those stirring days when Frémont
+and his frontiersmen came riding down from the passes,
+it was this Swiss-American adventurer who held the
+balance of power on the Pacific Coast, and it was in no
+small measure due to the encouragement and aid he
+gave the American settlers that California became
+American. The old frontiersman died in poverty, the
+great domain of which he was the owner having been
+wrested from him, on one pretext and another, each
+flimsier than the one preceding, during the turmoil
+and lawlessness which marked the gold-rush days.
+To-day the old fort is the centre of a highly landscaped
+city park; the muzzles of its brass field-guns frown
+from their embrasures down paved and shaded avenues;
+street-cars clang their noisy way past the gates which
+were double-barred at night against the attacks of
+marauding bands of Mexicans and Indians; and at
+night spluttering arc-lamps illuminate its loopholed,
+vine-clad walls. Sacramento has acknowledged the
+great debt she owes to Sutter by giving his destitute
+grandson employment as a day labourer on the grounds
+of the fort which his grandfather built and to which
+the capital city of California owes its being.</p>
+
+<p>There are two routes open to the automobilist
+between Sacramento and Lake Tahoe and, historically
+as well as scenically, there is little to choose between
+them. The Placerville route, though considerably the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_229"></a>[229]</span>
+longer, traverses the country immortalised by Bret
+Harte and inseparably associated with the “Forty-Niners.”
+From Sacramento to Folsom the highway
+follows the route of the first railroad built in California,
+this jerk-water line, constructed in 1854 to take the
+miners in and the gold-dust out, being the grandfather
+of those great systems which now cover the State with
+a cobweb of steel. At Folsom, built on the edge of a
+sheer cliff high above the waters of the American River,
+is the stone-walled château where a thousand or more
+gentlemen who have emerged second best from arguments
+with the law are dwelling in enforced seclusion
+at the expense of the State. Placerville is the historic
+“Hangtown” of early days, having gained its original
+name from the fact that the sacredness of law and order
+was emphasised there in the good old days by means
+of frequent entertainments known as “necktie parties,”
+the hosts at these informal affairs being committees
+of indignant citizens. At them the guest of honour
+made his positively last appearance. It was here
+that “Wheelbarrow John” Studebaker, by sticking to
+his trade of wheelwright instead of joining in the mad
+stampede to the diggings, laid the foundation for that
+great concern whose vehicles are known wherever
+there are roads for wheels to run on. At Coloma, not
+far from Placerville, a heroic statue does honour to the
+memory of John Marshall, the news of whose discovery
+of yellow sand in a mill-race brought fortune seekers
+flocking Californiaward from every quarter of the
+globe. Though fruit growing has long since succeeded<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_230"></a>[230]</span>
+mining as the chief industry of this region, and though
+the buildings mentioned in the stories of Bret Harte and
+Mark Twain have for the most part gone to wrack and
+ruin, these towns of the “Mother Lode” still retain
+enough of their old-time interest and picturesqueness
+so that it does not require a Bausch &amp; Lomb imagination
+to picture them as they were in the heyday of
+their existence, when their streets and barrooms and
+dance halls were filled with the flotsam and jetsam of
+all the earth: wanderers from dim and distant ports,
+adventurers, seafarers, soldiers of misfortune, gamblers,
+absconding bank clerks, farmers, unsuccessful merchants,
+out-at-elbows professional men, men of uneasy
+conscience and women of easy virtue, world without
+end.</p>
+
+<p>When Congress put an end to hydraulic mining
+the mining men made an outcry that rose to heaven.
+The prosperity of California was ended. The State
+was going to the bow-wows. There was nothing but
+gloom and disaster ahead. The companies that owned
+the water-rights along the American River planted
+their properties to grape-vines and used their hydraulic
+apparatus to water them with. But always they
+were tormented with the knowledge that under the
+roots of the vines was gold, gold, gold. Spurred on by
+this knowledge, there was devised a new process of
+gold extraction; a process that not only did not deposit
+any débris in the rivers but which proved to be
+far more profitable than the old. Ground that had
+not yielded enough gold to pay for its being worked<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_231"></a>[231]</span>
+was turned into “pay dirt” through the agency of the
+giant gold dredger invented in New Zealand and later
+developed to its highest efficiency in California. Picture
+to yourself a boulder-strewn field, covered with the
+tailings of old mining operations, with here and there
+a pit as large as the foundation for a sky-scraper made
+by the hydraulic miners. Each successive layer of
+gravel in this field, straight down to bed-rock, bears
+gold in small quantities—gold brought there ages ago
+by the waters of the river. To extract this gold by the
+old methods was obviously as unprofitable as it was
+illegal. So they tried the new method imported from
+the gold-fields of New Zealand. It is not easy to explain
+the workings of a modern gold dredger unless
+you have seen one. Go out into the middle of a field
+and dig a pit—a pit large enough to contain a city
+office-building. Run water into the pit until it becomes
+a mud-hole. Then build in that mud-hole a great steel
+caisson of several thousand cubic tons displacement.
+There you have the basis of the mammoth contrivances
+which have supplanted the ’Forty-Niner’s pick and
+pan. Each of these dredgers costs a quarter of a million
+dollars to build and labours night and day. The
+business end of the dredger consists of an endless chain
+of buckets, each of which weighs two tons when empty,
+which burrow down into the mud-hole until they strike
+bed-rock. The gravel which they bring up, after being
+saturated with water, is passed over quicksilver tables
+which collect the gold, and runs out again at the bottom
+of the pit, thus reversing the natural arrangement of<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_232"></a>[232]</span>
+the soil, the dirt being left on the bottom and the
+gravel and cobbles on top. It costs in the neighbourhood
+of seven thousand dollars a month to operate
+one of these dredgers, but the resultant “clean-up”
+pays for this several times over. Not only is the gold
+extracted from the earth as effectually as a bartender
+squeezes the juice out of a lemon, but rock crushers
+convert the mountains of cobbles into material for
+building highways all over the surrounding region, and
+on the aerated and renovated soil which the dredgers
+leave behind them any crop on earth will thrive. Thus
+has mechanical genius succeeded in turning those hereditary
+enemies, Agriculture and Mining, into coworkers
+and friends.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus23" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus23.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><p>LAKE TAHOE FROM THE SLOPES OF THE HIGH SIERRAS.</p></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>Because we wished to follow the route which the
+overland emigrants had taken in their epoch-making
+march, we did not go to Tahoe through Placerville,
+which is connected with Tallac, at the southern end of
+the lake, by one of the finest motor highways in California,
+but chose the more direct and equally good
+road which climbs over the Sierras by way of Colfax,
+Dutch Flat, and Emigrant Gap. Upward and upward
+wound our road, like a spiral stairway to the skies.
+One of the most characteristic features of this Sierra
+region is that the traveller can see at a glance the lay
+of the whole land. Nowhere else, so far as I am aware,
+not from the Saint Bernard, or Ararat, or even from
+Darjeeling, can one command such comprehensive views
+as are to be had from the rocky promontory known as
+Cape Horn, or from Summit, which, as its name implies,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_233"></a>[233]</span>
+is at the top of the pass. At our feet, like a map
+spread out upon the ground for our inspection, lay
+California. The dense forests which clothed the upper
+slopes of the Sierras gave way to orchards of pear and
+apple, and these changed to the citrus groves which
+flourish on the lower, balmier levels, and the green of
+the orange zone ended abruptly in the yellow of the
+grain-fields, and this merged into the checker-board of
+the truck-gardens, and through these we could dimly
+descry the blue ribbon of the Sacramento turning and
+twisting and doubling on its tortuous way to the sea.</p>
+
+<p>The summit of the pass is one hundred and five
+miles from Sacramento, and in that distance we had
+ascended just seven thousand feet, or seven hundred
+feet higher than Mount Washington, the highest peak
+east of the Rockies. From Summit to Truckee is fourteen
+miles and we coasted all the way, the rush of
+mountain air in our faces as we swept silently and
+smoothly down the long diagonals recalling the sensation
+on the Cresta Run at Saint Moritz. Swinging suddenly
+around a shoulder of the mountain at the “Three
+Miles to Truckee” sign, we found ourselves looking
+down upon a lake, a very gem of a lake, so scintillatingly
+blue amid the encircling forest that it looked like a
+sapphire set in jade. So smiling and pure and beautiful
+it was that it seemed impossible to associate it
+with the ghastliest and most revolting incident in
+Californian history. Yet this was Donner Lake and
+those who have heard the terrible tale of the Donner
+party, for whom it was named, are not likely to forget<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_234"></a>[234]</span>
+it. A party of some eighty emigrants—men, women,
+and children—making their way to California by the
+Overland route, and delayed by an ill-advised detour,
+reached the site of the present town of Truckee late
+in the autumn of 1846. While attempting to cross
+the pass a blinding snow-storm drove in upon them.
+The story of how the less robust members of the party
+died, one by one, from starvation, and of how the
+survivors were forced to eat the bodies of their dead
+comrades—Donner himself, it is claimed, subsisted
+on the remains of his grandmother; of the “Forlorn
+Hope” and of its desperate efforts to reach the settlements
+in the Sacramento Valley, in which only seven
+out of the twenty-two who composed it succeeded;
+of the successive relief expeditions sent out from Sutter’s
+Fort; and of the final rescue in the spring of 1847
+of the pitiful handful of survivors, illustrates as nothing
+else can the incredible hardships and perils encountered
+by the American pioneers in their winning of the West.
+A grim touch of humour is lent to the tragedy by the
+fact that two Indians in charge of some cattle which
+Sutter had sent to them were killed and eaten by the
+starving emigrants, on the theory of the frontiersman,
+no doubt, that the only good Indian is a dead one.
+The hospitable Sutter, in a statement published some
+months later, complained most bitterly of this ungrateful
+act, saying that they were welcome to the
+cattle but that they were unjustified in depriving him
+of two perfectly good Indians.</p>
+
+<p>Truckee still bears all the earmarks of a frontier<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_235"></a>[235]</span>
+town, for miners, cow-punchers, and lumbermen,
+bearded to the eyes, booted to the knees, and in several
+cases quite evidently loaded to the neck, lounged in
+the shade of the wooden awnings and swapped stories
+and spat tobacco juice as they waited for the train
+bringing the San Francisco papers to come in; while
+rows of saddle ponies, heads drooping and reins trailing
+in the dust, waited dejectedly at the edge of the
+raised wooden sidewalks for their masters. From
+Truckee to Tahoe our way led through the Truckee
+cañon, running for a dozen miles or more so close to
+the banks of the sparkling, tumbling mountain river
+that we could have cast for the rainbow-trout we saw
+in it without having to leave the car. Dusk fell, and
+hard on its heels came its mother, the Dark, but still
+the yellow road, turned by the twin beams of the
+headlights to silver now, wound and turned and twisted
+interminably on, now swerving sharply as though
+frightened by the ghostliness of a thicket of white
+birches, then plunging confidently into the eerie darkness
+of a grove of fir-trees and emerging, all unexpectedly,
+before a great, low, wide-spread building, its
+many windows ablaze with lights and its long verandas
+outlined by hundreds and hundreds of scarlet
+paper lanterns. A wave of fragrance and music
+intermingled was wafted to us from where an orchestra
+was playing dreamy music in the rose gardens above
+the lake, whose silent, sombre waters reflected a luminous
+summer moon. Music and moonlight I have
+known in many places—beneath the cypresses of<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_236"></a>[236]</span>
+Lago Maggiore, along the Canale Grande, off the coasts
+of Africa, in the gardens of the Taj Mahal—but I
+have never seen, nor do I ever expect to see, anything
+quite as beautiful as that first night on Tahoe, when
+the paper lanterns quivered in the night breeze, and
+the violins throbbed, oh, so softly, and the pale moon
+shone down upon the snow-capped mountains and
+they in turn were reflected dimly in the darkened
+waters of the lake.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_237"></a>[237]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="IX">IX<br>
+<span class="smaller">THE INLAND EMPIRE</span></h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_238"></a>[238]</span></p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">“I watched the sun sink from the west,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">I watched the sweet day die;</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Above the dim Coast Range’s crest</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">I saw the red clouds lie;</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">I saw them lying golden deep,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">By lingering sunbeams kissed,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Like isles of fairyland that sleep</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">In seas of amethyst.</div>
+  </div>
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="center">...</div>
+  </div>
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">“Then through the long night hours I lay</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">In baffled sleep’s travail,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">And heard the outcast thieves in grey—</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">The gaunt coyotes—wail.</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">With seaward winds that wandering blew</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">I heard the wild geese cry,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">I heard their grey wings beating through</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">The star-dust of the sky.</div>
+  </div>
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="center">...</div>
+  </div>
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">“Yet, with the last grim, solemn hour,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Stilled were the voices all,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">And then, from poppied fields aflower,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Rang out the wild bird’s call;</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">The glad dawn, deep in white mists steeped,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Breathed on the day’s hushed lyre,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">And far the dim Sierras leaped</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">In living waves of fire.”</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_239"></a>[239]</span></p>
+
+<h3>IX<br>
+<span class="smaller">THE INLAND EMPIRE</span></h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>Along in January, after the holiday festivities
+are over, and the youngsters have gone back to
+school or college, and the Christmas presents have
+been paid for, Mr. American Business Man and his
+wife, to the number of many thousands, escape from
+the inclemency of an Eastern winter by “taking a
+run out to the coast.” They usually choose one of
+the southern routes—the trip being prefaced by an
+animated family discussion as to whether they shall
+go via the Grand Cañon or New Orleans—getting
+their first glimpse of the Golden State at San Diego.
+After taking a shivery dip in the breakers at Coronado
+so as to be able to write the folks back home that they
+have gone in bathing in midwinter, they continue
+their leisurely progress northward by the <i>table-d’hôte</i>
+route, picking oranges at Riverside, taking the mountain
+railway up Mount Lowe from Pasadena, stopping
+off at Santa Barbara to see the mission and the homes
+of the millionaires at Montecito, playing golf and
+whirling round the Seventeen Mile Drive at Del
+Monte, visiting Chinatown, the Cliff House, and the
+Barbary Coast in San Francisco, and returning to the
+East in the early spring via Salt Lake City or the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_240"></a>[240]</span>
+“C. P. R.,” having, as they fondly believe, seen pretty
+much everything in California worth the seeing.</p>
+
+<p>They turn their faces homeward utterly unconscious
+of the fact that they have only skirted along the
+fringe of the State; that of the great country at the
+back, which constitutes the real California, they have
+seen absolutely nothing. To them Sacramento, Stockton,
+Merced, Fresno, Bakersfield, Lake Tahoe, the San
+Joaquin, the Big Trees, the Yosemite, the High Sierras
+are but names. They do not seem to appreciate, or
+it may be that they do not care, that the narrow
+coast zone dedicated to the amusement of the winter
+tourist is no more typical of California than the Riviera
+is typical of France. Though it is true that the Californian
+hinterland has no million-dollar “show places”
+and no huge hotels with tourists in white shoes and
+straw hats taking tea upon their terraces, it has other
+things which are more significant and more worth
+seeing. The visitor to the back country can see the
+orchards which supply the breakfast-tables of half the
+world with fruit and the vineyards which supply the
+dinner-tables of the other half with grapes and wine
+and raisins; he can see flocks of sheep so large that
+the hills on which they are grazing seem to be covered
+with snow; he can see oil-fields which produce enough
+petroleum to keep all the lamps in the world alight
+until the crack of doom. And, if this is not sufficient
+inducement, he can motor along the foot of the highest
+mountain range in America, he can visit the most
+beautiful valley in all the world, he can picnic under<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_241"></a>[241]</span>
+the biggest trees in existence. A country of big things:
+big distances, big mountains, big trees, big ranches,
+big orchards, big crops, big pay, big problems—that’s
+the hinterland of California.</p>
+
+<p>Now, that you may the more easily follow me in
+what I have to say, I will, with your permission, refer
+you to the map of the regions described in this volume.
+(<a href="#map">See end of book.</a>)</p>
+
+<p>The mountain systems, as you see, form a gigantic
+basin which comprises about three fifths of the total
+area of the State. The eastern rim of this basin is
+formed by the Sierra Nevada and the western rim by
+the Coast Range, these two coming together at the
+northern end of the basin in the great mountain wall
+which separates California from Oregon, while to the
+south they sweep inward in the form of a gigantic
+amphitheatre, being joined by a minor range known
+as the Tehachapis. Reaching Mexicoward is the
+continuation of the Coast system known as the San
+Bernardino Range, forming, as it were, a sort of handle
+to the basin. The only natural entrance to the basin
+is the Golden Gate, through which the two great river
+systems—the San Joaquin and Sacramento—reach the
+sea. Lying between the Coast Range and the Pacific
+is that narrow strip of pleasure land, with its orange
+groves, its silver beaches, its great hotels and splendid
+country houses, which is the beginning and end of
+California so far as the tourist is concerned. The
+northern part of the great basin, which is drained by
+the Sacramento River, is called the Sacramento Valley,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_242"></a>[242]</span>
+while its southern two thirds, whose streams run
+into the San Joaquin River, is commonly known as
+“the San Joaquin,” the whole forming the Great
+Valley of California. “Valley” is, however, a misnomer.
+One might as fittingly call Mount McKinley a hill, or
+Lake Superior a pond. It is a plain rather than a valley;
+a plain upon whose level reaches Belgium would be
+lost and Holland could be tucked away in the corners.
+From the rampart of the Sierra Nevada on the east
+to the wall of the Coast Range on the west the rich
+brown loam has an average width of half a hundred
+miles. North and south it extends upward of four
+hundred miles—as far as from Pittsburg to Chicago.
+What Rhodesia is to South Africa, what its prairie
+provinces are to Canada, the Great Valley, with its
+millions of incredibly fertile acres, level as a floor and
+checker-boarded with alfalfa, fruit, and vine, is to
+California—the storehouse of the State.</p>
+
+<p>Before the railway builders came the Great Valley
+was one of the most important cattle-ranges in the
+West, and hundreds of thousands of longhorns grazed
+knee-deep in its lush grass. With the railway came the
+homesteaders, who, despite the threats of the cattlemen,
+drove their stakes and built their cabins and
+started to raise wheat. Then a dry year came, and on
+top of that another, a heart-breaking succession of them,
+and the ruined wheat growers sold out to the cattle
+barons. In such manner grew up the big ranches—holdings
+ranging all the way from ten thousand to half a
+million acres or more—a few of which still remain intact.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_243"></a>[243]</span>
+But a drought that will kill wheat will kill cattle, too,
+and after one terrible year a hundred thousand horned
+skeletons lay bleaching on the ranges. And so the
+cattlemen evacuated the valley in their turn and their
+places were taken by the diggers of ditches. Now the
+Lord evidently built the Great Valley to encourage
+irrigation. He filled it with rich, alluvial loam, tilted
+it ever so slightly toward the centre, brought innumerable
+streams from the mountains and glaciers down
+to the edge of the plain, ordered the rain and the blizzard
+to stay away and the sun to work overtime. All
+this he did for the Great Valley, and the ditch did
+the rest—or, rather, the ditch allied to hard work, for
+without sweat-beaded brows, calloused hands, aching
+backs, the ditch is worthless. A social as well as an
+agricultural miracle was performed by the watering
+of the thirsty land. The great ranches were subdivided
+into farms and orchards. Settlers came pouring
+in. Communities of hardy, industrious, energetic
+folk sprang up everywhere and these grew into villages
+and the villages became towns and the towns
+expanded into cities. School bells clanged their insistent
+summons to the youth of the countryside,
+church spires pointed their slender fingers toward the
+sky, highways stretched their length across the plain,
+and before this onset of civilisation the moral code of
+the frontier crumbled and gave way. The gun-fighter
+took French leave, the gambler silently decamped
+between two days, and in many communities the saloon-keeper
+tacked a “For Sale” sign on his door and<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_244"></a>[244]</span>
+took the north-bound train. Civilisation had come to
+the Great Valley, not with the dust of hoofs or beat
+of train, but with the gurgle of water in an irrigating
+ditch—and it had come to stay.</p>
+
+<p>Of the effect produced by this spreading of the
+waters we saw many evidences as we fled southward
+from Sacramento across the oak-studded plain. Throwing
+wide the throttle, the car leaped forward like a
+live thing. The oiled road slipped away from our
+wheels like an unwinding bolt of grey silk ribbon. The
+grain-fields were wide, the houses few. Constables
+there were none. Vineyards and orchards, trim rows
+of vegetables, neatly fenced farms alternated with
+seas of barley undulating in the wind. Such a country,
+however prosperous, offers little to detain a motorist,
+and we went booming southward at a gait that made
+the telegraph poles resemble the palings in a picket
+fence. Occasionally a torpedo-shaped electric car, a
+monstrous thing in a dull, hot red, the faces of its passengers
+grotesquely framed by the circular port-holes
+which serve as windows, tore past us with the wail of
+a lost soul. Whence it came or whither it went was a
+matter of small moment.</p>
+
+<p>The factory whistles were raucously reminding
+the workers that it was time to take the covers off
+their dinner pails when we swung into the plaza of
+the city whose name perpetuates the memory of the
+admiral who added California to the Union and drew
+up before the entrance of the Hotel Stockton. If you
+should chance to go there, don’t let them persuade you<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_245"></a>[245]</span>
+into lunching in the restaurant with its fumed oak
+wainscotting and the Clydesdale furniture which appears
+to be inseparable from the mission style of
+decoration, but insist on having a table set on the roof-garden
+with its vine-hung pergola and its ramparts
+of red geraniums. That was what we did, and the meal
+we had there, high above the city’s bustle, became a
+white milestone on our highway of memories. Had it
+not been for the advertisements of chewing-gum and
+plug tobacco which stared at us from near-by hoardings,
+I would not have believed that we were in the
+United States at all, so different was the scene from my
+preconceived notions of the San Joaquin Valley. We
+might have been on the terrace of that quaint old
+hotel—I forget the name of it—that overlooks the
+Dam in Rotterdam. Stockton, you see, is at the head
+of navigation on the San Joaquin River, and the hotel
+stands at the head of one of the canal-like channels
+which permit of vessels tying up in the very heart of
+the city, so that from the terrace on its roof you look
+down on as animated and interesting a water scene as
+you will find anywhere: pompous, self-important tugs,
+launches with engines spluttering like angry washerwomen,
+stern-wheel passenger steamers, little sisters
+of those upon the Mississippi, and cumbersome, slow-moving
+barges, their flat decks piled high with bagged
+or barrelled products of the valley on their way to
+San Francisco Harbour, there to be transshipped for
+strange and far-off ports.</p>
+
+<p>As a result of the Powers That Be at Washington<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_246"></a>[246]</span>
+having recently had a change of heart in respect to
+motor-cars entering the Yosemite, every valley town
+between Stockton and Visalia has announced itself
+as the one and only “official gateway to the valley,”
+and has backed up its claims with tons of maps and
+literature. As a matter of fact, the Department of
+the Interior has announced that motorists desiring to
+visit the Yosemite must enter and leave it by the
+Coulterville road, and this road can be reached from
+any one of half a dozen valley towns with equal facility.
+Coming, as we did, from the north, the most convenient
+route led through Modesto. As a result of the sudden
+prosperity produced by a modern version of the Miracle
+of Moses, water having been brought forth where
+there was no water before by a prophet’s rod in the form
+of an irrigating ditch, the little town is as up to date
+as a girl just back from Paris. Its lawns and gardens
+have been Peter-Hendersonised until they look like
+the illustrations in a seedsman’s catalogue; the architecture
+of its schools and public buildings is so faithful
+an adaptation of the Spanish mission style that they
+would deceive old Padre Serra himself; and its roads
+would do credit to the genius of J. MacAdam.</p>
+
+<p>If you will set your travelling clock to awake you
+at the hour at which the servant-girl gets up to go to
+early mass you should, even allowing for the five-thousand-foot
+climb, reach Crocker’s Sierra Resort, which
+is the nearest stopping place to that entrance of the
+Yosemite assigned to motorists, before the supper
+table is cleared off. It is necessary to spend the night<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_247"></a>[247]</span>
+at Crocker’s, as the government regulations, which
+are far more inflexible than the Ten Commandments,
+permit motorists to enter the valley only between the
+hours of ten and one. Leaving Crocker’s at a much
+more respectable hour than we did Modesto, we reached
+the first military outpost at Merced Big Tree Grove
+shortly before ten, where a very businesslike young
+cavalry officer put me through a catechism which made
+me feel like an immigrant applying for admission at
+Ellis Island. If your answers to the lieutenant’s questions
+correspond to those in the back of the book and
+your car is able to do the tricks required of it—to test
+the holding power of its brakes you are ordered to
+take a running start and then throw the brakes on so
+suddenly that the wheels skid—you are permitted
+the pleasure of paying five dollars for the privilege of
+entering the jealously guarded portals. They stamp
+your permit with the hour and minute at which you
+leave the big trees, and if you arrive at the next
+military post, which is nine miles distant, at the foot
+of the Merced River Cañon, in a single second under
+an hour and seventeen minutes you are fined so heavily
+that you won’t enjoy your visit. I remember that we
+sneered at these regulations as being unnecessary and
+absurd—but that was before we had seen the Merced
+Cañon grade. As my chauffeur remarked, it is a real
+hum-dinger. It is nothing more or less than a narrow
+shelf chopped out of the face of the cliff.</p>
+
+<p>“I wonder if those soldiers were quite as careful
+in examining our brakes as they should have been?”<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_248"></a>[248]</span>
+anxiously remarked one of my companions, glancing
+over the side of the car into the dizzy gorge below and
+then looking hurriedly away again.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, there are some perfectly lovely wild flowers!”
+suddenly exclaimed the Lady, who had been choking
+the life out of the cushions. “If you don’t mind I’ll
+get out and pick them ... and please don’t wait for
+me, I’ll walk the rest of the way down. Yes, indeed,
+I’m very fond of walking.”</p>
+
+<p>It is only fair to warn those who propose to follow
+in our tire tracks that, entering the Yosemite by automobile,
+you do not get one of those sudden and overwhelming
+views which cause the beholder to “O-o-o-oh-h-h-h-h!”
+and “A-a-a-ah-h-h-h-h!” like the exhaust
+of a steam-engine. On the contrary, you sneak into the
+famous valley very unostentatiously indeed, along a
+winding wood road which might be in New England.
+Nor are you permitted to tear about the floor of the
+valley whither you list, for no sooner do you reach the
+Sentinel Hotel than a khaki-clad trooper steps up and
+orders you to put your car in the garage and keep it
+there until you are ready to leave.</p>
+
+<p>The Yosemite is not, properly speaking, a valley.
+That word suggests a gentle depression with sloping
+sides, a sort of hollow in the hills, which have been
+moulded by the fingers of ages into flowing and complaisant
+lines. The Yosemite is nothing of the sort.
+It is a great cleft or chasm, hemmed in by rocky walls
+as steep as the prices at a summer hotel and as smooth
+as the manners of a confidence man. It is the exact<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_249"></a>[249]</span>
+reverse of that formation so characteristic of the Southwest
+known as a mesa: it is a precipice-walled plain.
+One might imagine it to be the work of some exasperated
+Titan who, peeved at finding the barrier of the Sierras
+in his path, had driven his spade deep into the ridge of
+the range and then moved it back and forth, as a gardener
+does in setting out a plant, leaving a gash in the
+mountains eight miles long and a mile deep. When
+flocks of wild geese light in the Yosemite, so John
+Muir tells us, they have hard work to find their way
+out again, for, no matter in which direction they turn,
+they are soon stopped by the wall, the height of which
+they seem to have an insuperable difficulty in gauging.
+They must feel very much like a fish in an aquarium
+which is for ever battering its nose against the glass
+walls of its tank. The wall looks to be only about so
+high, but when they should be far over its top, northward
+or southward according to the season, back they
+find themselves once more, beating against its stony
+face, and it is only when, in their bewilderment, they
+chance to follow the downward course of the river,
+that they hit upon an exit.</p>
+
+<p>Standing in the centre of the valley floor, on the
+banks of the winding Merced, is the Sentinel Hotel,
+which, barring several camps, is the only hostelry in
+the valley. It is a cosy, homelike, old-fashioned place,
+the fashion in which the rooms open onto the broad
+verandas which run entirely around both the lower
+and the upper stories recalling the old-time taverns
+of the South. As there are neither dance pavilions<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_250"></a>[250]</span>
+nor moving-picture houses in the Yosemite, the young
+women employed as waitresses at the Sentinel Hotel
+frequently find their unoccupied time hanging heavy
+on their hands, this tedium occasionally leading them
+into exploits calculated to make the hair of the observer
+permanently pompadour. One of these girls, a slender,
+willowy creature, anxious to outdare her companions,
+climbed to Glacier Point and on the insecure and
+scanty foothold afforded by the Overhanging Rock,
+which juts from the face of the sheer cliff, three thousand
+two hundred feet above the valley floor, proceeded
+to dance the tango! Evidently feeling that this exhibition,
+which had sent chills of apprehension up the
+spines of the beholders, was too tame, she balanced
+herself on one foot on the ledge’s very brink and extended
+the other, like a <i>première danseuse</i>, over three
+fifths of a mile of emptiness.</p>
+
+<p>An unobtrusive but interesting feature of the
+Yosemite which may well escape the notice of the
+casual tourist is the little settlement of Indians, who
+dwell in a collection of wretched shacks at the base
+of the valley’s northern wall. Like all the California
+Indians, this remnant of the Yosemite tribe are entirely
+lacking in the picturesqueness of dress and bearing
+which characterises their kinsmen of the Southwest.
+Their presence in the Yosemite possesses, however, a
+certain romantic interest, for, had it not been for them,
+it may well be that the famous valley would still remain
+unfound. Their story is an interesting and
+pathetic one. As a result of the injustices and outrages<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_251"></a>[251]</span>
+committed upon the peaceful Californian Indians
+by the settlers who came flocking into the State
+upon the discovery of gold, the tribes were driven to
+revolt, and in 1851 the government found itself with a
+“little war” upon its hands. The trouble ended, of
+course, by the complete subjugation of the Indians,
+who were transferred from their hereditary homes to
+a reservation near Fresno. The Yosemites proved less
+tractable than the other tribes, however, and, instead
+of coming in and surrendering to the palefaces, they
+retreated to their fastnesses in the High Sierras, and
+it was while pursuing them that a troop of cavalry
+discovered the enchanted valley which bears their
+name. They were captured and carried to Fresno,
+but the humid climate of the lowlands wrought such
+havoc among these mountain-bred folk that the survivors
+petitioned the government for permission to
+return to their old home. Their petition was granted,
+and during the half century which has passed since
+their return to the valley which was the cradle of their
+race they have never molested the white man and
+have supported themselves by such work as the valley
+affords and by basket weaving.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp50" id="illus24" style="max-width: 28.125em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus24.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><p>THE YOSEMITE—AND A LADY WHO DIDN’T KNOW FEAR.</p>
+  <p>“She balanced herself on one foot on the ledge’s very brink and extended
+  the other, like a <i>première danseuse</i>, over three fifths of a mile of
+  emptiness.”</p></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>It was quite by chance that I stumbled upon these
+copper-coloured stragglers from another era. While
+riding one afternoon along the foot of the sheer precipice
+which hems the valley in, my eye was caught by
+three strange objects standing in a row. They resembled—as
+much as they resembled anything—West African
+voodoo priests in the thatched garments which<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_252"></a>[252]</span>
+they wear on ceremonial occasions. Upon questioning
+the Indian woman who appeared, however, I elicited
+the information that they were <i>chuck-ahs</i>, and were
+built to store acorns in. The Yosemite <i>chuck-ah</i>
+looks like a huge edition of the hampers they use in
+the lavatories of hotels to throw soiled towels in,
+thatched with fir branches and twigs, covered with a
+square of canvas to shed the rain, and mounted on
+stilts so as to place its contents beyond the reach of
+rodents. As the Yosemites, who are bitterly poor,
+largely subsist upon a coarse bread made from meal
+produced by pounding the bitter acorn, the <i>chuck-ah</i>
+is as essential to their scheme of household economy
+as a flour barrel is to ours. The copper-coloured lady
+who painstakingly explained all this to me in very disconnected
+English told me that her name was Wilson’s
+Lucy. Whether she was married to Wilson or whether
+she was merely attached, like her name, I did not
+inquire. Flattered by my obvious interest in her domestic
+affairs, she disappeared into the miserable hut
+which served as home, to reappear an instant later
+carrying what at first glance I took for a small-sized
+mummy, but which, upon closer inspection, proved to
+be a very black-haired, very bright-eyed, very lusty
+youngster, bound to a board from chin to ankle with
+linen bandages which served the double purpose of
+making him straight of body and keeping him out
+of mischief.</p>
+
+<p>“What’s his name?” I inquired, proffering a piece
+of silver.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_253"></a>[253]</span></p>
+
+<p>“My name Wilson’s Lucy,” the mother giggled
+proudly. “He name Woodrow Wilson.”</p>
+
+<p>So, should the President see fit to present a silver
+spoon to his copper-coloured namesake, he can address
+it care of Yosemite Valley Post-Office, California.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp50" id="illus25" style="max-width: 31.25em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus25.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><p>In midwinter, when the Yosemite is deep
+  in snow, skis and sledges provide the only means of giving the baby
+  an airing.</p>
+  <p>“What’s his name?” I inquired. The mother giggled proudly: “He
+  name Woodrow Wilson.”</p>
+  <p>YOSEMITE YOUNGSTERS, WHITE AND RED.</p></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p class="tb">Of the Yosemite, Herr Karl Baedeker, to whose
+red guide-books every travelling American clings as
+tenaciously as to his letter of credit, and whose opinions
+he accepts as unreservedly as a Mohammedan accepts
+the Koran, has said: “No single valley in Switzerland
+combines in so limited a space such a wonderful variety
+of grand and romantic scenery.” Aside from its unique
+scenic beauties, the chief attraction of the Yosemite,
+to my way of thinking, is the altogether unusual variety
+of recreation which it affords. Excursions afoot,
+ahorseback, or acarriage to a dozen points of charm
+in the valley and its environs; trail rides along the
+dizzy paths which the government has built to skirt
+the cañon’s rim; fishing in the icy mountain streams,
+in whose shaded pools half a dozen varieties of trout—Steelheads,
+Speckled, Brook, Rainbow, Dolly Varden,
+and others—await the fly; <i>al fresco</i> luncheons in the
+leafy recesses of the Happy Isles, with the pine-carpeted
+earth for a seat, a moss-covered boulder for a
+table, and the mingled murmur of waterfalls and wind-stirred
+tree tops for music; it is days spent in such
+fashion which makes of a visit to the Yosemite an
+unforgettable memory.</p>
+
+<p>A half-day’s journey south by stage from the Yosemite<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_254"></a>[254]</span>
+brings one to the lovely Sierran meadow of
+Wawona, above which are marshalled that glorious
+company of Sequoias known as the Mariposa Big Tree
+Grove. Just as Ireland has its lakes, and Switzerland
+its mountains, and Norway its fiords, so California has
+its Sequoias, and in many respects they are the most
+wonderful of all. The Big Trees, as they are called,
+are of two <i>genera</i>: the <i>Sequoia gigantea</i>, found only
+in the lower ranges of the high Sierras, and the <i>Sequoia
+sempervirens</i>, which are peculiar to the region lying
+between the Coast Range and the sea. There is no
+more fascinating trip on the continent than that from
+the Yosemite to the Big Trees of Mariposa, the road,
+which in the course of a few miles attains an elevation
+of six thousand five hundred feet, commanding magnificent
+retrospects of the Bridal Veil Falls, El Capitan,
+Cathedral Spires, and Half Dome, then plunging into
+the depths of a forest of cedar, fir, and pine, crossing
+the south fork of the brawling Merced, passing the
+hospitable verandas of the Wawona Hotel, and ending
+under the shadow of the redwood giants, traversing,
+en route, a tunnel cut through the heart of a living
+Sequoia. In their exploitation of the Big Tree groves,
+the railway companies have had the rather questionable
+taste to advertise these monarchs of the forest
+by means of pictures showing six-horse coaches being
+driven through them, or troops of cavalry aligned
+upon their prostrate trunks, or good-looking young
+women on horseback giving equestrian exhibitions
+upon their stumps. To me this sort of thing smacks<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_255"></a>[255]</span>
+too much of the professional showman; it is like making
+a Bengal tiger jump through a paper hoop or a lion sit
+up on his hind legs and beg like a trick dog. The
+Sequoias are too magnificent, too awesome to thus
+cheapen. When once you have stood in their solemn
+presence and have attempted to follow with your eye
+the course of the great trunks soaring skyward, higher
+than the Flatiron Building in New York, half again
+the height of the shaft on Bunker Hill; when you have
+made the circuit of their massive trunks, equal in circumference
+to the spires of Notre Dame; when you
+have examined their bark, thicker than the armour of
+the dreadnought <i>Texas</i>; you will agree with me, I
+think, that the Big Trees of California need no circus
+performances to emphasise their proportions and
+their majesty.</p>
+
+<p>According to the rules promulgated by the government,
+motorists are permitted to leave the Yosemite
+only between the hours of six and seven-thirty in the
+morning. After I had crawled out of a warm bed into
+the shiveryness of a Sierran dawn—for the early mornings
+are bitterly cold in the High Sierras—I felt inclined
+to agree with Madame de Pompadour that
+“travelling is the saddest of all pleasures.” But when
+we were sandwiched in the tonneau of the car again,
+with the long and trying grade by which we had
+entered the valley safely behind us and the river road
+to Merced stretching out in long diagonals in front,
+we soon forgot the discomforts of the early rising, for
+the big car leaped forward like a spirited horse turned<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_256"></a>[256]</span>
+loose upon the countryside, and the crisp, clear air
+dashed itself into our faces until we felt as buoyant and
+exhilarated as though we had been drinking champagne.
+After “checking out” at the Big Tree military outpost,
+we turned down the road which leads through Coulterville
+to Merced, the walls of the cañon gradually
+becoming less precipitous and the rugged character of
+the country merging into orchards and these in turn
+to farms and vineyards as we debouched into the San
+Joaquin again.</p>
+
+<p>Leaving Merced in the golden haze behind us,
+we swung southward, through the land of port wine
+and sherry, to Madera, the birthplace of the American
+raisin, and so down the splendid Kearney Boulevard—fifteen
+miles of oiled delight running between hedges
+of palms and oleanders—to Fresno, the geographical
+centre of California and the home of the American
+raisin and sweet-wine industry, which in little more
+than a dozen years has elbowed Spain out of first
+place among the raisin growers of the world and has
+caused ten thousand homes to spring up out on the
+sandy plain. Unleashing the power beneath the throbbing
+bonnet, we tore southward and ever southward,
+at first through growing grain-fields and then across
+vast barren stretches, waiting patiently for reclamation.
+Draped along the scalloped base of the moleskin-coloured
+foot-hills, where they rise abruptly from the
+plain, was a bright green ribbon—the citrus belt of
+the San Joaquin, where the orange groves nestle in
+the sheltered coves formed by the Sierras’ projecting<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_257"></a>[257]</span>
+spurs. In the region lying between Visalia and Porterville
+frost is an almost negligible quantity and, as a
+result, it is threatening the supremacy of the Riverside-Pasadena
+district as a producer of the golden fruit.</p>
+
+<p>Visalia is the starting-point for the Sequoia and
+General Grant Big Tree Groves, which have recently
+been opened to automobilists. The route to the
+Sequoia Park lies through Lemon Cove and then over
+a moderately good road, extremely dusty in summer,
+to Rocky Gulch, on the Giant Forest Road, where
+the motorist is halted by a cavalry patrol and the
+customary five-dollar admittance fee to national parks
+exacted. From Visalia to Camp Sierra, in the heart
+of the Sequoia, is fifty-five miles, to cover which,
+allowing for the mountain grades, the indifferent condition
+of the roads, and the delay at the park boundary,
+will require a full half day. The monarch of the Sequoia
+Grove is the redwood known as “General Sherman,”
+two hundred and eighty feet in height and ninety-five
+feet in circumference. Taking height and girth
+together, the “General Sherman” is, I believe, the
+largest tree in the world, though in the little-visited
+Calaveras Grove, the northernmost of the Californian
+groups of big trees, the “Mother of the Forest” is
+three hundred and fifteen feet high and the prostrate
+“Father of the Forest” is one hundred and twelve
+feet in circumference. If, however, the size of a tree
+is gauged by its girth only, there are several trees larger
+than any of the Californian Sequoias—the gigantic
+cypress near Oaxaca, in Mexico, known as the “Great<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_258"></a>[258]</span>
+Tree of Tule,” whose trunk measures one hundred and
+sixty feet in circumference but whose height is barely
+more; the great banyan in the botanical garden at
+Calcutta, and the “Chestnut Tree of a Hundred
+Horses”—said to be the largest tree in the world—at
+the foot of Mount Etna. I do not know whether these
+bald figures convey anything to you, but they certainly
+do not to me and I am not going to burden you with
+more of them. I have done my duty in giving you
+the dimensions of the largest of the Sequoias, which,
+I might add, is almost the exact height of the Flatiron
+Building. A vast deal of nonsense has been written
+about the age and other features of the Californian
+redwoods. It is not enough for the visitor to learn
+that the oldest Sequoia was probably a sapling when
+Rameses drove the Israelites out of Egypt, but the
+guide must needs draw upon his imagination and add
+another six or seven thousand years on top of that.
+The Sequoia, the noblest living thing upon our continent
+to-day, would appear, even at the age of five-and-twenty
+centuries, to be capable of much added lustre,
+for I was gravely assured that it was probably from
+these very groves that Solomon obtained the pillars
+for his temple.</p>
+
+<p>It is in the neighbourhood of fourscore miles from
+Visalia to the delta of the Kern, most southerly of the
+Sierra’s golden streams, along whose banks rise the
+gaunt, black skeletons of the oil-derricks. So vast is
+the extent of the Great Valley of California that,
+though it contains the greatest petroleum fields in all<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_259"></a>[259]</span>
+the world, the traveller may zigzag through it for many
+days without seeing a sign of the industry which lights
+the lamps and provides the motive power for trains,
+boats, and motor-cars from the Straits of Behring to
+the Straits of Magellan. It is not an attractive region.
+Hungry and bare are the tawny hills, viscous the
+waters of the stream that meanders between them,
+weird and gibbet-like the forest of derricks which
+crowns them. There is a smell of coal-oil in the air,
+and the few habitations we passed were, by their very
+ugliness, obviously connected with this, the unloveliest
+of the earth’s products.</p>
+
+<p>Bakersfield marks the virtual end of the Great
+Valley, a few miles south of it the converging ranges
+of fawn-coloured plush being linked by the Tehachapi,
+which is the recognised boundary between central and
+southern California. Bakersfield owes its abounding
+prosperity to the adjacent oil-fields, its streets being
+lined by the florid residences and its highways resounding
+to the arrogant <i>honk honk</i> of the high-powered
+motor-cars of the “oil barons,” as the men who have
+“struck oil” are termed. I like these oil barons because
+with their loud voices and their boisterous
+manners and the picturesqueness of their dress they
+typify a phase of life in the “Last West” which is
+rapidly disappearing. There is something rough-and-ready
+and romantic about them; something which
+recalls their get-rich-quick fellows in Dawson and
+Johannesburg and Baku. Most of them have acquired
+their wealth suddenly; most of them have worked up<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_260"></a>[260]</span>
+from the humblest beginnings; and most of them believe
+in the good old proverb of “Easy come, easy go—for
+there’s more where this came from.” Red-faced,
+loud-voiced, with a predilection for broad-brimmed
+hats and gaudy ties, you can see them playing poker
+for high stakes in the back rooms of the saloons or
+leaning over the hotel bars in boisterous conversation.
+After I had watched them for a time I no longer doubted
+the assertion that Bakersfield buys more spittoons
+than any city in the country.</p>
+
+<p>Although from the gilded cupola of Bakersfield’s
+truly beautiful court-house you can look out across a
+quarter of a million irrigated acres, though you can see
+a solid block of alfalfa covering forty squares miles
+and fattening twenty-five thousand head of steers a
+year, these form but a patch of green on the yellow
+floor of the valley’s gigantic amphitheatre. As a
+matter of fact, the development of the country around
+Bakersfield has been seriously retarded by the enormous
+holdings of two or three great landowners who neither
+improve their properties nor sell them. One of these
+great landlords, who numbers his Californian acres
+alone in the millions and who boasts that his cow-punchers
+can drive a herd of his steers from the Mexican
+frontier to the Oregon line and camp on his own
+land every night, obtained his enormous holdings near
+Bakersfield long years ago under the terms of the
+Swamp and Drowned Lands Act, which provided that
+any one who applied could obtain title to any land
+which he had gone over in a boat. So he put a boat on<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_261"></a>[261]</span>
+a wagon and had it hauled over hundreds of thousands
+of acres which he has since reclaimed. He was an
+ingenious fellow.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp50" id="illus26" style="max-width: 31.25em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus26.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><p>A “gusher” near Bakersfield spouting two
+  and a half million gallons of oil a day.</p>
+  <p>The Kern River oil fields, near Bakersfield, Cal.</p>
+  <p>THE GREATEST OIL FIELDS IN THE WORLD.</p></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>You will need to journey far to find a region more
+desolate and forbidding than that lying between Bakersfield
+and the summit of the Tehachapi. Never
+shall I forget the deadly monotony of that long, straight
+road along which we pushed in the teeth of a buffeting
+wind, with its whistling telegraph-poles, its creaking
+iron windmills at regular intervals, and its barbed-wire
+fences all converging to a vanishing-point which looked
+to be perhaps five miles ahead but at which we never
+seemed to arrive. There are no trees to obstruct the
+view of the barren hills which rim the distance, and for
+many miles there is not enough cover to hide a grasshopper,
+for the soil is poisoned by alkalis and the poor,
+thin grass dies of a broken heart. But as the car panted
+its tortuous way from the floor of the valley up the face
+of the mountain wall which hems it in, the scenery
+became more varied and interesting. Great patches
+of the mountainside were clothed with masses of lupin
+of the coldest, brightest blue you ever saw. Once we
+ran through a forest of tree yuccas whose spiked,
+fantastic branches looked as though they were laden
+with hedgehogs. Sometimes the road would dip quite
+suddenly into a charming little hollow in the hills,
+shaded by venerable live-oaks and with a purling brook
+running through it, only to emerge again and zigzag
+along the face of the mountain, clinging to the bare
+rock as a fly clings to the ceiling. Several times we<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_262"></a>[262]</span>
+had to stop for flocks of sheep—thousands and thousands
+of them—moving to pastures new, driven by
+shaggy, bright-eyed sheep-dogs which hung upon the
+flanks of the flock and seemed to anticipate every
+order of the Basque shepherds. I noticed that all
+these herdsmen wore heavy revolvers at their hips and
+had Winchesters slung at the pommels of their saddles,
+for the ancient feud between cattlemen and sheepmen
+still exists upon these Sierran ranges, and there is many
+a pitched battle between them of which no news creeps
+into the columns of the papers. The frequency of
+these flocks considerably delayed our progress, for the
+road is narrow and to have driven through the woolly
+wave which at times engulfed the car would have
+meant driving scores of sheep over the precipice to
+death on the rocks below.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp50" id="illus27" style="max-width: 31.25em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus27.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><p>“We ran through a forest of tree-yuccas
+  whose spiked, fantastic branches looked as though they were laden with
+  hedgehogs.”</p>
+  <p>“Our progress was frequently delayed by woolly waves which at times
+  engulfed the car.”</p>
+  <p>OVER THE TEHACHAPIS.</p></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>The change in scenery as we emerged from the
+mouth of the pass at Saugus was almost startling in
+its suddenness. Gone were the dreary, wind-swept
+plains; gone was the endless vista of telegraph-poles;
+gone the dun and desolate hills. We found ourselves,
+instead, at the entrance to a valley which might well
+have been the place of exile of Persephone. Symmetrical
+squares of bay-green oranges, of soft gray olives
+and of yellowing vines turned its slopes into chessboards
+of striking verdure. Rows of tall, straight
+eucalyptus trees made of the highway a tunnel of
+blue-green foliage. The mountains, from foot to summit,
+were clothed with lupins of a blue that dulled the
+blue of heaven. The oleanders and magnolias and<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_263"></a>[263]</span>
+palms and clumps of bamboo about the ranches gave
+to the scene an almost tropical luxuriance. This was
+the vale of Santa Clara—not to be confused with the
+valley of the same name farther north—perhaps the
+richest and most prosperous agricultural region for
+its size between the oceans and certainly the least
+advertised and the least known. Unlike the residents
+of other parts of California, its residents issue no enticing
+literature depicting the surpassing beauties and
+attractions of their valley as a place of residence, for
+the very good reason that they do not care to sell,
+unless at prohibitive prices. They have a good thing
+and they intend to keep it. Less than twoscore miles
+in length, the Santa Clara Valley, which begins at
+Saugus and runs westward to Ventura-by-the-Sea,
+comes nearer to being frostless than any region in the
+State, save only the Imperial Valley. But its industries
+are by no means restricted to the cultivation of
+citrus fruits, for the walnuts it produces are finer than
+those of England, its figs are larger than those of
+Smyrna, and its olives more succulent than those grown
+on the hills of Greece.</p>
+
+<p>As with engines droning like giant bumblebees we
+sped down the eucalyptus-bordered highway which
+leads to Santa Paula, the valley was flooded with the
+rare beauty of the fleeting twilight of the West. The
+sky, a moment before a dome of lapis lazuli, merged
+into that exquisite ashes-of-roses tint which is the
+foremost precursor of the dark, and then burst, all
+unexpectedly, into a splendid fiery glow which turned<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_264"></a>[264]</span>
+the western heavens into a sheet of rosy coral. But,
+like most really beautiful things, the Californian sunsets
+are quick to perish. A few moments only and the
+rose had dulled to palest lavender and this to amethyst
+and this in turn to purple and then, at one bound,
+came the night, and our head lamps were boring twin
+holes in the velvety, flower-scented darkness. Before
+us the street lights of Santa Paula burst into flame
+like a diamond necklace clasped about the neck of a
+lovely woman.</p>
+
+<p class="tb">The region of which Lake Tahoe is the centre is
+difficult to describe; one is drawn illusively into over-praising
+it. Yet everything about it—the height of the
+surrounding mountains, the vastness of the forests,
+the size of the trees, the beauty of the wild flowers,
+the grandeur of the scenery, the colourings of the lake
+itself—is so superlative that, to describe it as it really
+is, one must, perforce, lay himself open to the charge
+of exaggeration. There is no lake in Switzerland or,
+for that matter, anywhere else in Europe which is
+Tahoe’s equal. To find its peer you will need to go to
+Lake Louise, in the Canadian Rockies, or, better still,
+to some of the mountain lakes of Kashmir. Here, set
+down on the very ridge-pole of the High Sierras, is a
+lake twenty-two miles long by ten in width, the innumerable
+pleasure craft whose propellers churn its
+translucent waters into opaline and amaranthine hues
+being nearly a mile and a quarter above the surface
+of the Pacific. To attempt to describe its ever-changing<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_265"></a>[265]</span>
+and elusive colourings is as futile as to describe the
+colours of a sunset sky, of a peacock’s tail, of an opal.
+Looked at from one point, it is blue—the blue of an
+Ægean sky, of a baby’s eyes, of a turquoise or of a
+sapphire—but an hour later, or from another angle,
+it will be green: a gorgeous, glorious, dazzling green,
+sometimes scintillating like an emerald of incredible
+size, sometimes lustreless as a piece of jade. In the
+bays and coves and inlets which corrugate its shores
+its waters become even more diverse in colouring:
+smoke grey, pearl grey, bottle green, Nile green, yes,
+even apple green, lavender, amethyst, violet, purple,
+indigo, and—believe me or not, as you choose—I have
+more than once seen Tahoe so rosy in the reflected
+<i>alpenglow</i> of twilight that it looked for all the world
+like a sheet of pinkest coral. Its shores are as diverse
+as its colourings, pebbly beaches alternating with
+emerald bays; pine-crowned promontories; snug coves
+on whose silver beaches bathers disport themselves
+and children gambol; moss-carpeted banks shaded by
+centenarian trees; cliffs, smooth as the side of a house,
+rising a thousand feet sheer above the water; and,
+here and there, deep and narrow inlets so hemmed in
+by vertical precipices of rock that to find their like you
+would have to go to the Norwegian fiords. Completely
+encircling the lake, like watchful sentinels, rise the
+snow peaks—not the domesticated mountains of the
+Adirondacks or the Alleghenies, but towering monsters,
+ten, twelve, fifteen, thousand feet in height and
+white-mantled throughout the year—the monarchs of<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_266"></a>[266]</span>
+the High Sierras. From the snow-line, which is generally
+about two thousand feet above the surface of
+the lake and ten thousand feet above the level of the
+sea, the coniferous Sierran forests—the grandest and
+most beautiful in the world—clothe the lower slopes
+of the mountains in mantles of shaggy green which
+sweep downward until their hems are wet in the waters
+of the lake.</p>
+
+<p>One of the most distinguishing and pleasing characteristics
+of these Sierran forests is their inviting
+openness. The trees of all the species stand more or
+less apart in groves or in small, irregular groups, enabling
+a rider to make his way almost anywhere, along
+sun-bathed colonnades and through lush, green glades,
+sprinkled with wild flowers and as smooth as the lawns
+of a city park. Now you cross a forest garden ariot
+with wild flowers, now a mountain meadow, now a
+fern-banked, willow-shaded stream, and ever and anon
+emerge upon some granite pavement or high, bare
+ridge commanding superb views of majestic snow-peaks
+rising grandly above the intervening sea of evergreen.
+Every now and then you stumble upon mountain
+lakes tucked away in the most unexpected places,
+gleaming amid the surrounding forest like sapphires
+which a jeweller has laid out for inspection upon a
+green plush cloth. The whole number of lakes in the
+Sierras is said to be upward of fifteen hundred, not
+counting the innumerable smaller pools and tarns.
+Another feature of the High Sierras are the glacier
+meadows: smooth, level, silky lawns, lying embedded<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_267"></a>[267]</span>
+in the upper forests, on the floors of the valleys, and
+along the broad backs of the ridges at a height of from
+eight to ten thousand feet above the sea. These mountain
+meadows are nearly as level as the lakes whose
+places they have taken and present a dry, even surface,
+free from boulders, bogs, and weeds. As one suddenly
+emerges from the solemn twilight of the forest into
+one of these dreamy, sunlit glades, he looks instinctively
+for the dainty figures of Watteau shepherdesses
+or for the slender forms of sportive nymphs. The close,
+fine sod is so brightly enamelled with flowers and butterflies
+that it may well be called a meadow garden, for
+in many places the plushy turf is so thickly strewn with
+gentians, daisies, ivesias, forget-me-nots, wild honeysuckle,
+and paint-brush that the grass can scarcely
+be seen.</p>
+
+<p>In certain of these mountain meadows I noticed a
+phenomenon which I have observed nowhere else save
+in Morocco: the flowers, instead of being mixed and
+mingled in a huge bouquet, grew in distinct but adjacent
+patches—a square of blue forget-me-nots here, a
+blanket of white daisies there, a strip of Indian paint-brush
+over there, and beyond a dense clump of wild
+lilac—so that from a little distance the meadow looked
+exactly like a great floral mosaic. It was very beautiful.
+On the higher slopes the scarlet shoots of the snow-plant
+dart from the soil like tongues of flame. Around
+it hangs a pretty native legend. Two young braves,
+so the legend runs, made desperate love to an Indian
+princess, who at length chose the one and turned away<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_268"></a>[268]</span>
+the other. On the marriage day the rejected lover
+ambushed himself in the forest, and, as his rival went
+riding past to claim his bride, sent an arrow twanging
+into his breast. But, though wounded unto death, the
+lover clung to his horse and raced through the forest
+to die in the arms of his bride. As he sped his heart’s
+blood, welling forth, left a trail of crimson splotches
+on the ground behind him. And wherever a drop of
+blood fell, there a blood-red flower sprang into bloom.
+If you doubt the story you can see and pick them for
+yourself.</p>
+
+<p>Set high on the western shore of Tahoe, and so
+appropriately designed that it seems to be a part of
+the forest which encircles it, is Tahoe Tavern—a long,
+low hostelry of shingles, stone, and logs, its deep verandas
+commanding an entrancing view of the lake
+and of the mountainous Nevada shore, for the California-Nevada
+boundary runs down the middle of the
+lake. Just as the smart set along the Atlantic seaboard
+flock to Newport, Narragansett, and Bar Harbour in
+the summer, so the corresponding section of society
+upon the Pacific Coast may be found at Tahoe from
+July to September. A narrow-gauge railway, leaving
+the main line of the Southern Pacific at Truckee, two
+hundred miles or so east of San Francisco, hugs the
+brawling Truckee to the Tavern, a distance of a dozen
+miles, whence steamers convey the visitor to the
+numerous hotels, camps, and cottages which dot the
+shores of the lake. The summers are never warm on
+Tahoe, nor, for that matter, ever uncomfortably cool,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_269"></a>[269]</span>
+while the air is as crisp and invigorating as extra-dry
+champagne. From the first of July to the first of
+October it almost never rains. And yet ninety-nine
+Easterners out of a hundred pity the poor Californians
+who, they imagine, are sweltering in semitropic heat.</p>
+
+<p>One never lacks for amusement at Tahoe. Lean
+power-boats tear madly from shore to shore, their
+knife-like prows ploughing the lake into a creamy
+furrow. Hydroplanes hurtle by like leaping tunas.
+There is angling both in Tahoe and the maze of adjacent
+lakes and lakelets for every variety of trout that
+swims. There is bathing—if one doesn’t mind cold
+water. At night white-shouldered women and white-shirted
+men dip and hesitate and glide on the casino’s
+glassy floor to the impassioned strains of “Get Out and
+Get Under” and “Too Much Mustard.” But trail
+riding is the most characteristic as it is the most exciting,
+diversion of them all. It is really mountaineering
+on horseback—up the forested slopes, across the gaunt,
+bare ridges, and so to the icy summits, on wiry ponies
+which are as sure-footed as mountain-goats and as active
+as back-yard cats. The narrowness of many of the
+trails, the slipperiness of ice and snow, the giddiness of
+the sheer cliffs, the thought of what would happen if
+your horse <i>should</i> stumble, combine to make it an
+exciting amusement. You can leave the shores of the
+lake, basking in a summer climate, with flowers blooming
+everywhere, and in a two hours’ ride find yourself
+amid perpetual snow. It is a novel experience, this
+sudden transition from July to January, and not to be<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_270"></a>[270]</span>
+obtained so readily anywhere else that I know, unless
+it be in a cold-storage plant. On the Fourth of July,
+for example, after a late breakfast, the Lady and I
+waved <i>au revoir</i> to our white-flannelled friends on the
+Tavern’s veranda and before noon were pelting each
+other with snowballs on a snow-drift forty feet deep,
+with Lake Tahoe, gleaming beneath the sun like a gigantic
+opal, three thousand feet below us. There may,
+of course, be more enchanting vacation places than
+this Tahoe country—higher mountains, grander forests,
+more beautiful lakes, a better climate—but I do not
+know where to find them.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_271"></a>[271]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="X">X<br>
+<span class="smaller">“WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON”</span></h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_272"></a>[272]</span></p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">“I hear the far-off voyager’s horn;</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">I see the Yankee’s trail—</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">His foot on every mountain pass,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">On every stream his sail.</div>
+  </div>
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="center">...</div>
+  </div>
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">“I hear the mattock in the mine,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">The axe stroke in the dell,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">The clamour from the Indian lodge,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">The Jesuit chapel bell!</div>
+  </div>
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">“I see the swarthy trappers come</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">From Mississippi’s springs;</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">And war-chiefs with their painted brows</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">And crests of eagle wings.</div>
+  </div>
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">“Behind the scared squaw’s birch canoe</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">The steamer smokes and raves;</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">And city lots are staked for sale</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Above old Indian graves.</div>
+  </div>
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="center">...</div>
+  </div>
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">“Each rude and jostling fragment soon</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Its fitting place shall find—</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">The raw material of a State,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Its muscle and its mind.”</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_273"></a>[273]</span></p>
+
+<h3>X<br>
+<span class="smaller">“WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON”</span></h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>With a rattle of wheels and a clickety-clack of
+hoofs the coach bore down upon us, its yellow
+body swaying drunkenly upon its leathern springs. It
+was a welcome sight, for since early morning we had
+been journeying through a region sans sign-posts, sans
+houses, sans people, sans everything. I threw up my
+hand, palm outward, which is the recognised halt
+sign of the plains, and in obedience to the signal the
+sombreroed driver pulled his wheelers back on their
+haunches and jammed his brakes on hard. Half a
+dozen bearded faces peered from the dim interior of
+the vehicle to ascertain the reason for the sudden
+stop.</p>
+
+<p>“Are we right for the Columbia?” I asked.</p>
+
+<p>“You betcha, friend,” said the driver, squirting a
+jet of tobacco juice with great dexterity between the
+portals of his drooping moustache. “All ye’ve got to
+do is keep ’er headed north an’ keep agoin’. You’re
+not more nor sixty mile from the river now. How
+fur’ve ye come with that there machine, anyway?”</p>
+
+<p>“From Mexico,” I replied a trifle proudly.</p>
+
+<p>“The hell you say!” he responded with open admiration.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_274"></a>[274]</span>
+“An’ where ye bound fur, ef I might make
+so bold’s to ask?”</p>
+
+<p>“As far north as we can get,” I answered. “To
+Alaska, if the roads hold out.”</p>
+
+<p>“Waal, don’t it beat the Dutch what things is
+acomin’ to anyway,” he ejaculated, “when ye kin git
+into a waggin like that there an’ scoot acrost the country
+same’s ye would on a railroad train? I’ve druv
+this old stage forty year come next December, but the
+next thing ye know they’ll be wantin’ an autermobile,
+an’ me an’ the critters’ll be lookin’ fer another job.
+But that’s progress, an’ ’tain’t no manner o’ use tryin’
+to buck it. These old Concords hev done a heap toward
+civilisin’ the West, but their day’s about over, I
+reckon, an’ the autermobile will come along an’ take
+up the job where they left off. Come to think on it,
+it’s sorter ’s if the old style was shakin’ hands an’ sayin’,
+‘Glad tew meet you’ to the new. But I’ve got your
+Uncle Sam’l’s mail to deliver an’ I can’t be hangin’
+’round here gossipin’ all day.”</p>
+
+<p>He kicked off his brake, and his long whip-lash,
+leaping forward like a rattlesnake, cracked between
+the ears of his leaders. “Get to work there, ye lazy,
+good-fer-nothin’ sons o’ sea-cooks, you!” he bellowed.</p>
+
+<p>“S’long, friend, an’ good luck to ye,” he called
+over his shoulder. The whip-lash cracked angrily
+once more, wheelers and leaders settled into their collars,
+and the coach tore on amid a rolling cloud of dust.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus28" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus28.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><p>THE OVERLAND MAIL.</p>
+  <p>“With a rattle of wheels and a clickety-clack of hoofs the coach
+  bore down upon us.”</p></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>“That was perfectly wonderful,” said the Lady,
+with a little gasp of satisfaction. “That was quite<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_275"></a>[275]</span>
+the nicest thing we’ve seen since we left Mexico. I
+didn’t know that that sort of thing existed any more
+outside of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.”</p>
+
+<p>“It won’t exist much longer,” said I. “This
+Oregon hinterland is the last American frontier, but
+the railway is coming and in a few more years the only
+place you will be able to see a Concord coach like the
+one we just met will be in a museum or on a moving-picture
+screen. The old fellow was perfectly right when
+he said that our meeting typified the passing of the old
+and the coming of the new.”</p>
+
+<p>“I’m awfully sorry for them,” remarked the Lady
+abstractedly.</p>
+
+<p>“Sorry for whom?” I asked.</p>
+
+<p>“Why,” she answered, “for the people who can
+only see this wonderful West on moving-picture
+screens.”</p>
+
+<p class="tb">We took the back-stairs route to Oregon. When we
+turned the bonnet of the car northward from Lake
+Tahoe, we had the choice of two routes to the Columbia.
+One of these, which we would have taken had we followed
+the advice of every one with whom we talked,
+would have necessitated our retracing our steps across
+the High Sierras to Sacramento, where we would have
+struck the orthodox and much-travelled highway that
+runs northward through the Sacramento Valley, via
+Marysville and Red Bluff and Redding, enters the Siskiyous
+at Shasta and leaves them again at Grant’s
+Pass, and keeps on through the fertile and thickly settled<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_276"></a>[276]</span>
+valleys of the Rogue, the Umpqua, and the Willamette,
+to Portland and its rose gardens. The other
+route, which is ignored by the road-books and of which
+those human road-books who run the garages seemed to
+be in total ignorance, strikes boldly into the primeval
+wilderness that lies to the north of Tahoe, parallels for
+close on two hundred miles the western boundary of
+Nevada, crosses the Oregon border at Lower Klamath
+Lake, and then, hugging the one hundred and twenty-second
+parallel like a long-lost brother, climbs up and up
+and up over the savage lava beds, through the country
+of the Warm Springs Indians, across the fertile farm
+lands of the Inland Empire, and so down the Cañon
+of the Deschutes to where the rocky barrier of The
+Dalles says to the boats upon the Columbia: “You can
+go no further.” This is the famous Oregon Trail, which
+lies like a long rope thrown idly on the ground, abandoned
+by the hand that used it. Though the people
+with whom we talked urged us not to take it, prophesying
+long-neglected and impassable roads and total
+lack of accommodation and all manner of disaster,
+we stubbornly persisted in our choice, lured by the
+romantic and historic memories that hover round it;
+for was it not, in its day, one of the most famous of
+all the routes followed by mankind in its migrations;
+was it not the trail taken by those resolute frontiersmen
+who won for us the West?</p>
+
+<p>We were warned repeatedly, by people who professed
+to know whereof they spoke, that, if we persisted
+in taking this unconventional and therefore<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_277"></a>[277]</span>
+perfectly ridiculous route, we would experience great
+difficulty in crossing the mountains, and, as some of
+our informants cheeringly observed, it was dollars to
+doughnuts that we wouldn’t be able to cross them at
+all. But as we had had experiences with these brethren
+of calamity howlers while motoring in Rhodesia and
+in Grande Kabylie and in the Anti-Lebanon, their
+mournful prognostications did not trouble us in the
+least. In fact, they but served to whet our appetites
+for the anticipated adventures. As a matter of fact,
+throughout the entire thousand miles that our speedometer
+recorded between Tahoe and The Dalles, not
+once did we cross any mountains worthy of the name,
+for our route, which had been carefully selected for
+its easy gradients long years before our time by men
+who traversed it in prairie-schooners instead of motor-cars
+and whose motive power was oxen instead of
+engines, lay along the gently rolling surface of that
+great mile-high plateau which parallels the eastern
+face of the Cascade Range and comes to a sudden termination
+in the precipitous cliffs which turn the upper
+reaches of the Columbia into a mighty gorge.</p>
+
+<p>Turning our tonneau upon Truckee and its brawling
+trout-stream, we struck into the forest as the
+compass needle points, with Susanville one hundred
+and fifty miles away, as our day’s objective. (Who
+Susan was I haven’t the remotest idea, unless she was
+the lady that they named the black-eyed daisies after.)
+For hour after hour the road wound and turned and
+twisted through the grandest forest scenery that can<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_278"></a>[278]</span>
+be found between the oceans. To our left, through
+occasional breaks in the giant hedge of fir and spruce
+and jack-pine, we caught fleeting glimpses of Pilot
+Peak, whose purple summit has doubtless served as a
+sign-post for many an Oregon-bound band of pioneers.
+To us, who had seen only the tourist California and the
+highly cultivated valleys of the interior, these Californian
+highlands proved a constant source of joy and
+self-congratulation. We felt as though we were explorers
+and, so far as motoring for pleasure in that
+region is concerned, we were. But the greatest revelation
+was the road. We had expected to need the
+services of an osteopath to rejoint our dislocated vertebræ
+and, to modify the anticipated jolts, I had had
+the car equipped with shock-absorbers and had taped
+the springs. We could, however, have gone over that
+road with no great discomfort in a springless wagon,
+for, upon a roadbed undisturbed for close on half a
+century by any traffic worthy of the name, had fallen
+so thick and resilient a blanket of pine-needles that
+we felt as though a strip of Brussels carpet had been
+laid for our benefit, as they do in Europe when royalty
+has occasion to set foot upon the ground. The sunbeams,
+slanting through the lofty tree tops, dappled
+the tawny surface of the road with golden splotches
+and fleckings, squirrels chattered at us from the over-arching
+boughs; coveys of grouse, taken unaware by
+the stealth of our approach, rocketed into the air,
+wings whirring like machine guns, only to settle unconcernedly
+as soon as we had passed; an antlered<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_279"></a>[279]</span>
+stag bounded suddenly into the road, stood for an
+instant motionless as though cast from iron, with wide-open,
+startled eyes, and disappeared in panic-stricken
+flight; once, swinging silently around a turning, we
+came upon a black bear gorging himself at the free-lunch
+counter that the wild blackberries provide along
+the road; but before we could get our rifles out of their
+cases he had crashed his way into underbrush too
+dense for us to follow. Nor did we have any great
+desire to follow. The smoothness and silence of the
+road were too enchanting. Hour after hour we sped
+noiselessly along without a glimpse of a human being
+or a human habitation. There were no sign-posts to
+point the way and we wanted none.</p>
+
+<p>But all good things must end in time, and our
+pine-carpeted road debouched quite unexpectedly into
+the loveliest valley that you ever saw. Perhaps it is
+because its sylvan serenity is undisturbed as yet by
+the jeering screech of the locomotive, but you will
+need to use much gasoline and wear out many tires
+before you will happen upon anything more idyllic
+than those cloistered and incredibly fertile acres that
+sweep down from the summit of the Iron Hills to the
+margin of Honey Lake. The trim white farmhouses
+that peep coquettishly, like bashful village maidens,
+from amid the fragrant orchards at the passer-by; the
+fields green-carpeted with sprouting grain; the barns
+whose queer hip-roofs made them look as though they
+were aburst with stored-up produce, as, indeed, they
+are; the sleek cattle, standing knee-deep in a lake as<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_280"></a>[280]</span>
+clear as Circe’s mirror—all these things spell p-r-o-s-p-e-r-i-t-y
+so plainly that even those who whirl by, as
+we did at forty miles an hour, may read.</p>
+
+<p>Susanville, which is built on a hill at the end of
+Honey Lake Valley, very much as the Italian hill
+towns command the tributary countryside, is a quiet
+rural community that has been stung by the bee of
+progress and is running around in circles in consequence.
+When we were there a railroad was in course of construction
+for the purpose of tapping the wealth of this
+rich but hitherto unexploited region, and the main
+street of the town, which we reached on a Saturday
+evening, was alive with farmers who had come in to
+do their week-end shopping, cow-punchers in gaudy
+neckerchiefs and Angora chaps, fresh from the ranges,
+engineers in high-laced boots and corduroy trousers,
+sun-tanned labourers from all four corners of Europe
+and the places in between. As a result of this week-end
+influx, the only hotel that Susanville possessed
+was filled to the doors.</p>
+
+<p>“I can’t even fix you up with a pool-table, gents,”
+said the shirt-sleeved proprietor, mopping the perspiration
+from his forehead with a violent-hued bandana;
+“and what’s more, every blame boardin’-house
+in town’s just as full up as we are.”</p>
+
+<p>“But we <i>must</i> find some place to sleep,” I asserted
+positively. “We’ve a lady with us, you see, and she
+can’t very well sleep in the open—or on a pool-table
+either, can she?”</p>
+
+<p>“A lady? God bless my soul! Why didn’t you<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_281"></a>[281]</span>
+say so? Well, now, that’s too durned bad. But hold
+on a minute, friends. I wouldn’t be s’prised if Bill
+Dooling, the barber, could fix you up. He’s got a cottage
+down the road a piece and I’ll send a boy along
+with you to show you where he lives.”</p>
+
+<p>Bill the barber and his family, which consisted of
+his wife, his mother—known as granmaw—nine children
+who had reached the age of indiscretion, and a
+baby, dwelt in a vine-clad cottage as neat as the proverbial
+beeswax and about as roomy as a limousine.</p>
+
+<p>“Sure,” said he cordially, when I had explained
+our predicament, “we’ve got slathers of room. We’ll
+fix you up and welcome. You and the lady can have
+Rosamond Clarissa’s room, and your friend here can
+have the boys’ room across the hall, and your showfer
+can sleep in Ebenezer’s bed. Me and the wife’ll fix
+ourselves up on the porch, and granmaw she’ll go
+acrost the street to a neighbour’s, and Abel and Absalom
+and David and Rosamond Clarissa and Ebenezer and
+Elisha and Gwendoline Hortensia and Hiram and
+Isaiah’ll sleep in the tent. Sure, we’ve got all the
+room you want.”</p>
+
+<p>“You must have almost as much trouble in finding
+names for your children,” the Lady remarked,
+“as the Pullman Company does in naming its sleeping-cars.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, it’s this way, ma’am,” he explained. “Me
+and maw have a sort of an agreement. She names
+the girls and gets the names out of the magazines. I
+name the boys and get the names out of the Bible.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_282"></a>[282]</span>
+She hoped that the baby’d be a girl so’s she could name
+her Patricia Penelope, but seeing as it’s a boy it’s up
+to me, and I haven’t been able to make up my mind
+yet between Jabez, Josiah, and Jeremiah.”</p>
+
+<p>Barring the fact that we were awakened at a somewhat
+unseasonable hour by a high-voiced discussion
+between Rosamond Clarissa and Gwendoline Hortensia
+as to which should have the privilege of washing
+the baby, we were very comfortable indeed—very
+much more so, I expect, than if we had been able to
+obtain quarters at the hotel—and, after a breakfast
+of berries with cream that was not milk incognito, and
+coffee, and hot cakes, and eggs that tasted as though
+they might have originated with a hen instead of a
+cold-storage vault, we rolled away with the hospitable
+barber and his brood waving us Godspeed from the
+doorstep.</p>
+
+<p>It is in the neighbourhood of two hundred and
+fifty miles from Susanville to the Oregon line, the
+earlier portion of the journey taking us through a
+forest that had evidently never known the woodsman’s
+axe. North of Dry Lake Ranch, which is the only
+place in between where a motorist can count on finding
+a bed to sleep in or a bite to eat, a grazing country of
+remarkable fertility begins, much of it having been
+taken up by Czechs from Bohemia: a stolid, sturdy,
+industrious folk who work themselves and their patient
+families and the ground unremittingly and whose
+prosperity, therefore, passes that of their more shiftless
+neighbours at a gallop. This fringe of farming<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_283"></a>[283]</span>
+communities, although in California, really mark the
+beginning of that great, rich agricultural region comprising
+the back country of Oregon which, because of
+its prosperity, its extent, and its wealth of resources, is
+known as the Inland Empire.</p>
+
+<p>A few miles beyond these Bohemian settlements
+we caught our first glimpse of Lower Klamath Lake,
+whose low and marshy shores, which lie squarely
+athwart the boundary between California and Oregon,
+forming a spring and autumn rendezvous for untold
+thousands of wild fowl, the government having set it
+aside as a sort of natural aviarium.</p>
+
+<p>“Look!” suddenly exclaimed the Lady, pointing.
+“The shores of the lake are covered with snow!”</p>
+
+<p>But what looked for all the world like an expanse
+of snow suddenly transformed itself, as we drew near,
+into a cloud of huge, ungainly birds with perfectly
+enormous bills, creating a racket like a thousand motor-cars
+with the beating of their wings.</p>
+
+<p>“Pelicans, by Jove!” exclaimed my friend, and
+that is what they were—thousands, yes, tens of thousands
+of them. The pelican, as we learned later, is
+the symbol, as it were, of all this Klamath country,
+the really beautiful hotel at Klamath Falls being
+named The White Pelican, “perhaps,” as the Lady
+observed, “because of the size of its bill.” However
+this may be, it is a very excellent hotel, indeed, and if
+you ever chance to find yourself in that part of the
+country I would advise you to spend a night there, if
+for no other reason than to enjoy the novel experience<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_284"></a>[284]</span>
+of staying in a hostelry which would do credit to Fifth
+Avenue and looking out of your window on a frontier
+town. This, mind you, is casting no aspersions on
+Klamath Falls, which is a very prosperous and wide-awake
+little place indeed, although ten years ago you
+would have had some difficulty in finding it on the map,
+its mushroom growth being due to the development of
+the immense lumber territory of which, since the completion
+of the railway, it has become the centre. As a
+matter of fact, the hotel was not built so much for the
+convenience of the traveller as it was for the comfort
+of the handful of Eastern capitalists whose great lumber
+interests necessitate their spending a considerable
+portion of the year in Klamath Falls and who demanded
+the same luxuries and conveniences in this backwoods
+town that they would have on Broadway. That
+explains why it is that in this remote settlement in
+the wilderness you can get a room furnished in cretonne
+and Circassian walnut, with a white porcelain
+bathroom opening from it, and can sit down to dinner
+at a red-shaded table in a gold-and-ivory dining-room.
+I know a man who keeps a private orchestra of thirty
+pieces, year in and year out, for his own amusement,
+but these Oregon lumber kings are the only men I
+have ever heard of who have built a great city hotel
+purely for their personal convenience.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp50" id="illus29" style="max-width: 31.25em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus29.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><p>Crater Lake: “It looks like a gigantic
+  wash-tub filled with blueing.”</p>
+  <p>A flock of young pelicans on the shores of Lower Klamath Lake.</p>
+  <p>IN THE OREGON HINTERLAND.</p></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>The late E. H. Harriman, knowing the continent
+and having the continent to choose from, built a shooting
+lodge on the shores of Upper Klamath Lake, to
+which he was wont to retreat, after the periodical<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_285"></a>[285]</span>
+strikes and railroad mergers and congressional investigations
+which punctuated his career, for rest and recreation.
+After the death of the great railway builder
+the lodge was purchased by the same group of men
+who built The White Pelican Hotel and has been converted
+into a sort of sporting resort <i>de luxe</i>. They call
+it Pelican Bay Lodge, and I know of nothing quite
+like it anywhere. It consists of perhaps a dozen log
+cabins, externally as rough as any frontiersman’s
+dwelling, but steam-heated, luxuriously furnished, and
+liberally bathtubised.</p>
+
+<p>Pelican Bay Lodge is the most convenient starting-point
+for that mountain mystery known as Crater
+Lake, which lies forty miles to the north of it and six
+thousand feet above it, in the heart of the Cascade
+Range. It took us five hours of steady running to
+cover those forty miles, and we didn’t stop to pick
+wild flowers either. The road is a very beautiful one,
+winding steadily upward through one of the finest
+pine forests on the continent. The last mile is more
+like mountaineering than motoring, however, for the
+road, in order to attain the rim of the lake, suddenly
+shoots upward at a perfectly appalling angle—I think
+they told me that at one place it had a grade of thirty-eight
+per cent—and more than once it seemed to us
+who were sitting in the tonneau that the car would
+tip over backward, like a horse that rears until it overbalances
+itself. Crater Lake is one of those places
+where the most calloused globe-trotter, from, whom
+neither the Pyramids nor the Taj Mahal would wring<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_286"></a>[286]</span>
+an exclamation of approval, gives, perforce, a gasp of
+real astonishment and admiration. Part of this is
+due, no doubt, to the startling suddenness with which
+you come upon it and to its dramatic situation; the
+rest to its surpassing beauty and its extraordinary
+colour. The lake, which occupies the crater of an extinct
+volcano the size and height of Mount Shasta, is
+almost circular, half a mile deep, five miles in circumference,
+and nearly a mile and a half above sea-level,
+the rocky walls which surround it being in places two
+thousand feet high and as sheer and smooth as the
+side of an upright piano. But its outstanding feature
+is its colour, for it is the bluest blue you ever saw or
+dreamed of: as blue as lapis lazuli, as a forget-me-not,
+as an Italian sky, as a baby’s eyes (provided, of
+course, that it is a blue-eyed baby), or as a Monday
+morning. It looks, indeed, like a gigantic wash-tub,
+filled with bluing, in which some weary colossus has
+been condemned to wash the clothing of the world.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing that we had seen since leaving Mexico so
+profoundly stirred my imagination as that portion of
+our road which stretched northward from Crater Lake,
+through Crescent and Shaniko, to The Dalles. Every
+few miles we passed groups of dilapidated and decaying
+buildings, with sunken roofs and boarded windows,
+which must once have been busy road-houses and
+stage stations, for near them were the remains of great
+barns and tumble-down corrals, now long since disused—melancholy
+reminders of those days, half a
+century agone, when down this lonely road that we<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_287"></a>[287]</span>
+were following plodded mile-long wagon-trains, the
+heads of women and children at every rent and loophole
+of the canvas tops, the men, rifle on shoulder,
+marching in the dust on either hand. Few, indeed, of
+these pioneers were rich in anything save children,
+affluent except in expectations; yet weather, roads,
+fare, mishaps—nothing daunted them, for they were
+“going West.”</p>
+
+<p>Roughly speaking, it is a hundred miles from
+Shaniko to The Dalles, over a road most of which is
+back-breakingly rough and all of which is so intolerably
+dusty that we felt as though we were covered with
+sandpaper instead of skin. But the scenery of the
+last half dozen miles caused us to forgive, if not to
+forget, the discomforts and the monotony of those
+preceding, for in them we dropped down through the
+wild and winding gorge which the Deschutes follows
+on its way to join hands with its big sister, the Columbia.
+The nearer we drew to the mighty river the higher
+our expectations grew, and every time we topped a
+rise or swung around a granite shoulder we searched
+for it eagerly, just as our migrating predecessors must
+have done. But, owing to the high, sheer cliffs that
+wall it in, we caught no glimpse of it whatever until,
+our road emerging from the cañon’s mouth upon the
+precipice’s brink, we suddenly found ourselves looking
+down upon it as it lay below us in all its shimmering
+and sinuous beauty, its silvery length winding away,
+away, away: eastward to its birthplace in the country
+of the Kootenai: westward to Astoria and its mother,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_288"></a>[288]</span>
+the sea. Far below us, so far below that it looked like
+the little wooden villages you see in the windows of
+toy stores, the white houses of The Dalles were clustered
+upon the river’s banks.</p>
+
+<p class="tb">The highroad, which had been palpably ailing for
+some time, took a sudden turn for the worse a few
+miles south of The Dalles, so that, when it found the
+great, peaceful, silent-flowing Columbia athwart its
+path, the temptation became too great to resist and it
+ended its misery in the river, leaving us, its faithful
+friends, who had borne it company all the way from
+Mexico, disconsolate upon the bank. Thus it befell
+that we were compelled to put the car and ourselves
+aboard a boat and trust to steam, instead of gasoline,
+to bear us over the ensuing section of our journey.
+It was a humiliating thing for motorists to have to do,
+of course—but what would you? There were no more
+roads. We were in the deplorable position of the man
+who told his wife that he came home because all the
+other places were closed. And think how keenly the
+veteran car—</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">“Me that ’ave been what I’ve been,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Me that ’ave gone where I’ve gone,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Me that ’ave seen what I’ve seen”</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="noindent">—must have felt the disgrace of being turned over to
+a crew of stevedores and a ruffianly, tobacco-chewing
+second mate, who unceremoniously sandwiched it
+between a pile of milk-cans and a crate of cabbages on<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_289"></a>[289]</span>
+the lower deck of a chug-achug-chugging stern-wheel
+river boat.</p>
+
+<p>But before the rickety deck chairs had ceased
+their creaking complaints about the burden we had
+imposed on them we were congratulating ourselves
+on the circumstance that had forced us to exchange a
+hot and dusty highroad for a cool and silent waterway.
+To me there is something irresistibly fascinating
+and seductive about a river. I always find myself
+wondering where it comes from, and what strange
+things it has seen along its course, and where it is going
+to, and I invariably have a hankering to take ship and
+keep it company. And the greater the stream, the
+greater its fascination, because, of course, it has travelled
+so much farther. Now the Columbia, as that
+friend of our boyhood, Huck Finn, would have put it,
+is no slouch of a river. If its kinks and twists were
+carefully straightened out it would reach half-way
+across the continent, or as far as from New York to
+Kansas City. It is somewhat disturbing for one who
+visits the valley of the Columbia for the first time,
+with the purpose of writing about it, to have these
+facts suddenly thrown, as it were, in his face, particularly
+if, like myself, he has been brought up in that
+part of the country where the Hudson is regarded as
+the only real river in America—doubtless because it
+washes the shores of Manhattan—and where all other
+waterways are looked upon as being not much better
+than creeks. I felt like apologising to somebody, and
+when, on top of all this, I was told that the Columbia<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_290"></a>[290]</span>
+and its tributaries drain a region equal in area to all the
+States along our Atlantic seaboard put together, I had
+a sudden desire to go ashore at the next landing and
+take a train back home.</p>
+
+<p>Though of British birth, for it has its source above
+the Canadian line in the country of the Kootenai, the
+Columbia emends this unfortunate circumstance by
+becoming naturalised when it is still a slender stripling,
+dividing its allegiance, however, between Oregon and
+Washington, for which it serves as a boundary for upward
+of four hundred miles. It is not only the father
+of Northwestern waters, but it is the big brother of all
+those streams, from the Straits of Behring to the Straits
+of Magellan, which call the Pacific Ocean “grandpa.”
+By white-hulled river steamer, by panting power-boat,
+by produce-laden barge, by bark canoe, by the goatskin
+raft called <i>kelek</i>, I have loitered my leisurely
+way down many famous rivers—the St. Lawrence,
+the Hudson, the Mississippi, the Fraser, the Skeena,
+the Rio Balsas, the Rhine, the Danube, the Volga, the
+Euphrates, the Ganges, the Zambesi, the Nile—and I
+assert, after having duly weighed my words, that in
+the continuity and grandeur of its scenery the Columbia
+is the superior of them all. If you think that I am carried
+away by enthusiasm you had better go and see
+it for yourself.</p>
+
+<p>It was Carlyle—was it not?—who remarked that
+all great works produce an unpleasant impression on
+first acquaintance. It is so with the Columbia. We
+saw it first on a broiling August day from the heights<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_291"></a>[291]</span>
+above Celilo—the great, silent, mysterious river winding
+away into the unknown between banks of lava as
+sinister and forbidding as the flanks of Etna, and with
+a sun beating down upon it from a sky of molten brass.
+There were no grassy banks, no trees, no flowers, no
+vegetation of any kind, none of the things that one
+usually associates with a river. But when the steamer
+bears you around the first of those frowning cliffs
+that rise sheer from the surface of the river below The
+Dalles—ah, well, that is quite another matter.</p>
+
+<p>Since Time began, the sheets of lava which give
+The Dalles its name, by compressing the half-mile-wide
+river into a channel barely sixscore feet across,
+have effectually obstructed continuous navigation upon
+the Upper Columbia. But, as towns multiplied and
+population increased along the upper reaches of the
+great river and its tributaries in Washington and
+Oregon, in Montana and Idaho, this hinderance to the
+navigation of so splendid a waterway became intolerable,
+unthinkable, absurd. At last the frock-coated
+gentlemen in Congress were prodded into action, and
+the passage of a bill for the construction of a canal
+around The Dalles, at Celilo, was the result. Came
+then keen-eyed, self-reliant men who, jeering at the
+obstacles which Nature had heaped in their path,
+proceeded to slash a canal through eight miles of shifting
+sands and basalt rock, so that hereafter the fruit
+growers and farmers and ranchers as far inland as
+Lewiston, in Idaho, can send their produce down to
+the sea in ships.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_292"></a>[292]</span></p>
+
+<p>“The trouble with the Columbia,” complained
+the Lady, “is that it’s all scenery and no romance.
+It’s too big, too prosaic, too commercial. It doesn’t
+arouse any overwhelming enthusiasm in me to be told
+that this river irrigates goodness knows how many
+thousand square miles of land, or that the top of that
+mountain over there is so many thousand feet above
+the level of the sea, or that so many thousand barrels
+of apples were grown last year in the valley we just
+passed and that they brought so many dollars a barrel.
+Facts like those are all well enough in an almanac,
+because no one ever reads almanacs anyway, but they
+don’t interest me and I don’t believe that they interest
+many other visitors, either. If a river hasn’t any romance
+connected with it, it isn’t much better than a
+canal. Don’t you remember that rock in the Bosphorus,
+near Scutari, to which Leander used to swim out
+to see Hero, and how when we passed it the passengers
+would all rush over to that side of the deck, and how
+the steamer would list until her rail was almost under
+water, and how the Turkish officers would get frightened
+half to death and shove the people back? You
+don’t see the passengers on this boat threatening to
+capsize it because of their anxiety to see something
+romantic, do you? I should say not. Do you remember
+Kerbela, that town on the Euphrates, where all
+Persians hope to be buried when they die, and how,
+long before we reached there, we could smell the
+Caravans of the Dead which were carrying the bodies
+there from across the desert? And those crumbling,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_293"></a>[293]</span>
+ivy-covered castles along the Rhine, with their queer
+legends and traditions and superstitions? That’s
+what I mean by romance, and you know as well as I
+do that there is nothing romantic about apple orchards
+and salmon canneries and sawmills. Is there?”</p>
+
+<p>“Pardon me, madam,” said a gentleman who had
+been seated so close to us that he could not help overhearing
+what she said and who had been unable to
+conceal his disagreement with the views she had expressed,
+“but do you see that island over there near
+the Washington shore? The long, low one with the
+little white monument sticking up at the end of it.
+That is Memaloose—the Island of the Dead. It is
+the Indian Valhalla. Talk about the Persians whose
+bodies are borne across the desert to be buried at Kerbela!
+Did you happen to know that on the slopes of
+that island are buried untold thousands of Chinooks,
+whose bodies were brought on the backs of men hundreds
+of miles through the wilderness or in canoes
+down long and lonely rivers that they might find their
+last resting-places in its sacred soil? And the monument
+that you see marks the grave of a frontiersman
+who was as romantic a character as you will find in
+the pages of Fenimore Cooper. His name was Victor
+Trevet; he knew and liked the Indians; and he asked
+to be buried on Memaloose that his bones might lie
+among those of ‘honest men.’ Is it legend and tradition
+that you say the river lacks? A few miles ahead
+of us, at the Cascades, the river was once spanned, according
+to the Indian legend, by a stupendous natural<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_294"></a>[294]</span>
+bridge of rock. The Indians called it the Bridge of the
+Gods. The great river flowed under it, and on it lived
+a witch woman named Loowit, who had charge of the
+only fire in the world. Seeing how wretched was the
+lot of the fireless tribes, who had to live on uncooked
+meats and vegetables, she begged permission of the
+gods to give them fire. Her request was granted and
+the condition of the Indians was thus enormously
+improved. So gratified were the gods by Loowit’s
+consideration for the welfare of the Indians that they
+promised to grant any request that she might make.
+Womanlike, she promptly asked for youth and beauty.
+Whereupon she was transformed into a maiden whose
+loveliness would have caused Lina Cavalieri to go out
+of the professional beauty business. The news of her
+beauty spreading among the tribes like fire in summer
+grass, there came numberless youths who pleaded for
+her hand, or, rather, for the face and figure that went
+with it. Among them were two young chieftains:
+Klickitat from the north and Wiyeast from the west.
+As she was unable to decide between them, they and
+their tribesmen decided to settle the rivalry with the
+tomahawk. But the gods, angry at this senseless waste
+of lives over a pretty woman, put Loowit and her two
+gentlemen friends to death and sent the great bridge
+on which she had dwelt crashing down into the river.
+But as they had all three been good to look upon in
+life, so the gods, who were evidently æsthetic, made
+them good to look upon even in death by turning them
+into snow peaks. Wiyeast became the mountain which<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_295"></a>[295]</span>
+we palefaces call Mount Hood; Klickitat they transformed
+into the peak we know as Mount Adams; while
+Mount Saint Helens is the beautiful form taken by the
+fair Loowit. Thus was the wonderful Bridge of the
+Gods destroyed and the Columbia dammed by the
+débris which fell into it. In a few minutes we will be
+at the Cascades and you can see the ruins of the bridge
+for yourself. And, if you still have any lingering doubts
+as to the truth of the story, why, there is Klickitat in
+his white blanket rising above the forests to the right,
+and Wiyeast is over there to your left, and ahead of
+us, down the river, is the Loowit lady disguised as
+Mount Saint Helens. So you see there is no room for
+doubt.</p>
+
+<p>“You assert that the Columbia is lacking in romance
+because, forsooth, no Leander has swum across
+it to see a Hero. Good heavens, my dear young lady,
+I can tell you a story that has more all-wool-and-a-yard-wide
+romance in it than a dozen such Hellespontine
+fables. Did you never hear of Whitman the missionary,
+who, instead of crossing a measly strait to
+win a woman, crossed a continent and won an empire?</p>
+
+<p>“In the early forties Whitman established a mission
+station near the present site of Walla Walla. Hearing
+rumours that our government was on the point of accommodatingly
+ceding the Valley of the Columbia to
+England in return for some paltry fishing rights off
+the banks of Newfoundland—the government officials
+of those days evidently preferred codfish to salmon—he
+rode overland to Washington in the dead of winter,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_296"></a>[296]</span>
+through blinding snow-storms, swimming icy rivers,
+subsisting on his pack-mules and his dogs when his
+food ran out, facing death by torture at the hands of
+hostile Indians. Gaining admission to the White
+House in his dress of furs and buckskin, with his feet
+and fingers terribly frozen, he so impressed President
+Tyler and Secretary of State Webster by his vivid
+description of the richness and fertility of the region
+which they were on the point of ceding to England
+that he saved the entire Pacific Northwest to the
+Union. If that isn’t sufficient romance for you, then
+I’m afraid you’re hard to please.”</p>
+
+<p>“I surrender,” said the Lady. “Your old Columbia
+has plenty of romance, after all. The trouble is
+that tourists don’t know these interesting things that
+you’ve just been telling us and they <i>do</i> know all about
+the Danube and the Rhine.”</p>
+
+<p>“That’s easily remedied,” said I. “I’ll tell them
+about it myself.”</p>
+
+<p>And that, my friends, is precisely what I have
+just been trying to do.</p>
+
+<p class="tb">“Next stop Hood River!” bawled the purser.</p>
+
+<p>“That’s where the apples come from,” remarked
+our deck acquaintance, who had turned himself into a
+guide-book for our benefit. “In some of the orchards
+up the valley you’ll find apples with paper letters
+pasted on them: ‘C de P’ for the Café de Paris, you
+know, and ‘W-A’ for the Waldorf-Astoria, and ‘G R
+&amp; I’ for Georgius Rex et Imperator—which is <i>not</i> the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_297"></a>[297]</span>
+name of the restaurant. They paste the letters on
+quite carefully when the apples are still green upon
+the tree, and when they ripen the paper is torn off,
+leaving the yellow initials on the bright red fruit.
+Those are the apples that they serve at royal banquets
+and that they charge a dollar apiece for in the smart
+restaurants in Europe. I don’t mean to imply that
+all of the Hood River apples are thus initialled to order,
+but some of them are. The average value of the land
+in that valley, cultivated and uncultivated, is three
+hundred and forty dollars an acre, and if a man wanted
+to purchase an orchard in bearing he would have to
+pay at least four thousand dollars an acre for it. Some
+people think that it was the original Garden of Eden.
+If it was, I don’t blame Eve for stealing the apple.
+I’d steal a Hood River apple myself if I got the chance.”</p>
+
+<p>Had the second mate been a little more obliging,
+and had there not been so formidable a barricade of
+crates and milk cans about the car, I would have had
+it run ashore then and there and would have taken a
+whirl through the famous apple orchards which cover
+the lower slopes of Mount Hood and have kept on up
+the zigzag mountain road as far as the cosy little
+hostelry called Cloud Cap Inn, which some public-spirited
+Portlander has built upon the snow-line. Perhaps
+it was just as well we didn’t, however, for I learned
+afterward that the famous valley is only about twenty
+miles long, so, if we had not put on the emergency
+brake before we started, we would have run through it
+before we could have stopped and would not have seen<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_298"></a>[298]</span>
+it at all. Nowhere in Switzerland do I recall a picture
+of such surpassing splendour as that which stood before
+us, as though on a titanic easel, as, from the vantage
+of the steamer’s upper deck, we looked up the vista
+formed by this fragrant, verdant valley toward the
+great white cone of Mount Hood. It is, indeed, so
+very beautiful that those Americans who know and
+love the world’s white rooftrees can find scant justification
+for turning their faces toward the Alps when
+here, in the upper left-hand corner of their own country,
+are mountains which would make the ghost of the
+great Whymper moan for an alpenstock and hobnailed
+boots. This startlingly sudden transition from
+orchards groaning with fruit to dense primeval forests,
+and from these forests to the stately, isolated snow
+peaks, is very different from Switzerland, of course.
+Indeed, to compare these mountains of the Pacific
+Northwest with the Alps, as is so frequently done,
+seems to me to be a grave injustice to them both. The
+Alps form a wild and angry sea of icy mountains, and
+we have nothing in America to which they can be fittingly
+compared. The Cascades, on the other hand,
+form a great system of lofty forest-wrapped ranges
+surmounted by the towering isolated peaks of snowy
+volcanoes, and Europe contains nothing to equal them.
+I am perfectly aware, of course, that the very large
+number of Americans who spend their summers in the
+ascent of the orthodox Swiss peaks—more often than
+not, if the truth were known, by means of funicular
+railways or through telescopes on hotel piazzas—look<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_299"></a>[299]</span>
+with scorn and contumely upon these mountains of
+the far Nor’west, which they regard as home-made and
+unfashionable and vulgar and not worth bothering
+about. Perhaps they are not aware, however, that no
+less an authority on mountaineering than James Bryce
+(I don’t recall the title that he has taken now that he
+has been made a peer, and no one would recognise him
+if I used it) said not long ago, in speaking of these sentinels
+that guard the Columbia:</p>
+
+<p>“We have nothing more beautiful in Switzerland
+or Tyrol, in Norway or the Pyrenees. The combination
+of ice scenery with woodland scenery of the
+grandest type is to be found nowhere in the Old World,
+unless it be in the Himalayas, and, so far as we know,
+nowhere else on the American continent.”</p>
+
+<p>Which but serves to point the truth that foreigners
+are more appreciative of the beauties and grandeurs
+of our country than we are ourselves.</p>
+
+<p class="tb">At the Cascades the Columbia takes a drop of
+half a hundred feet and we had, perforce, to bide our
+time in the locks, by means of which the rapids have
+been circumvented, until the waters found their level.
+It is not until the Cascades are passed that the scenery
+for which the Columbia is famous begins in all its
+sublimity and grandeur. The Great Artist has painted
+pictures more colourful, more sensational, perhaps, as
+the Grand Cañon, for example, the Yellowstone, and
+the Sahara, but none which combines the qualities of
+strength and restfulness as this mighty river, flowing<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_300"></a>[300]</span>
+swiftly, silently between the everlasting hills. From
+the shores the orchards and the gardens rise, terrace
+above terrace, until they become merged in the forest-covered
+ranges, and above the ranges rise the august
+snow peaks, solitary, silent, like a line of sentries strung
+along the horizon. At times, particularly in the early
+morning and again at sunset, these snow mountains
+present that singular appearance familiar to the traveller
+in the Himalayas and the Cordilleras, when the
+snowy cone seems to be floating ethereally upon a sea
+of mist which completely shrouds the hills and forests
+at its base. Immediately below the Cascades commences
+the series of waterfalls for which the lower
+reaches of the Columbia are famous, the granite cliffs
+which, for nearly twoscore miles border the Oregon
+shore with a sheer wall of rock, being scored at frequent
+intervals by what seem, from a distance, to be
+ribbons of shining silver. As the boat draws nearer,
+however, you see that what looked like ribbons are
+really mountain streams which are so impatient to
+join their mother, the Columbia, that, instead of taking
+the more sedate but circuitous route, they fling themselves
+tempestuously over the brink of the sheer cliff
+into the arms of the parent stream. First come the
+Horsetail Falls, whose falling waters, blown by the
+wind into silvery strands, are suggestive of the flowing
+tail of a white Arab; then, in quick succession, the
+Oneonta Falls, at the end of a narrow gorge which
+penetrates the cliffs for a mile or more; the nine-hundred-feet-high
+Multnomah, the highest falls in all
+the northwest country if not, indeed, on the entire<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_301"></a>[301]</span>
+Pacific Coast; the Bridal Veil, as radiantly beautiful
+as its namesake of the Yosemite; and finally, just
+below the great monolith rising from the river known
+as Rooster Rock, the Falls of Latourelle. On the opposite
+shore the mighty promontory known as Cape
+Horn rises five hundred feet above the surface of the
+river, and, a few miles farther up-stream, Castle Rock,
+whose turreted crags bear a striking resemblance to
+some stronghold of the Middle Ages, attains to twice
+that height. By the time the steamer reaches the
+mighty natural gateway known as the Pillars of Hercules,
+the traveller is actually surfeited with grandeur
+and is quite ready for the simple, friendly, pastoral
+scenes again, just as one after a season of Wagnerian
+opera welcomes the simple airs and the old-fashioned
+songs.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus30" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus30.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><p>“WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON.”</p>
+  <p>The Columbia from Saint Peter’s Dome, with Mount Adams in the distance.
+  “The Great Artist has painted pictures more colorful, more sensational,
+  perhaps, but none which so combine the qualities of strength and
+  restfulness as this mighty river.”</p></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>As I do not chew popcorn, peanuts, gum, or candy,
+nor munch dripping ice-cream cones, and as I have an
+unconquerable aversion to other people doing those
+unpleasant things in my immediate vicinity, I left the
+others, who did not seem to mind such minor annoyances,
+among the excursionists upon the upper deck
+and made my way below. After clambering over great
+piles of crates, sacks, and barrels filled with Columbia
+River produce, I finally succeeded in finding a secluded
+spot in the vessel’s bows, whence I could watch, undisturbed
+by sticky-fingered youngsters or idle chatter,
+the varied commerce of the mighty water road. Stern-wheel,
+twin-funnelled passenger boats zigzagged from
+shore to shore to pick up the passengers and freight
+that patiently awaited their coming; rusty freighters<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_302"></a>[302]</span>
+scuttled down-stream laden with fruit for the coast
+towns and salmon for the Astoria canneries; spick-and-span
+pleasure craft, with shining brass work
+and graceful, tapering spars, daintily picked their way
+through the press of river traffic as a pretty girl picks
+her way along a crowded street; grimy fishing craft,
+their sails as weather-beaten as the faces of the men
+that raise them, danced by us, eager for home and
+supper and the evening fire; great log rafts wallowed
+by, sent down by the forests to propitiate the greedy
+sawmills, whose sharp-toothed jaws devour the sacrifice
+and scream for more.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps the most interesting and characteristic
+feature of the landscape along the lower Columbia
+are the fish-wheels—ingenious contrivances, twenty
+to forty feet in diameter and six to eight feet across,
+which look like pocket editions of the passenger-carrying
+Ferris wheel at the Chicago Exposition. The
+wheels, which are hung in substantial frameworks
+close to the banks, where the salmon run the thickest,
+are revolved by the current, which keeps the wire-meshed
+scoops with which each pair of spokes are fitted
+for ever lifting from the water. The great schools of
+salmon are guided toward the wheel by means of a lattice
+dam which reaches out into the river like the arm
+of a false friend, and, before the unsuspecting fish
+know what has happened to them, they are hoisted
+into the air in the wire scoops and dumped into an
+inclined trough, down which they slide into a fenced-in
+pool, where the fishermen can get them at their leisure.
+They are then strung on wires and attached to a barrel<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_303"></a>[303]</span>
+which acts as a buoy, the barrel, sometimes with a ton
+of fish trailing behind it like the tail to a kite, floating
+down-stream to the nearest cannery, where a man in a
+launch is on the lookout and tows them ashore.
+Months later, in Pekin or Peoria, in Rome or Rumford
+Falls, or wherever else you may happen to be dining,
+you will see the item “Columbia River Salmon”
+on the hotel menu.</p>
+
+<p>As I hung over the steamer’s bow, with the incomparable
+landscape slipping past me as though on
+Burton Holmes’s picture screen, and no sound save
+the muffled throbbing of the engines and the ripple of
+the water running aft along the hull, I unconsciously
+yielded to the Columbia’s mystic spell. I closed my
+eyes and in a moment the surface of the river seemed
+peopled with the ghosts of the history makers. Nez
+Percés, in paint and feathers, slipped silently along,
+in the shadow of yonder wooded bank, in their barken
+war canoes. Two lean and sun-bronzed white men,
+clad in the fringed buckskin of the adventuring frontiersman,
+floated past me down the mighty stream
+which they had trekked across a continent to find.
+Half-breed trappers, chanting at the paddles, descended
+with precious freights of fur. A square-rigged merchantman
+poked its inquisitive bowsprit around a
+rocky headland, and as she passed I noted the words
+<i>Columbia, of Boston</i>, in raised gilt letters on her stern,
+and I remembered that it was from this same square-rigged
+vessel that the river took its name. A warship,
+flying the flag of England and with the black muzzles
+of guns peering from its rows of ports, cautiously<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_304"></a>[304]</span>
+ascended, the leadsmen in the shrouds sounding for
+river bars. Log forts and trading-posts and mission
+stations once again crowned the encircling hills. Forgotten
+battles blew by on the evening breeze. A yellow
+dust cloud rose above the river bank and out of it
+emerged a plodding wagon-train. The smoke of pioneer
+camp-fires spiralled skyward from those rich valleys
+where in reality the cattle browse and the orchards
+droop with fruit. From the vantage of a rocky promontory
+a ghostly war party peered down upon me—a
+paleface—taking a summer’s holiday along that mighty
+stream upon whose bosom of old went forth the bepainted
+fighting men. The furtive twilight slipped
+behind night’s velvet curtain. The mountains changed
+from jade to coral, from coral to sapphire, from sapphire
+to amethyst. The snow peaks gleamed luminously,
+like sheeted ghosts, against the purple velvet of
+the sky. The night-breeze rose and I shivered. The
+steamer swung silently around a bend in the river
+and, all suddenly, the darkness ahead was sprinkled
+with a million blinking fireflies. At least they looked
+like fireflies.</p>
+
+<p>“Portland!” shouted a raucous voice, far off
+somewhere, on the upper deck. “Portland! All
+ashore!”</p>
+
+<p>I felt a hand upon my shoulder. It was the Lady.</p>
+
+<p>“Where on earth have you been?” she asked.
+“We have been hunting for you everywhere.”</p>
+
+<p>“I’ve been on a long journey,” said I.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_305"></a>[305]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XI">XI<br>
+<span class="smaller">A FRONTIER ARCADY</span></h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_306"></a>[306]</span></p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">“Oh, woods of the West, I am sighing to-day</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">For the sea songs your voices repeat,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">For the evergreen glades, for the glades far away</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">From the stifling air of the street.</div>
+  </div>
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">“And I long, ah, I long to be with you again,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">And to dream in that region of rest,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Forever apart from this warring of men—</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Oh, wonderful woods of the West.”</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_307"></a>[307]</span></p>
+
+<h3>XI<br>
+<span class="smaller">A FRONTIER ARCADY</span></h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>“<i>Arcady—the home of piping shepherds and coy shepherdesses,
+where rustic simplicity and plenty satisfied the ambition of untutored
+hearts and where ambition and its crimes were unknown.</i>”</p>
+
+<p>Some pamphlet writer with a gift for turning
+phrases has called Oregon “The Land That Lures.”
+And, so far as home and fortune seekers are concerned,
+it is. Whether it is the spirit of romance that our
+people have always associated with the great Northwest;
+whether it is the glamour of its booming rivers
+and its silent, axe-ripe forests or the appeal of its soft
+and balmy climate; or whether it is the extraordinary
+opportunities it offers for the acquirement of modest
+fortunes before one is too old to enjoy them, I do not
+know, but the undeniable fact remains that no region
+between the Portlands exercises so irresistible a fascination
+for the man who knows the trick of coaxing a
+fortune from the soil as this great, rich, hospitable,
+unfenced, forest-and-mountain-and-stream, meadow-and-orchard-and-home
+land that stretches from the
+Columbia south to the Siskiyous. It may be that
+California holds more attractions for the man who has
+already made his fortune, but certainly Oregon is the
+place to make the fortune in. No Western State is
+essentially less “Western” in the accepted sense of the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_308"></a>[308]</span>
+term. This is due in part, no doubt, to the fact that
+it has been longer settled by Americans than any other
+portion of the Pacific Coast. Portland was a thriving
+city, remember, when St. Paul and Minneapolis were
+little more than trading-posts on the frontier. Settlers
+from the Atlantic seaboard and from the Middle
+West find themselves, upon reaching Oregon, in the
+midst of “home folks” and all the friendly, kindly,
+homely things that the term implies: ice-cream sociables
+and grange meetings and church picnics and
+literary societies and debating clubs and county fairs.
+The name of the State capital is inseparably associated
+with Puritan New England, one of its largest cities is
+named after the Massachusetts town which gave its
+name to rum, and I can show you a score of towns
+whose peaceful, elm-shaded streets and white-porticoed,
+red-brick houses might almost—but hot quite—deceive
+you into thinking that you are in Cooperstown,
+N. Y., or Newburyport, Mass., or Biddeford, Me.
+Almost, as I have said, but not quite, for all of
+these Oregonian towns, despite the staidness and sobriety
+of their appearance, are animated by an enthusiasm,
+an up-to-dateness, by an unshakable faith
+in their future, that is essentially a characteristic of
+the West.</p>
+
+<p>The orthodox way of entering Oregon from the
+south is by way of Ashland, Medford, and Grant’s
+Pass, and so northward, through Roseburg and Eugene
+and Albany and Salem, to Portland. But, as I have
+related in the preceding chapter, we deliberately chose<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_309"></a>[309]</span>
+the back-stairs route, crossing the California-Oregon
+line at Klamath Lake and motoring northward, along
+the trail of the Lewis and Clark expedition, via Crater
+Lake and the valley of the Deschutes to The Dalles,
+and thence down the Columbia to Portland. We
+prided ourselves on having thus obtained an extraordinarily
+comprehensive idea of the State and its resources,
+not to mention having traversed a region
+which is quite inaccessible to the tourist unless he
+travels, as we did, by motor-car, but when we came
+to talk with some people from western Oregon we found
+that we didn’t know nearly as much about the State
+as we thought we did.</p>
+
+<p>“How did you find the roads in the Willamette
+Valley?” inquired a friend with whom we were dining
+one night in Portland.</p>
+
+<p>“We haven’t seen the Willamette Valley,” I explained.
+“You see, we came round the other way.”</p>
+
+<p>“I suppose you’ve been down to Salem, though—nice
+city, Salem.”</p>
+
+<p>“No,” I was forced to admit, “we haven’t been to
+Salem.”</p>
+
+<p>“What did you think of the Marble Halls?
+Many people claim they’re finer than the Mammoth
+Cave.”</p>
+
+<p>“The Marble Halls? Where are they? What are
+they? I never heard of them.”</p>
+
+<p>“I suppose you had some fine fishing in the Grant’s
+Pass country. I hear that the trout are running big
+down there this season.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_310"></a>[310]</span></p>
+
+<p>“No, we didn’t come through Grant’s Pass.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, you surely don’t mean to tell me that you
+didn’t visit the Rogue River Valley—the apple-cellar
+of the world?”</p>
+
+<p>“Sorry to say we didn’t.”</p>
+
+<p>“Nor the valley of the Umpqua?”</p>
+
+<p>“No.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” after a long and painful pause, “what in
+the name of Heaven <i>have</i> you seen?”</p>
+
+<p>“I think,” said I, turning to the others, “that the
+thing for us to do is to turn the car south again and see
+Oregon. Else we shall never be able to hold up our
+heads and look an Oregonian in the eye. The thousand
+miles or so of the State that we’ve just come through
+apparently don’t count.”</p>
+
+<p>Though I made the remark facetiously, it contained
+a good-sized germ of truth. Just now the back
+country of Oregon, the hinterland, as our Teutonic
+friends would call it, doesn’t count for very much. It
+is going to count tremendously, mind you, in the not
+far distant future, when the railroads now under construction
+have opened it up to civilisation and commerce
+and when it is settled by the European hordes
+that will pour into it through the gateway of Panama.
+As things stand at present, however, the wealth and
+prosperity of Oregon are concentrated in that comparatively
+narrow but incredibly fertile zone which lies
+between the sea and the mile-high mountain wall formed
+by the Cascades, and whose farms and orchards are
+watered by the Willamette, the Umpqua, and the Rogue.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_311"></a>[311]</span></p>
+
+<p>It was one of those autumn days so characteristic
+of the Pacific Northwest, which seem to be a combination
+of an Italian June and a Devonshire September,
+when we slipped out of Portland’s rush and bustle and
+turmoil and turned our front tires toward the south and
+the open country. For a dozen miles or more our
+road, built high on the hill slope above the broad
+reaches of the lower Willamette, commanded as entrancing
+a vista of beautiful homes as I have ever seen.
+For six solid miles south of Portland the banks of the
+Willamette are bordered by country houses of shingle,
+stone, and stucco, rising from the most beautiful
+rose gardens this side of Persia (Portland, you know,
+is called “The City of Roses”) and with shaven lawns
+sweeping gently down, like unrolled carpets, to the
+river’s edge. Through gaps in the screen of shrubbery
+which lines the highway we caught fleeting glimpses,
+as we whirled past, of vine-covered garages housing
+shiny motor-cars, while along the river front were
+moored lean power-boats, every line of them bespeaking
+speed, for those who are fortunate enough—and wealthy
+enough—to own homes upon the Willamette are able
+to run in to their offices in the city either by road or
+river. Far in the distance the Fujiyama-like cone of
+Mount Saint Helens rose above the miles of intervening
+forest, and, farther to the southward, the hoary head
+of Mount Hood. About this portion of residential
+Portland which lies along the banks of the Willamette
+there is a suggestion of the Thames near Hampton
+Court, a hint of the Seine near Saint Cloud, a subtle<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_312"></a>[312]</span>
+reminder of those residences which have been built by
+the rich of Budapest along the Danube, but most of
+all it recalls Stockholm. This is due, I suppose, to the
+proximity of the forests which surround the city, to
+the snow-capped mountains which loom up behind
+them, and to the ever-present scent of balsam in the
+air.</p>
+
+<p>It is fifty miles or thereabout from Portland to
+Salem, which is the capital of the State, and when the
+roads are dry you can leave one city after an early
+dinner and reach the other before the theatre curtains
+have gone up for the first act. After a rain, however,
+it is a different matter altogether, for the roads, which
+leave a great deal to be desired, are for the most part
+of red clay, and so slippery that a car, even with chains
+on all four wheels, slips and slides and staggers like a
+Scotchman going home after celebrating the birthday
+of Robert Burns. Salem is as pleasing to the eye as a
+certified cheque. It is asphalted and electric-lighted
+and landscaped to the very limit. Though the residential
+architecture of the city shows unmistakable
+traces of the influence of both Queen Anne and Mary
+Anne, their artistic deficiencies are more than counter-balanced
+by the pleasant, shady lawns and the broad,
+hospitable piazzas, which seem to say to the passer-by:
+“Come right up, friend, and sit down and make yourself
+to home.” That’s the most striking characteristic
+of the place—hospitality.</p>
+
+<p>The gates of the State Fair were thrown open the
+same day that we arrived in Salem, though I do not<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_313"></a>[313]</span>
+wish to be understood as intimating that the two events
+bore any relation to each other. Now, a fair is generally
+a pretty reliable index to the agricultural condition
+of a region. The first thing that strikes the visitor
+upon entering the gates of a New England fair is the
+extraordinary number of ramshackle, mud-stained,
+“democrat” wagons lined up along the fence, the horses
+munching contentedly in their nose-bags. The first
+thing that struck me as we entered the grounds of the
+Oregon State Fair was the extraordinary number of
+shiny new automobiles. Save en route to a Vanderbilt
+Cup Race, I don’t recall ever having seen so many
+motor-cars on one stretch of road as we encountered
+on our way to the fair-grounds. They made a noise
+like the droning of a billion bumblebees. Though
+there was, of course, a preponderance of little cars,
+there were also any number of big six-cylinder seven-passenger
+machines, for your Oregonian is nothing if
+not up to the minute. Instead of jogging in from the
+farm in rattletrap wagons, they came tearing down
+the pike in shiny, spick-and-span automobiles; pa at the
+steering-wheel, hat on the back of his head and whiskers
+streaming, ma in her new bonnet sitting proudly beside
+him, and grandma and the youngsters filling up the
+tonneau. It did my heart good to see them. There is
+an intangible something about a motor-car that seems
+to give the most hidebound old farmer in the community
+a new lease of life. A year or so ago a weekly magazine
+published a picture of a group of cars at some rural
+gathering in the Northwest, and unwisely labelled it:<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_314"></a>[314]</span>
+“Where the old cars go to.” It elicited a wave of
+indignant letters from automobile dealers and automobile
+owners in that section of the country that made
+the editor feel as though he had stepped on a charged
+wire. That gentleman learned, at the cost of several
+cancelled subscriptions, that, wherever else the second-hand
+cars go, they certainly do not go to the Northwest,
+whose people might well take as their motto:
+“The best is none too good for us.”</p>
+
+<p>Your Oregonian farmer, unlike his fellows in the
+older, colder States, is neither hidebound nor conservative.
+He has no kinship with the bewhiskered, bebooted,
+by-gum and by-gosh hayseed made familiar
+by the comic papers and the bucolic dramas. Instead
+of shying from a new-fangled device as a horse does
+from a steam roller, he promptly gives it a trial and,
+if it makes good, he adopts it. He milks his cows and
+makes his butter by electricity, orders his groceries
+from the nearest town and asks for the baseball score
+by telephone, goes to church and to market in his
+motor-car, and passes his evenings with the aid of a
+circulating library, a pianola, and a phonograph. It
+did not take me long to find out that Oregon is as progressive
+agriculturally as it is politically. If the farmer
+does not succeed in Oregon it is because he has been
+hypnotised by those siren sisters, Obstinacy and Laziness;
+for if he is ignorant, the State stands ready to
+educate him; if he is perplexed, it stands ready to
+advise him; and if he gets into trouble, it stands ready
+to assist him. In other words, it wants him to make<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_315"></a>[315]</span>
+good, and it isn’t the fault of the State if he does not.
+For this purpose it maintains, in addition to the State
+Agricultural College at Corvallis, which is one of the
+most completely equipped institutions of its kind in
+the world, six experimental farms which are geographically
+distributed so as to meet practically every condition
+of agriculture found in Oregon. Two extensive
+demonstration farms are maintained, moreover, by
+business interests, and there is an enormous amount
+of agricultural co-operative work among the farmers
+themselves, so that if a man is in doubt as to whether
+he had better go in for Jerseys or Holsteins, for White
+Wyandottes or Plymouth Rocks, for Spitzenbergs or
+Newtown Pippins, all he has to do to obtain expert
+advice is to ask for it.</p>
+
+<p>It is an undeniable fact that at most fairs in the
+East, and at a great many in the West, for that matter,
+the wheel-of-fortune, the ring-and-cane, and the
+three-balls-for-a-dime-and-your-money-back-if-you-hit-the-coon
+concessionaires, the fat woman, the living skeleton,
+the bearded lady, and the wild man from Borneo, to
+say nothing of the raucous-voiced venders of ice-cold-lemonade-made-in-the-shade
+and red-hot-coney-islands-only-a-nickel-half-a-dime,
+serve to distract both the
+attention and the shekels of the rural visitors from the
+legitimate exhibits. It seemed to me that the farmers
+and fruit growers who came pouring into the Salem
+fair were there for purposes of education rather than
+recreation. They seemed to take the fair seriously and
+with the idea of obtaining all the information and suggestions<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_316"></a>[316]</span>
+that they could from it. Eager, attentive
+groups surrounded the lecturers from the State Agricultural
+College and constantly interrupted them with
+intelligent, penetrating queries as to soils, grafting,
+fertilisers, insect sprays, and the like, while out in the
+long cattle sheds the men who are growing rich from
+milk and butter talked of Aaggie Arethusa Korndyke
+Koningen Colantha Clothilde Netherland Pietertje’s
+Queen of the Dairy IV and of Alban Albino Segis Pontiac
+Johann Hengerveld’s Monarch of the Meadows
+(the bearer of this last resonant title proving, upon
+investigation, to be a wabbly-kneed three-weeks-old
+calf) as casually as a New Yorker would refer to Connie
+Mack or Caruso or John Drew.</p>
+
+<p>We went to the fair, as I have already intimated,
+for the primary purpose of getting a line on rural conditions
+as they exist in Oregon; but that did not prevent
+us from doing things which visitors to county
+fairs have done ever since county fairs began. We tossed
+rings—three-for-a-dime-step-right-this-way-and-try-your-luck-ladies-and-gents—over
+a bed of cane heads so temptingly thick that it seemed it would be only
+by a miracle that you could miss one, and after spending
+a dollar in rings the Lady won a bamboo walking-stick
+which she could have bought for ten cents almost
+anywhere and which she didn’t have the remotest use
+for, anyway. We tried our luck at breaking clay pipes
+in the shooting-gallery, and, in spite of the fact that
+the sights on my rifle had been deliberately hammered
+a quarter of an inch out of line, I succeeded in winning<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_317"></a>[317]</span>
+three dubious-looking cigars, to the proprietor’s very
+great astonishment. Had I smoked them I should not
+have survived to write this story. Then we leaned over
+the pig-pens and poked the pink, fat hogs with the
+yard-sticks which some enterprising advertiser had
+forced upon us; in the art department we gravely
+admired the cross-stitched mottoes bearing such virtuous
+sentiments as, “Virtue Is Its Own Reward,” and
+“There’s No Place Like Home,” and the water-colour
+studies of impossible fruit perpetrated “by Jane Maria
+Simpkins, aged eleven years.” Then we went over to
+the race-track and hung over the rail and became as
+excited over the result of the 2.40 free-for-all as we used
+to be in the old days at Morris Park before the anti-racing
+bill became a law. In fact, I surreptitiously
+wagered a dollar with an itinerant book-maker on a
+sixteen-to-one shot, on the ground that, as the horse
+had the same name as the Lady, it would surely prove
+a winner—and lost. Not until dark settled down and
+the lights of the homeward-bound cars had turned the
+highway into an excellent imitation of the Chicago
+freight yards did we climb into the tonneau again,
+sticky and dusty and tired, and tell the driver to “hit
+it up for the nearest hotel.”</p>
+
+<p>From Salem to Eugene, down the pretty and well-wooded
+valley of the Willamette, is seventy odd miles
+as the motor goes, and the scenery throughout every
+mile of the distance looks exactly like those pictures
+you see on bill-boards advertising Swiss chocolate or
+condensed milk—I forget which: black cows with<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_318"></a>[318]</span>
+white spots, or white cows with black spots, grazing
+contentedly on emerald hillsides, with white mountains
+sticking up behind; rivers meandering through lush,
+green meadows; white farmhouses with red roofs and
+neat, green blinds peering out between the mathematically
+arranged orchard rows. But always there are
+the orchards. No matter how wide you open your
+throttle, no matter how high your speedometer needle
+climbs, you can’t escape them. They border the road
+on both sides, for mile after mile after mile, and in the
+spring, when they are in blossom, the countryside looks
+as though it had been struck by a snow-storm—and
+smells like Roger &amp; Gallet’s perfumery works.</p>
+
+<p>When I visited the Southwest the horny-handed
+farmer folk would meet me when I stepped from the
+train and whirl me incredible distances across the
+desert to show me a patch of alfalfa—“the finest patch
+of alfalfa, by jingo, in the whole blamed State!” In
+Oregon they did much the same thing, except, instead
+of showing me alfalfa they showed me apples. Up
+north of the Siskiyous, they’re literally apple drunk.
+They talk apples, think apples, dream apples, eat
+apple dumplings and apple pies, drink apple cider
+and apple brandy and applejack. Even their women
+are apple-cheeked. You can’t blame them for being
+a trifle boisterous about their apple crops, however,
+when you see what the apple has done for Oregon. I
+was shown one orchard of forty-five acres whose crop
+had sold the preceding year for seventy-five thousand
+dollars. Another orchard of but eight acres brought<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_319"></a>[319]</span>
+its owner sixteen thousand dollars. Five hundred
+trees yielded another man five thousand dollars. And
+I could repeat similar instances <i>ad infinitum</i>. They
+assured us in Medford that the apple cellars at Buckingham
+Palace and Windsor Castle always contain
+barrels stencilled “Grown in Oregon”—which is, I
+believe, a fact—and, though they didn’t say so in so
+many words, they intimated that when King George
+feels the need of a bite after a court ball or some equally
+arduous function, he lights a candle and shuffles down
+the cellar stairs in his dressing-gown and slippers and
+gropes about until he finds an Oregon-grown Northern
+Spy or a big, green Newtown Pippin.</p>
+
+<p>Oregon’s success in apple growing—a success that
+has headed the pioneer northwestward as the gold
+craze of ’49 started the frontiersman Californiaward—is
+the joint product of work and brains. Where New
+England has given up all thought of saving her orchards,
+Oregon, by tincturing labour with scientific knowledge,
+has founded an industry which is doing for the State
+what wheat did for the Dakotas, what gold did for
+California. What happened to the orchards all through
+New England? There was enough hard work put
+into them, Heaven knows. The old New England
+farmer and his wife slaved to the bone and were eventually
+trundled away to the insane asylum or the
+cemetery from overwork, from devotion to the arid
+soil. The orchards of New England have been watered
+with blood and sweat and fertilised with blasted hopes.
+The young men were away in the universities acquiring<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_320"></a>[320]</span>
+scientific knowledge and learning how to apply that
+knowledge on the farms, and it never occurred to the
+old men that the wearied soil needed some encouragement,
+some strengthening, some vivifying, even as
+their spirits did, to bring material and spiritual prosperity.
+And Oregon has taken to heart and is profiting
+by the pathetic example of the New England farmer.</p>
+
+<p>It is approximately four hundred miles as a motor
+goes from the Columbia to the California line and, as
+our object was to see the country, we spent upward of
+a week upon the journey, stopping as our fancies
+dictated to cast for trout in the swirling rivers, to
+gossip with village folk and farmers, and sometimes
+just to lie on our backs on inviting hillsides and smoke
+and chat and throw pebbles at inquisitive squirrels
+and watch the sunbeams filter through the foliage of
+the trees. That’s where the true joy of motoring comes
+in: to be able to stop when and where you please, without
+the necessity of having to give any why or wherefore,
+and, when you grow weary of one place, flying
+on again until you find another that tempts you. I
+have never been able to comprehend why those speed
+maniacs who tear through the country so fast that the
+telegraph-poles look like palings in a picket fence
+bother with automobiles at all; they could travel
+quite as fast in a train and ever so much more comfortably.</p>
+
+<p>From Eugene our course lay south, due south
+through a bountiful and smiling land. We tore down
+yellow highroads between orchard rows as precisely<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_321"></a>[321]</span>
+placed and uniform as ranks of Prussian grenadiers; we
+flashed past trim farmhouses overshadowed by huge
+hip-roofed barns which seemed to be bursting with produce,
+as, in fact, they were; we rolled through villages
+so neat and clean and happy that they might have
+served as models for the street-car advertisement of
+Spotless Town; we spun along the banks of sun-flecked
+rivers whose waters were broken by trout
+jumping hungry for the fly; we boomed down forest
+roads so dim and silent that we felt as though we were
+motoring down a cathedral nave; Diamond Peak and
+the white-bonneted Three Sisters came into view and
+disappeared again; until at last, churning our way up
+the tortuous road that climbs the Umpqua Range, we
+looked down upon the enchanted valley of the Rogue.</p>
+
+<p>Imagine a four-hundred-thousand-acre valley,
+every foot of which is tilled or tillable, protected on
+every side by mountain walls—on the east by the Cascades,
+on the west by the Coast Range, on the north
+by the Umpqua chain, and on the south by the Siskiyous;
+and meandering through this garden valley,
+watering its every corner, the winding, mischievous,
+inquisitive Rogue. It is indeed a beckoning land.
+But mind you, it is not a get-rich-quick land. It is a
+work-like-the-devil-and-you’ll-become-prosperous country.
+The soil and the climate will do as much for the
+farmer, perhaps more, than anywhere else in the world,
+but he must do his share. And no one should buy a
+ticket to Oregon expecting to find immediate employment
+in any line. Jobs are not lying loose on the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_322"></a>[322]</span>
+streets, waiting for some one to come along and pick
+them up, any more than they are in Chicago or New
+York. I doubt very much, indeed, if the workingman
+with no other capital than his two hands has much to
+gain by emigrating to Oregon. Large projects, it is
+true, require many labourers, and these openings
+often present themselves; but the means of bringing
+in workmen are just as cheap and rapid as in other
+sections of the country, so it need not be expected that
+there would be any great difference in wages. The
+chief advantages that Oregon offers to labouring people
+without sufficient accumulations to give them a
+start are: a mild and equable climate, an absence of
+damaging storms, a certainty of crops, and opportunities
+as good, though perhaps no better, than any other
+State. If, however, he has been able to accumulate
+anywhere from a thousand to three thousand dollars,
+he is then in a position to avail himself of the innumerable
+opportunities which exist for men of small
+capital. Such men will find their best opportunities
+in buying a few acres of land, building a modest home
+upon it, and then “going in,” as the English say, for
+fruit growing or poultry raising or dairying or market-gardening.
+As sawmills are as plentiful in Oregon as
+pretty women are on Fifth Avenue, and as the State
+contains one fifth of all the standing timber in the
+country (you didn’t know that, did you?) lumber is
+extraordinarily cheap, the cost of the material for a
+comfortable four-room farmhouse, for example, not
+running to more than one hundred and fifty dollars.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_323"></a>[323]</span>
+It is a mistake for the intending emigrant to count on
+getting a farm under the terms of the Homestead Act,
+for, though the total government lands open to homestead
+entry in Oregon are greater in area than the entire
+State of West Virginia, they are, for the most part, in
+the least desirable portions of the State and the settler
+who occupied them would have to pay the price incident
+to life in a remote and semicivilised region. On
+the other hand, excellent land, within easy reach of
+towns and railroads, can be had in the valleys of western
+Oregon all the way from fifty to one hundred and
+fifty dollars an acre, and this would, I am convinced,
+prove the best investment in the end.</p>
+
+<p>There is no space to dwell at any length on the
+towns of western Oregon—Salem, Eugene, Roseburg,
+Drain, Grant’s Pass, Medford, Ashland. All of these
+towns have paved streets lined with comfortable and
+homelike residences and remarkably well-stocked shops;
+up-to-the-minute educational, lighting, and sewage
+systems; about double the number of parks, hotels,
+garages, and moving-picture houses that you would
+find in towns of similar size in the East; and boards
+of trade and chambers of commerce with enough surplus
+energy and enthusiasm to make a booster out of
+an Egyptian mummy. In most of these towns prohibition
+reigns, and, though, to be quite truthful, I am
+not accustomed to raise an admonishing hand when
+some one uncorks a gilt-topped bottle, I repeatedly
+remarked the fact that they were cleaner, quieter, more
+orderly—in short, pleasanter places to live—than those<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_324"></a>[324]</span>
+whose streets are dotted by the familiar swinging
+half-doors. That prohibition has done no harm to
+business is best proved by the fact that the very
+merchants who in the beginning were its most bitter
+assailants have become its most ardent advocates.
+After comparing the “dry” towns of Oregon to the
+“wet” ones—say, in the vicinity of Bakersfield, in
+California—it seems to me that, so far as the smaller
+rural communities are concerned, at least, there is only
+one side to the prohibition question.</p>
+
+<p>Thirty miles from Grant’s Pass, in the fastnesses
+of the Siskiyous, are the recently discovered mammoth
+caves, which some genius in the art of appellation has
+christened “The Marble Halls of Oregon.” It needed
+an inspiration to conceive a name like that! Such a
+name would induce one to make a trip to see a hole in
+a sand-bank. As a matter of fact, these Oregonian
+caverns are decidedly worth the journey. Though they
+are very far from having been completely explored,
+sufficient investigations have been made to prove conclusively
+that they are much superior, both in size and
+beauty, to the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky, a visit
+to which was considered as essential for every well-travelled
+American half a century ago as to have seen
+the Virginia Natural Bridge and Niagara Falls.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp50" id="illus31" style="max-width: 29.6875em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus31.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><p>Trout fishing in the high Sierras.</p>
+  <p>Salmon fishing in a Northwestern river.</p>
+  <p>WHERE RODS BEND DOUBLE AND REELS GO WHIR-R-R-R.</p></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p class="tb">Oregon, with its fish-filled streams, its game-filled
+forests, and its coast-line rich in bays and coves and
+beaches, possesses all the requisites for one of the
+world’s great playgrounds, but some years must pass<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_325"></a>[325]</span>
+before it will possess the luxuries demanded by that
+class of summer vacationists who travel with wardrobe
+trunks. With less than one fifteenth of its sixty odd
+million acres under cultivation, it is still to a great
+extent a frontier region, with many of a frontier’s
+crudities and discomforts and, for a man who knows
+and loves the open, with all of a frontier country’s
+charm. I am perfectly aware, of course, that the
+farmers who are growing such amazing quantities of
+big, red apples in the valleys of the Hood and the Rogue
+and the real-estate boosters who are so frantically
+chopping town sites out of the primeval forest within
+cannon-shot of Portland will resent the statement that
+this is still a frontier country; but it is, nevertheless,
+and will be for a number of years to come. Barring
+the system which parallels the coast from north to
+south and the one which cuts across its northeast
+corner, there are no railways in Oregon; the scantiness
+of population and the peculiarly savage nature of a
+great portion of the country having offered few inducements
+to the railroad builders. This condition is
+changing rapidly, however, for the transcontinental
+systems which enter the State are working overtime
+to give it population, cities and towns and villages
+are springing up like mushrooms along its many waterways,
+the vast grants held by the railway and trading
+companies and by the pioneers are gradually being
+cut up into small farms, and a rural situation is being
+slowly created which is bound to effect a marked change
+in the conditions which have heretofore prevailed.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_326"></a>[326]</span>
+But it has not yet, thank Heaven, reached that stage
+of civilisation which is characterised by summer hotels
+with miles of piazzas and acres of green lawns and oceans
+of red-and-white striped awnings. Taking the place
+of these sophisticated and ostentatious summer resorts
+are the unpretentious inns and camps and summer
+colonies which are sprinkled along the Oregon shore
+from the mouth of the Columbia to the California line.</p>
+
+<p>The easiest way to reach this summer land is to
+take the little jerk-water railroad which meanders
+eastward from Hillsboro, a main-line townlet fifty miles
+or so south of Portland, through Tillamook County to
+the sea. For many miles the train follows the tumultuous
+Nehalem, stopping every now and then, as the
+fancy seems to strike it, at shrieking sawmills or at
+groups of slab-walled loggers’ shacks set down in clearings
+in the forest, where bearded, flannel-shirted men
+come out and swap stories and tobacco with the engineer.
+After a time the woods begin to dwindle into
+tracts of stumps and second-growths, and these merge
+gradually into farms, with neat white houses and
+orderly rows of fruit-trees and herds of sleek cattle
+grazing contentedly in clover meadows. Quite soon
+Nehalem Bay comes in sight and the lush meadows
+give way to wire-grass and the wire-grass runs out in
+beaches of yellow sand so much like those which border
+Cape Cod and Buzzard’s Bay that it is hard to believe
+that one is not on the coast of New England. From
+the names of the towns and from the types of faces
+that I saw, I gathered that much of this country was<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_327"></a>[327]</span>
+settled by New Englanders, who must have found in
+its hills and forests and fertile farm lands and alternate
+stretches of sandy beach and rock-bound shore much
+to remind them of home. Oregon is, as a glance at the
+map will show you, in exactly the same latitude as the
+New England States and has the same cool, invigorating
+summer weather that one finds in Maine, though
+its winters, thanks to the warm Japan current which
+sweeps along its shores, are characterised by rains instead
+of snow. From Nehalem to Tillamook the railroad
+hugs the coast. On one side the bosom of the
+Pacific rises and falls languorously under a genial sun;
+on the other the line of rugged hills, in their shaggy
+mantles of green, go up to meet the sky. Here and
+there some placid lake mirrors the crags and wind-bent
+trees, or a river, complaining noisily at the delay
+to which it has been subjected, finds a devious way
+through the hindering hill range to the waiting ocean.
+Nor are the attractions of the Tillamook country those
+of the sea alone, for within a dozen miles of the coast
+bear, panther, wildcats, deer, partridge, pheasant, duck,
+and geese are to be found, while the mountain streams
+are alive with trout waiting to be lured by the fly.
+It is a storied region, too, for thousands of moccasined
+feet have trod the famous Indian trail which was once
+the only route from the wilds of southern Oregon to
+the fur-post which the first Astor established at the
+mouth of the Columbia and which still bears his name,
+and here and there along the coast are the remains of
+the forts and trading stations which the Russians, in<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_328"></a>[328]</span>
+their campaign for the commercial mastery of the
+Pacific half a century ago, pushed southward even to
+the Bay of San Francisco. The lives led by those who
+summer along this shore would delight such rugged
+apostles of the simple life as John Muir and John
+Burroughs and Colonel Roosevelt, for there is a gratifying
+absence of fashionable hotels and luxurious
+camps and cottages, though there is an abundance of
+unpretentious but comfortable tent colonies and inns.
+The people whom I met in Portland and elsewhere
+apologised profusely for Oregon’s deficiencies in this
+respect and assured me very earnestly that in two or
+three years more the State would have a complete
+assortment of summer hotels “as good as anything
+you’ll find at Atlantic City or Narragansett Pier, by
+George.” All I have to say is that when their promises
+are realised, Oregon’s chiefest and most distinctive
+charm—its near-to-nature simplicity—will have disappeared,
+and, so far as the traveller and the pleasure
+seeker are concerned, it will be merely an indifferent
+imitation of the humdrum and prosaic East. At
+present, however, it is still a big, free, unfenced, keep-on-the-grass,
+do-as-you-please, happy-go-lucky, flannel-shirt-and-slouch-hat
+land. Even as I write I can hear
+its insistent, subtle summons in my ears: the whisper of
+the forests, the chatter of the rivers, the murmur of the
+ocean, the snarling of the sawmills, the chunk-a-chunk
+of paddles, the creak of saddle gear, all seeming to say:
+“Cut loose from towns and men; pack your kit and
+come again.” And that’s precisely what I’m going to do.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_329"></a>[329]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XII">XII<br>
+<span class="smaller">BREAKING THE WILDERNESS</span></h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_330"></a>[330]</span></p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">“They rise to mastery of wind and snow;</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">They go like soldiers grimly into strife</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">To colonise the plain. They plough and sow,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">And fertilise the sod with their own life,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">As did the Indian and the buffalo.”</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_331"></a>[331]</span></p>
+
+<h3>XII<br>
+<span class="smaller">BREAKING THE WILDERNESS</span></h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>When white men in Africa make long desert
+journeys on camel-back, they follow the example
+of the Arabs and wind themselves tightly from chest
+to hips with bandages like those with which trainers
+wrap the legs of race-horses. This, to put it inelegantly
+but plainly, is done to prevent their bursting from the
+violent and sustained shaking to which they are subjected
+by the roughness of the camel’s gait. When I
+said good-bye to the Sudan, taking it for granted that
+I would have no further use for my spiral corselet in
+the presumably civilised country to which I was going,
+I left it behind me in Khartoum. How was I to know
+that I would need it far more than I ever had in Africa
+while journeying in so essentially Occidental a conveyance
+as a motor-car through a region where camels
+are confined to circuses and Turkish-rug advertisements?
+But long before we had traversed the forty
+atrocious miles which make the distance between
+Portland, Ore., and Kalama, Wash., seem more like
+four hundred, I would have given a good deal to have
+had my racked and aching body snugly wrapped in
+it again. I have had more than a speaking acquaintance
+with some roads so bad that they ought to have<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_332"></a>[332]</span>
+been in jail—in Asiatic Turkey and in Baja California
+and in other places—but to the Portland-Kalama road
+I present the red-white-and-blue championship ribbon.
+Roll down a rocky hillside in a barrel; climb into an
+electric churn and tell the dairyman to turn on the
+power; ride a bicycle across a railroad trestle and you
+will have had but the caviare course of the dinner of
+discomfort that was served to us. As, after five hours
+of this sort of thing, we bumped our way down a particularly
+vicious bit of hill road, every joint and bolt
+in the car squealing in agonised complaint, I saw a
+prosperous-looking farmer in his shirt-sleeves leaning
+comfortably over the front gate, interestedly watching
+our progress.</p>
+
+<p>“St-t-t-op a m-m-m-inute,” I chattered to the
+chauffeur, as we jounced into the thank-ye-marms and
+rattled over the loose stones, “I w-w-want to t-t-t-t-ell
+this m-m-m-an-n-n w-what I think of the r-r-r-oad.”</p>
+
+<p>As we drew up in front of the gate, the farmer,
+taking a straw out of his mouth, drawled:</p>
+
+<p>“Say, stranger, you might like to know that you’ve
+just come over the most gol-damnedest piece of road
+north o’ Panama.”</p>
+
+<p>So, unless the gentlemen who have the say in this
+portion of the State of Washington have repaired the
+road since we passed over it, I would advise those
+automobilists who are Seattle-bound to keep on the
+Oregon side of the Columbia as far as Goble (I think
+that is the name of the tiny hamlet), where they can
+put their car on a barge and hire the ferryman to tow<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_333"></a>[333]</span>
+them across the river to Kalama. This will cost them
+five dollars, but it’s worth it.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus32" style="max-width: 50em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus32.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><table><tr>
+  <td class="td2"><p>A road near the Columbia as it was.</p></td>
+  <td class="td2"><p>A road near the Columbia as it is.</p></td>
+  </tr></table>
+  <p>WHAT THE ROAD-BUILDERS HAVE DONE IN WASHINGTON.</p></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>Were one to prejudge a country by the names of
+its villages and towns and counties he would form a
+peculiar conception of Washington, for I do not recall
+ever having heard anything quite so outlandish as the
+names which some one—the Siwash aborigine, presumably—has
+wished upon it. How would you like to get
+this sort of a reply to your question as to some one’s
+antecedents? “Me? Oh, I was born near Wahkiacus,
+down in Klickitat County, and I met my wife, whose
+folks live up Snohomish way, in Walla Walla, and
+later on we moved to Puyallup, but I’ve a sort of notion
+of goin’ into the cannery business at Skamokawa,
+over in Wahkiakum County, though the wife, she’s been
+a-pesterin’ me to buy an apple orchard up in the Okanogan.”
+Still, it’s more interesting to motor through a
+country like that, always wondering what bizarre,
+heathenish name is going to turn up next, than to tour
+through a region sprinkled with Simpson’s Centres
+and Cranberry Crossroads and New Carthages and
+Hickory Hollows until you feel as though you were an
+actor in “The Old Homestead.”</p>
+
+<p>Throughout our trip through Washington we were
+caused untold annoyance, and in several instances
+were compelled to travel many weary and needless
+miles, because of the wanton destruction of the sign-posts
+by amateur marksmen. Up in that country
+every boy gets a gun with his first pair of pants, and,
+when there is nothing else to shoot, he makes a target<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_334"></a>[334]</span>
+of the enamelled guide-posts which have been erected
+for the benefit of tourists. More than once, coming
+to a crossroads in the forest, we found these placards
+so riddled with bullets that we were compelled to guess
+which road to take—and we usually guessed wrong.
+“I wish to goodness,” said my friend in exasperation,
+after we had gone half a dozen miles out of our way on
+one of these occasions, “that they would declare a close
+season on sign-posts, just as they have on elk, and then
+give the man the limit who is caught shooting them.”</p>
+
+<p>It would be a grave injustice to place undue emphasis
+upon the crudities and inconveniences which
+annoy the traveller in certain portions of Washington,
+for, when you get down to bed-rock facts, its farmers
+are still wrestling with the wilderness—and in most
+instances they have had to put up a desperate resistance
+to keep the wilderness from shoving them off the
+mat. We passed through many a community, far
+removed from the railway (for the railway builders
+have done little more than nibble at the crust of the
+Washington pie) where the people were living under
+conditions almost identical with those which confronted
+the Pilgrim settlers of New England. Many a farmstead
+that we passed was chopped out of the virgin
+forest, the house being built from the trees that had
+grown upon its site. Cleared land, as an Eastern
+or Middle Western farmer knows the term, seemed
+almost non-existent. Black and massive stumps rose
+everywhere, like gravestones to the dead forest.
+“There’s so danged many stumps in this country,”<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_335"></a>[335]</span>
+one of these pioneer farmers remarked, “that sometimes
+I think that the Lord never intended for it to be
+cleared at all.” The problem of getting rid of these
+stumps is one of the most perplexing with which the
+Northwestern farmer has to contend, the expense of
+clearing land averaging in the neighbourhood of seventy-five
+dollars an acre. So inimical to colonisation has
+the question of land clearing become, indeed, that the
+State has found it necessary to step in and finance the
+stump-pullers in districts established in accordance
+with recent legislation. Though Washington is a country
+of hustle and hard work, no one who spends any
+length of time in it can fail to be impressed with the
+belief that it has a promising future. The climate is,
+as a whole, attractive. Though the cold is never
+extreme, the climate does not lack vigour, and, as a
+result of the Oregon mists, there is plenty of moisture.
+“We call ’em Oregon mists,” a farmer explained to me,
+“because they missed Oregon and hit here.” They
+are really more of a fog than a rain, and no one pays
+the slightest attention to them, even the womenfolk
+scorning to use umbrellas. These mists, taken with
+the verdancy of the vegetation and the pink-and-white
+complexions of the women, constantly reminded me of
+Ireland and the south of England. In striking contrast
+to the <i>arroyos secos</i> to which we became accustomed
+in many parts of California are the streams of Washington,
+which flow throughout the year, enough water-power
+going to waste annually to run a plant that
+would supply the nation.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_336"></a>[336]</span></p>
+
+<p>As the Pacific Highway goes, it is close to a hundred
+and fifty miles from Portland to Tacoma, but we
+made a slight detour so as to see Olympia, which is the
+capital of the State. Beyond its rococo State-house,
+which is surmounted by a statue of a female—it might
+be Justice and it might be Mrs. Pankhurst in her
+peignoir—there is nothing to distinguish Olympia
+from any one of a score of other pretty little towns
+whose back doors open onto the primeval forest.
+Because there was a moon in the heavens as big and
+yellow as a Stilton cheese, we decided to push on to
+Tacoma, which is thirty miles from Olympia, that
+night. I’ll not soon forget the beauty of that ride.
+With our engines purring like a contented cat we
+boomed down the radiant path that our headlights
+cut out of the darkness; the night air, charged with
+balsamic fragrance, beat in our faces; the black walls
+of the forest rose skyward on either hand, the tree
+tops bordering with ghostly hedges a star-sprinkled
+lane of sky. I wish you might have been there ... it
+was so enchanting and mysterious.</p>
+
+<p>The theatres were vomiting their throngs of playgoers
+when we rolled under the row of electric arches
+which turns Tacoma’s chief thoroughfare into an avenue
+of dazzling light and drew up beneath the grotesque
+and towering totem-pole in the square in front of our
+hotel. Tacoma is as up-and-doing a city as you will
+find in a week’s journey through a busy land. It does
+not need to be rapped on the feet with a night-stick to
+be kept awake. Magnificently situated on a series of<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_337"></a>[337]</span>
+terraces rising above an arm of Puget Sound, its streets,
+instead of defying the steepness of the hills, as do those
+of San Francisco and Seattle, sweep up them in long
+diagonals, like the ramps at the Grand Central Terminal
+in New York. Tacoma is peculiarly fortunate in
+being girdled by a series of so-called natural parks, a
+zone ten miles in width in which the landscape architect
+has not been permitted to improve on the lakes and
+woods and wild-flower-carpeted glades provided by the
+Creator. But Tacoma’s chief boast and glory is, of
+course, a mountain whose graceful, snow-capped cone,
+which bears an astonishing resemblance to Fujiyama,
+rises like an ermine-mantled monarch above the encircling
+forest. The name of the mountain is Rainier
+or Tacoma, according to whether you live in Seattle
+or Tacoma, an acrimonious dispute having been in
+progress between the people of the two cities over the
+question for some time, the citizens of Seattle claiming
+that the mountain is far too beautiful to be used as an
+asset in Tacoma’s municipal advertising campaign,
+while the people of the latter city assert that, as the
+British Admiral Rainier, for whom the peak was
+originally named, fought against the Americans in the
+Revolution, he does not deserve to have his name tacked
+onto an American mountain.</p>
+
+<p>For thirty miles or more the road from Tacoma
+to Mount Rainier (for that is the name to which the
+Federal Government has given its approval) strikes
+across a wooded country as level as the top of a table,
+until, reaching the base of the mountain, it sweeps<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_338"></a>[338]</span>
+upward in long and graceful spirals which were laid
+out by army engineers, for the region has been taken
+over by the government under its new and admirable
+policy of protecting the beauty-spots of the country
+through the formation of national parks. Nowhere,
+not even in the Alps, have I driven over a finer mountain
+road, the gradients being so gradual and the curves
+so skilfully designed that one scarcely appreciates,
+upon reaching National Park Inn, in the heart of the
+reservation, that he has climbed upward of five thousand
+feet since leaving tide-water at Tacoma. We
+spent the night at the Inn, a low-roofed, big-fireplaced
+tavern which has an air of cosiness and comfort in
+keeping with the surroundings. Everything about it
+reminded us of hotels we knew in the Alpine valleys,
+and when I drew up the shade in the morning the illusion
+was complete, for the great peak, its snow-clad
+flanks all sparkling in the morning sunlight, towered
+above us, just as Mont Blanc towers above Chamonix,
+dazzling, majestic, sublime. Leaving the Inn after an
+early breakfast, we motored up the mountain road as
+far as the snout of the great Nisqually Glacier, which
+is as far as automobiles are permitted to go. Take my
+word for it, this glacier—the largest on the continent
+outside of Alaska—is one of the most worth-while
+sights in all America. A river of ice, seven miles long
+and half a mile wide, it coils down the slope of the
+mountain like a mammoth boa-constrictor whose progress
+has been barred in other directions by the encircling
+wall of forest. We left the car at the glacier’s<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_339"></a>[339]</span>
+snout, and, after an hour’s hard climbing over loose
+rubble and slippery rock, succeeded, in defiance of
+the danger signs, in reaching a flat shelf of rock from
+which we could look directly down upon the ice torrent,
+and there we ate the lunch that we had brought
+with us to the accompaniment of the intermittent
+crashes which marked the glacial torrent’s slow advance.</p>
+
+<p>We descended to the road in time to catch the
+four-horse stage which runs twice daily from the Inn
+to Paradise Valley, which the Lady insisted that we
+must visit, “because,” she said, “there are snow-fields
+and fields of wild flowers side by side.”</p>
+
+<p>“But you’ve seen much the same sort of thing
+in Switzerland,” I objected. “Don’t you remember
+that place above the Lake of Geneva, Territet, I think
+it was, where people in furs were skating on one side
+of the hotel and other people were having tea under
+big red parasols on the other?”</p>
+
+<p>“I remember it, of course,” she answered, “but
+that was in Switzerland and this is in my own country,
+which makes all the difference in the world. Evidently
+you have forgotten that German baron we met
+at Grindelwald, who asked us if we didn’t think that the
+view from Paradise Valley was finer than the one from
+Andermatt, and we had to admit that we didn’t know
+where Paradise Valley was. I’m not going to let that
+sort of thing happen again. The next time I meet a
+foreigner I’m not going to be embarrassed to death
+by finding that he knows more about my own country
+than I know myself.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_340"></a>[340]</span></p>
+
+<p>So she had her way and, leaving the car behind
+us, we took the creaking stage up the steep and narrow
+road to the valley, where we gathered armfuls of wild
+flowers one minute and pelted each other with snowballs
+the next, and peered through the telescope—at a
+quarter a look—at the thirteen glaciers which radiate
+from the mountain’s summit, and aroused perfectly
+shameless appetites for supper, and slept as only healthily
+tired people can sleep, and the next morning, half
+intoxicated with the combination of blazing sunlight
+and sparkling mountain air, we rattled down again to
+the Inn and the waiting car.</p>
+
+<p>The run from Rainier National Park, through
+Tacoma, to Seattle is as smooth and exhilarating as
+sliding down the banisters of the front stairs. Auto-intoxicated
+by the perfection of the roads, I stepped on
+the accelerator and in obedience to the signal the car
+suddenly leaped into its stride and hurtled down the
+highway at express-train speed, while farmhouses and
+barns and fields and orchards swept by us in an indistinguishable
+blur. It was glorious while it lasted. But
+out of the distance came racing toward us a big white
+placard, “City Limits of Seattle,” and I slowed down
+to a pace more conformable with the law and rolled
+over the miles of trestles which span the swamps and
+lowlands adjacent to Seattle as sedately as though a
+motor-cycle policeman had his eye upon us. The
+builders of Seattle must have been men of resource as
+well as courage, for those portions of the city that have
+not been reclaimed from the tide-lands have been<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_341"></a>[341]</span>
+blasted out of the rocky hillsides, so that the city gives
+one the impression of clinging precariously to a slippery
+mountain slope midway between sea and sky.
+Instead of propitiating the hills, as is the case in Tacoma,
+the streets go storming up them at angles which
+give a motorist much the same sensation a rider has
+when his horse rears and threatens to fall over backward.
+Though Seattle is very big and very busy, with
+teeming streets and huge department stores and miles
+of harbour frontage and one of the tallest sky-scrapers
+in existence and a park and boulevard system probably
+unequalled anywhere, it gave me the impression of
+being a little crude, a trifle <i>nouveau riche</i>, and not yet
+entirely at home in its resplendent garments. Between
+Seattle and Portland the most intense rivalry
+exists, the two cities running almost neck-and-neck as
+regards population, although this assertion will be
+indignantly denied by the citizens of both of them.
+Standing at one of the world’s crossways, the terminus
+of several transcontinental railways and several trans-Pacific
+steamship lines, with a superb harbour and the
+recognised gateway to Alaska, Seattle has a tremendous
+commercial advantage over her Oregonian rival, but
+from a residential standpoint Portland, exquisitely
+situated on the Willamette near its junction with the
+Columbia, with its milder climate, its greater number of
+theatres and hotels, and its older society, has rather a
+more metropolitan atmosphere, a more assured air
+than its northern neighbour.</p>
+
+<p>Seattle is the natural portal to the Puget Sound<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_342"></a>[342]</span>
+country, that wilderness of mountains, glaciers, forests,
+lakes, lagoons, islands, bays, and inlets which
+makes the upper left-hand corner of the map of the
+United States look like a ragged fringe. It is not an
+easy country to describe. Southward from the Straits
+of Juan de Fuca, an eighty-mile-long arm of the Pacific
+penetrates the State of Washington—that is Puget
+Sound. On its eastern shore are the cities of Seattle
+and Tacoma, at the head of the sound is Olympia, the
+capital of the State, and bordering the western shore
+rise the splendid peaks of the unexplored Olympic
+Range. If your imagination will stand the further
+strain of picturing an archipelago four times the size
+of the Thousand Islands, clothed with forests of cedar,
+fir, and pine, and indented with countless bays, harbours,
+coves, and inlets, dropped down in this body
+of water, you will have a hazy conception of the island
+labyrinth of Puget Sound, which is generally admitted,
+I believe, to be the most beautiful salt-water estuary
+in the world. Despite the narrowness of many of its
+channels, the water is so deep and the banks so precipitous
+that at many points a ship’s side would touch the
+shore before its keel would touch the ground, which,
+taken in conjunction with its innumerable excellent
+harbours, makes it the most ideal cruising ground for
+power-boats on our coasts.</p>
+
+<p>I can conceive, indeed, of no more enchanting
+summer than one spent in a well-powered, well-stocked
+motor-boat cruising in and about this archipelago,
+loitering from island to island as the fancy seized one,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_343"></a>[343]</span>
+dropping anchor in inviting harbours for a day or a
+week, as one pleased. There are deer and bear in the
+forests and trout in the rivers and salmon in the deeper
+waters, and, if those did not provide sufficient recreation,
+one could run across to the mainland and get the
+stiffest kind of mountain climbing on Mount Olympus
+or Mount Rainier. During the summer months scores
+of small steamers, the “mosquito fleet,” ply out of
+Seattle and Tacoma, hurrying backward and forward
+between the city wharfs and the fishing villages, farming
+communities, lumber camps, sawmills, and summer
+resorts that are scattered everywhere about the archipelago’s
+inland waterways, so that the camper on their
+shores, seemingly far off in the wilds, need never be
+without his daily paper, his fresh vegetables, or his
+mail.</p>
+
+<p>Let us give ourselves the luxury of imagining—for,
+to my way of thinking, there is about as much enjoyment
+to be had in imagination as in realisation—that
+we have a fortnight at our disposal on which no business
+worries shall be permitted to intrude, that we have
+the deck of a sturdy power-boat beneath our feet, and
+that the placid, island-dotted waters of Puget Sound
+lie before us, asparkle on a summer’s morning. Leaving
+Seattle, seated on her stately hills, astern, and the
+grim, grey fighting ships across the Sound at the Bremerton
+Navy Yard abeam, we will push the wheel to
+starboard and point the nose of our craft toward Admiralty
+Inlet, the Straits of Juan de Fuca, and the
+open sea. Our first port of call will be, I think, at<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_344"></a>[344]</span>
+Dungeness, whose waters are the habitat of those
+Dungeness crabs which tickle the palates and deplete
+the pocketbooks of gourmets from Vancouver to San
+Diego. At the back of Dungeness is Sequim Prairie,
+whose seventy odd thousand acres of irrigated lands
+produce “those great big baked potatoes” which are so
+prominent an item on dining-car menus in the Northwest.
+It is nothing of a run from Dungeness to Port
+Angeles, which is the most convenient gateway to the
+unexplored Olympics. A score or so of miles southward
+from Port Angeles by automobile, a portion of
+which is by ferry across the beautiful mountain Lake
+Crescent, and over a road which is a marvel of mountain
+engineering, are the Sol Duc Hot Springs, whose
+great modern hotel is in startling contrast to the savagery
+of the region which surrounds it. Laying our
+course from Port Angeles straight into the setting sun,
+we coast along the rock-bound, heavily timbered shores
+of the Olympic Peninsula to Neah Bay, where a crew
+of Macah Indians will take us in one of their frail
+canoes close around the harsh face of Cape Flattery,
+which is the extreme northwest corner of the United
+States. Westward of Cape Flattery we may not go,
+for beyond it lies the open sea; but, steering eastward
+again, we can nose about at will, loitering through the
+romantic scenery of Deception Pass and Rosario Straits,
+dropping in at Anacortes, whose canneries supply a
+considerable portion of the world with salmon, and
+coming thus to Friday Harbour, the county-seat of the
+San Juan Islands, which, despite the Robinson Crusoe-ness<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_345"></a>[345]</span>
+of its name, looks exactly like one of those quaint,
+old-fashioned seaport towns which dot the coast of
+Maine. The San Juan Islands, which are a less civilised
+and more beautiful edition of the Thousand Islands of
+the Saint Lawrence, like their counterparts on the other
+side of the continent, lie midway between the American
+and the Canadian shores. They were the scene of
+numerous exciting incidents in the boundary dispute
+of the late fifties, being for a number of years jointly
+occupied by British and American troops; but, though
+several crumbling British blockhouses still rise above
+the island harbours, the nearest British soil is Vancouver
+Island, across the Strait of Georgia. That the Stars
+and Stripes, and not the Union Jack, fly to-day over
+this picturesque archipelago is due, curiously enough,
+to the Emperor Frederick, father of the present Kaiser,
+who was asked to act as arbitrator between England
+and the United States and decided in favour of the
+latter.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus33" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus33.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><p>THE UNEXPLORED OLYMPICS.</p>
+  <p>A forest fire sweeping across the flanks of the Olympic range near Lake
+  Chelan. In the foreground is a sea of glacial ice.</p></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>Did you ever, by any chance, drop into a sporting-goods
+store only to find yourself so bewildered by the
+amazing number and variety of implements for sports
+and recreations displayed upon its shelves that you
+scarcely knew what to choose? Well, that is precisely
+the sensation I had the first time I visited the Puget
+Sound country. I felt as though I had been turned
+loose in a gigantic sporting-goods store with so many
+things to choose from that I couldn’t make up my mind
+which to take first. And, mark you, everything is
+comparatively close at hand. If a Londoner wants to<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_346"></a>[346]</span>
+get some mountain climbing he has to go to Chamonix
+or Zermatt, which means a journey of at least two
+days. If, getting his fill of precipices and glaciers and
+crevasses, he wishes some bear shooting, he must turn
+his face toward the Caucasus, to reach which will
+require seven or eight days more. Should he suddenly
+take it into his head that he would like some salmon
+fishing he will have to spend ten days and several hundred
+dollars in recrossing Europe to reach the fishing
+streams of Norway—and then pay a good round sum
+for the privilege of fishing in them when he gets there.
+On the other hand, one can leave Tacoma by train or
+motor-car and reach the slopes of the second highest
+peak in the United States, a mountain higher and more
+difficult of ascent than the Jungfrau, as quickly and as
+easily as one can go from New York to Poughkeepsie.
+From Seattle one can reach the country of the big
+grizzlies as easily as a Boston sportsman can reach
+the Maine woods. From Victoria, the island capital
+of British Columbia, a gallon of gasoline and a road as
+smooth as a billiard-table will take one to the banks
+of a stream where the salmon are too large to be
+weighed on pocket scales in less time than a Chicagoan
+spends in getting out to the golf-links at Onwentsia.</p>
+
+<p>There is no other region of equal size, so far as I
+am aware, which offers so many worth-while things in
+a superlative degree for red-blooded people to do.
+Where else, pray, can you climb a mountain which is
+higher than any peak in Europe save one (Mount
+Hooker, in British Columbia, is only eighty feet lower<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_347"></a>[347]</span>
+than Mont Blanc, the monarch of the Alps, while Mount
+Rainier, which, as I have remarked, is almost in Tacoma’s
+front yard, is nearly a thousand feet higher than
+the Jungfrau); where else can you look along your
+rifle barrel at such big game as grizzly, elk, panther,
+mountain-sheep, and even the spotted bear, the rarest
+of all North American big game; where else can you
+have your fly-rod bent like a sapling in a storm and
+hear your reel whir like a sawmill by a sixty-pound
+salmon or a six-pound trout; where else can you cruise,
+for weeks on end, amid the islands of an archipelago
+more beautiful than those of Georgian Bay and more
+numerous than those of the Ægean, without the necessity
+of ever dropping anchor twice in the same harbour;
+where else can you canoe by day and camp by
+night along rivers which have their sources on the roof
+of a continent and, after taking their course through a
+thousand miles of wilderness, empty into the greatest
+of the oceans; where else can you throw open the
+throttle of your motor on a macadamised highway
+which, in another year or two, will stretch its length
+across twenty-five degrees of latitude, linking Mexico
+with Alaska? Where else can you find such amusements
+as these, I ask? Answer me that.</p>
+
+<p class="tb">Were it not for the complicated customs formalities
+that a motorist has, perforce, to go through at the
+Canadian border, one could, by getting an early start
+and not lingering over his lunch, make the one-hundred-and-seventy-mile
+journey from Seattle to Vancouver<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_348"></a>[348]</span>
+between dawn and dark of the same day. But the red
+tape which the American officials insist upon unwinding
+before you can leave the land of the beef trust
+and the home of the Pullman porter and the equal
+amount of red tape which the Canadian officials wind
+up before you are permitted to enter the dominions
+of his gracious Majesty King George make a one-day
+trip out of the question; so we did it comfortably
+in two and spent the intervening night in the seaport
+town of Bellingham. It’s a great place for canneries,
+is Bellingham; indeed, I should think that the residents
+would be ashamed to look a salmon in the face.
+Twenty miles farther on, at a hamlet called Blaine, we
+were greeted by a huge sign whose staring letters
+read: “International Boundary.” On one side the
+Stars and Stripes floated over an eight-by-ten shanty;
+on the other side of this imaginary but significant line
+the Union Jack flapped in the breeze over a shanty a
+trifle larger. They are inquisitive, those British customs
+officials, and when they had finished with our
+car there wasn’t much they didn’t know about it.
+They inspected it as thoroughly as a Kaffir is inspected
+when he knocks off work in a South African diamond
+mine. Before entering Canada it is wise to obtain
+from the American authorities at the border a certificate
+containing a description of your car and all that it
+contains; otherwise you will be subjected to innumerable
+formalities upon entering the country again, while
+the Canadian laws require that a tourist desiring to
+remain more than eight days in the Dominion must<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_349"></a>[349]</span>
+provide a bond to cover the value of his car and make
+in addition a deposit of twenty-five dollars, both of
+which will be returned to him when he leaves the country.
+There is a grocer in Blaine—I forget his name,
+but he is a most obliging fellow—who makes a specialty
+of providing bonds for motorists, and by going to
+him we saved ourselves much trouble. It was all very
+informal. He simply called up the Canadian customs
+house on the phone and said: “Say, Bill, there’s some
+folks here that’s motorin’ into Canada. I ain’t got
+time to make out a bond just now, ’cause there’s an
+old lady here waitin’ to buy some potatoes, but you
+just let ’em skip through and I’ll fix it up the next time
+I see you.” Careless and informal, just like that. So
+all they did was to take the pedigree of the car for four
+generations, note the numbers of the spare tires, inventory
+the extra parts, go through our belongings
+with a dandruff comb, inquire where I was born, what
+the E. in my name stood for, and was I unfortunate
+enough to have to pay taxes; and, after presenting me
+with a list of the pains and penalties which I would
+incur if I broke any of his Majesty’s orders in council,
+permitted us to enter the territory of the Dominion.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus34" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus34.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><p>WHERE THE SALMON COME FROM.</p>
+  <p>“It’s a great place for canneries, is Bellingham; I should think the
+  residents would be ashamed to look a salmon in the face.”</p></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>I hope, for the sake of those who follow in our tire
+tracks, that the fifty miles of highway between Blaine
+and Vancouver has been materially improved since we
+went over it. Doubtless with the best intentions in
+the world, they had constructed a “crowned” road,
+which, as its name implies, is one that is rounded upward
+in the middle so as to drain the more readily;<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_350"></a>[350]</span>
+but, as a result of the rains, the sloping sides were so
+greasy that it was only with considerable difficulty
+that I kept the car from sliding into the ditch. There
+is one thing that the motorist must bear constantly in
+mind from the moment his front tires roll across the
+Canadian border, and that is <i>keep to the left</i>. Barring
+New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, British Columbia
+is the only Canadian province which retains the English
+system of turning to the left and passing to the
+right, and it takes an American some time to become
+habituated to it.</p>
+
+<p>After seemingly endless miles of slippery going
+through dripping woods, we entered the outskirts of
+New Westminster, a prosperous seaport near the mouth
+of the Fraser and the oldest place in this region, as age
+is counted in western Canada. A splendid boulevard,
+twenty-five miles long, connects New Westminster with
+Vancouver, and the car fled along it as swiftly as an
+aeroplane and as silently as a ghost. The virgin forest
+dwindled and ran out in recently made clearings, where
+gangs of men were still at work dynamiting and burning
+the stumps; and on the cleared land neat cottages
+of mushroom growth appeared, and these changed
+gradually to two-storied, frame houses, and these again
+to the increasingly ornate mansions of the well-to-do,
+the wealthy, and the <i>rich</i>. Through the murk beyond
+them the white sky-scrapers of Vancouver shot
+skyward—memorials to the men who have roped and
+tied and tamed a savage land.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_351"></a>[351]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XIII">XIII<br>
+<span class="smaller">CLINCHING THE RIVETS OF EMPIRE</span></h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_352"></a>[352]</span></p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">“Up along the hostile mountains where the hair-poised snowslide shivers—</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Down and through the big fat marshes that the virgin ore bed stains,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Till I heard the mile-wide muttering of unimagined rivers</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">And beyond the nameless timber saw illimitable plains.</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Plotted sites of future cities, traced the easy grades between ’em;</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Watched unharnessed rapids wasting fifty thousand head an hour;</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Counted leagues of water frontage through the axe-ripe woods that screen ’em—</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Saw the plant to feed a people—up and waiting for the power!”</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_353"></a>[353]</span></p>
+
+<h3>XIII<br>
+<span class="smaller">CLINCHING THE RIVETS OF EMPIRE</span></h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>Darkness had fallen on the Oregonian forest
+when our forward tire exploded with a report
+which sounded in that eerie stillness like a bursting
+shell. It was not a reassuring place to have a blowout—in
+the heart of a forest as large as many a European
+kingdom, with the nearest settlement half a hundred
+miles away and the nearest apology for a hotel
+as many more. Between the cathedral-like columns of
+the pines, however, I glimpsed a signal of human
+presence in the twinkling of a fire, and toward it I
+made my way through underbrush and over fallen
+trunks, while my chauffeur, blaspheming under his
+breath, busied himself at the maddening task of fitting
+on another tire in the darkness.</p>
+
+<p>I shall not soon forget the incongruity of the scene
+which greeted me as I halted on the edge of a little
+clearing fitfully illuminated by a roaring camp-fire.
+Within the circle of warmth—for the summer nights
+are chilly in the north country—stood a canvas-topped
+wagon which appeared to be a half-brother to a prairie-schooner,
+an uncle to an army ambulance, and a cousin
+to a moving van. Its side curtains had been let down,
+so that it formed a sort of tent on wheels, and seated<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_354"></a>[354]</span>
+beside it on an upended soap box a plump little woman
+in a calico dress was preparing six small youngsters
+for bed as unconcernedly as though she were in a New
+England farmhouse, with the neighbours’ lights twinkling
+through the trees, instead of in the middle of a
+primeval wilderness, a long day’s journey from anywhere.
+The horses had been outspanned, as they say
+in South Africa, and were placidly exploring the recesses
+of their nose-bags for the last stray grams of
+oats. A lank, stoop-shouldered, sinewy-framed man,
+who had been squatting beside the fire watching the
+slow progress of a pot of coffee, slowly rose to his feet
+on my approach and slouched forward with outstretched
+hand. He radiated good nature and hospitality and an
+air of easy-going efficiency, and from the first I liked
+him.</p>
+
+<p>“Howdy, friend,” he drawled, with the unmistakable
+nasal twang of the Middle West. “I reckon
+you’ve had a little bad luck with your machine, ain’t
+you? We heard you a-comin’ chug-chuggin’ through
+the woods, hell bent for election, an’ all to once there
+was a noise ’s if some one had pulled the trigger of
+a shotgun. ‘There,’ says I to Arethusa, ‘some pore
+autermobile feller’s limpin’ ’round in the darkness on
+three legs,’ says I, ‘an’ as soon ’s I get this coffee to
+boilin’ I reckon I’ll stroll over with a lantern an’ see
+if I can’t give him some help.’”</p>
+
+<p>“Just as much obliged,” said I, “but my man has
+the tire pretty well on by now. But we could do with
+a cup or so of that coffee if you’ve some to spare.”</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp50" id="illus35" style="max-width: 28.125em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus35.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><p>This settler’s nearest neighbour was fifty miles away—</p>
+  <p>And he was a Swede farmer with a Siwash wife.</p>
+  <p>OUTPOSTS OF CIVILISATION.</p></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_355"></a>[355]</span></p>
+
+<p>“That’s what coffee’s for, friend—to drink,” he
+said cordially, reaching for a tin cup. “Where’ve you
+come from?” he added with polite curiosity.</p>
+
+<p>“From the Mexican border,” said I, with, I suspect,
+a trace of self-satisfaction in my voice, for fifteen
+hundred miles of desert, forest, and mountains lay
+behind us. “And you?” I asked in turn.</p>
+
+<p>“Us?” he answered. “Oh, we’ve come from Kansas.”
+(He said it as unconcernedly as a New Yorker
+might mention that he had just run over to Philadelphia
+for a day.) “Left Emporia thirteen weeks ago
+come Thursday and have averaged nigh on twenty-five
+miles a day ever since. An’ the horses ain’t in bad
+condition, neither.”</p>
+
+<p>“And where, in the name of Heaven,” I exclaimed,
+“are you going?”</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” was the reply, “we’re headed for British
+Columbia, but I reckon we’ll have to winter somewheres
+in Washington and push on across the line in
+the spring. You see, friend,” he continued, in his
+placid, easy-going manner, in reply to my rapid fire
+of inquiries, “it was this way. I was in the furniture
+business back in Kansas, furniture an’ undertakin’,
+but I didn’t much care for the business ’cause it kept
+me indoors so much, my folks always havin’ been
+farmers and such like. Well, one day a while back, I
+picked up one of them folders sent out by the Canadian
+Gov’ment, tellin’ ’bout the rich resources up in
+British Columbia, an’ how land was to be had for
+the askin’. So that night when I went home I says to<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_356"></a>[356]</span>
+Arethusa: ‘What’d you think of sellin’ out an’ packin’
+up and goin’ up British Columbia way, an’ gettin’ a
+farm where we can live out o’ doors an’ make a decent
+livin’?’ ‘Sure,’ says she, ‘I’d like it fine. An’ it’ll
+be great for the kids.’ ‘All right,’ says I,’ it’s all decided.
+I’ll build a body for the delivery wagon that
+we can sleep in, an’ we’ll take Peter an’ Repeater, the
+delivery team, an’ it won’t take us more than six or
+eight months to make the trip if we keep movin’.’
+You see, friend,” he added, “my paw moved out to
+Kansas when there warn’t nothin’ there but Indians
+an’ sage-brush, an’ hers did, too, so I reckon this
+movin’ on to new places is sort of in the blood.”</p>
+
+<p>“But why British Columbia?” I queried. “Why
+Canada at all? What’s the reason that you, an American,
+don’t remain in the United States?”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, I don’t know exactly, friend,” he answered,
+a little shamefacedly, I thought, “unless it’s because
+it’s a newer country up there an’ a man has a better
+chance. What with the Swedes an’ the Germans an’
+the Eyetalians, this country’s gettin’ pretty well settled
+an’ there ain’t the chances in it there was once;
+but up British Columbia way it’s still a frontier country,
+they tell me, an’ a man who’s willin’ to buckle
+down an’ work can make a home an’ a good livin’
+quicker’n anywhere else, I guess. It’s fine land up in
+the middle o’ Vancouver Island, I hear, an’ in the Cariboo
+country, too, an’ they want settlers so darn bad
+that they’ll give you a farm for nothin’. An’ it’s a
+pretty good country for a man to live in, too. Here in<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_357"></a>[357]</span>
+the United States we do a heap o’ talkin’ ’bout our laws,
+but up in Canada they don’t talk about ’em at all—they
+just go right ahead an’ enforce ’em. I may be in
+wrong, of course, but from all I hear it’s goin’ to be a
+great country up there one of these days, when they
+get the railroads through, an’ me an’ Arethusa sorta
+got the notion in our heads that we’d like to be pioneers,
+like our paws were, an’ get in an’ help build the country,
+an’ let our kids grow up with it. You’ve got to
+be startin’, eh? Won’t you have another cup o’ coffee
+before you go? Well, friend, I’m mighty glad to’ve
+met you. Good luck to you.”</p>
+
+<p>“Good luck to <i>you</i>,” said I.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus36" style="max-width: 50em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus36.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><table><tr>
+  <td class="td2"><p>“Chopping a path to To-morrow—” Frontiersmen clearing
+  a town site in the forests of British Columbia.</p></td>
+  <td class="td2"><p>Law and order in the back country: the sheriff of the
+  Cariboo—the only law-officer for three hundred miles.</p></td>
+  </tr></table>
+  <p>BREAKING THE WILDERNESS.</p></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p class="tb">Though I didn’t appreciate it at the time, my
+acquaintance of the forest was a soldier in an army of
+invasion. This army had come from the south quietly,
+unostentatiously, without blare of bugle or beat of
+drum, its weapons the plough and the reaper, the hoe
+and the spade, its object the conquest, not of a people
+but of a wilderness. Have you any conception, I
+wonder, of the astounding proportions which this agricultural
+invasion of Canada has assumed? Did you
+know that last year upward of one hundred thousand
+Americans crossed the border to take up farms and
+carve out fortunes for themselves under another flag?
+These settlers who are trekking northward by rail and
+road are the very pick of the farming communities of
+our Middle West. Besides being men of splendid
+character and fine physique, and of a rugged honesty<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_358"></a>[358]</span>
+that is characteristic of those closely associated with
+the soil, they take with them a substantial amount of
+capital—probably a thousand dollars at least, on an
+average, either in cash, stock, or household goods.
+Moreover, they bring what is most valuable of all—experience.
+Coming from a region where the agricultural
+conditions are similar to those prevailing in
+the Canadian West, they quickly adapt themselves to
+the new life. Unlike the settlers from the mother country
+and from the Continent, to whom everything is
+strange and new, and who consequently require some
+time to adjust themselves to the changed conditions,
+the American wastes not a moment in contemplation
+but rolls up his sleeves, spits on his hands, and goes
+hammer and tongs at the task of making a farm and
+building a home. He is efficient, energetic, industrious,
+businesslike, adaptable, and quite frankly admits that
+he has come to the country because it offers him better
+prospects. So, though he may not sing “God Save the
+King” with the fervour of a newly arrived Briton, he is
+none the less valuable to the land of his adoption.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp50" id="illus37" style="max-width: 29.6875em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus37.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><table><tr>
+  <td class="td2"><p>A heavy load but well packed.</p></td>
+  <td class="td2"><p>Even the dogs have to carry their share.</p></td>
+  </tr><tr>
+  <td colspan="2"><p>A heavy load poorly packed.</p></td>
+  </tr></table>
+  <p>PACK-HORSES AND A PACK-DOG.</p></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>Ask your average well-informed American what
+he knows about British Columbia, and it is dollars to
+doughnuts that he will remark rather dubiously: “Oh,
+yes, that’s the place where the tinned salmon comes
+from, isn’t it?” Take yourself, for example. Did you
+happen to be aware that, though it has barely as many
+inhabitants as Newark, N. J., its area is equal to that
+of California, Oregon, and Washington put together,
+with Indiana thrown in to make good measure? Or,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_359"></a>[359]</span>
+if the comparison is more graphic, that it is larger than
+the combined areas of Italy, Switzerland, and France?
+Westernmost of the eleven provinces comprising the
+Dominion, it is bounded on the south by the orchards
+of Washington and the mines of Idaho; eastward it
+ends where the cattle-ranges of Alberta begin; to its
+north are the fur-bearing Mackenzie Territories and
+the gold-fields of the Yukon; westward it is bordered
+by the heaving Pacific and that narrow strip of ragged
+coast which forms the panhandle of Alaska. Though
+clinging to its edges are a score of towns and two great
+cities; though a transcontinental railway (the only one
+on the continent, by the way, which runs from tide-water
+to tide-water under the same management and
+the same name) hugs the province’s southern border
+and another is cutting it through the middle; its vast
+hinterland, larger than the two Scandinavian kingdoms,
+with its network of unnamed rivers and its unguessed-at
+wealth in forests, fish, furs, and minerals, contains
+thousands upon thousands of square miles which have
+never felt the pressure of a white man’s foot or echoed
+to a white man’s voice. Do you realise that, should you
+turn your horse’s head northwestward from the Kootenai,
+on the Idaho border, you would have to ride as far
+as from Lake Superior to the Gulf of Mexico before you
+could unsaddle beneath the Stars and Stripes at White
+Pass, on the frontier of Alaska? Did you know that
+the province contains the greatest compact area of
+merchantable timber in North America, its forests
+being greater in extent than those of the New England<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_360"></a>[360]</span>
+States, New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin,
+Minnesota, and the Blue Ridge combined? I have
+heard naval experts and railway presidents and mining
+men talk ponderously of a future shortage in the coal
+supply—but they need not worry, for British Columbia’s
+coal measures are estimated to contain forty billion
+tons of bituminous and sixty billion tons of anthracite
+(100,000,000,000, tons in all, if so endless a caravan
+of ciphers means anything to you)—enough to run the
+engines of the world until Gabriel’s trumpet sounds
+“Cease working.” The output of its salmon canneries
+will provide those who order fish on Fridays with most
+excellent and inexpensive eating until the crack of
+doom. Its untouched deposits of magnetite and hematite
+are so extensive that they bid fair to make the
+ironmasters of Pittsburg break that commandment (I
+forget which one it is) which says: “Thou shalt not
+covet thy neighbour’s goods.” The province has
+enough pulpwood to supply the Hearst and Harmsworth
+presses with paper until the last “extra special
+edition” is issued on the morning of judgment day.
+The recently discovered petroleum deposits have proved
+so large that they promise to materially reduce the
+income of the lean old gentleman who plays golf on
+the Pocantico Hills. The area of agricultural and
+fruit lands in the province is estimated at sixty million
+acres, of which less than one tenth has been taken up,
+much less put under cultivation. And scattered through
+the length and breadth of this great Cave-of-Al-ed-Din-like
+territory is a total population of less than four<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_361"></a>[361]</span>
+hundred thousand souls. Everything considered, it
+has, I suppose, greater natural resources than any area
+of the same size on the globe. So I don’t see how a
+young man with courage, energy, ambition, a little
+capital, and a speaking acquaintance with hard work
+could do better than to drop into the nearest railway
+ticket office and say to the clerk behind the counter:
+“A ticket to British Columbia—and step lively, if you
+please. I want to get there before it is too late to be a
+pioneer.”</p>
+
+<p>Situated in the same latitude as the British Isles,
+sheltered from the winter blizzards of the prairie provinces
+by the high wall of the Rocky Mountains, its
+long western coast washed by the warm waves of the
+Japan current, its air tinctured with the balsamic
+fragrance of millions of acres of hemlock, spruce, and
+pine, British Columbia’s climate is, to use the phraseology
+of the real-estate boosters, “highly salubrious”;
+although, to be strictly truthful, I am compelled to add
+that it is extremely wet during a considerable portion
+of the year. But it is a misty, drizzly sort of rain to
+which no one pays the slightest attention. You will
+see ladies without umbrellas stop to chat on the streets,
+and men lounging and laughing in front of the clubs
+and hotels in a rain which would make a Chicagoan
+hail a taxicab and a Bostonian turn up his collar and
+seek the subway. When you speak about it they laugh
+good-naturedly and say in a surprised sort of way:
+“Why, is it raining? By Jove, it is a trifle misty, isn’t
+it? Really, you know, I hadn’t noticed it at all.”<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_362"></a>[362]</span>
+Then they will go on to tell you that it is the moistness
+of the climate which gives British Columbia its
+beautiful women and its beautiful flowers. And I can,
+and gladly do, vouch for the beauty of them both.
+They—particularly the women—are worth going a
+long way to see.</p>
+
+<p>You mustn’t confuse British Columbia, you understand,
+with the flat, monotonous, grain-growing provinces
+which lie on the other side of the Rockies. It
+isn’t that sort of a country at all. It is too mountainous,
+too ravined, with many impassable chasms and
+nigh-impenetrable forests. Its plateaus are eroded by
+lake and river into gorges which are younger sisters of
+the Grand Cañon of the Colorado. From a little distance
+the mountain slopes look as though they had
+been neatly upholstered in the green plush to which
+the builders of Pullman cars are so partial, but, upon
+closer inspection, the green covering resolves itself into
+dense forests of spruce and pine. Thousands and thousands
+of brooks empty into the creeks and hundreds
+of creeks empty into the big rivers, and these mighty
+waterways, the Fraser, the Kootenai, the Skeena, the
+Columbia, go roaring and booming seaward through
+their rock-walled channels, wasting a million head of
+power an hour. Nowhere, that I can recall, are so
+many picturesque and interesting scenes combined
+with such sensational and impressive scenery as along
+the cañon of the Lower Fraser. Here the mountains
+of the Coast Range rise to a height of nearly two miles
+above the surface of the swirling, angry river, the walls<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_363"></a>[363]</span>
+of the cañon being so precipitous and smooth that one
+marvels at the daring and ingenuity of the men who
+built a railway there. As the cañon widens, the traveller
+catches fleeting glimpses of Chinamen washing for gold
+on the river bars; of bearded, booted lumberjacks
+guiding with their spike-shod poles the course of mile-long
+log rafts; of Siwash Indians, standing with poised
+salmon-spears on the rocks above the stream, like
+statues cast in bronze. Then the outposts of civilisation
+begin to appear in the form of hillsides which have
+been cleared and set out to fruit-trees, of Japanese
+truck-gardens, every foot of which is tended by the
+little yellow men with almost pathetic care, of sawmills,
+and salmon canneries; and so through a region where
+neat hamlets alternate with stretches of primeval forest,
+until in the distance, looming above the smoke
+pall, the sky-scrapers of Vancouver appear.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp50" id="illus38" style="max-width: 28.125em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus38.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><p>The Upper Fraser: “Streams of threaded
+  quicksilver hasten through the valleys as though anxious to escape from
+  the solitude that reigns.”</p>
+  <p>“On the flanks of the ridges, massed in their black battalions, stand
+  the bleak, barbarian pines.”</p>
+  <p>IN THE GREAT, STILL LAND.</p></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>The chief cities of the province are Vancouver, the
+commercial capital and a port and railway terminus
+of great industrial importance, and Victoria, the seat of
+government and the centre of provincial society. There
+are also several smaller cities: New Westminster, at the
+mouth of the Fraser and so close to Vancouver that
+it is almost impossible for the stranger to determine
+where the one ends and the other begins; Nanaimo,
+a coal-mining town of considerable importance on
+the eastern shore of Vancouver Island, and Alberni,
+famous for its salmon fisheries, at the head of an arm
+of the sea extending inland from the western coast;
+Nelson, the <i>chef-lieu</i> of the prosperous fruit-growing<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_364"></a>[364]</span>
+district of the Kootenai, in the extreme southeastern
+corner of the province; Bella Coola, on a fiord at the
+mouth of the Bella Coola River; Ashcroft, the gateway
+to the hinterland, on the main line of the Canadian
+Pacific Railway; Fort George, at the junction of the
+Fraser and Nechako Rivers; and Prince Rupert, the
+remarkable mushroom city which the Grand Trunk
+Pacific Railway has built, from the ground up, on the
+coast of British Columbia, forty miles south of the
+Alaskan border, as the Pacific Coast terminus for the
+transcontinental system which has recently been completed.</p>
+
+<p>Between Vancouver and Victoria the most intense
+rivalry exists. They are as jealous of each other as
+two prima donnas singing in the same opera. Vancouver
+is a great and prosperous city, with broad and
+teeming streets, clanging street-cars, rumbling traffic,
+belching factory chimneys, towering office-buildings,
+extensive railroad yards, excellent pavements, and attractive
+residential suburbs. Of course there is nothing
+very startling in all this, were it not for the fact that
+it is all new—twenty years ago there was no such place
+on the map. It is a busy, bustling place, where every
+one seems too much occupied in making fortunes overnight
+to have much time to spare for social amenities.
+There was a land boom on the last time I was in
+Vancouver—in fact, I gathered that it was a perennial
+condition—and prices were being asked (and paid!)
+for town lots not yet cleared of forest which would have
+made an American real-estate agent admit quite frankly<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_365"></a>[365]</span>
+that he had not progressed beyond the kindergarten
+stage of the game. I am perfectly serious in saying
+that within the city limits of Vancouver lots are being
+sold which are still covered with virgin forest. Within
+less than two miles of the city hall you can see gangs
+of men clearing residential sites by chopping down the
+primeval forest with which they are covered and blowing
+out and burning the stumps. This real-estate boom,
+with its consequent inflation of land values, has had
+a bad effect on the prosperity of Vancouver, however,
+for many ordinarily conservative business men, dazzled
+by visions of sudden wealth, have gone land mad;
+money is difficult to get, for Canadian banks are prohibited
+by law from loaning on real estate; and, like
+so many other towns which have been stimulated by
+artificial means, Vancouver is already beginning to
+show the effects of the inevitable reaction.</p>
+
+<p>Victoria, unlike Vancouver, is old, as oldness
+counts in the Dominion. It was the seat of government
+when Vancouver was part jungle and part beach. It
+is the residential city of western Canada, and is much
+in vogue as a place of permanent abode for those who
+in any of the nearer provinces “have made their pile,”
+for well-to-do men with marriageable daughters and
+socially ambitious wives, and for military and naval
+officers who have retired and wish to get as much as
+possible out of their limited incomes. Victoria is as
+essentially English as Vancouver is American. It is,
+indeed, a bit of England set down in this remote corner
+of the empire. It has stately government buildings,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_366"></a>[366]</span>
+broad, tree-shaded streets, endless rows of the beam-and-plaster
+villas which one sees in every London
+suburb, and one of the most beautiful parks I have
+ever seen. Its people spend much of their time on the
+tennis-courts, cricket-fields, and golf-links, and are careful
+not to let business interfere with pleasure. That
+is the reason, no doubt, why in business Vancouver
+has swept by Victoria as an automobile sweeps by a
+horse and buggy. Vancouver might aptly be compared
+to a hustling, energetic business man who never
+lets slip an opportunity to make a dollar and who is
+always on the job. Victoria, on the contrary, is a
+quietly prosperous, rather sportily inclined old gentleman
+who is fond of good living and believes that no
+time is wasted that is devoted to sport. Each town has
+a whole-souled contempt for the other. The Victorian
+takes you aside and says: “Oh, yes, Vancouver is progressing
+quite rapidly, I hear, although, fact is, the
+subject really doesn’t interest me. The people are so
+impossible, you know. Why, would you believe it,
+my dear fellow, most of them came there without a
+dollar to their names—fact, I assure you. Now they’re
+all bally millionaires. Positively vulgar, I call it.
+Very worthy folk, no doubt, but scarcely in our class.
+Look here, let’s have a drink and then motor out and
+have a round of golf. What say, old chap? Right-o!”</p>
+
+<p>The Vancouver man shoves his derby on the back
+of his head, sticks a thumb in the armhole of his waistcoat,
+and with the other hand gives you a resounding
+whack on the shoulder. “Victoria? Pshaw, no one<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_367"></a>[367]</span>
+takes Victoria seriously. Nice little place to send the
+madam and the kids for the summer. But it’s asleep—nothing
+doing—no business. Why, say, friend, do you
+know what they do down there? <i>They drink afternoon
+tea!</i> Believe me, Vancouver is the only real, growing,
+progressive, wide-awake, up-and-doing burg this side
+of Broadway. Say, have you got an hour to spare?
+Then just jump into my car here and I’ll run you out
+and show you a piece of property that you can make a
+fortune on if you buy it quick. Yes, sirree, you can
+get rich quick, all right all right, if you invest your
+money in Vancouver.”</p>
+
+<p>There are not more than ten harbours in the world,
+certainly not more than a dozen at the most, that have
+a right to be spoken of in the same breath with Victoria’s
+landlocked port. Picking her cautious way
+through the long, narrow, curving entrance that makes
+the harbour of Victoria resemble a chemist’s retort,
+our vessel swept ahead with stately deliberation, while
+we leaned over the rail in the crispness of the early
+morning and watched the scenes that accommodatingly
+spread themselves before us. Slender, white-hulled
+pleasure yachts, dainty as a débutante; impertinent,
+omnipresent launches, poking their inquisitive noses
+everywhere and escaping disaster by the thickness of
+their paint; greasy, hard-working tugboats, panting
+like an expressman who has carried your trunk upstairs;
+whalers outfitting for the Arctic—you can tell
+’em by the scarlet lookout’s barrel lashed to the fore
+masthead; rusty freighters from Sitka, Callao, Singapore,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_368"></a>[368]</span>
+Heaven knows where; Japanese fishing-boats
+with tattered, weather-beaten sails such as the artists
+love to paint; Siwash canoes manned by squat, shock-headed
+descendants of the first inhabitants; huge
+twin-funnelled Canadian Pacific liners outward bound
+for Yokohama or homeward bound for Vancouver, for
+Victoria boasts of being “the first and last port of call”—take
+my word for it, it’s a sight worth seeing, is
+Victoria Harbour on a sunny morning. We forged
+ahead at half speed and the city crept nearer and
+nearer, until we could make out the line of four-horsed
+brakes waiting to rattle those tourists whose time was
+limited to the customary “points of interest,” and the
+crowd of loungers along the quay, and the constables
+with their helmet straps under their lower lips and
+blue-and-white-striped bands on their sleeves, exactly
+like their fellows in Oxford Circus and Piccadilly. At
+the right the imposing stone façade of the Parliament
+buildings rose from an expanse of vivid lawn—as a
+result of the combined warmth and moisture the vegetation
+of Victoria is unsurpassed in the temperate
+zone; at the left the business portion of the city
+stretched away in stolid and uncompromising brick
+and stone; squarely ahead of us loomed the great
+bulk of the Empress Hotel. We would have run into
+it had we kept straight on, but of course we didn’t,
+for the captain yanked a lever on the bridge and bells
+jangled noisily in the engine room, and the vessel,
+turning ever so deliberately, poked her prow into the
+berth that awaited it like a horse entering its accustomed
+stall.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_369"></a>[369]</span></p>
+
+<p>What I like about Victoria is that it is so blamed
+British. Unless you are observing enough to notice
+that the date-lines of the London papers in the Union
+Club are quite a fortnight old, you would never dream
+that you were upward of six thousand miles from Trafalgar
+Square and barely sixty from the totem-pole in
+Seattle. If you still have any lingering doubts as to
+the atmosphere of the place being completely and unreservedly
+British, they will promptly be dispelled if
+you will drop into the lobby (they call it lounge) of
+the Empress Hotel any afternoon at four o’clock and
+see the knickerbockered sons of Albion engaged in the
+national diversion of drinking tea. When an American
+is caught drinking afternoon tea he assumes an
+I-give-you-my-word-I-never-did-this-before-but-the-ladies-dragged-me-into-it
+air, but your Britisher does it with
+all the matter-of-courseness with which a New Yorker
+orders his pre-dinner cocktail. One of the earliest
+impressions one gets in Victoria is that all the inhabitants
+are suffering from extraordinarily hard colds—brought
+on, you suppose, by the dampness of the climate—but
+after a little it dawns on you that they are
+merely employing the broad A that they brought with
+them from the old country, along with their monocles
+and their beautifully cut riding clothes. In Vancouver,
+on the contrary, you never hear the broad A used at
+all unless by a new arrival with the brand of Bond
+Street fresh upon him. They have no time for it.
+They are too busy making money. The Victorians, on
+the other hand, never lie awake nights fretting about
+the filthy lucre. <i>They</i> are too busy having a good time.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_370"></a>[370]</span>
+They have enough money to be comfortable, and that
+seems to be all they want. That’s the plan on which
+the place is run—comfort and pleasure. Most of the
+Victorians, so I was told, are people with beer pocketbooks
+and champagne thirsts. For a man with a
+modest income and an unquenchable thirst for sport
+Victoria is the best place of residence I know. In
+most places it needs a rich man’s income to lead the
+sporting life, for game-preserves and salmon rivers
+and polo ponies run into a lot of money, but in Victoria
+almost any one can be a sport, if not a sportsman,
+for you can pick up a pony that can be broken to polo
+for sixty or seventy dollars and a few miles back of
+the city lies one of the greatest fishing and shooting
+regions in the world. The last time I was in Victoria
+I found all the banks and business houses closed, and
+flags were flying from every public building, and a
+procession, headed by mounted police and a band,
+was coming down the street. “What’s going on?” I
+inquired of a deeply interested bystander. “Is it the
+King’s birthday or is there royalty in town, or what?”
+“Not on your life!” he answered witheringly. “It’s
+the prime minister on his way to open the baseball
+season.”</p>
+
+<p>If you want to go a-motoring in a foreign country
+without the expense and trouble of an ocean voyage,
+I doubt if you could do better than to put your car on
+a steamer at Seattle or Vancouver, with “Victoria”
+pencilled on the bill of lading. Take my word for it,
+you will find Vancouver Island as foreign (perhaps I<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_371"></a>[371]</span>
+should say as un-American) as England; in many respects
+it is more English than England itself. Though
+the aggregate length of the insular highways is not very
+great, for civilisation has as yet but nibbled at the
+island’s edges, the roads that have been built are unsurpassed
+anywhere. If roads are judged not only by
+their smoothness but by the scenery through which
+they pass, then the highways of Vancouver Island are
+in a class by themselves. They are as smooth as the
+arguments of an automobile salesman; their grades are
+as easy as the path to shame; they are bordered by
+scenery as alluring as Scherezade. The spinal column
+of Vancouver’s highway system is the splendid Island
+Highway, which, after leaving Victoria, parallels the
+east coast, running through Cowichan, Chemainus,
+Ladysmith, Nanaimo, and Wellington, to Nanoose
+Bay. Here the road divides, one fork continuing up
+the coast to Campbell River, which is the northernmost
+point that can be reached by road, while the other
+fork swings inland, skirting the shores of Cameron
+Lake and through Alberni, at the head of Barclay
+Sound, to Great Central Lake, which, as its name indicates,
+is in the very heart of the island, upward of a hundred
+and fifty miles from Victoria as the motor goes.
+The first twenty miles of the Island Highway are known
+as the Malahat Drive, the road here climbing over a
+mountain range of considerable height by means of
+a splendidly surfaced but none too wide shelf, with
+many uncomfortably sharp turns, cut in the rocky
+face of the cliff. This shelf gradually ascends until<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_372"></a>[372]</span>
+the giant firs in the gloomy gorge below look no larger
+than hedge-plants, and the waters of the sound, with
+its wild and wooded shores, like a miniature lakelet in
+a garden. The Malahat is a safe enough road if you
+drive with caution. But it is no place for joy riding.
+It is too narrow, in the first place, and the turns are
+too sharp, and it is such a fearfully long way to the
+bottom that they would have to gather up your remains
+with a shovel, which is messy and inconvenient.</p>
+
+<p>Throughout our tour on Vancouver Island we
+were impressed with the universal politeness and good
+nature of the people we met, particularly in the back
+country, and by the courteous wording of the signs
+along the highways. The highway signs in the United
+States have a habit of shaking a fist in your face, metaphorically
+speaking, and shouting at you: “Go any
+faster if you dare!” But in Vancouver they assume
+that you are a gentleman and address you as such.
+Instead of curtly ordering you to “Go slow” without
+condescending to give any reason, they erect a sign
+like this: “Schoolhouse ahead. Please look out for
+the children,” and, a little way beyond, another
+which says, “Thank you”—a little courtesy which
+costs nothing except a few extra strokes of the brush
+and leaves you permeated with a glow of good feeling.</p>
+
+<p>When we reached Nanaimo, which is a coal-mining
+centre of considerable importance, we found one of
+the periodic strikes which serve to relieve the tedium
+of life in the drab little colliery town in progress and a
+militia regiment of Highlanders encamped in its streets.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_373"></a>[373]</span>
+When we speak of militia in the United States we
+usually think of slouch-hatted youths in rather slovenly
+uniforms of yellow khaki, who meet every Wednesday
+night for drill at the local armoury, spend ten days in
+an instruction camp each summer, and parade down
+the main streets of their respective towns on Decoration
+Day and the Fourth of July. But these Canadian
+militiamen were something quite different. I don’t
+suppose that they are a whit more efficient when it
+comes to the business of slaughter than their cousins
+south of the border, but they are certainly a lot more
+picturesque. But I ask you now, candidly, can you
+imagine several hundred young Americans dressed in
+plaid kilts and plaid stockings, with an interim of bare
+knees, jackets chopped off at the waist-line, and dinky
+little caps with ribbons hanging down behind keeping
+the upper hand in a strike-ridden American city?
+I can’t. These young men belonged, so I was told, to
+a “Highland” regiment, though after talking with a
+few of them I gathered that their acquaintance with
+the Highlands consisted in having occupied seats in
+the upper gallery at a performance by Harry Lauder.
+But, kilts or no kilts, there was no doubt that they
+were running the show in Nanaimo and, from all indications,
+running it very well.</p>
+
+<p>Decidedly the most worth-while thing on Vancouver
+Island, either from the view-point of an artist
+or a motorist, is that portion of the Island Highway
+between Nanoose Bay, on the Straits of Georgia, and
+Alberni, at the head of Barclay Sound. When I first<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_374"></a>[374]</span>
+traversed it in the golden radiance of an October day,
+I thought it was the most beautiful road I had ever
+seen. And as I traverse it again in the motor-car of
+memory, with a knowledge of most of the other beautiful
+highways of the world to compare it with, I am
+still of the same opinion. So impressive is the scenery,
+so profound the silence that we felt a trifle awed and
+spoke in whispers when we spoke at all, as though we
+were in the nave of a great cathedral. High above us
+the tree tops interlaced in a roof of translucent green
+through which the sun-rays filtered, turning the road
+into a golden trail and the moss on the rocks and the
+tree trunks into old-gold plush. The meadowed hillsides
+were so thickly strewn with lacy ferns and wild
+flowers that it seemed as though the Great Architect
+had draped them in the dainty, flowered cretonne they
+use in ladies’ boudoirs; and scattered about, as might
+be expected in a lady’s boudoir, were silver mirrors—with
+rainbow-trout leaping in them. Then there were
+the mountains: range piled upon range, peaks peering
+over the shoulders of other peaks like soldiers <i>en
+échelon</i>. They ran the gamut of the more sober colours;
+green at the base, where the lush meadows lay, then
+the dark green of the forest, then the rusty brown of
+scrub and underbrush, the violet and blue and purple
+of the naked rock, and, atop of all, a crown of dazzling
+white.</p>
+
+<p>The versatile gentlemen who write those alluring
+folders that you find in racks in railway offices and
+hotel lobbies very cleverly play on the Anglo-Saxon<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_375"></a>[375]</span>
+love for sport by describing the region through which
+their particular system runs as “a sportsman’s paradise.”
+It makes small difference whether they are
+describing the New Jersey mud-flats or the Berkshire
+hills, they are all “sportsman’s paradises.” But the
+northern half of Vancouver Island is all that this much-abused
+term implies and more. It is, I suppose, the
+finest and most accessible fish and game country on the
+continent south of the Skeena. I am perfectly aware
+that I may be accused of belonging to the Ananias
+Club when I say that certain of the smaller streams in
+Vancouver Island (and also in northern British Columbia)
+are at certain seasons of the year so choked with
+salmon that they can be, <i>and are</i>, speared with a
+pitchfork, and that ruffed grouse and Chinese pheasants
+are so plentiful and tame that they can be knocked
+over with a long-handled shovel. It’s true, just the
+same. We didn’t pitchfork any salmon ourselves,
+because it isn’t our conception of sport, but we saw
+natives tossing them out of a stream north of Alberni
+as unconcernedly as though they were pitchforking
+hay. Nor did we assassinate any game-birds with a
+shovel; but more than once, during the run from
+Nanoose Bay to Great Central Lake, we had to swerve
+aside to avoid running down grouse, which were so
+tame that a Plymouth Rock would be wild in comparison;
+and once, near Cameron Lake, we actually did
+run over the trailing tail-feathers of a gorgeous Chinese
+cock pheasant that insolently refused to get off the road.</p>
+
+<p>Alberni and its bigger, busier sister, Port Alberni,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_376"></a>[376]</span>
+occupy the anomalous position of being in the middle
+of the island and at the same time on its western coast.
+If you will take the trouble to look at the map you
+will see that the arm of the sea called Barclay Sound
+reaches into the very heart of the island, thus permitting
+deep-sea merchantmen to tie up at Port Alberni’s
+wharfs and take aboard cargoes of lumber and dried
+salmon. Alberni was one of the places that I should
+have liked to linger in, so peaceful and easy-going is
+its Old-World atmosphere as it dozes the sunny days
+away, the soft salt breath of the sea mingling with
+the balsamic fragrance of the forest which surrounds
+it. Because it is so comparatively little visited, and
+because the waters of the sound are famous for their
+salmon runs, we expected that we would have an opportunity
+to bend our rods off Alberni, but we were met
+with disappointment, for the salmon with which these
+waters swarm were, for strictly domestic reasons, not
+biting at the time we were there. So we kept on to
+Great Central Lake, a dozen miles north of Alberni,
+through the forest.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp50" id="illus39" style="max-width: 29.6875em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus39.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><p>The Ark, on Great Central Lake. “Like its
+  prototype of Noah’s day, it is a floating caravansary.”</p>
+  <p>A wolverine caught in a trap in the forest at the northern end of
+  Vancouver Island.</p>
+  <p>SPORT ON VANCOUVER ISLAND.</p></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>Even though you do not know a trout from a
+turbot, a fly from a spoon; even though some of the
+finest scenery in the three Americas could not elicit
+an “Oh!” of admiration or an “Ah!” of pleasure, I
+hope that some day you will visit Great Central Lake,
+if for no other reason than to experience the novelty
+of spending a night in its extraordinary hotel. It is
+called The Ark, and, like its prototype of Noah’s day,
+it is a floating caravansary. Briefly, it is a hotel of<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_377"></a>[377]</span>
+twenty bedrooms built on a raft anchored in the lake.
+When the fishing becomes indifferent in the neighbourhood,
+the proprietor hoists his anchors, starts up
+the engines of his launch, and tows his floating hotel
+elsewhere. The fish have a hard time keeping away
+from it, for it pursues them remorselessly. It is patronised
+in the main by that world-wide brotherhood
+whose members believe that no place is too remote or
+too difficult of access if their journey is rewarded by
+the thrill of a six-pound trout on an eight-ounce rod
+or by glimpsing a bighorn or a bear along a rifle barrel.
+For that reason one is quite likely to run across some
+very interesting people at The Ark. While we were
+there a party of English notabilities arrived. There
+were the Earl of Something-or-Other and his beautiful
+daughter, Lady Marjorie What’s-her-Name, and a
+cousin, the Honourable So-and-So, and the earl’s mine
+manager, and one or two others. Now there isn’t
+anything very remarkable about meeting British nobility
+in the Colonies, for nowadays you find earls and
+marquises and dukes floating around everywhere. In
+fact, as Mark Twain once remarked of decorations,
+you can’t escape them. The remarkable thing about
+this particular party was that they had tramped overland
+from the extreme northern end of the island, where
+some mining properties in which the earl was interested
+are situated, through unmapped and almost unknown
+forests, sleeping in the open with no covering
+save the blankets they carried on their backs, and with
+the Lady Marjorie for their cook. She was as slim and<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_378"></a>[378]</span>
+trim and pretty a girl as one could ask for, and, with
+her curly hair creeping out from under her soft hat, her
+Norfolk jacket snugly belted to her lissom figure, her
+smartly cut knickerbockers and her leather stockings,
+she might have stepped out of one of those novels by
+the Williamsons.</p>
+
+<p class="tb">The chief factor in the colonisation of British Columbia
+and in the development of its resources is the remarkable
+railway expansion which is now taking place.
+No region in the world has witnessed such extraordinary
+progress in railway construction during the past
+five years. Until the spring of 1914 the “C. P. R.,”
+as the Canadian Pacific is commonly called throughout
+the Dominion, enjoyed a monopoly of freight and
+passenger transportation in the province, being scarcely
+less autocratic in its attitude and methods than the
+Standard Oil Company before it was curbed by Federal
+legislation. But when, early in 1914, the last rail of
+the Grand Trunk Pacific was laid in the vicinity of
+Fort George and the last spike driven, the “C. P. R.”
+suddenly found its hitherto undisputed supremacy
+challenged by a rich, powerful, and splendidly equipped
+system, which, owing to its more northerly route and
+easier gradients, is able to make considerably faster
+running time from ocean to ocean than its long-established
+rival. Moreover, another great transcontinental
+system, the Canadian Northern, is already in
+partial operation and is rapidly nearing completion,
+while the construction gangs have begun work on the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_379"></a>[379]</span>
+Pacific Great Eastern, a subsidiary of the Grand Trunk
+Pacific, over whose rails the latter plans to reach tide-water
+at Vancouver, thus invading territory which the
+Canadian Pacific has heretofore regarded as peculiarly
+its own. In another year or so, therefore, British
+Columbia will not only have a more complete railway
+system than either Washington or Oregon, but it will
+be the terminus of three great transcontinental systems,
+each of which will run from tide-water to tide-water,
+under the same management and the same name.</p>
+
+<p>If you will glance at <a href="#map">the map at the back of this
+volume</a> you will see that the railway systems of British
+Columbia roughly resemble a gigantic Z. The lower
+right-hand corner of the Z represents Kicking Horse
+Pass, near Lake Louise, where the Canadian Pacific
+crosses the Rockies; the lower left-hand corner may
+stand for Vancouver, which is the terminus of the
+Canadian Pacific, the Canadian Northern, and the
+Pacific Great Eastern; the upper right-hand corner
+of the Z we will designate as Yellowhead (or Tête
+Jaune) Pass, where both the Grand Trunk Pacific and
+the Canadian Northern cross the Rockies; while the
+upper left-hand corner is the great terminal port which
+the Grand Trunk Pacific has built to order at Prince
+Rupert. The lower bar of the Z approximately represents
+the Canadian Pacific, the upper bar the Grand
+Trunk Pacific, and the diagonal the Canadian Northern.</p>
+
+<p>The main line of the Canadian Pacific enters the
+province at Kicking Horse Pass and, dropping southward
+in a series of sweeping curves, strikes the Fraser<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_380"></a>[380]</span>
+at Lytton and hugs its northern bank to Vancouver.
+From the main line numerous branches straggle southward
+to the American border, thus giving access to the
+rich country lying between the Kootenai and the Okanogan.
+Entering British Columbia far to the northward,
+through the Tête Jaune Pass, where the mountains
+are much lower, the Canadian Northern lays its
+course southwestward in almost a straight line, crossing
+the Thompson just above its junction with the
+Fraser and thence paralleling the Canadian Pacific
+through the cañon of the Fraser, though on the opposite
+side of the river, to Vancouver. The Canadian
+Northern is, I might add, spending a large sum in the
+construction of railway shops and yards at Port Mann,
+a place which it is building to order amid the virgin
+forest, a few miles east of New Westminster. The
+Grand Trunk Pacific likewise uses the Tête Jaune Pass
+as a gateway. Instead of turning southward after
+crossing the mountains, however, it swings far to the
+north, following the east fork of the Fraser to Fort
+George and thence up the level and fertile valleys of
+the Nechako and the Bulkley to New Hazelton and so
+down the Skeena to Prince Rupert. Recognising the
+necessity of having a means of direct access to Vancouver,
+which is the metropolis of western Canada, the
+Grand Trunk Pacific now has under construction a subsidiary
+system, to be known as the Pacific Great Eastern,
+which, leaving the main line at Fort George, will
+follow the Fraser due southward to Lillooet and then
+strike directly across a virgin country to Vancouver,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_381"></a>[381]</span>
+thus giving the Grand Trunk Pacific two west-coast
+terminals instead of one. The Grand Trunk Pacific
+engineers have also drawn plans for a line running due
+north from New Hazelton toward the Yukon, which
+would throw open to exploitation the rich coal-fields of
+the Groundhog and the fertile prairies of northernmost
+British Columbia, the idea being, of course, to ultimately
+effect a junction with the proposed Federal railway
+in Alaska, thus bringing Alaska into direct railway
+communication with the outside world.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp50" id="illus40" style="max-width: 31.25em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus40.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><p>Indians breaking camp.</p>
+  <p>Mr. Powell arriving at a frontier hotel in the Nechako country.</p>
+  <p>An Indian bridge near New Hazelton.</p>
+  <p>LIFE AT THE BACK OF BEYOND.</p></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>Though enormously rich in timber and ore, Vancouver
+Island has not yet had its share of railway expansion,
+its only system of transportation at present
+being the Esquimault &amp; Nanaimo Railway, which runs
+from Victoria to Alberni, in the heart of the island.
+The Canadian Northern, however, proposes to build
+a line from Victoria half-way up the west coast of the
+island, while the Grand Trunk Pacific, going its rival
+one better, has obtained a concession for building a
+railway from one end of the island to the other, thus
+opening up its enormously rich fisheries, mines, and
+forests. With this era of railway expansion immediately
+before them, it seems to me that the British Columbians
+are quite justified in looking at the future
+through rose-coloured glasses.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus41" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus41.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><p>The bull train: the last on the continent.</p>
+  <p>The dog train: taking in supplies to the miners of the Groundhog coal-fields.</p>
+  <p>TRANSPORT ON AMERICA’S LAST FRONTIER.</p></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>Consider the cities, how they grow—Prince Rupert,
+for example. A city literally made to order, just
+as a tailor would make a suit of clothes, is something
+of a novelty even in an age which jeers at precedent
+and slaps tradition in the face. “Rome was not built<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_382"></a>[382]</span>
+in a day,” but that was because it had no transcontinental
+railway system to finance and superintend and
+push forward its construction. If a Gaul, Transalpine,
+&amp; Pompeian Railway had been in operation, and its
+directors knew their business, they would have turned
+loose their engineers, architects, and builders and, after
+staking out and draining a town site beside the Tiberian
+marshes, they would have run up the Eternal City and
+auctioned off the building lots along the Via Appia as
+expeditiously as the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway has
+brought into being the west-coast terminus which it
+has named Prince Rupert after that adventurous Palatine
+prince, nephew of Charles I, who was in turn a
+cavalry leader, a naval commander, and the first
+governor of the Hudson Bay Company. Unless your
+family atlas is of recent vintage (and I have regretfully
+observed that most of them were purchased at
+about the period of Stanley’s explorations) you will
+search it in vain for Prince Rupert, for this custom-made
+municipality came into existence about the same
+time as the tango and the turkey-trot. The easiest
+way to locate it, then, is to trace with your finger
+parallel 54° 40′ North (the slogan “Fifty-four forty or
+fight!” you will recall, once nearly brought on a war
+with England) until it reaches the Pacific Coast of
+North America. There, five hundred and fifty miles
+north of Vancouver, forty miles south of the Alaskan
+border, on Kai-en Island, at the mouth of the Skeena
+River, set on a range of hills overlooking one of the
+finest deep-water harbours in the world, is Prince<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_383"></a>[383]</span>
+Rupert. It is in the same latitude as London and has
+a wet and foggy climate which cannot fail to make a
+Londoner feel very much at home. Probably never before
+have there been so much time and money expended
+in the planning and preliminary work of a new city.
+The town site was chosen only after a careful inspection
+of the entire British Columbia coast-line and was laid
+out by a famous firm of Boston landscape engineers
+with the same attention to detail which they would have
+given to laying out a great estate. Experts who have
+studied the plan on which Prince Rupert is built assert
+that in time it will be one of the most beautiful cities
+on the continent. The site is a picturesque one, for,
+from the six-mile-long shore-line which sweeps around
+the front of the city, the ground rises abruptly, so that
+on clear days—which, by the way, are far from common—a
+magnificent view may be had from the heights of
+the forested and fiord-indented coast, of the island-studded
+channel, of the Indian village of Metlakatla,
+known as the “Holy City,” and, on rare occasions, of
+the mountains of Alaska. Unless one is conversant
+with the development of the Pacific Coast; unless one
+has seen its seaports—Victoria, Vancouver, Seattle,
+Tacoma, San Pedro, San Diego—spring into being
+almost overnight, one cannot fully realise the possibilities
+and potentialities of this new city with the
+unfamiliar name. To begin with, the distance from
+Liverpool to Yokohama by way of Prince Rupert is
+eight hundred miles shorter than via New York and
+San Francisco; it is five hundred miles nearer the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_384"></a>[384]</span>
+Orient than any other Pacific port. Nothing illustrates
+more graphically the strategic value of its position
+than the fact that a traveller bound, say, for New
+York from China, Japan, or Alaska can board a train
+at Prince Rupert and be as far as Winnipeg, or virtually
+half across the continent, before the steamer
+from which he disembarked could reach Vancouver.
+In addition to the shorter distance across the Pacific
+must be added the much faster time that can be made
+by rail over the practically level grades (four tenths
+of one per cent) that the Grand Trunk Pacific has
+obtained through the lower mountains to the north,
+which will enable trains to be moved at the rate of two
+miles for every one mile on the heavier grades of rival
+systems. What is most important of all, however,
+Prince Rupert has at its back probably the potentially
+richest hinterland in the world—a veritable commercial
+empire waiting to be explored, developed, and exploited.
+The mineral wealth of all this vast region, the forest
+products, the gold, the coal, the copper, the iron ore
+of northern British Columbia and the Yukon, the food
+products of the prairie provinces, and the fish and fur
+of the far North—in short, all the westbound export
+wealth of this resourceful region—will find its outlet to
+the sea at Prince Rupert as surely and as true to natural
+laws as its rivers empty into the Pacific.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus42" style="max-width: 43.75em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus42.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><p>The pack-train: crossing the prairies of
+  northern British Columbia.</p>
+  <p>The wagon-train: a settler on his way into the interior over the Cariboo Trail.</p>
+  <p>TRANSPORT ON AMERICA’S LAST FRONTIER.</p></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>You of the sheltered life: you, Mr. Bank President,
+you, Mr. Lawyer, you, Mr. Business Man, you,
+Mr. Tourist, who travel in Pullman cars and sleep in
+palatial hostelries, have you any real conception of the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_385"></a>[385]</span>
+breed of men who are conquering this wilderness, who
+are laying these railways, who are building these cities,
+who are making these new markets and new playgrounds
+for you and me? Some of them have saved
+and scrimped for years that they might be able to buy
+a ticket from the Middle West, or from the English
+shires, or from the Rhine banks to this beckoning,
+primeval, promiseful land. Others, taking their families
+and their household belongings with them, have
+trekked overland by wagon, just as their grandfathers
+did before them for the taking of the West, trudging
+in the dust beside the weary horses, cooking over
+camp-fires in the forest or on the open prairie, sleeping,
+rolled in their blankets, under the stars. Some there
+are who have come overland from the Yukon, on snowshoes,
+mayhap; their pitifully meagre possessions on
+their back, living on the food which they killed, their
+only sign-posts the endless line of wire-draped poles.
+There are the engineers, who, mocking at the hostility
+of the countenance which this savage, untamed land
+turns toward them, are pushing forward and ever
+forward their twin lines of steel, cutting their way
+through well-nigh impenetrable forests, throwing their
+spider spans across angry rivers and forbidding gorges,
+running their levels and laying their rails and driving
+their spikes oblivious to torrential rains or blinding
+snows, to blistering heat or freezing cold. Then, too,
+there are the silent, efficient, quick-witted men who
+have maintained law and order through the length and
+breadth of this great province—travelling on duty<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_386"></a>[386]</span>
+through its wildest parts, amid dangers and privations
+without end, at one time deep in the snows of the far
+Nor’west, at others making their hazardous way on
+horseback along the brink of precipices which make
+one sick and dizzy to look down; swimming rapid rivers
+holding to the tails of their horses or journeying over
+the frozen lands with teams of dogs; one month in the
+mining camps on the uppermost reaches of the Fraser
+and the next carrying the fear of the law to the wild
+tribes of the Kootenai. Such are the men who, in
+Britain’s westernmost outpost, are clinching down the
+rivets of empire.</p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_387"></a>[387]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XIV">XIV<br>
+<span class="smaller">BACK OF BEYOND</span></h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_388"></a>[388]</span></p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">“I hear the tread of pioneers,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Of millions yet to be;</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">The first low wash of waves where soon</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Shall roll a human sea.</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">The elements of empire here</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Are plastic yet and warm,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">The chaos of a mighty world</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Is rounding into form.”</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_389"></a>[389]</span></p>
+
+<h3>XIV<br>
+<span class="smaller">BACK OF BEYOND</span></h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>Most people—and by that I mean nine hundred
+and ninety-eight in every thousand—have come
+to believe quite positively that, on this continent at
+least, there is no longer any region that can truthfully
+be called “The Frontier.” Therein they are wrong.
+Because the municipality of Tombstone has applied
+to the Arizona Legislature for permission to change its
+name, because the cow-puncher is abandoning the
+range for the more lucrative occupation of cavorting
+before a moving-picture camera, because the roulette
+ball clicks no longer behind open doors in any Western
+town is no proof that the frontier is no more. As a
+matter of fact, it has only been pushed back. There
+still exists a real frontier, all wool and eight hundred
+miles wide, together with all the orthodox concomitants
+of cowboys, Concord coaches, log cabins, prairie-schooners,
+pack-trains, trappers, grizzly bears, and Indians.
+But it won’t last much longer. This is the last call.
+If you would see this stage of nation building in all its
+thrilling realism and picturesqueness you have need
+to hurry. A few more years—half a dozen at the most—and
+store clothes will replace the <i>chaparejos</i> and sombreros;
+the mail-sacks, instead of being carried in the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_390"></a>[390]</span>
+boots of stage-coaches, will be flung from the doors of
+flying trains; the motor-car will supplant the prairie-schooner
+and the pack-train.</p>
+
+<p>Answer me, now. If, at a moderate outlay of
+time, money, and exertion, you could visit a region as
+untamed and colourful as was the country beyond the
+Pecos forty years back and peopled by the hardiest
+breed of adventurers that ever foreran the columns
+of civilisation, would you give up for a time the comforts
+of the sheltered life and go? You would? I
+hoped so. Get out the atlas, then, from its dusty place
+of exile and open it to the map of North America
+that I may show you the way. In the upper left-hand
+corner, stretching its scarlet bulk across eleven degrees
+of printed latitude, is British Columbia, whose central
+and northern portions contain thousands upon thousands
+of square miles that have never felt the pressure
+of a white man’s foot or echoed to a white man’s voice.
+Here is the last of the “Last West”; here the frontier
+is making its final stand; here, fighting the battles
+and solving the problems of civilisation, are to be
+found the survivors of that race of rugged adventurers,
+now almost extinct, who replaced the forest with the
+wheat-field—the Pioneers.</p>
+
+<p>There are several routes by which one can reach
+the interior of the province: from the made-to-order
+seaport of Prince Rupert up the Skeena by railway to
+New Hazelton and Fort Fraser, for example; or down
+the South Fork of the Fraser by river steamer from
+Tête Jaune Cache to Fort George; or from the country<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_391"></a>[391]</span>
+of the Kootenai overland through the Okanogan and
+Lillooet. These, however, are obscure side entrances
+and more or less difficult of access. The front door to
+the hinterland, and the logical way to enter it, is by
+way of Ashcroft, a one-street-two-hotels-and-eight-saloons
+town on the main line of the Canadian Pacific,
+eight hours east of Vancouver as the <i>Imperial Limited</i>
+goes. At Ashcroft, which is the principal outfitting
+point for all this region, begins the historic highway
+known as the Cariboo Trail, by which you can travel
+northward—provided you are able to get a seat in the
+crowded stages—until civilisation sits down to rest
+and the wilderness begins.</p>
+
+<p>What the Wells-Fargo Company, with its comprehensive
+system of mail, passenger, and freight services,
+was to our own West in the days before the railway
+came, the British Columbia Express Company, commonly
+known as the “B. C. X.,” is to that vast region
+which is watered by the Fraser. Nowhere that I can
+recall has travelling through a wild and mountainous
+country been reduced to such a science. Although the
+company operates upward of a thousand miles of stage
+lines, along which are distributed more than three
+hundred horses at relay stations approximately sixteen
+miles apart, its coaches, in spite of blizzards, torrential
+rains, and ofttimes incredibly atrocious roads, maintain
+their schedules with the rigidity of mail-trains.
+The company’s equipment is as complete in its way as
+that of a great railway system, its rolling stock consisting
+of everything from a two-horse thorough-brace<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_392"></a>[392]</span>
+“jerky” to a six-horse Concord stage, to say nothing
+of automobiles and sleighs. In conjunction with its
+system of vehicular transportation it operates a service
+of river steamers, specially constructed for running
+the rapids, upon the Upper Fraser and the
+Nechako.</p>
+
+<p>The backbone of the “B. C. X.” system, and,
+indeed, of all transportation in the British Columbian
+hinterland, is the Cariboo Trail, a government post-road,
+three hundred miles long, which was built by the
+Royal Engineers in the early sixties as a result of the
+rush to the gold-fields on Williams Creek. Starting
+from Ashcroft, it runs due north for two hundred and
+twenty miles to Quesnel, on the Upper Fraser, where
+it abruptly turns westward and continues to its terminus
+at Barkerville, once a famous mining-camp but now
+a quiet agricultural community in the heart of the
+Cariboo. Scattered along the trail, at intervals of
+fifteen miles or so, are rest-houses where the wayfarer
+can obtain surprisingly well-cooked meals at a uniform
+charge of six bits—a “bit,” I might explain for the
+benefit of the Eastern chechako, being equivalent to
+twelve and a half cents. For the same price the
+traveller can get a clean and moderately soft bed,
+although he must accept it as part and parcel of frontier
+life should he find that the room to which he is
+assigned already contains half a dozen snoring occupants.
+These rest-houses, which, with their out-buildings,
+stables, and corrals, are built entirely of
+logs, are often liberally coated with whitewash and<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_393"></a>[393]</span>
+occasionally surrounded by stockades and constantly
+reminded me of the post stations which marked the
+end of a day’s journey on the Great Siberian Road
+before Prince Orloff and his railway builders came.
+During the summer months the “up journey” of three
+hundred and twenty miles from Ashcroft to Fort
+George is performed by a conjoined service of motor-cars,
+stage-coaches, and river boats, and, if the roads
+are dry, is made in about four days. As a one-way
+ticket costs sixty-five dollars, exclusive of meals, the
+fare works out at a trifle over twenty cents a mile,
+thus making it one of the most expensive journeys of
+its length in the world, being even costlier, if I remember
+rightly, than the one by the Abyssinian railway from
+Djibuti to Deré Dawa. It is worth every last penny of
+the fare, however, for there is about it a novelty, a
+picturesqueness, an excitement, which cannot be duplicated
+on this continent. From the moment that
+you set your foot on the hub of the stage-coach in Ashcroft
+until your steamer slips out of Prince Rupert
+Harbour, southward bound, you are seeing with your
+own eyes, instead of through the unconvincing mediums
+of the Western novel and the moving-picture screen,
+a nation in the cellar-digging stage of its existence;
+you are transported for a brief time to the Epoch of
+the Dawn.</p>
+
+<p>In anticipation of the atrocious roads which we
+expected to encounter, I had had the car fitted with
+shock-absorbers and had brought with me from Vancouver
+an entire extra set of springs, and at Ashcroft<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_394"></a>[394]</span>
+we selected an equipment with as great care as though
+we were starting on an East African <i>safari</i>. A pick, a
+long-handled shovel, a pair of axes, a block and tackle,
+four spare tires, and a dozen inner tubes comprised the
+essentials of our outfit, to which was added at Quesnel
+a supply of tinned foods, a small shelter tent, a set of
+rubber sheets, and three of the largest-size Hudson
+Bay blankets. It’s a costly business, this motoring
+in lands where motors have never gone before. The
+most important thing of all, of course, is the gasoline,
+the entire success of our venture depending upon our
+ability to carry a sufficient supply with us to get us
+through the six hundred miles of uninhabited wilderness
+between Quesnel and the Skeena. By reducing
+our personal belongings to a minimum, we succeeded
+in getting eight five-gallon tins into the tonneau of the
+car, in addition to the twenty gallons in the tank, thus
+giving us a total of sixty gallons, which, theoretically
+at least, should have sufficed us. As a matter of fact,
+it did not suffice to carry us half-way to the Skeena, so
+slow was the going and so terrible the condition of the
+road, and, had I not been so fortunate as to obtain an
+order from a British development company on its agents
+at several points in the interior, instructing them to supply
+us with gasoline from some drums which had been
+taken in at enormous expense a year or so before in a
+futile attempt to establish an automobile service, we
+should have been compelled to abandon the car in the
+wilderness for lack of fuel. Gasoline, like everything
+else, is expensive in the interior: at Ashcroft I paid<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_395"></a>[395]</span>
+fifty cents a gallon, at Quesnel a dollar, and thereafter,
+until we reached the end of steel at Moricetown, two
+dollars a gallon—which, so I was assured, was exactly
+what it had cost the company to freight it in. Briefly,
+our plan was this: to start from Ashcroft, a station on
+the Canadian Pacific, two hundred miles from the coast,
+and follow the Cariboo Trail northward to Quesnel,
+thence striking through the unsettled and almost unexplored
+wilderness which reaches from the Fraser to
+the Skeena, following the Yukon Telegraph Trail
+through Fort Fraser to New Hazleton, on the Skeena,
+which is barely half a hundred miles south of the
+Alaskan border. I asked every one I met in Ashcroft
+as to our chances of getting through, and the more
+people to whom I talked the slimmer they seemed to
+become.</p>
+
+<p>One man assured us that there was no road whatever
+north of Fort Fraser and that, if we wanted to
+get through, we would have to take the car apart and
+pack it in on the backs of horses, as an automobile
+agent from Seattle had done the year before; another
+told us that there were no bridges and that we would
+be compelled to hire Siwash Indians to make rafts to
+ferry us across the streams; still a third cheered us
+up by assuring us that we could always get a team to
+haul us out.</p>
+
+<p>“An eight-horse swing ought to haul you out in
+a fortnight,” he remarked cheeringly.</p>
+
+<p>“What would it cost?” I inquired.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh,” he answered, “if you’re a good hand at<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_396"></a>[396]</span>
+bargaining you ought to get the outfit for about a
+hundred dollars a day.”</p>
+
+<p>That cheered us up tremendously, of course.</p>
+
+<p>We started from Ashcroft early on an autumn
+morning. The air was like sparkling Moselle, overhead
+was a sky of wash-tub blue, and before us the
+gray ribbon of the Cariboo Trail stretched away, between
+dun and barren hills, into the unknown. The
+entire population of the little town had turned out to
+see us off, and as we moved away, with the long, low
+bonnet of the car pointed northward, they gave us a
+cheer and shouted after us, “Hope you’ll get through,
+fellows!” and “Good luck!” Before we left Seattle
+I had bought a little silk American flag, and this we
+flew from a metal rod at the front of the hood, and
+more than once, when we were mired in the mud below
+the Nechako, and were utterly exhausted and ready to
+quit, it was the sight of that bit of tricoloured bunting
+fluttering bravely before us which spurred us on.</p>
+
+<p>Were the Cariboo Trail in certain of the Eastern
+States it would be described by the natives as “a fair
+to middlin’ road,” and it is all of that and more—in the
+dry season. When we traversed it, in the early fall, it
+had not yet been rutted by the torrential autumn
+rains and heavy teaming and was as good a road as an
+automobile pioneer could ask for. In that journey up
+the Cariboo Trail were concentrated all the glamour
+and colour and panorama of that strange, wild border
+life which most people think of as having passed with
+the pony express and the buffalo. A stage-coach rattled<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_397"></a>[397]</span>
+past amid a rolling cloud of dust, its scarlet body
+lurching and swaying on its leathern springs, its four
+horses at a spanking trot, the driver cracking his whip-lash
+spasmodically between the ears of his leaders, for
+he carried his Majesty’s mails and must make his six
+miles an hour, hour in and hour out. Like a gigantic
+boa-constrictor, a pack-train wound slowly past, the
+burdened mules plodding by dejectedly, long ears to
+shaven tails. Scattered along the line, like mounted
+officers beside a marching column, were the packers:
+wiry, iron-hard fellows, their faces sun tanned to the
+colour of their saddles; picturesque figures in their
+goatskin <i>chaparejos</i>, their vivid neckerchiefs, and their
+broad-brimmed, rakish hats. Where they were bound
+for, Heaven only knows: with supplies for the operators
+of the Yukon Telegraph, perhaps, or the miners of the
+Groundhog, or, it might be, for the lonely trading-posts
+on Great Slave Lake and the headwaters of the
+Liard and the Peace. In the pack-train’s dusty wake
+would plod a solitary prospector, dog dirty, his buckskin
+shirt glazed with grime, his tent, pick, shovel, and
+his meagre store of food loaded upon a single patient
+donkey. Occasionally we passed some Sguswap and
+Siwash ranchers—for the Indian of British Columbia
+takes more kindly to an agricultural life than do his
+brothers on the American side of the border—gaily
+clad squaws and bright-eyed children peering curiously
+at our strange vehicle from beneath the canvas
+covers of the wagons, driving into the settlements to
+barter the produce of their holdings in the back country<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_398"></a>[398]</span>
+for cartridges, red blankets, ginger ale, perhaps a
+phonograph.</p>
+
+<p>But oftenest of all we met the freighters, their
+six and eight and twelve horse teams straining at the
+huge, creaking, white-topped wagons—the freight
+trains of the railroadless frontier. Though they bear
+a marked resemblance to the prairie-schooners of
+crossing-the-plains days, the British Columbian freight
+wagons are barely half as large as the enormous scow-bodied
+vehicles in which the American pioneers trekked
+westward. Their inferior carrying capacity is compensated
+for, however, by the custom of linking them
+in pairs, experience having proven that to attempt to
+negotiate the hairpin turns in the mountain roads with
+vehicles having an unusually long wheel-base is but
+to invite disaster. In freighting parlance, five wagons
+with their teams are called a “swing,” the drivers are
+known as “skinners,” and the man in charge of the
+outfit is the “swing boss.” To meet one of these
+wagon-trains on a road that was uncomfortably narrow
+at the best and frequently bordered by a sheer cliff
+was not a pleasant business, for, according to law, the
+freighter is always permitted to take the inside of the
+road, so that more than once we were compelled to
+pull so far to the outside, in order to give the huge
+vehicles space to get by, that there was not room between
+our outer wheels and the precipice’s brink for
+a starved greyhound to pass.</p>
+
+<p>The deeper into the wilderness you push, the more
+infrequent become the mails, until, north of the Fraser,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_399"></a>[399]</span>
+the settlers receive their letters and newspapers only
+once a month during the summer and frequently not
+for many months on end when the rains have turned
+the trails into impassable morasses. When we left
+Quesnel for Fort Fraser the mail was already two
+weeks overdue, and the roads were in such terrible
+condition that the driver of the mail-stage would not
+even hazard a guess as to when he could start. At
+frequent intervals along the way men were camping
+in the rain-soaked brush beside the road, with no protection
+save the scant shelter afforded by a dog-tent
+or a bit of canvas stretched between two trees. At the
+sound of our approach they would run out and hail
+us and inquire eagerly as to whether we could tell
+them when the mail was likely to be along. These men
+were settlers whose ranches lay far back in the wilderness,
+and they had been waiting patiently beside that
+road for many days, straining their ears to catch the
+rattle of the wheels which would bring them word from
+the loved ones at home. One of them, a clean-cut,
+clear-eyed young Englishman, who was camping beside
+the road in a little shelter tent, told us that he had
+been there for fifteen days waiting for the postman.</p>
+
+<p>“I’ve got a little ranch about thirty miles back,”
+he explained, “and I was so afraid that I might miss
+the mail that I tramped out and have been sleeping
+here by the roadside waiting for it. My wife and the
+kiddies are back in the old country, in Devonshire,
+waiting until I can get a home for them out here. I
+haven’t had a letter from them now for going on seven<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_400"></a>[400]</span>
+weeks. The last one that I had told me that my little
+girl was sick, and I’m pretty anxious about her. It’s
+bad news that the coach hasn’t started yet. I guess
+the only thing to do is to keep on waiting.”</p>
+
+<p>To such men as these I lift my hat in respect
+and admiration. Resolute, patient, persevering, facing
+with stout hearts and smiling lips all the hardships
+and discouragements that such a life has to bring,
+they are the real advance-guards of progress, the
+skirmishers of civilisation. In Rhodesia, the Sudan,
+West Africa, New Zealand, Australia, Canada you find
+them, wherever the flag of England flies, clamping
+down the rivets of empire.</p>
+
+<p>A great deal has been written about the brand of
+Englishman who goes by the name of remittance-man.
+With a few pounds a month to go to the devil on, he
+haunts the highways and byways of the newer lands,
+working when he must, idling when he may. In Cape
+Town, Bulawayo, Johannesburg, Sydney, Melbourne,
+Calgary you will find him, hanging over the polished
+bars, or, if his remittances permit, in the local clubs.
+As his long-suffering relatives generally send him as
+far from home as they can buy a ticket, he has become
+a familiar figure in the western provinces of the Dominion
+and particularly along the Pacific Coast. Dressed
+in well-cut tweeds or flannels and smoking the inevitable
+brier, you can see him at almost any hour of any
+day strolling aimlessly about the corridors of the
+Empress Hotel in Victoria or dawdling about the
+Union Club. But you rarely find him in the British<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_401"></a>[401]</span>
+Columbian bush. The atmosphere—and by this I
+do not mean the climate—is uncongenial, for “he
+ain’t a worker” and in consequence is cordially detested
+by the native-born no less than by those industrious
+settlers whose mail from home brings them no monthly
+cheques. In that country, if a man does not go out
+to his labour in the morning he is counted an undesirable
+addition to the population. Hence, though the
+hinterland is filled with the discards of the pack, comparatively
+few of them bear the despised label of
+remittance-man.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp50" id="illus43" style="max-width: 31.25em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus43.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><p>A meeting of the old and the new.</p>
+  <p>“The freight trains of the railroadless frontier.”</p>
+  <p>“The rest-houses are built entirely of logs and occasionally surrounded
+  by stockades.”</p>
+  <p>SCENES ON THE CARIBOO TRAIL.</p></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>But that is not saying that you do not find numbers
+of well-bred, well-educated young Englishmen
+chopping out careers for themselves up there in the
+forests of the North. We came across two such at a
+desolate and lonely ranch midway between Quesnel
+and Blackwater, three hundred miles from the nearest
+railway and thirty from the nearest house. We stopped
+at their little cabin and asked for lunch, and they welcomed
+us as they would a certified cheque. One of
+them, I learned after considerable questioning, was the
+nephew of an earl and had stroked an Oxford crew;
+the other, with a diffidence that was delightful, showed
+me the picture of a rambling, ivy-covered manor-house
+in Hampshire which he called home, and remarked
+quite casually that he had been something of a cricketer
+before he came out to the Colonies and had played for
+the Gentlemen of England. Yet here were these two
+youngsters, gently born and cleanly bred, “pigging
+it,” as they themselves expressed it, in a one-room<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_402"></a>[402]</span>
+cabin up here at the Back of Beyond. Good Heavens!
+how glad they were to see us—not for our own sakes,
+you understand, but because we were messengers from
+that great, gay world from which they had exiled
+themselves. While one of them pared the potatoes,
+the other fried the bacon—“sow-belly” they called
+it—in ill-smelling cottolene, and both of them fired
+questions at us like shots from an automatic: what
+were the newest plays, the latest songs, how long
+since I had been in London, was the chorus at the
+Gaiety as good-looking as it used to be, was Winston
+Churchill really making good in the cabinet or was he
+just a bally ass, did we think that there was anything
+to this talk about the Ulstermen revolting—and all the
+other questions that homesick exiles ask.</p>
+
+<p>“What on earth induces you to stay on in this
+God-forsaken place?” I asked, when at length they
+paused in their questioning for lack of breath. “No
+neighbours, no theatres, no amusements, mails once a
+month if you are lucky, rain six months out of the
+twelve, and snow for four months more. Why don’t you
+try some place nearer civilisation? You can’t do much
+more than make a bare living up here, and a pretty
+poor one at that, eh?”</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” said one of them apologetically, “we do
+a lot better up here than you’d think. Why, last season
+we cut a hundred tons of hay and this year, now
+that we’ve cleared some more land, we’ll probably get
+a hundred and fifty.”</p>
+
+<p>“A hundred tons of hay!” I exclaimed, with pity<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_403"></a>[403]</span>
+in my voice. “Heavens alive, man, what does that
+amount to?”</p>
+
+<p>“It amounted to something over ten thousand
+dollars,” he answered. “Up here, you see, hay is a
+pretty profitable crop—it sells for a hundred dollars a
+ton. Besides, we like the life jolly well. It’s a bit
+lonely, of course, but we’re fond of the open and there’s
+all sort of fishin’ and shootin’—there’s a skin of a
+grizzly that I killed last week tacked up at the back of
+the house. And,” he added, with a hint of embarrassment,
+“this life is a lot more worth while than loafin’
+around London and doin’ the society-Johnnie act. We
+feel, y’ know, as though we were doin’ a bit toward
+buildin’ up the country—sort of bally pioneers.”</p>
+
+<p>Though they probably didn’t know it, those two
+young fellows in flannel shirts and cord breeches, who
+had evidently left England because they were tired of
+living <i>à la métronome</i>, because they had wearied of
+garden-parties and club windows and the family pew,
+were members in good standing of the Brotherhood
+of Nation Builders.</p>
+
+<p>Though we had started from Quesnel with sixty
+gallons of gasoline, the going had been so heavy that
+by the time we reached the telegraph hut at Bobtail
+Lake, where the development company of which I
+have already spoken had left the first of its drums of
+gasoline, our supply was seriously diminished. These
+relay telegraph stations are scattered at intervals of
+fifty miles or so along that single strand of copper wire,
+two thousand miles long, which connects Dawson City<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_404"></a>[404]</span>
+with Vancouver. Many of them are so remotely situated
+that the only time the operators see a white man’s
+face or hear a white man’s voice is when the semiannual
+pack-train brings them their supplies in the
+spring and fall. I can conceive of no more intolerable
+existence than the lives led by these men, sitting at
+deal tables within the lithograph-covered walls of their
+log cabins, with no neighbours, no amusements, nothing
+under the sun to do save listen to the ceaseless
+chatter of a telegraph instrument, day after day, week
+after week, month after month the same. Imagine
+the monotony of it! There were two young men at
+the Bobtail Lake hut, an operator and a linesman,
+and when they saw the little flag of stripes and stars
+fluttering from the bonnet of the car they waved their
+hats and cheered madly. To you who lead sheltered
+lives in offices or factories or stores, the flag may be
+nothing more than a bit of red-white-and-blue bunting,
+but to those who live in the earth’s far corners, where
+it is rarely seen, it stands for home and country and
+family and friends, and is reverenced accordingly.</p>
+
+<p>“It seems darned good to see the old flag again,”
+one of the young men remarked a trifle huskily. “This
+is the first time I’ve laid eyes on it in more’n two years.
+When we heard you coming through the woods we
+thought we must be dreaming. We never expected to
+see an automobile up in this God-forsaken hole.”</p>
+
+<p>“You’re not a Canadian, then?” I asked.</p>
+
+<p>“Not on your tintype. I’m from Tennessee.
+Used to be a train-despatcher down in Texas, got tired<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_405"></a>[405]</span>
+of living in a box car with no trees but sage-brush and
+no neighbours but coyotes, so I wandered up here.
+And believe me, I wish I was back in God’s country
+again.”</p>
+
+<p>That night we spent at a ranch on the Blackwater.
+The English owner and his wife were absent in Vancouver,
+but the ranch hand in charge of the place was
+only too willing to play the part of host. The ranch-house,
+though built of logs, for up there there is nothing
+else to build with, was considerably more pretentious
+than the general run of frontier dwellings. Instead of
+the customary kitchen-living-dining-sleeping room, it
+had a comfortable living-room with a hospitable stone
+fireplace and the floor thickly strewn with bearskins,
+and two sleeping rooms, while in front, in pathetic
+imitation of some old-country garden, was a tiny
+plat set out to fuchsias and mignonette and geraniums
+and surrounded by an attempt at a picket fence. The
+floor of the house was of planks hand-hewn; cedar
+poles laid lengthwise and covered with shakes and sod
+formed a roof impervious to snow or rain; the chinks
+in the log walls were stuffed with moss and clay and
+papered over with illustrations torn from the London
+weeklies. Like nearly all of the houses that we saw in
+the interior of the province, its furniture was crude and
+obviously home-made, with benches instead of chairs,
+for the freighters, who charge thirty cents a pound for
+hauling merchandise in from the railway, refuse to
+bother with anything so unprofitable as chairs, which
+require space out of all proportion to their weight.<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_406"></a>[406]</span>
+Lying on the table in the living-room, atop of a heap
+of year-old newspapers and magazines (for in the north
+country printed matter of any description is something
+to be read and reread and then read once again
+before it is passed on to a neighbour) were two much-thumbed
+volumes. I picked them up, for I was curious
+to see what sort of literature would appeal to people
+who lived their lives in such a place. One was the
+“Discourses of Epictetus,” the other “Manners and
+Social Usages”—with a book-mark at the chapter entitled
+“The Etiquette of Visiting Cards”! And the
+nearest neighbour, a Swedish rancher with a Siwash
+wife, lived fifty miles away.</p>
+
+<p>If the food at Blackwater had been as good as the
+house, or only half as good, there would have been
+little left to be desired. The ranch hand who was in
+charge of the place and who did the cooking—he vouchsafed
+the information that he had been a British soldier
+in India before coming to Canada to seek his fortune
+and wished to God that he was back in India again—made
+it a point, so he told us, to bake enough soda-biscuits
+the first of every month to last until the next
+month came round. As we were there about the
+twenty-eighth, the biscuits were quite hard—like dog-biscuits,
+only not so appetising. Then we had a platter
+of “sow-belly” swimming in an ocean of rancid grease;
+stone-cold boiled potatoes, a pan of the inevitable
+stewed prunes, and mugs of evil-looking coffee, which
+was really chicory in disguise. But what would you?
+This was not Fifth Avenue; this was the Frontier.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_407"></a>[407]</span></p>
+
+<p>I was particularly impressed throughout our journey
+across British Columbia with the almost paternal
+interest the provincial government takes in the welfare
+of the settlers. On trees and buildings everywhere
+are posted crown-surmounted notices relating to everything
+from the filing of homestead claims to the prevention
+of forest-fires. Rest-houses are maintained
+by the government along certain of the less-travelled
+routes; new roads are being cut through the wilderness
+in every direction; forest-rangers and agricultural
+experts are constantly riding about the province with
+open eyes and ears; in every settlement is stationed a
+government agent from whom the settlers can obtain
+information and advice on every subject under the sun.
+Law and order prevail to an extraordinary degree. I
+was told that there are only three police constables
+between Ashcroft and Fort George, a distance of more
+than three hundred miles—and this in a savage and
+sparsely settled country, where a criminal would have
+comparatively little difficulty in making his escape.
+This remarkable absence of crime is due in large measure,
+no doubt, to the rigid prohibition of the sale of
+alcoholic liquor within a certain distance of a public
+work, such as the building of a railway; in fact, the
+workman is debarred from intoxicants as rigorously
+as the Indian. “No drink, no crime,” say the authorities,
+and results have shown that they know what they
+are talking about. Not until the railway is completed
+and the construction gangs have moved on are the
+saloons permitted to throw open their doors. Although<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_408"></a>[408]</span>
+this policy unquestionably makes for law and
+order, it is by no means popular with the workmen,
+who refuse to consider any place deserving of the name
+of town until it has obtained a licence. “Such and
+such a place is a hell of a fine town,” I was frequently
+assured. “They’ve got a saloon there!” Judged by
+this standard, Fort George, which is a division point
+on the Grand Trunk Pacific, at the junction of the
+Fraser and Nechako Rivers, and will unquestionably
+become in time a second Winnipeg or Calgary, is a
+veritable metropolis, for it has considerably more than
+its share of gin-palaces and booze joints. The poet has
+vividly described it in a single couplet:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">“The camp at the bend of the river, with its dozen saloons aglare,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Its gambling dens ariot, its gramophones all ablare.”</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p class="noindent">It is not surprising, therefore, that Fort George is a
+Mecca for the dry of throat, who make bacchanalian
+pilgrimages from incredible distances to its bottle-decorated
+shrines; for if a man is determined to “go on
+a jag” no power on earth, not even a journey of a hundred
+miles or more, can prevent him from gratifying
+his desires. Indeed, it is by no means unusual for a
+man to work on a ranch or on the railway until he has
+accumulated a half year’s wages, and then, throwing
+up his job, to tramp a hundred miles through the
+wilderness to Fort George and blow every last cent of
+his hard-earned money in one grand jamboree. What
+a sudden falling off in intemperance there would be in
+a civilised community if a man had to walk a hundred<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_409"></a>[409]</span>
+miles to get a drink! What? Yet this proscription of
+alcohol has, in a way, defeated its own object, for the
+men, being denied what might be described as legal
+liquors, resort to innumerable more or less efficient
+substitutes. Red ink they will swallow with avidity,
+for it contains a good percentage of low-grade alcohol,
+and the colour, no doubt, completes the illusion. Another
+popular refreshment is lemon extract, such as is
+commonly used in civilised households for flavouring
+jellies and puddings. But the favourite beverage,
+which is to all other alcoholic substitutes what vintage
+champagne is to all other wines, is a certain patent
+medicine which contains <i>eighty per cent of pure alcohol</i>.
+This is as common in the “end-of-steel” towns and the
+construction camps as cocktails are in a New York
+club, both workmen and Indians pouring it down like
+water. It is warranted to cure all pains, and it does,
+for the man who drinks two bottles of it is dead to the
+world for at least a day.</p>
+
+<p>As a result of its popularity with the thirsty ones,
+Fort George might truthfully be described as a very
+lively town. In one of its saloons twelve white-aproned
+individuals are constantly on duty behind a bar of
+polished oak; behind the cash-register sits a watchful
+man with a cocked revolver on his knees; while mingling
+with the crowd in front of the bar are three bull-necked,
+big-bicepsed persons known as the “chuckers-out.”
+Instead of throwing a patron who becomes
+obstreperous into the street, however, in which case he
+would stagger to the saloon opposite and get rid of the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_410"></a>[410]</span>
+balance of his money, he is thrown into the “cooler,”
+where he is given an opportunity to sleep off the effects
+of his debauch, after which he is ready to start in all
+over again. As a result of this ingenious system of
+conservation, very little money gets away.</p>
+
+<p>These frontier communities have handled the perplexing
+problem of the social evil in a novel manner.
+The bedecked and bedizened women who follow in the
+wake of the gold seekers and the construction gangs,
+instead of being permitted to flaunt themselves within
+the town, are forced to reside in colonies of their own
+well without the municipal limits, sometimes half a
+dozen miles back in the bush. The miner who wishes
+to see his light-o’-love is compelled, therefore, to expend
+a considerable amount of time and shoe-leather,
+though I regret to add that this did not appear to act
+as a serious deterrent, the deepest-worn trails that I
+saw in the Northland being those which led from the
+settlements to these colonies of easy virtue.</p>
+
+<p>Shortly after we left Blackwater Ranch it began
+to rain—not a sudden shower which comes and drenches
+and goes, but one of those steady, disheartening drizzles,
+which in this region sometimes last for a week.
+The road—I call it a road merely for the sake of politeness—which
+had been atrocious from the moment we
+left the Fraser, quickly became worse. It was composed
+of the decayed vegetable accumulations of centuries,
+saturated with stagnant water, thus forming a very
+sticky and very slippery material peculiar to British
+Columbia, known as “muskeg.” Though it looks substantial<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_411"></a>[411]</span>
+enough, with its top growth of stubble and
+moss, it combines the most unpleasant qualities of
+Virginia red clay, Irish peat-bog, Mexican adobe, and
+New Orleans molasses. To make matters worse, a
+drove of several hundred cattle had recently preceded
+us, so that the road, which was inconceivably bad under
+any circumstances, had been trampled into a black
+morass which no vehicle could by any possibility get
+through. There was only one thing for us to do and
+that was to corduroy the road, or at least the worst
+stretches of it. I have heard veterans of the Civil
+War dwell on the difficulties of corduroying roads for
+the guns to pass over in the swamps of the Chickahominy,
+but I didn’t appreciate the truth of their
+remarks until I tried it myself. While camping in
+various parts of the world I had used an axe in a dilettante
+sort of way for cutting tent-poles and chopping
+fire-wood, but there is a vast deal of difference between
+that sort of thing and cutting down enough trees to
+pave a road. In an hour our hands were so blistered
+that every movement of the axe helve brought excruciating
+pain; but it was a question of corduroying that
+road or else abandoning the car and making our way
+to civilisation afoot through several hundred miles of
+forest. There was no garage to telephone to for assistance.
+At noon we paused long enough to light a fire
+and cook a meal of sorts, which we ate seated on logs
+amid a sea of slimy ooze, with rain pelting down and
+swarms of voracious black flies and mosquitoes hovering
+about us. Five hours more of tree felling and we<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_412"></a>[412]</span>
+decided that our corduroy causeway was sufficiently
+solid to get over it with the car. As a matter of fact,
+we doubted it in our hearts, but we had reached that
+stage of exhaustion and desperation where we didn’t
+care what happened. If the car stuck in the mud, well
+and good. She could stay there and take root and
+sprout motor-cycles, so far as I was concerned. Backing
+up so as to get a running start, our driver opened
+wide his throttle and the car tore at the stretch of
+home-made corduroy like a locomotive running amuck.
+Under the terrific impact logs as large as a man’s
+body were hurled a dozen feet away. The snapping of
+the limbs and the deafening explosions of the engines
+sounded like a battle in the Balkans. The car reeled
+and swayed like a schooner in a squall, and every instant
+I expected it to capsize; but our driver, clinging
+desperately to the wheel, contrived, with a skill in
+driving that I have never seen equalled, to keep it
+from going over, and, in far less time than it takes to
+tell it, we had traversed the morass we had spent an
+entire day in corduroying, and the car, trembling like
+a frightened horse, stood once again on solid ground.
+The road over which we had passed looked as though
+it had been struck by a combined hurricane, cyclone,
+and tornado.</p>
+
+<p>It was nightfall when we reached the ranch owned
+by a Swede named Peter Rasmussen. What the man
+at Blackwater had described as “a swell place” consisted
+of two small cabins and a group of log barns set
+down in the middle of a forest clearing. No smoke<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_413"></a>[413]</span>
+issued from the chimney, no dog barked a welcome,
+there was not a sign of life about the place, and for a
+few minutes we were assailed by the horrid fear that
+no one was at home. Presently, however, we saw a
+fair-haired, raw-boned Swede, an axe upon his shoulder,
+emerge from the forest and come swinging toward us
+across the pasture. I hailed him.</p>
+
+<p>“Are you Mr. Rasmussen?”</p>
+
+<p>“Ay ban reckon ay am.”</p>
+
+<p>“And can you put us up for the night?” I queried
+anxiously.</p>
+
+<p>“Ay ban reckon ay can.”</p>
+
+<p>A stone’s throw from the one-roomed log cabin in
+which Rasmussen and his single ranch-hand, a stolid
+and uncommunicative Swede, slept and cooked and ate
+and in the evenings read three-months-old papers by
+the light of a guttering candle was the bunk house.
+A bunk house, I might explain, is a building peculiar
+to the frontier, usually consisting of one large room
+with two, and sometimes three, tiers of bunks built
+against the wall. Here travellers may find a roof to
+shelter them and some hay on which to spread their
+blankets, for in British Columbia every one carries his
+bedding with him. From the musty odour which greeted
+us when Rasmussen threw open the heavy door, this
+particular bunk house had evidently not been occupied
+for some time. When we tried to go to sleep, however,
+we found that the bunks were very much occupied
+indeed. But after Pete had started a roaring fire in
+the little sheet-iron stove and when we had spread<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_414"></a>[414]</span>
+our “five-point” Hudson Bay blankets on the five-cents-a-pound
+hay which served in lieu of mattresses and
+had scrubbed off some of the mud with which we were
+veneered and had changed our wet clothes for dry ones,
+the complexion of things began to change from brunette
+to blonde. Between the intervals of corduroying the
+road in the morning, I had shot with my revolver half
+a dozen grouse that persisted in getting in our way.
+They were almost as large as Plymouth Rocks and we
+handed them over to Pete to pluck and cook for supper,
+which was still further eked out by a mess of lake
+trout brought in by his ranch hand. Up in that region
+one may have considerable difficulty in obtaining the
+every-day necessities, such as salt and butter and bread,
+but he can surfeit himself on such luxuries as venison
+and grouse and trout. We found that Rasmussen,
+like so many other settlers in British Columbia, had
+come from the American Northwest, lured by the
+glowing prospectuses issued by the provincial government.
+But he, like so many others, had found that
+the appalling cost of living had made it impossible,
+even with hay at a hundred dollars a ton, for him to
+clear as much as he had in the United States. “So ay
+ban tank ay go back an’ buy a farm in Minnesota,” he
+concluded, knocking the ashes from his pipe. And
+that’s precisely what a great many other discouraged
+Americans in western Canada are going to do.</p>
+
+<p>For thirty miles or so after leaving Rasmussen’s
+the road was rough, boggy, and exceedingly trying to
+the disposition, but it gradually improved until by the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_415"></a>[415]</span>
+time we reached Stony Creek we found ourselves
+running along a short stretch of road of which a New
+England board of supervisors need not have felt too
+much ashamed. The terrible condition of the roads
+throughout the interior of British Columbia is largely
+due to the fact that they run for great distances through
+dense forests where the sun cannot penetrate to dry
+them up; this, taken with the abnormally heavy rains,
+serving to make them one long and terrifying slough.
+At Stony Creek there is a Siwash village consisting of
+some twoscore log cabins clustered about a mission
+church whose gaudy paint and bulging dome spoke
+of its proximity to Alaska and the influence of the
+Russians. The interior tribes are known as “stick
+Indians,” referring, of course, to the fact that they
+dwell in the forest, in contradistinction to those living
+along the coast, who are known as “salt-chuck Indians.”
+Squaws in vivid blankets and quill-embroidered
+moccasins sat sewing and gossiping before their
+cabin doors, just as womenfolk, be their skins white
+or black or bronze, sit and gossip the whole world
+over; bright-eyed, half-naked youngsters gambolled
+like frisky puppies in the street; bearskins were
+stretched on frames for drying, and at the rear of every
+house was a cache for dried salmon, which forms the
+Siwashes’ staple article of food. Though only one of
+the braves, who had been out into civilisation, had
+ever set eyes on a motor-car before, none of them seemed
+to have any particular fear of it, although, strangely
+enough, they became as shy as deer at sight of my<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_416"></a>[416]</span>
+camera, one picturesque old squaw refusing consecutive
+offers of twenty-five cents, fifty cents, and a dollar
+to come out from behind the door where she was hiding
+and let us take her picture. The old lady’s daughter
+was willing enough to take a chance, however, for she
+offered to pose for as many pictures as we desired if
+we would give her a ride in the car, a proposal to which
+I promptly acceded. I brought her down the stone-strewn
+street of the village at a rattling clip, and she
+not only never turned a hair but asked me to go faster.
+Given an opportunity, that Siwash maiden would make
+a real road burner.</p>
+
+<p>It is less than twenty miles from Stony Creek to
+Fort Fraser and the road proved a surprisingly good
+one. You must bear in mind, however, that when I
+speak of a British Columbian road being a good one,
+I am speaking comparatively. The best road we encountered
+would, if it existed in the United States,
+drive a board of highway commissioners out of office,
+while the worst road we negotiated in a civilised community
+wouldn’t be considered a road at all—it would
+be used for a hog-wallow or for duck shooting. The
+mushroom settlement of Fort Fraser takes its name
+from the old Hudson Bay post, which is three miles
+from the town on the shores of Fraser Lake. When we
+were there the town consisted of half a hundred log
+and frame buildings, a blacksmith shop, four or five
+general stores, the branch of a Montreal bank, and the
+only hotel in the four hundred miles between Quesnel
+and Hazelton. It was a real frontier town when we<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_417"></a>[417]</span>
+were there, and was of particular interest to us because
+it represented a phase of civilisation which in our own
+country has long since passed, but now that the railway
+is in operation its picturesque log cabins will
+doubtless be replaced by prosaic white frame houses
+with green blinds, the boards laid along the edge of
+the road will give way to cement sidewalks, and it will
+have street lamps and a town hall and its name displayed
+in a mosaic of whitewashed pebbles on the
+station lawn and will look exactly like any one of a
+hundred other towns scattered along the transcontinental
+lines of railway. Some day, no doubt, I shall
+pass through it again, this time from the observation
+platform of a Pullman, and I shall remark quite nonchalantly
+to my fellow travellers: “Oh, yes, I was up
+here in the good old days when this was nothing but a
+cluster of log huts at the Back of Beyond.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_418"></a>[418]</span></p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_419"></a>[419]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="XV">XV<br>
+<span class="smaller">THE MAP THAT IS HALF UNROLLED</span></h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_420"></a>[420]</span></p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">“Have you gazed on naked grandeur where there’s nothing else to gaze on,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Set pieces and drop-curtain scenes galore,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Big mountains heaved to heaven, which the blinding sunsets blazon,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Black canyons where the rapids rip and roar?</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Have you swept the visioned valley with the green stream streaking through it,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Searched the Vastness for a something you have lost?</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Have you strung your soul to silence? Then for God’s sake go and do it;</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Hear the challenge, learn the lesson, pay the cost.”</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_421"></a>[421]</span></p>
+
+<h3>XV<br>
+<span class="smaller">THE MAP THAT IS HALF UNROLLED</span></h3>
+
+</div>
+
+<p>It wasn’t much of a chain as chains go—it really
+wasn’t. After a good deal of poking about I had
+come upon its dozen feet of rusted links thrown carelessly
+behind the forge in the only blacksmith shop in
+Fort Fraser. Now, I had an imperative need for a
+chain of some sort, for our skid chains, as the result of
+the wear and tear to which they had been subjected on
+the journey from Quesnel, were on the point of giving
+out, and it is not wise to attempt to negotiate what
+the settlers of northern British Columbia, with an
+appalling disregard for the truth, call roads unless you
+have taken all possible precautions against skidding.
+Up in that country of two-mile-high mountains, and
+mountain roads as slippery as the inside of a banana
+peel, a side-slip of only a few inches is as likely as not
+to send car and occupants hurtling through half a mile
+of emptiness. As the chain would answer our purpose
+after a fashion, and as we could get nothing better, I
+told the smith to throw it in the car. After he had
+attended to a few minor repairs I asked him how much
+I owed him.</p>
+
+<p>“Well,” he answered, figuring with his pencil on
+a chip of wood, “the chain comes to sixteen dollars an’
+forty cents, an——”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_422"></a>[422]</span></p>
+
+<p>“Hold on!” I interrupted. “Please say that over
+again. It must be that I’m getting hard of hearing.”</p>
+
+<p>“Sixteen dollars and forty cents for the chain,”
+he repeated, unabashed.</p>
+
+<p>I leaned against the door of the log smithy for
+support. “Not for the chain?” I gasped unbelievingly.
+“Not for twelve feet of rusty, second-hand, five-eighths-inch
+chain that I could get for half a dollar almost
+anywhere?”</p>
+
+<p>“Sure,” said he. “An’ I ain’t makin’ no profit
+on it at that. The freight charges for bringin’ it in
+from the coast were eighteen cents a pound. But
+lookee here, friend, I don’t want you to go away from
+Fort Fraser with the idee in your head that things
+up here is high-priced, ’cause they ain’t. I wanta do
+the right thing by you. I’ll tell you what I’ll do—<i>I’ll
+knock off the forty cents</i>.”</p>
+
+<p class="tb">Despite the assurances of the blacksmith, by no
+stretch of the imagination could Fort Fraser be called
+a poor man’s town. Some of the prices which were
+asked—and which we paid—in the local store where
+we replenished our supply of provisions were as follows:</p>
+
+<table>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Flour</td>
+    <td class="tdpg">16 cents per pound</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Sugar</td>
+    <td class="tdpg">25 cents per pound</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Tea and coffee</td>
+    <td class="tdpg">$1.00 per pound</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Butter</td>
+    <td class="tdpg">75 cents per pound</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Oatmeal</td>
+    <td class="tdpg">30 cents per pound</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Dried fruits</td>
+    <td class="tdpg">25 cents per pound</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Tinned fruits</td>
+    <td class="tdpg">75 cents to $1.00 per 2-pound tin</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Bacon</td>
+    <td class="tdpg">50 cents per pound<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_423"></a>[423]</span></td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Eggs (when procurable)</td>
+    <td class="tdpg">$1.50 per dozen</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td colspan="2" class="tdc">(In winter they sell for 50 cents each.)</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Potted meats</td>
+    <td class="tdpg">50 cents to $1.00 per tin</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Bread</td>
+    <td class="tdpg">25 cents per 1-pound loaf</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td colspan="2" class="tdc">(Farther in the interior 50 cents per loaf
+    is the standard price.)</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Potatoes</td>
+    <td class="tdpg">$3.00 per bushel</td>
+  </tr>
+  <tr>
+    <td>Chickens</td>
+    <td class="tdpg">$4.00 each</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>It was my introduction to a scale of frontier prices to
+which I soon became accustomed though not reconciled.
+It is only fair to say, however, that this was
+before the completion of the railway. Now that Fort
+Fraser is a station on a transcontinental system, the
+cost of living has doubtless been materially reduced,
+though I have no doubt that the scale of prices just
+quoted still obtains and will for a very long time to
+come in the settlements to the north of the Skeena.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus44" style="max-width: 50em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus44.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><table><tr>
+  <td class="td3"><p>A Siwash lady going shopping.</p></td>
+  <td class="td3"><p>Half-breeds of the Upper Skeena.</p></td>
+  <td class="td3"><p>“Blackwater Kate.”</p></td>
+  </tr></table>
+  <p>SOME LADIES FROM THE UPPER SKEENA.</p></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>The population of Fort Fraser turned out <i>en masse</i>
+to see us off, the mothers—there were only eight white
+women in the town when we were there—bringing
+their children to the cabin doors to see their first motor-car.
+Did you ever stop to think of the deprivations
+suffered by these women who dwell along “the edge of
+things”: no soda-water fountains, no afternoon teas,
+no bargain sales, no moving-picture shows, and the
+fashion papers usually six months late? It must be
+terrible.</p>
+
+<p>We felt quite gay and light-hearted that morning,
+I remember, for we had slept in beds instead of vermin-infested
+bunks or in blankets beside the road, we had
+breakfasted on coffee, eggs, and porridge instead of the
+customary chicory, “sow-belly,” and prunes, and a<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_424"></a>[424]</span>
+feeble sun was doing its best to dry up the rain-soaked
+roads. Three miles out of Fort Fraser the swollen
+Nechako lay athwart our path and our troubles once
+more began, for the ferry was not built to carry three-ton
+motor-cars, or, indeed, any motor-cars at all, and
+when it felt the sudden weight of the big machine upon
+its deck it dipped so alarmingly that for a moment it
+looked as though the car would end its journey at
+the bottom of the river. Barring numerous short
+stretches where the treacherous black mud was up to
+our hubs, several miles of bone-racking corduroy, two
+torrential showers, any number of stumps which
+threatened to rip off our pan and had to be levelled
+before we could pass, two punctures, a blowout, and a
+broken spring, the journey from the banks of the Nechako
+to Burns Lake was uneventful.</p>
+
+<p>Darkness had long since fallen when we zigzagged
+down the precipitous flank of a forest-clothed mountain,
+and the beams from our head lamps illumined the
+cluster of tents, shacks, and cabins which compose the
+settlement known as Burns Lake. Though the settlement
+boasted at the time we were there the population
+of a fair-sized village, notwithstanding the
+fact that there was not a woman or a child in it, it was
+nothing more than a railway-construction camp, with
+its usual concomitants of hash houses, bunk houses,
+and gambling dens. With the completion of the railway
+it has doubtless disappeared as suddenly as it
+arose. Upon inquiring for sleeping quarters, we were
+taken up a creaking ladder into a loft above an eating-house,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_425"></a>[425]</span>
+where fully twoscore labourers from the south
+of Europe lay stretched on their backs on piles of
+filthy straw, snoring or scratching or tossing, in an
+atmosphere so dense with the mingled odours of garlic,
+fried pork, wet leather, and perspiration that it could
+have been removed with a shovel. While we were
+debating as to whether we should look for less impossible
+quarters or wrap up in our blankets and spend the
+night in the car, an American, who, from his air of authority,
+I gathered to be a foreman, addressed us:</p>
+
+<p>“There’s no place here that’s fit to sleep in,” he
+said, “but I understand that one of the contracting
+company’s barges is leaving for Decker Lake at midnight.
+She’s empty, so they’d probably be willing to
+carry you and your car. You’d have to sleep in the
+car, of course, and it’s pretty cold on the water at this
+time of the year, but, believe me, it’ll be a heap more
+comfortable than spending the night in one of these
+bunk houses. There’s no road around the lake anyway,
+so you’ll have to go by water if you go at all.”</p>
+
+<p>Thanking him for his suggestion, we set out in
+quest of the manager of the contracting company,
+whom we found in a log cabin at the entrance to the
+roughly constructed wharf. It took but a few words
+to explain our errand and complete arrangements for
+being transported down the lakes by the barge which
+was leaving at midnight. Burns and Decker Lakes,
+which are each approximately ten miles in length and
+whose shores are lined with almost impenetrable forest,
+are connected by a shallow and tortuous channel which<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_426"></a>[426]</span>
+winds its devious course through a wilderness of
+swamps, lagoons, and bulrushes known as the Drowned
+Lands. The firm of Spokane contractors engaged in
+the construction of the western division of the Grand
+Trunk Pacific had availed itself of this devious waterway
+for transporting its men, materials, and supplies
+to the front, using for the purpose flat-bottomed
+barges drawing only a few inches of water. Notwithstanding
+the fact that the pilots frequently lost their
+way at night and the barges went aground in the
+shallow channel, the fortunate circumstance of the
+two lakes being thus connected had saved the company
+tens of thousands of dollars.</p>
+
+<p>It will be a long time, a very long time, before my
+recollection of that night journey down those dark and
+lonely lakes will fade. The deck of the barge was but
+a few inches wider than the car, so that, as we sat in
+our accustomed seats, wrapped to the eyes in blankets,
+it seemed as though the car were floating on the surface
+of the water. The little gasoline engine that supplied
+the barge’s motive power was aft of us, and its
+steady throb, together with the twin swaths of light
+which our lamps mowed out of the darkness, put the
+final touch to the illusion. It was an eerie sensation—very.
+Though a crescent moon shone fitfully through
+scudding clouds, its feeble light but served to emphasise
+the darkness and mystery of the forest-covered shores,
+which were as black as the grave and as silent as the
+dead. Once some heavy animal—a bear, no doubt—went
+crashing through the underbrush with a noise<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_427"></a>[427]</span>
+that was positively startling in that uncanny stillness.
+By the time we reached the shallow channel that
+winds its devious course through the Drowned Lands
+the moon had disappeared and a thick white fog had
+fallen on everything, hiding the shores with its impalpable
+curtain and completely nullifying the effect of
+our powerful lights. The only sound was the laboured
+panting of the engine and the scraping of the bulrushes
+against the bow. How the skipper found his
+way through that fog-bound channel I can’t imagine,
+unless he smelt it, for he couldn’t see an object five
+feet away. Day was breaking above the eastern forest
+when the barge crunched against the timbers of the
+wharf at Decker Lake, and I breathed a little prayer
+of thanksgiving for our safe arrival; for, truth to tell,
+I had fully expected that the light of morning would
+find us hard and fast aground in the middle of a swamp.
+Word of our coming had preceded us and we found that
+the company’s local manager—an American—had cots
+and blankets awaiting us in the log shanty that served
+him as an office. We were shivering with the cold and
+heavy-eyed from weariness. My word, how we slept!
+I can’t remember when I have so enjoyed a pillow.</p>
+
+<p>Before leaving Decker Lake we acquired an addition
+to our party. His name was Duncan and he was
+an axeman from the forests of Quebec. He had the
+shoulders of a Clydesdale, the sinews of a mule, and
+could handle an axe as an artist handles a brush. One
+of those restless spirits who, with their worldly possessions
+on their backs, are here to-day and gone to-morrow,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_428"></a>[428]</span>
+he had worked on the railway grade just long
+enough to earn a little money and, when we arrived,
+was setting out on foot for New Hazelton, two hundred
+miles away, to spend it. He was only too glad to work
+his passage and we were only too glad to have him
+along—he was so extremely capable that his presence
+gave us a feeling of reassurance. It was well that we
+took him along, for before we had left Decker Lake an
+hour behind us we found ourselves at the beginning of
+as ugly a stretch of road as I ever expect to set eyes on.</p>
+
+<p>“That’s not a road,” said my companion disgustedly,
+as he stood looking at the sea of slime.
+“That’s a lake, and if we once get into it we’ll never see
+the car again.”</p>
+
+<p>What he said was so obviously true that we decided
+that the only thing to do was to avoid the road
+altogether and chop our way around it. This involved
+cutting a path through three quarters of a mile of primeval
+forest and the removal of scores of trees. There
+was nothing to be gained by groaning over the prospect,
+so we rolled up our sleeves, spat on our lacerated palms,
+and went at it with the axes. Did you ever see an expert
+woodsman in action? No? Well, it’s a sight
+worth seeing, take my word for it. Duncan would
+walk up to a forest giant that looked as big as the
+Tower of Pisa and slam-bang into it with his double-bitted
+axe, amid a perfect shower of chips, until he had
+chopped a hole in the base the size of a hotel fireplace.
+A few more strokes at the right spot, a warning shout
+of “Timber!” “Timber!” and the great tree would<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_429"></a>[429]</span>
+come crashing down within a hand’s breadth of where
+he wanted it. A few minutes more of the axe business
+and the prone trunk would be cut into sections and
+rolled away. “She’s all jake, boys,” Duncan would
+bellow, and, putting on the power, we would push the
+car a few yards more ahead. It took the four of us
+eight hours of steady chopping to make our way around
+that awful stretch of road, but we did get through
+finally with no more serious mishap than crumpling
+up one of the forward fenders, caused by the car swerving
+into a tree. While we were still congratulating ourselves
+on having gotten out of the woods in more senses
+than one, we swung around a bend in the road and came
+to a sudden halt before a hog-wallow which stretched
+away, like a black and slimy serpent, as far as the eye
+could see.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp50" id="illus45" style="max-width: 29.6875em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus45.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><p>After the car had passed: a stretch of road
+  south of the Nechako.</p>
+  <p>Mired in muskeg on the Yukon Telegraph Trail.</p>
+  <p>Prying the car out of a swamp in the Blackwater country.</p>
+  <p>WHERE NO MOTOR-CAR HAD EVER GONE: SOME INCIDENTS OF MR. POWELL’S JOURNEY
+  THROUGH THE BRITISH COLUMBIAN WILDERNESS.</p></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>“We’re up against it good and hard this time,”
+said our driver, grown pessimistic for the first and only
+time. “I don’t believe the car can make it. There’s too
+much of it and it’s too deep—the wheels simply can’t
+get traction.”</p>
+
+<p>As we were contemplating it in dismal silence we
+heard the welcome rattle of wheels and clink of harness,
+and an empty freight wagon, drawn by eight
+sturdy mules, pulled out of the forest behind us, the
+bearded “mule-skinner” urging on his beasts with
+cracking whip and a crackle of oaths. I waded toward
+him through the mire.</p>
+
+<p>“Where’s the nearest place that we can eat and
+sleep?” I demanded.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_430"></a>[430]</span></p>
+
+<p>“Waal,” he drawled with exasperating slowness,
+“I reckon’s how they mought fix ye up fer the night at
+th’ Hunderd an’ Fifty Mile House. Thet’s the only
+place I knows on, an’ it’s darned poor, too.”</p>
+
+<p>“How far is it from here?” I asked.</p>
+
+<p>“Waal, I calkilate it mought be a matter o’ two
+mile an’ a half or three mile.”</p>
+
+<p>“Good,” said I, “and what will you charge to haul
+us there? We can’t get through this mud-hole alone,
+but the car’s got lots of power and with the help of
+your mules we ought to make it all right.”</p>
+
+<p>Instantly the man’s native shrewdness asserted
+itself. He cast an appraising eye over my mud-stained
+garments, over the mud-bespattered car and at the
+yawning sea of mud ahead.</p>
+
+<p>“I’ll haul ye to th’ Hunderd an’ Fifty Mile House
+for fifteen dollars,” he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Fifteen dollars for a two-and-a-half-mile haul?”
+I exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>“Take it or leave it,” said the teamster rudely.
+“I ain’t got no time to stand in the road bargainin’.”</p>
+
+<p>I promptly capitulated, for I had no intention of
+letting our only hope of rescue get away. “Hitch on to
+the car,” said I.</p>
+
+<p>That was where the sixteen-dollar-and-forty-cent
+chain to which I referred at the beginning of this story
+came in handy, for we had no rope that would have
+stood the strain of hauling that car through those three
+<i>perfectly awful</i> miles. Night was tucking up the land
+in a black and sodden blanket when the driver pulled<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_431"></a>[431]</span>
+up his weary mules at the roadside post bearing the
+numerals “150,” which signified that we were still a
+hundred and fifty miles from our journey’s end, and I
+counted into his grimy paw the sum agreed upon in the
+greasy bank-notes of the realm. <i>It had taken us just
+eleven hours to make fourteen miles.</i></p>
+
+<p>Though we had not deluded ourselves into expecting
+that we would find anything but the most primitive
+accommodation at the 150 Mile House, we were none
+of us, unless it might have been Duncan, prepared for
+the wholly impossible quarters that greeted us. Standing
+in a clearing in the wilderness was a log cabin containing
+but a single room, in one corner of which was a
+stove and in the other a rickety table piled high with
+unwashed dishes. Such space as was left in the twelve-by-fourteen
+room was occupied by a huge home-made
+bed which provided sleeping quarters for the English
+rancher, his gaunt, starved-looking wife, and a veritable
+litter of small children.</p>
+
+<p>“We’ve nothing here that ’ud do for the likes of
+you, sir,” said the man civilly, in reply to my request
+for accommodations. “The missis can fix you up a
+meal, but there’s not a place that you could lay your
+heads, unless ’twould be in the loft.”</p>
+
+<p>“Good Heavens, man!” interrupted my companion,
+“We can’t sleep out-of-doors on such a night as
+this. Let’s see the loft.”</p>
+
+<p>Assuring us once more that “it was no place for
+the likes of us,” the rancher pointed to a ladder made of
+saplings which poked its nose through a black square<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_432"></a>[432]</span>
+in the ceiling directly above the family couch. Taking
+a candle from the woman I ascended. The fitful light
+illuminated a space formed by the ceiling of the room
+below and the steeply pitched roof of the cabin, barely
+large enough for a man to enter on his hands and knees.
+Its uneven floor, made of saplings, laid lengthwise, was
+strewn with musty hay, upon which were thrown some
+tattered pieces of filthy burlap bagging. One of these
+pieces of bedding seemed to move, but upon looking
+at it more closely I saw it was fairly aswarm with
+vermin. I took one glance and scrambled down the
+ladder. “Where’s the nearest ditch?” I asked. “I’d
+rather sleep in a ditch any time than in that loft.”</p>
+
+<p>But we did not have to do either, for Duncan, who
+had previous acquaintance of the place, wasting no
+time in lamentation, had set to work with his axe and
+in ten minutes a great fire was sending its hail of sparks
+into the evening sky. It’s marvellous what wonders
+can be worked in the wilderness with a sharp axe by a
+man who knows how to handle it. By stretching the
+piece of sail-cloth we had with us between two convenient
+trees and keeping it in place with saplings, in an
+amazingly brief time Duncan had constructed a shelter
+which was proof against any but a driving rain, and
+which, thanks to the camp-fire blazing in front of it,
+was as warm as a steam-heated room in a hotel. Covering
+the soggy ground with a layer of hemlock branches,
+and this in turn with a layer of hay bought from the
+rancher at five cents per pound, and spreading on top
+of the hay our rubber sheets and our blankets—behold,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_433"></a>[433]</span>
+we were as comfortable as kings; more comfortable,
+I fancy, than certain monarchs in the Balkans.
+We lay side by side beneath the flimsy shelter like sardines
+in a tin, while outside the rain fell drearily and
+the night wind soughed in the tree tops, and the flickering
+flames of the camp-fire alternately illumined and
+left in darkness everything.</p>
+
+<p>We awoke the next morning to find that the sun,
+which is an infrequent visitor to northern British Columbia
+in the autumn, had tardily come to our assistance
+and was trying to make up for its remissness by a desperate
+attempt to dry up the roads which, for the succeeding
+hundred miles or so, lay across an open, rolling
+country bordered by distant ranges of snow-capped
+mountains. Though the recollection of that day
+stands out sharp and clear in my memory as the only
+one since leaving Quesnel when we were not delayed
+by mud, our progress was hampered by something
+much more inimical to the car—stumps. When the
+road was constructed it evidently never entered into
+the calculations of its builders that it would be used
+by a motor-car, so they sawed off the trees which occupied
+the route at a height which would permit of their
+stumps being cleared without difficulty by the axles
+of the high-wheeled freight wagons, but which, had
+they been struck by the automobile, would have torn
+the pan from the body and put it permanently out of
+business. Along the stump-strewn stretches, therefore,
+our progress was necessarily slow, for Duncan marched
+in advance, axe on shoulder, like a scout before an advancing<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_434"></a>[434]</span>
+army, and whenever he found an enemy in the
+form of a stump lying in wait to disable us he would
+destroy it with a few well-directed blows of his axe.
+But it was a tiresome business. After a time, however,
+the stump-dotted trail was supplanted by quite an excellent
+road of gravel, and down this we spun for thirty
+miles with nothing to interrupt our progress. When
+we started that morning we would have laughed derisively
+if any one had told us that we could make Aldermere
+that night, but, thanks to the unexpected blessing
+of good roads, we whirled into that little frontier village
+at five o’clock in the afternoon, ascertained from
+the open-mouthed loungers on the steps of the grocery
+store that it was only thirty miles to Moricetown,
+which was at that time the “end of steel,” and determined
+to push on that night. The good roads soon
+died a sudden death, however, and it was late that
+night before there twinkled in the blackness of the
+valley below us the bewildering arrangement of green
+and scarlet lights which denote a railway yard all the
+world over, and heard the familiar friendly shriek of
+a locomotive.</p>
+
+<p>I don’t care to dwell on the night we spent at
+Moricetown. The recollection is not a pleasant one.
+In a few years, no doubt, it will grow into a prosperous
+country village, with cement sidewalks and street
+lamps and rows of neat cottages, but when we were
+there it was simply the “end of steel.” In other words,
+it was the place where civilisation, as typified by the
+railway in operation between there and the coast, quit<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_435"></a>[435]</span>
+work and the wilderness began. The “town” consisted
+of the railway station, still smelling of yellow paint,
+two or three log cabins, a group of hybrid structures,
+half house, half tent, and another building which, if
+one had no regard whatever for veracity, might have
+been called a hotel. Let me tell you about it. It was
+built of scantlings covered with log slabs, and the partition
+walls consisted of nothing thicker than tarred
+paper. In certain respects this had its advantages, for
+if you needed more light or air in your room all you
+had to do was to poke your finger through the wall.
+Because we had arrived by automobile and were therefore
+fair game, we were given the <i>suite de luxe</i>. This
+consisted of a six-by-eight room containing an iron bed
+with a dubious-looking coverlet which had evidently
+passed through every possible experience save a washing.
+There being no place in the room for a wash-stand,
+the cracked wash-bowl was kept under the bed.
+Indeed, had not the door opened outward we could
+never have gotten into the room at all. The partitions
+were so flimsy that we were awakened every time the
+occupant of the next room changed his mind. Outside
+our door was what, for want of a better term, I
+will call the lobby: a low-ceilinged room warmed to
+the suffocating point by a huge whitewashed stove,
+around which those who could not get rooms sat through
+the night on rude benches, talking, whispering, cursing,
+snoring, spitting, coughing, smoking. The place was
+blue with the acrid fumes of Bull Durham. Dozing
+on the benches were all the types peculiar to this remote<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_436"></a>[436]</span>
+corner of the empire: Montenegrin and Croatian railway
+labourers, stolid and dirty; Canadian lumberjacks
+in their moccasins and hooded parkas; Scandinavian
+ranchers from the back country; a group of immigrants,
+fresh from England, their faces whitened by the confinement
+of the long journey, who had left their rented
+farms in Sussex or their stools in London counting-houses
+to come out to the colonies to earn a living;
+even some pallid women with squalling children in
+their arms, fretful from lack of sleep, who had come
+from the old country to join their husbands and lead
+pioneer lives in the British Columbian wild. The men
+snored sickeningly, the tired mothers scolded their
+crying children, the clouds of tobacco smoke eddied
+toward the ceiling, the army of insects that we found
+in possession of the bed attacked us from all directions,
+the rain pattered dishearteningly upon the tin roof, the
+air was heavy with the odours of grimy, sweat-soaked,
+tired humanity. It was a <i>nuit du diable</i>, as our Paris
+friends would say.</p>
+
+<p>It is only about five-and-twenty miles from Moricetown
+to New Hazelton, the prefix “new” distinguishing
+it from the “old town,” which lies five miles
+from the railway to the north. The road, so we were
+told, though slippery after the rains and very hilly,
+was moderately smooth, and we were as confident that
+we would eat our Sunday dinner in New Hazelton as we
+were that the next day was Monday. But the best-laid
+plans of mice and motorists, you know, “gang aft agley,”
+which, according to the glossary of Scottish phrases<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_437"></a>[437]</span>
+in the back of the dictionary, means “to go off to the
+side,” and that was precisely what we did, for when
+only five miles from our destination our driver, in his
+eagerness to taste civilised cooking again, took a slippery
+curve at incautious speed and the car skidded over
+into the ditch and reclined against the shelving bank
+like some mud-stained, weary monster. It took the
+better part of an hour to get out the jacks and build
+a causeway of stones and pry her up. But at last
+everything was ready and we shouted to the driver to
+throw on the power. But there was no response from
+the engines to his pressure on the throttle.</p>
+
+<p>“By Jove!” he muttered despondently. “We’re
+out of gasoline!”</p>
+
+<p>Sunday noon, a deserted mountain road, a ditched
+and helpless car, a sky leaden with impending rain—and
+only five miles from our destination. There was
+nothing for it but for some one to walk into New Hazelton,
+rouse the local storekeeper from his Sunday nap,
+and bring us a tin of gasoline. The choice unanimously
+fell on Duncan, who set off down the middle of the
+muddy road at a four-miles-an-hour pace. Meanwhile,
+we set about preparations for our Sunday dinner.
+While the driver skirmished about with an axe in
+search of wood that was not too rain-soaked to burn,
+my friend opened such of the tinned goods as were left,
+and I attempted to wash the knives and forks and tin
+plates in a convenient mud puddle. As we had neglected
+to clean them after our last meal in the open,
+on the ground that we would have no further use for<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_438"></a>[438]</span>
+them, the task I had set myself was not an easy one:
+it’s surprising how difficult it is to remove grease from
+tin with nothing but a stick and some cold water. We
+achieved a meal at last, however—tinned sausages,
+tinned spaghetti, mouldy bread made palatable by
+toasting, and some week-old coffee which we found in
+one of the thermos bottles and heated—and I’ve had
+many a worse meal, too. Just as the rain began to
+descend in earnest, a horse and sulky swung round the
+bend bearing Duncan and the precious tin of gasoline.
+Thirty minutes later we were rolling between a double
+line of welcoming townspeople down the muddy main
+street of New Hazelton. We were at our journey’s end!</p>
+
+<p>Though New Hazelton now boasts the most pretentious
+hotel in all the North country, when we were
+there this hostelry was still in course of construction,
+so we were compelled to look elsewhere for bed and
+board. After some searching we found accommodation
+in the cabin occupied by the operator of the Yukon
+Telegraph and ate our meals at the pie counter run by
+an American known as “Black Jack” Macdonald.
+And it was good eating, too. Our first question after
+reaching New Hazelton was, of course:</p>
+
+<p>“Is there any chance of our getting through to
+the Alaskan border?”</p>
+
+<p>“Not a chance in the world,” was the chorused
+answer. But we protested that that was the answer
+we had received at Vancouver and Ashcroft and
+Quesnel and Fort Fraser when we inquired as to the
+chances of getting through to Hazelton.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_439"></a>[439]</span></p>
+
+<p>“The boys are quite right, gentlemen,” said a
+bearded frontiersman named “Dutch” Cline. “There
+isn’t a chance in the world. I’ve lived in this country
+close on twenty years and I know what I’m talking
+about. It’s only about forty miles in an air-line from
+here to the Alaskan boundary, but I doubt if a pack-mule
+could get through, let alone a motor-car. You
+would have to actually chop your way through forests
+that haven’t so much as a trail. You would have to devise
+some way of getting your car across no less than a
+dozen dangerous rivers. You would have to climb to
+the very summit of a six-thousand-foot mountain
+range and then drop down on the other side; and,
+finally, you would have to find some means of crossing
+the Portland Canal, which separates British Columbia
+from Alaska. Add to that the fact that winter is at
+hand and that you would probably be snowed in before
+you had got a quarter of the way, and you will understand
+just how utterly impossible it is.”</p>
+
+<p>So we were forced to abandon regretfully the hope
+of hearing the Alaskan gravel crunch beneath our
+tires and to content ourselves with the knowledge that
+we had driven farther north than a motor-car had
+ever been driven on this continent before: farther
+north than the Aleutian Islands, farther north than
+Hudson Bay, farther north than the Peninsula of
+Kamchatka, half a hundred miles farther north, in
+fact, than the southern boundary of Alaska itself.</p>
+
+<p>New Hazelton is in the very heart of northern
+British Columbia, where the Skeena, the Babine, and<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_440"></a>[440]</span>
+the Bulkley meet, and in the same latitude as the lower
+end of the Alaskan panhandle.</p>
+
+<p>A collection of log cabins and weather-beaten
+shacks huddled on the river bank at the foot of the
+Rocher de Boulé, whose cloud-wreathed summit, seven
+thousand feet in height, seems to scrape the sky, it is
+one of those boom towns with which the pioneer business
+men of the region are shaking dice against fate.
+If they lose, the place will revert to the primeval
+wilderness from which it sprang; if they win—and the
+coming of the railway has made it all but certain that
+they will—they will have laid the foundation of a
+future Winnipeg or Vancouver. Save only in Constantinople
+during the stirring days which marked
+the end of the Hamidieh régime, and at Casablanca
+with the Foreign Legion, I do not recall ever having
+encountered so many strange and picturesque and
+interesting figures as I did in this log town on the
+ragged edge of things. Every evening after supper
+the men would come dropping into the hut by twos
+and threes until there were a dozen or more gathered
+in a circle about the whitewashed stove and the air
+was so thick with the fumes of Bull Durham that you
+could have cut it with a knife. Talk about the Arabian
+Nights! Those were the British Columbian
+Nights, and if the Caliph of Bagdad had sat in that
+circle of frontiersmen and listened to the tales that
+passed round with the black bottle in that cabin on
+the banks of the Skeena he would have beheaded
+Scherezade in disgust. Here, in the flesh, were the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_441"></a>[441]</span>
+characters of which the novelists love to write: men
+whom the wanderlust had lured from the Morris
+chairs of ease; men who had gone the pace in England
+long ago; men who had left their country between two
+days and for their country’s good; men who, in clubs or
+regimental messes, had been caught with an ace too
+many; men who, on nameless rivers or in strange
+valleys, had played knuckle down with Death.</p>
+
+<p>The talk fest of anecdote and reminiscence would
+generally be opened by “Dutch” Cline, a hairy, iron-hard
+pioneer who would have delighted the heart of
+Remington. I remember that the first time I met
+him he remarked that there would be an early winter,
+and when I asked him how he knew he explained quite
+soberly it was because he was afflicted with an uncontrollable
+desire to steal a dog. Cline was a Boer by
+birth—hence his nickname of “Dutch”—and in his
+youth had fought in turn the Zulus, the Basutos, and
+the Matabele, having, as he expressed it, lived on
+the frontier ever since he was knee-high to a grasshopper.
+He was a born raconteur and would hold us
+spellbound as he yarned of the days when he sailed
+under Captain Hansen, “the Flying Dutchman,” and
+poached for seals off the Pribilofs. Hansen, who was
+a Dane, evolved the ingenious idea of having a ship
+built in Japan but owned by Americans and sailing
+under the British flag, so that when he was overhauled
+by a gunboat, whether American, British, Japanese,
+or Russian, and arrested for pelagic sealing, it stirred
+up such an international rumpus with all the other<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_442"></a>[442]</span>
+nations concerned that it was easier to let him go.
+He once gave his vessel a coat of the grey-green paint
+used on the Czar’s warships, uniformed his crew as
+Russian sailors, and, with guns of stovepipe frowning
+from his decks and the flag of Saint Andrew flaunting
+from his stern, bore majestically down on the sealing
+grounds, and when his unsuspecting rivals cut their
+cables and fled seaward he helped himself to the skins.
+Though a pirate and an outlaw whose hands were stained
+with blood, he met his death not on deep water, as he
+would have wished, but in a little harbour at the north
+end of Vancouver Island while trying to save a little
+child. I remember that “Dutch” wiped his eyes as he
+told the story, and no one smiled at his doing it, either;
+for, though these men of the North have the hearts of
+vikings, they likewise often have the tenderness of a
+woman.</p>
+
+<p>Then there was Bob MacDonald, a red-headed
+man-o’-war’s man who had served under Dewey
+at the taking of the Philippines and later on had been
+a steam-shovel man at Panama. He needed no urging
+to reel off tales of mad pranks and wild adventures on
+every seaboard of the world, but when the deed for
+which he had been recommended for the Carnegie
+medal was mentioned his face would turn as fiery as
+his hair. So, as he could never be induced to tell the
+story, some one, to his intense embarrassment, would
+insist on telling it for him. While prospecting in that
+remote and barren region which borders on the Great
+Slave Lake his only companion had gone suddenly<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_443"></a>[443]</span>
+insane. MacDonald bound the raging madman hand
+and foot, placed him in a canoe which he built of whip-sawed
+planks, and brought him down a thousand miles
+of unexplored and supposedly unnavigable rivers,
+sometimes dragging his flimsy craft across mile-long
+portages, sometimes hoisting it, inch by inch, foot by
+foot, over rocky walls half a thousand feet in height,
+sometimes running cataracts and rapids where his life
+hung on the twist of a paddle, living on wild berries
+and such game as he could kill along the way, but
+always caring for the gibbering maniac as tenderly as
+though he were a child. He reached New Hazelton
+and its hospital with his charge at last, after one of
+the most intrepid journeys ever made by a white man—and
+the next day his comrade died. Yet when I
+exclaimed over his heroism, MacDonald was genuinely
+abashed. “Hell,” he blurted, “what else was there
+for me to do? You wouldn’t have had me go off and
+leave him up there to die, would you? You’d do the
+same thing if your pal was took sick on the trail. Sure
+you would.”</p>
+
+<p>When his instrument would cease its chatter for
+a time, the telegraph operator would chip in with
+stories of the men who sit in those lonely cabins scattered
+along two thousand miles of copper wire and
+relay the news of the world to the miners of the Yukon.
+In hair-raising detail he told of that terrible winter
+when the pack-train with its supplies was lost and the
+snow-bound operators had to keep themselves alive
+for many months upon such scanty game as they<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_444"></a>[444]</span>
+could find in the frozen forests. He told of the insufferable
+loneliness that drives men raving mad, of the
+awful silence that seems to crush one down. He told,
+with the thrill in the voice that comes only from
+actual experience, of how men run from their own
+shadows and become frightened at the sound of their
+own voices; of how each succeeding day is the intolerable
+same, only a little worse, the messages that come
+faintly over the line being the sole relief from the
+awful feeling that you are the only person left on all
+the earth.</p>
+
+<p>Occasionally Eugene Caux, or Old Man Cataline
+as he is invariably called because of his Catalonian
+origin, would join our conversazione. His ninety odd
+years notwithstanding, he is a magnificent figure of a
+man, six feet four in his elk-hide moccasins, with a
+chest like a barrel, his mop of snowy hair in striking
+contrast to a skin which has been tanned by sun and
+wind to the rich, ripe colour of a well-smoked meerschaum.
+Cataline is the most noted packer in the
+whole North country, being, in fact, the owner of the
+last great pack-train north of the Rio Grande. So
+much of his life has been spent in the wild, with Indian
+packers and French-Canadian trappers for his only
+companions, that his speech has become a strange
+mélange of English, French, half a dozen Indian dialects,
+and some remnants of his native Spanish, the
+whole thickly spiced with oaths. When, upon his
+periodic visits to the settlements, he is compelled to
+sleep under a roof, he strips the bed of its blankets and,<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_445"></a>[445]</span>
+wrapping himself in them, spends the night in comfort
+on the floor, his cocked revolver next his leg so that he
+can shoot through the coverings in case a marauder
+should appear. It is a custom among those who know
+him to invariably offer him a drink for the sake of
+enjoying the unique performance that ensues. His
+invariable brand of “hooch” is Hudson Bay rum,
+strong enough to eat the lining from a copper boiler.
+“Salue, señores!” says the old Spaniard, and drains
+half his glass at a single gulp. But he does not drink
+the other half. Instead, he pours it slowly over his
+mop of tousled hair and carefully rubs it in. It is a
+strange performance.</p>
+
+<p>They tell with relish in the northern camps the
+story of how Old Man Cataline, summoned to appear
+before the court sitting at Quesnel to defend the title
+to some land that he had filed a claim on, strode into
+the crowded court-room in the midst of a trial, and,
+shoving aside the bailiffs, menacingly confronted the
+startled judge. “Je worka pour that land, señor!”
+he thundered, shaking his fist and his whole frame
+trembling with passion. “Je payez pour heem, mister!
+He belonga to moi! Je killa any one who try tak heem
+away! Oui, by God, je killa you, m’sieu!” and,
+drawing a hunting-knife from his belt, he drove its
+blade deep into the top of the judge’s table. Leaving
+this grim memento quivering in the wood, Cataline
+turned upon his heel and strode away. He was not
+molested.</p>
+
+<p>When the world was electrified by the news that<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_446"></a>[446]</span>
+gold had been discovered on the Yukon, the authorities
+at Ottawa, anticipating the stampede of the
+lawless and the desperate that ensued, rushed a body
+of troops to the scene for the preservation of law and
+order. To Old Man Cataline was intrusted the task
+of transporting the several hundred soldiers and their
+supplies overland to the gold-fields by pack-train.
+The officer in command was a pompous person, fresh
+from the Eastern provinces and much impressed with
+his own importance, who insisted that the routine of
+barrack life should be rigidly observed upon the long
+and tedious march through the wilderness, the men
+rising and eating and going to bed by bugle-call.
+The absurdity of this proceeding aroused the contempt
+of Cataline, who would snort disgustedly: “Pour cinquante,
+soixante year I live in the grand forêt. Je
+connais when it ees time to get up. Je connais when I
+am hongry. Je connais when I am tired. But now it
+ees blowa de bug’ to get up; blowa de bug’ to eat;
+blowa de damned bug’ to sleep. Nom d’un nom d’un
+nom du chien! What t’ell for?” Within twenty-four
+hours Cataline and the commanding officer were not
+on speaking terms. But the expedition continued to
+press steadily forward, the commander riding at the
+head of the mile-long string of soldiers on mule back,
+and Cataline bringing up the rear. One day a heavily
+laden pack-mule became mired in a marsh and,
+despite the orders of the officer and the efforts of the
+soldiers, could not be extricated. As they were standing
+in deep perplexity about the helpless animal<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_447"></a>[447]</span>
+Cataline came riding up from the rear. Pulling up
+his mule, he sat quietly in his saddle without volunteering
+any advice. At last the officer, at his wit’s
+end, pocketed his pride.</p>
+
+<p>“How would you suggest that we get this mule
+out, Mr. Cataline?” he asked politely.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh,” remarked the old frontiersman drily, “blowa
+de bug’.”</p>
+
+<p>Nor will I readily forget Michael Flaherty, a
+genial Irish section boss on the Grand Trunk Pacific,
+whose effervescent Celtic wit formed a grateful relief
+to the grim stories of hardship and suffering. He had
+a front tooth conveniently missing, I remember, and one
+of his chief delights was to lean back in his chair and
+write patriotic “G. R.’s” and “U. S. A.’s” in squirts
+of tobacco juice upon the ceiling. One day he ordered
+out his hand-car in a hurry.</p>
+
+<p>“And where moight yez be goin’, Misther Flaherty?”
+solicitously inquired his assistant.</p>
+
+<p>“To hell wid yer questions,” was the answer.
+“Did Napoleon always be tellin’ his min where he was
+goin’?”</p>
+
+<p class="tb">The Indians of British Columbia, doubtless because
+of their remoteness from civilisation, have retained
+far more of their racial customs and characteristics
+than have their cousins below the international
+boundary. Though divided into innumerable clans
+and tribes, under local names, they fall naturally, on
+linguistic grounds, into a few large groups. Thus, the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_448"></a>[448]</span>
+southern portion of the hinterland is occupied by the
+Salish and the Kootenay; in the northern interior are
+to be found the Tinneh or Athapackan people; while
+the Haidas, Tsimshians, Kwakiatles, and Nootkas have
+their villages along the coast, though the white settlers
+speak of them collectively as Siwashes, “Siwash”
+being nothing more than a corruption of the French
+<i>sauvage</i>. These British Columbian aborigines are strikingly
+Oriental in appearance, having so many of the
+facial characteristics of the Mongol that it does not
+need the arguments of an ethnologist to convince one
+that they owe their origin to Asia. Indeed, it is a
+common saying that if you cut the hair of a Siwash
+you will find a Japanese. They are generally short
+and squat of figure and, though habitually lazy, are
+possessed of almost incredible endurance. One of them
+was pointed out to me, a brave named Chickens, who
+packed a piece of machinery weighing three hundred
+pounds over one hundred and eighty miles of rough
+forest trails in twelve days. Some years ago the Indians
+of the Hag-wel-get village constructed a suspension
+bridge of rope and timbers across the dizzy chasm
+at the bottom of which flows the raging Bulkley.
+This bridge is an interesting piece of work, for in building
+it the Indians adopted the cantilever system, a
+form of construction generally supposed to be beyond
+the comprehension of uncivilised peoples. But the
+amazing feature of the structure is that the varying
+members are not secured together by nails, bolts, or
+screws but simply lashed with willow withes. It is<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_449"></a>[449]</span>
+a crazy-looking affair, and when you venture on it it
+creaks, groans, and swings as if threatening to collapse.
+Even the weight of a dog is sufficient to set it vibrating
+sickeningly. When it was completed, the Indians
+were evidently in some doubt as to the stability of
+their handiwork, for they tested it by sending a score
+of kloochmen out upon the quivering structure. If
+it held, well and good—it was strong enough to bear
+the weight of an Indian; if it gave way—oh, well, there
+were plenty of other squaws where those came from.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp50" id="illus46" style="max-width: 29.6875em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus46.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><p>“Some of the cemeteries look as though
+  they were filled with white-enamelled cribs.”</p>
+  <p>The grave-house of a chieftain near Kispiox.</p>
+  <p>“Over each grave is a house which is a cross between ... a Turkish
+  kiosk and a Chinese pagoda.”</p>
+  <p>SOME SIWASH CEMETERIES.</p></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>The Siwashes bury their dead in some of the
+strangest cemeteries in the world, over each grave
+being erected a grave house of grotesquely carved and
+gaudily painted wood, which is a cross between a dog
+kennel, a chicken-coop, a Chinese pagoda, and a Turkish
+kiosk. In these strange mausoleums the personal
+belongings and gewgaws of the dear departed are
+prominently displayed. It may be a trunk or a dressing-table,
+usually bedecked with vases of withered
+flowers; from a line stretched across the interior of
+the structure hang the remnants of his or her clothing,
+and always in a conspicuous position is a photograph
+of the deceased. Though sometimes several hundred
+dollars are expended in the erection of one of these
+quaint structures, as soon as the funeral rites are over
+the tomb is left to the ravages of wind and rain, not a
+cent being expended upon its up-keep. Of recent
+years, however, those Indians who can afford it are
+abandoning the old-time wooden grave houses for
+elaborate enclosures of wire netting which gave the<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_450"></a>[450]</span>
+cemeteries the appearance of being filled with enamelled
+iron cribs. Perhaps their most curious custom, however,
+is that of potlatch giving. A potlatch is generosity
+carried to the nth degree. Some of them are very
+grand affairs, the Indians coming in to attend them
+from miles around. It is by no means unusual for an
+Indian to actually beggar himself by his munificence
+on these occasions, a wealthy chieftain who gave a
+potlatch recently at Kispiox piling blankets, which
+are the Indians’ chief measure of wealth, around a
+totem-pole to a height of forty feet.</p>
+
+<p>The Siwash villages are usually built high on a
+bank above some navigable stream, the totem-poles
+in front of the miserable cabins being so thick in
+places as to look from a distance like a forest that has
+been ravaged by fire. The Skeena might, indeed, be
+called the Totem-Pole River, for from end to end it is
+bordered by Indian villages whose grotesquely carven
+spars proclaim to all who traverse that great wilderness
+thoroughfare the genealogies of the families before
+whose dwellings they are reared. Though the Siwashes
+are accustomed to desert a village when the fishing
+and hunting run out and establish themselves elsewhere,
+their totem-poles may not be disturbed with
+impunity, as some business men of Seattle once found
+out. A few years ago the Seattle Chamber of Commerce
+arranged an excursion to Alaska, chartering a steamer
+for the purpose. While returning down the British
+Columbian coast, the vessel dropped anchor for a few
+hours at the head of a fiord, off a deserted Siwash<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_451"></a>[451]</span>
+village whose water-front was lined with imposing
+totem-poles.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp100" id="illus47" style="max-width: 50em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus47.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><table><tr>
+  <td class="td3"><p>“Proclaiming ... the stories of the families
+  before whose dwellings they are reared.”</p></td>
+  <td class="td3"><p>“The Skeena might be called the Totem Pole River.”</p></td>
+  <td class="td3"><p>The base of a Siwash totem-pole—“the God of Love.”</p></td>
+  </tr></table>
+  <p>HERALDRY IN THE HINTERLAND.</p></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>“Say,” said an enterprising business man, “this
+place is deserted, all right, all right. The Indians have
+evidently gotten out for good. So what’s the matter
+with our chopping down that big totem-pole over there,
+hoisting it on deck, and taking it back to Seattle?
+It’ll look perfectly bully set up in Pioneer Square.”</p>
+
+<p>Every one agreed that it was, indeed, a perfectly
+bully suggestion and it was carried out, the purloined
+pole being erected in due time in the heart of Seattle’s
+business section, where it stands to-day. The affair
+received considerable notice in the newspapers, of
+course, and those responsible for thus adding to the
+city’s attractions were editorially patted on the back.
+A few weeks later, however, they were served with
+papers in a civil suit brought against them by the Indians
+from whose village, without so much as a by-your-leave,
+they had removed the pole. At first they
+jeered at the idea of a handful of Siwash villagers
+dwelling up there on the skirts of civilisation having
+any rights which they could enforce in a court of
+law, but they soon found that it was no laughing
+matter, for the Indians, backed by the British Columbian
+Government, pressed their claim and it cost the
+gentlemen concerned four thousand dollars for their
+Siwash souvenir.</p>
+
+<p>Everything considered, British Columbia is, I
+believe, the finest game country in the western hemisphere,
+bar none, for the sportsmen have as yet barely<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_452"></a>[452]</span>
+nibbled at its edges. It is to America, in fact, what
+the Victoria Nyanza country is to Africa: a veritable
+sportsman’s paradise, to make use of a term which
+the writers of railway folders have taken for their
+own. It is the sole remaining region south of Alaska
+where the hunter can go with almost positive assurance
+that he will have a chance to draw a bead upon a grizzly
+bear; mountain sheep and goat are seen so frequently
+on the slopes of the Rocher de Boulé, at the back of
+New Hazelton, that they do not provoke even passing
+comment; the islands off the province’s ragged coast
+are the only habitat of that <i>rara avis</i>, the spotted
+bear; musk-ox and wood-buffalo, among the scarcest
+big game in existence, still graze on the prairies which
+are watered by the headwaters of the Mackenzie and
+the Peace; elk, caribou, and mule-deer are as common
+as squirrels in Central Park; wolves, wolverenes,
+lynxes, and the fox in all its species, to say nothing of
+the beaver, the marten, and the mink, still make the
+province one of the richest fur grounds in the world.
+Wild fowl literally blacken its lakes and fiords in the
+spring and autumn; grouse and pheasant, as I have
+previously remarked, are so tame that they can be
+and are killed with a club; while salmon, trout, and
+sturgeon fill the countless streams, sometimes in such
+vast numbers that they actually choke the smaller
+creeks and rivers. When there is taken into consideration
+the fact of its comparative accessibility (New
+Hazelton can be reached from Seattle in a little more
+than three days) and the healthfulness of its climate—for<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_453"></a>[453]</span>
+British Columbia, unlike most of the other celebrated
+hunting-grounds, is distinctly a “white man’s
+country”—it is almost incomprehensible why it has
+not attracted far greater attention from the men who
+go into the wild with rod and gun.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp50" id="illus48" style="max-width: 29.6875em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/illus48.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><p>The Rocher de Boulé from the Indian
+  village of Awillgate.</p>
+  <p>The Upper Fraser at Quesnel. This is the head of steamer navigation
+  and the end of the Cariboo Trail.</p>
+  <p>The Babine Range from Old Hazelton.</p>
+  <p>A LAND OF SUBLIMITY AND MAGNIFICENCE AND GRANDEUR, OF GLOOM AND
+  LONELINESS AND DREAD.</p></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<p>It is a land of immensity and majesty and opportunity,
+is this almost unknown empire in the near-by
+North. It is a region of sublimity and magnificence
+and grandeur, of gloom and loneliness and dread. It
+is as savage as a grizzly, as alluring as a lovely woman.
+Its scenery is of the set-piece and drop-curtain kind.
+Streams of threaded quicksilver, coming from God
+knows where, hasten through deep-gashed valleys as
+though anxious to escape from the solitude that reigns.
+On the flanks of the ridges, massed in their black battalions,
+stand the bleak barbarian pines, while above
+the scented pine gloom, like blanketed chiefs in council
+under the wigwam of the sky, the snow peaks gleam
+in splendour, and behind them, beyond them, the sun-god
+paints his canvas in the West. Pregnant with the
+seed of unborn cities, potent in resources and possibilities
+beyond the stranger’s ken, it lies waiting to
+be conquered:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">“The last and the largest empire,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">The map that is half unrolled.”</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_454"></a>[454]</span></p>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_455"></a>[455]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="INDEX">INDEX</h2>
+
+</div>
+
+<ul>
+
+<li class="ifrst">Abbott, Judge, ranch-house of, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Acoma, New Mexico, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a href="#Page_40">40-55</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">antiquity, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">costumes, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">church, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">customs, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">dwellings, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">funeral, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">graveyard, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">houses, <a href="#Page_45">45-47</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">industries, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">paths to, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">people of, <a href="#Page_42">42</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">picture of San José in, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">police, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">site of, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">symbolic hair-dressing, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>, <a href="#Page_55">55</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">women, <a href="#Page_53">53-55</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Agricultural College, Oregon, <a href="#Page_315">315</a>, <a href="#Page_316">316</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Agriculture, United States Department of, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Alaska, <a href="#Page_381">381</a>, <a href="#Page_438">438</a>, <a href="#Page_439">439</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Alberni, B. C., <a href="#Page_363">363</a>, <a href="#Page_375">375</a>, <a href="#Page_376">376</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Albuquerque, New Mexico, <a href="#Page_13">13-16</a>, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">agricultural possibilities, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">climate, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">commercial club, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">university at, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Alcatraz, prison at, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Aldermere, B. C., <a href="#Page_434">434</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Alejandro, Padre, <a href="#Page_179">179</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Alfalfa raising, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>, <a href="#Page_260">260</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Algiers, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Amargosa River, the, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">“American Alps,” the, <a href="#Page_217">217</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">“American Mentone,” the, <a href="#Page_217">217</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">American River, the, <a href="#Page_229">229</a>, <a href="#Page_230">230</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">American School of Archæology, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Anacapa Island, <a href="#Page_151">151</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Anacortes, <a href="#Page_344">344</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Apple orchards, Oregon, <a href="#Page_296">296</a>, <a href="#Page_297">297</a>, <a href="#Page_318">318</a>, <a href="#Page_319">319</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Archæological research in the United States, <a href="#Page_22">22-25</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Architecture, California, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Arizona, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">admitted to the Union, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">cities, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">climate, <a href="#Page_83">83-85</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">contrasted with Egypt, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">copper output, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">desert, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">early inhabitants, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">effects of civilization in, <a href="#Page_63">63-65</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">game-hunting, <a href="#Page_85">85-87</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">history of, <a href="#Page_76">76-79</a>, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">irrigation, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">misconceptions concerning, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>, <a href="#Page_74">74</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">missions, <a href="#Page_91">91-93</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">organised as territory, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">people law-abiding, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">pioneers, <a href="#Page_67">67-69</a>, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">prison system, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">products of the soil, <a href="#Page_74">74-76</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">progress in, <a href="#Page_66">66-69</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">two distinct regions of, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Arizona Rangers, the, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Ark, the, <a href="#Page_376">376</a>, <a href="#Page_377">377</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Arroyo Hondo, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Ashcroft, B. C., <a href="#Page_391">391-6</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Ashland, Oregon, <a href="#Page_323">323</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Automobiles, in Oregon, <a href="#Page_313">313</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Avalon, Santa Catalina, <a href="#Page_148">148-151</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="ifrst">Bakersfield, California, <a href="#Page_259">259-261</a>, <a href="#Page_324">324</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Banning Company, the, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Barbareños, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Barkerville, B. C., <a href="#Page_392">392</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Barrancas, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bay of Monterey, the lost, <a href="#Page_195">195</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Beaman, Judge, <a href="#Page_150">150</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bellingham, <a href="#Page_348">348</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">“Ben Hur,” <a href="#Page_16">16</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Benedict, Judge Kirby, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Benicia, California, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bent, Governor, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Big-game hunting, <a href="#Page_85">85-87</a>, <a href="#Page_347">347</a>, <a href="#Page_451">451-3</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Big trees of California, <a href="#Page_254">254</a>, <a href="#Page_255">255</a>, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>, <a href="#Page_258">258</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bisbee, Arizona, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Black Hills, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Blackwater, B. C., <a href="#Page_401">401</a>, <a href="#Page_405">405</a>, <a href="#Page_406">406</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Blaine, <a href="#Page_348">348</a>, <a href="#Page_349">349</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Boar-hunting, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bobtail Lake, B. C., <a href="#Page_403">403</a>, <a href="#Page_404">404</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bohemian Club of San Francisco, the, <a href="#Page_158">158</a>, <a href="#Page_202">202</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_456"></a>[456]</span>Bohemians in California, <a href="#Page_282">282</a>, <a href="#Page_283">283</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Borax deposits, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bradshaw Mountains, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bret Harte, <a href="#Page_229">229</a>, <a href="#Page_230">230</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bridge built by Indians, <a href="#Page_448">448</a>, <a href="#Page_449">449</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bridger, Jim, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">British Columbia, <a href="#Page_209">209</a>, <a href="#Page_355">355 <i>et seq.</i></a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">area, <a href="#Page_358">358</a>, <a href="#Page_359">359</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">character of the country, <a href="#Page_362">362</a>, <a href="#Page_363">363</a>, <a href="#Page_453">453</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">cities of, <a href="#Page_363">363</a>, <a href="#Page_364">364</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">climate, <a href="#Page_361">361</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">corduroying roads in, <a href="#Page_411">411</a>, <a href="#Page_412">412</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">cutting path through forest, <a href="#Page_428">428</a>, <a href="#Page_429">429</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">freighters, <a href="#Page_398">398</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">frontier, <a href="#Page_389">389 <i>et seq.</i></a>, <a href="#Page_421">421 <i>et seq.</i></a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">game-hunting, <a href="#Page_451">451-3</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">government’s interest in settlers, <a href="#Page_407">407</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Indians, <a href="#Page_415">415</a>, <a href="#Page_447">447-451</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">“muskeg,” <a href="#Page_410">410</a>, <a href="#Page_411">411</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">pioneers in, <a href="#Page_385">385</a>, <a href="#Page_386">386</a>, <a href="#Page_390">390</a>, <a href="#Page_397">397 <i>et seq.</i></a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">prohibition in, <a href="#Page_407">407-9</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">railways, <a href="#Page_378">378-382</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">resources, <a href="#Page_359">359-361</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">roads, <a href="#Page_411">411</a>, <a href="#Page_415">415</a>, <a href="#Page_416">416</a>, <a href="#Page_433">433</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">British Columbia Express Company, <a href="#Page_391">391</a>, <a href="#Page_392">392</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Brussels, restoration of, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bryce, James, <a href="#Page_299">299</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bunk-houses, British Columbia, <a href="#Page_413">413</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Bureau of Indian Affairs, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Burlingame, California, <a href="#Page_198">198</a>, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Burns Lake, B. C., <a href="#Page_424">424</a>, <a href="#Page_425">425</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Busch Gardens, Pasadena, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="ifrst">Cabbage-growing in New Mexico, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Cabrillo, Juan Rodrigues, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>, <a href="#Page_171">171</a>, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"><i>Cabrillo</i>, the, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Caire estate, the, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">California Debris Commission, <a href="#Page_226">226</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">California, <a href="#Page_160">160 <i>et seq.</i></a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">agriculture of, <a href="#Page_218">218</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">architecture, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Chinese in, <a href="#Page_207">207</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">climate, <a href="#Page_157">157-9</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">coast, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">discovery of, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">dust, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">festivals, <a href="#Page_201">201-3</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">fogs, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Great Valley of, <a href="#Page_242">242-4</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">hinterland, <a href="#Page_240">240 <i>et seq.</i></a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Japanese in, <a href="#Page_207">207-210</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">labour problems in, <a href="#Page_206">206-8</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">missions, <a href="#Page_117">117-122</a>, <a href="#Page_179">179</a>, <a href="#Page_180">180</a>, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_195">195</a>, <a href="#Page_198">198</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">orange groves, <a href="#Page_125">125-8</a>, <a href="#Page_133">133-8</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">popular misnomers, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>, <a href="#Page_217">217</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">rain, <a href="#Page_158">158</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">roads, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>, <a href="#Page_197">197</a>, <a href="#Page_198">198</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">seaside resorts, <a href="#Page_142">142-4</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">summer climate, <a href="#Page_157">157-160</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">three distinct zones of, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">trees, <a href="#Page_254">254-8</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Camels, wild, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx" id="Camino_Real">Camino Real, El, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>, <a href="#Page_122">122</a>, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_178">178</a>, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>, <a href="#Page_197">197</a>, <a href="#Page_198">198</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Camp Sierra, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Canada, agricultural invasion of, <a href="#Page_357">357</a>, <a href="#Page_358">358</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">motoring in, <a href="#Page_348">348-350</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">railways, <a href="#Page_378">378-381</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Canadian Northern Railway, <a href="#Page_378">378-381</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Canadian Pacific Railway, <a href="#Page_378">378-380</a>, <a href="#Page_395">395</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Canal at Celilo, <a href="#Page_291">291</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Cañon of the Macho, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">of the Santa Fé, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Cañons, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Cañon’s Crest, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Cape Flattery, <a href="#Page_344">344</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Cape Horn, <a href="#Page_232">232</a>, <a href="#Page_301">301</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Caravels, miniature, <a href="#Page_171">171</a>, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Cariboo Trail, the, <a href="#Page_391">391-9</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Carmel, mission of, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Carpinteria, California, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Carquinez Straits, the, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Carson, Kit, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Casa Grande, ruins of, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">irrigation, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Cascade Range, the, <a href="#Page_277">277</a>, <a href="#Page_285">285</a>, <a href="#Page_293">293</a>, <a href="#Page_295">295</a>, <a href="#Page_298">298-300</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_310">310</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Casitas Pass, the, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Casteñeda, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Castle Hot Springs, Arizona, <a href="#Page_81">81-83</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Castle Rock, <a href="#Page_301">301</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Castro, General, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Catalina Range, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Cattle-raising in New Mexico, <a href="#Page_26">26</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Caux, Eugene (Old Man Cataline), <a href="#Page_444">444-7</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Cave-dwellers, <a href="#Page_22">22-25</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Caves, painted, of Santa Cruz, <a href="#Page_151">151</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Oregon, <a href="#Page_324">324</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Celilo, canal at, <a href="#Page_291">291</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Channel Islands, the, <a href="#Page_146">146-154</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Charles the Second of Aragon, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Chinese, in California, <a href="#Page_207">207</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1"><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_457"></a>[457]</span>farming, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Church, adobe, at Acoma, <a href="#Page_48">48-50</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Civil War, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Clarksburg, California, <a href="#Page_223">223</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Cline, “Dutch,” <a href="#Page_439">439</a>, <a href="#Page_441">441</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Cloud Cap Inn, <a href="#Page_297">297</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Coast Range, the, <a href="#Page_241">241</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Colorado Desert, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Colorado River, the, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Colton Hall, Monterey, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"><i>Columbia, of Boston</i>, the, <a href="#Page_303">303</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Columbia River, the, <a href="#Page_273">273 <i>et seq.</i></a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Indian legend, <a href="#Page_293">293-5</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">length of, <a href="#Page_289">289</a>, <a href="#Page_290">290</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">romance of, <a href="#Page_292">292-6</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">salmon, <a href="#Page_302">302</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">scenery, <a href="#Page_290">290</a>, <a href="#Page_299">299-301</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">traffic, <a href="#Page_301">301</a>, <a href="#Page_302">302</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">waterfalls, <a href="#Page_300">300</a>, <a href="#Page_301">301</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Commerce of the prairies, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Commercial Club in Albuquerque, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Contra Costa County, California, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Copper mines, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Coronado, California, <a href="#Page_103">103-7</a>, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">hotel, <a href="#Page_105">105-7</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Polo Club, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Tent City, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Coronado, Don Francisco Vasquez de, expedition of, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Coronados Islands, the, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Cotton, Egyptian, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Coulterville, California, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">road, <a href="#Page_246">246</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Crater Lake, <a href="#Page_285">285</a>, <a href="#Page_286">286</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Crocker’s Sierra Resort, <a href="#Page_246">246</a>, <a href="#Page_247">247</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Czechs, <a href="#Page_282">282</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="ifrst">Dalton Divide, the, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Dams, Laguna and Roosevelt, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Elephant Butte, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Date, the Algerian, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>, <a href="#Page_76">76</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">the Deglet Noor, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Death Valley, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>, <a href="#Page_172">172-8</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">borax deposits, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">climatic variation, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">effects of ultrararefied air, <a href="#Page_175">175</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">sand-storms, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Decker Lake, <a href="#Page_425">425-8</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Del Mar, California, <a href="#Page_117">117-9</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Del Monte, California, <a href="#Page_184">184</a>, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Deming, New Mexico, <a href="#Page_3">3-8</a>, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Denver, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Depew, Chauncey, <a href="#Page_84">84</a>, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Deschutes, the, <a href="#Page_287">287</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Desert, Arizona, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Colorado, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">New Mexican, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Dikes on the Sacramento, <a href="#Page_226">226</a>, <a href="#Page_227">227</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Donner Lake, <a href="#Page_233">233</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Donner party tragedy, story of, <a href="#Page_233">233</a>, <a href="#Page_234">234</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Drain, Oregon, <a href="#Page_323">323</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Drowned Lands, the, <a href="#Page_426">426</a>, <a href="#Page_428">428</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Dry Lake Ranch, <a href="#Page_282">282</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Duncan, woodsman, <a href="#Page_427">427-433</a>, <a href="#Page_437">437</a>, <a href="#Page_438">438</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Dungeness, <a href="#Page_344">344</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="ifrst">Easter pilgrimage, <a href="#Page_129">129-131</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Egypt, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>, <a href="#Page_72">72</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">El Centro, <a href="#Page_101">101</a>, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">El Paso, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Elephant Butte, dam at, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Elkins, Stephen B., <a href="#Page_21">21</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">English in New Mexico, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">pioneers in the North, <a href="#Page_399">399-403</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Erosion, Acoma, a striking example of, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Eugene, Oregon, <a href="#Page_317">317</a>, <a href="#Page_320">320</a>, <a href="#Page_323">323</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="ifrst">Fair, Oregon State, <a href="#Page_312">312-7</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Farms, New Mexico, <a href="#Page_7">7-11</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Oregon, <a href="#Page_314">314</a>, <a href="#Page_315">315</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Feast of the Blossoms, the, <a href="#Page_192">192</a>, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>, <a href="#Page_201">201</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Festivities, California out-of-door, <a href="#Page_201">201-3</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Fishing, deep-sea, at Avalon, <a href="#Page_149">149-151</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Fishing industry of the Sacramento, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>, <a href="#Page_221">221</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Fish-wheels, <a href="#Page_302">302</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Flaherty, Michael, <a href="#Page_447">447</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Floral mosaic, <a href="#Page_267">267</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Florence, Arizona, State penitentiary at, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Folsom, California, <a href="#Page_229">229</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Foot-hills Hotel, the, <a href="#Page_164">164-6</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Forests, Sierran, <a href="#Page_266">266</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Fort Fraser, B. C., <a href="#Page_390">390</a>, <a href="#Page_395">395</a>, <a href="#Page_399">399</a>, <a href="#Page_416">416</a>, <a href="#Page_421">421-4</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">cost of provisions in, <a href="#Page_422">422</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Fort George, B. C., <a href="#Page_393">393</a>, <a href="#Page_408">408</a>, <a href="#Page_409">409</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_458"></a>[458]</span>Fowl, wild, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Fraser River, the, <a href="#Page_391">391</a>, <a href="#Page_392">392</a>, <a href="#Page_398">398</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Freight wagons, British Columbian, <a href="#Page_398">398</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Frémont, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>, <a href="#Page_228">228</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Fresno, California, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Friday Harbour, <a href="#Page_344">344</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Frontier, the last, <a href="#Page_389">389 <i>et seq.</i></a>, <a href="#Page_421">421 <i>et seq.</i></a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Frontiersmen, British Columbian, <a href="#Page_440">440-7</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Frost in the orange belt, <a href="#Page_133">133</a>, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Fruit-growing, in Arizona, <a href="#Page_75">75</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Fruit-packing industry, <a href="#Page_205">205</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Funeral Range, the, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Furnace Creek, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="ifrst">Gadsden Treaty, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Gasoline, cost of in British Columbia, <a href="#Page_394">394</a>, <a href="#Page_395">395</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Gaviota Pass, the, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">General Grant Big Tree Grove, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Gila River, the, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Gilroy, California, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Glacier meadows, <a href="#Page_266">266</a>, <a href="#Page_267">267</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Globe, Arizona, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Goat, wild, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Gold discovery, California, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>, <a href="#Page_173">173</a>, <a href="#Page_224">224</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Gold dredger, <a href="#Page_230">230-2</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Golden Gate, the, <a href="#Page_241">241</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Golf-links, California, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>, <a href="#Page_185">185</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Grand Island, <a href="#Page_227">227</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Grand Trunk Pacific Railway, <a href="#Page_364">364</a>, <a href="#Page_378">378-382</a>, <a href="#Page_384">384</a>, <a href="#Page_408">408</a>, <a href="#Page_426">426</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Grant’s Pass, Oregon, <a href="#Page_323">323</a>, <a href="#Page_324">324</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Great Central Lake, B. C., <a href="#Page_220">220</a>, <a href="#Page_375">375</a>, <a href="#Page_376">376</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Great Valley of California, the, <a href="#Page_242">242 <i>et seq.</i></a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">irrigation of, <a href="#Page_243">243</a>, <a href="#Page_244">244</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">petroleum fields, <a href="#Page_258">258</a>, <a href="#Page_259">259</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Grove Play, Bohemian Club’s, <a href="#Page_158">158</a>, <a href="#Page_202">202</a>, <a href="#Page_203">203</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="ifrst">Halleck, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Harriman, E. H., <a href="#Page_284">284</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Hawk’s Nest, the, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Heenan, the “Benicia Boy,” <a href="#Page_220">220</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">High Sierras, the, <a href="#Page_266">266</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Highways, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>, <a href="#Page_114">114-8</a>, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_197">197</a>, <a href="#Page_198">198</a>, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>, <a href="#Page_229">229</a>, <a href="#Page_278">278</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Hillsboro, California, <a href="#Page_198">198</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Oregon, <a href="#Page_326">326</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Holland, waterways of, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Hollanders in New Mexico, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Hollywood, California, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Homestead and Desert Land Acts, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_323">323</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Honey Lake, <a href="#Page_279">279</a>, <a href="#Page_280">280</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Hood River, <a href="#Page_296">296</a>, <a href="#Page_297">297</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Hopi Indians, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_53">53-59</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Horton, Alonzo, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Hot Springs Junction, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Hotel Arlington, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>, <a href="#Page_171">171</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">del Coronado, <a href="#Page_105">105-7</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">The Foot-hills, <a href="#Page_164">164-6</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Hund, John, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Hundred and Fifty Mile House, the, <a href="#Page_430">430-2</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Hunt, Governor George W. P., <a href="#Page_79">79</a>, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Hunting big game in Arizona, <a href="#Page_85">85-87</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">in British Columbia, <a href="#Page_451">451-3</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">in the Puget Sound country, <a href="#Page_347">347</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Hydraulic mining, <a href="#Page_226">226</a>, <a href="#Page_230">230</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="ifrst">Imperial Valley, the, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_97">97-102</a>, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>, <a href="#Page_194">194</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">agricultural products, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">highway into, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">irrigation of, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">soil expert’s report concerning, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">towns in, <a href="#Page_101">101</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Indian education, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">legend of the Columbia, <a href="#Page_293">293-5</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">punishments, <a href="#Page_58">58-60</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">revolt of 1680, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">settlement in the Yosemite, <a href="#Page_250">250-2</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">sheep-owners, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Indians, Palatingwa, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Hopi, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>, <a href="#Page_53">53-59</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Siwash, <a href="#Page_415">415</a>, <a href="#Page_447">447-451</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Invalids, in Albuquerque, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Iron Hills, the, <a href="#Page_279">279</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Irrigation, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_70">70</a>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>, <a href="#Page_225">225-7</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_243">243</a>, <a href="#Page_246">246</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Isleton, California, <a href="#Page_223">223</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="ifrst">Japanese in California, <a href="#Page_207">207-210</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_459"></a>[459]</span>Jewellery, Indian, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="ifrst">Kalama, <a href="#Page_331">331</a>, <a href="#Page_332">332</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Katzimo, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Kearney Boulevard, the, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Kearney, General, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">King’s Highway. (See <a href="#Camino_Real"><i>Camino Real</i></a>.)</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Kino, Jesuit Father, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Klamath Falls, <a href="#Page_283">283-5</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="ifrst">La Jolla, California, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Labour problems in California, <a href="#Page_206">206-8</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Laguna, New Mexico, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">dam, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Lake Chapala, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Lake of Elsinore, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx" id="Lake_Tahoe">Lake Tahoe, <a href="#Page_228">228</a>, <a href="#Page_232">232</a>, <a href="#Page_235">235</a>, <a href="#Page_236">236</a>, <a href="#Page_264">264-270</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Larkin house, Monterey, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Leland Stanford, Jr., University, <a href="#Page_197">197</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Lick, James, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Linda Vista grade, the, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Lisa, Manuel, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Long Beach, California, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Los Angeles, California, <a href="#Page_142">142-5</a>, <a href="#Page_209">209</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">harbour, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">name, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Los Gatos, <a href="#Page_191">191</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Los Olivos, inn at, <a href="#Page_180">180</a>, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Lummis, Charles, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="ifrst">Macdonald, “Black Jack,” <a href="#Page_438">438</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">MacDonald, Bob, <a href="#Page_442">442</a>, <a href="#Page_443">443</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Machine shearing, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Madera, California, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Manzano Ranges, the, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">“Marble Halls of Oregon,” the, <a href="#Page_324">324</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Marcos de Niza, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Mare Island Navy Yard, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Mariposa Big Tree Grove, <a href="#Page_254">254</a>, <a href="#Page_255">255</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Mark Twain, <a href="#Page_230">230</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Marshall, John, <a href="#Page_229">229</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Matilija Valley, the, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Meadows, mountain, <a href="#Page_266">266</a>, <a href="#Page_267">267</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Medford, Oregon, <a href="#Page_319">319</a>, <a href="#Page_323">323</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Mediterranean Riviera, the, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Memaloose, the Island of the Dead, <a href="#Page_293">293</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Merced Big Tree Grove, <a href="#Page_247">247</a>, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"><i>Mesa Encantada, La</i> (the Enchanted Mesa), <a href="#Page_30">30-41</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Mexican War, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Mexicans, in New Mexico, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Militiamen, Canadian, <a href="#Page_372">372</a>, <a href="#Page_373">373</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Miller, Frank, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Mimbres Valley, the, <a href="#Page_6">6 <i>et seq.</i></a>, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">climate, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Mining, <a href="#Page_226">226</a>, <a href="#Page_230">230-2</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Miramar, California, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Mission Inn at Riverside, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Mission Valley, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Missions, Arizona, <a href="#Page_91">91-93</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">California, <a href="#Page_117">117-122</a>, <a href="#Page_179">179</a>, <a href="#Page_180">180</a>, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_195">195</a>, <a href="#Page_198">198</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Modesto, California, <a href="#Page_246">246</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Mojave City, Arizona, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Montecito, California, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>, <a href="#Page_223">223</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Monterey, California, <a href="#Page_159">159</a>, <a href="#Page_181">181-5</a>, <a href="#Page_195">195</a>, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">historic interest of, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Morehouse, Colonel C. P., <a href="#Page_150">150</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Moricetown, B. C., <a href="#Page_434">434-6</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Motoring in British Columbia, <a href="#Page_348">348-350</a>, <a href="#Page_372">372</a>, <a href="#Page_439">439</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">in California, <a href="#Page_113">113-8</a>, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>, <a href="#Page_228">228</a>, <a href="#Page_261">261-4</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_278">278</a>, <a href="#Page_279">279</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">in Oregon, <a href="#Page_320">320</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">in the Yosemite, <a href="#Page_246">246-8</a>, <a href="#Page_254">254</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Mount Adams, <a href="#Page_295">295</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Hamilton, <a href="#Page_191">191</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Hood, <a href="#Page_295">295</a>, <a href="#Page_298">298</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Hooker, <a href="#Page_346">346</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Lowe, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Rubidoux, <a href="#Page_128">128</a>, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Rainier, <a href="#Page_337">337-340</a>, <a href="#Page_347">347</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Shasta, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Saint Helens, <a href="#Page_295">295</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">San Jacinto, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Tamalpais, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Topotopo, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Moving pictures taken in the West, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>, <a href="#Page_171">171</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Muir, John, <a href="#Page_249">249</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="ifrst">Nanaimo, <a href="#Page_363">363</a>, <a href="#Page_372">372</a>, <a href="#Page_373">373</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Napoleon, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"><i>Natalie</i>, the, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Nechako River, the, <a href="#Page_424">424</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Nehalem Bay, <a href="#Page_326">326</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">“Netherlands Route,” the, <a href="#Page_217">217</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">New Hazelton, B. C., <a href="#Page_380">380</a>, <a href="#Page_381">381</a>, <a href="#Page_428">428</a>, <a href="#Page_436">436-440</a>, <a href="#Page_443">443</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_452">452</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">“New Helvetia,” <a href="#Page_227">227</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_460"></a>[460]</span>New Mexico, annexation of, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">changes in, <a href="#Page_3">3 <i>et seq.</i></a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">character of the people, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">climate of, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">desert, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>, <a href="#Page_38">38</a>, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">dress, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">farming in, <a href="#Page_7">7-11</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">fuel, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">industries, <a href="#Page_25">25-28</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Mexicans in, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">mineral deposits, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">prosperity of, <a href="#Page_31">31</a>, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">religious fanaticism, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">settlers in, <a href="#Page_10">10-13</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">social fabric, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Spanish spoken in, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">turquoise deposits, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">water discovery, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">well-digging, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">white population, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">New Westminster, B. C., <a href="#Page_350">350</a>, <a href="#Page_363">363</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Nisqually Glacier, the, <a href="#Page_338">338-340</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="ifrst">Oak Knoll, California, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Oceanside, California, <a href="#Page_117">117-9</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Oil-fields, California, <a href="#Page_258">258</a>, <a href="#Page_259">259</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Ojai Valley, the, <a href="#Page_162">162-6</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Olympia, <a href="#Page_336">336</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Oñate, Juan de, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Orange groves of California, <a href="#Page_125">125-8</a>, <a href="#Page_133">133-8</a>, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Oregon, <a href="#Page_307">307-328</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Agricultural College, <a href="#Page_315">315</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">apple orchards, <a href="#Page_296">296</a>, <a href="#Page_318">318</a>, <a href="#Page_319">319</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">caves, <a href="#Page_324">324</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">character of the country, <a href="#Page_324">324-8</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">charm of, <a href="#Page_326">326-8</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">climate, <a href="#Page_327">327</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">emigration to, <a href="#Page_321">321-3</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">farmer, <a href="#Page_313">313-6</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">a frontier country, <a href="#Page_325">325</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">hinterland, <a href="#Page_275">275 <i>et seq.</i></a>, <a href="#Page_309">309</a>, <a href="#Page_310">310</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">opportunities in, <a href="#Page_322">322</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">prohibition in, <a href="#Page_323">323</a>, <a href="#Page_324">324</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">railroad, <a href="#Page_325">325-7</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">State Fair, <a href="#Page_312">312-7</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">timber, <a href="#Page_322">322</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">towns, <a href="#Page_308">308</a>, <a href="#Page_323">323</a>, <a href="#Page_324">324</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Oregon Trail, the, <a href="#Page_276">276</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">“Our Italy,” <a href="#Page_216">216</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="ifrst">Pacific Great Eastern Railway, <a href="#Page_379">379-380</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Pack-train on the Cariboo Trail, <a href="#Page_397">397</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">“Padre’s Path,” <a href="#Page_42">42</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Pajarito National Park, <a href="#Page_22">22-25</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Pala, San Antonia de, mission chapel, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Palatingwa tribe, the, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Palo Alto, <a href="#Page_197">197</a>, <a href="#Page_198">198</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Panamint Range, the, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Pasadena, California, <a href="#Page_131">131-3</a>, <a href="#Page_138">138-142</a>, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>, <a href="#Page_201">201</a>, <a href="#Page_223">223</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Busch Gardens, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Mount Lowe, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Orange Grove Avenue, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Pecos, the, valley of, <a href="#Page_9">9</a>, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Forest Reserve, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Pelican Bay Lodge, <a href="#Page_285">285</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Pelicans, <a href="#Page_283">283</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Penitentes, the, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Petroleum fields, California, <a href="#Page_258">258</a>, <a href="#Page_259">259</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Philip III, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Phœnix, Arizona, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_110">110</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Pillars of Hercules, <a href="#Page_301">301</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Pilot Peak, <a href="#Page_278">278</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Pio Pico, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Placerville, California, <a href="#Page_228">228</a>, <a href="#Page_229">229</a>, <a href="#Page_232">232</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Plaza del Mar, Santa Barbara, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>, <a href="#Page_171">171</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Point Loma, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Polo Club at Coronado, <a href="#Page_104">104</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Port Alberni, B. C., <a href="#Page_376">376</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Port Angeles, <a href="#Page_344">344</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Port Mann, B. C., <a href="#Page_380">380</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Portland, Oregon, <a href="#Page_202">202</a>, <a href="#Page_308">308</a>, <a href="#Page_331">331</a>, <a href="#Page_332">332</a>, <a href="#Page_341">341</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">residences, <a href="#Page_311">311</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Portola, Don Caspar de, <a href="#Page_195">195</a>, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Prescott, Arizona, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Prince Rupert, B. C., <a href="#Page_379">379-384</a>, <a href="#Page_390">390</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Prison system, Arizona, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Prunes, California, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Pueblo system of government, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Puget Sound country, the, <a href="#Page_341">341-7</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">a trip through, <a href="#Page_343">343-5</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">variety of sports and recreations, <a href="#Page_345">345-7</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Punishments, Indian, <a href="#Page_58">58-60</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="ifrst">Quesnel, B. C., <a href="#Page_392">392</a>, <a href="#Page_394">394</a>, <a href="#Page_395">395</a>, <a href="#Page_399">399</a>, <a href="#Page_401">401</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_445">445</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="ifrst">Railways in British Columbia, <a href="#Page_378">378-382</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Rainier National Park, <a href="#Page_338">338</a>, <a href="#Page_340">340</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Raisin industry, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"><i>Ramona</i>, home of, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Ranches, Californian, <a href="#Page_242">242</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Rasmussen, Peter, <a href="#Page_412">412-4</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Raton, New Mexico, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Redlands, California, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_461"></a>[461]</span>Redondo, California, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Remittance-man, the, <a href="#Page_400">400</a>, <a href="#Page_401">401</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Rincon route, the, <a href="#Page_166">166</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Rio Grande, the, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Rito de los Frijoles, the, <a href="#Page_23">23-25</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">River gardens, <a href="#Page_221">221</a>, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Riverside, California, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>, <a href="#Page_125">125-133</a>, <a href="#Page_136">136</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Easter pilgrimage, <a href="#Page_129">129-131</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Mission Inn at, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Riviera, the Californian, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Rogue, valley of the, <a href="#Page_321">321</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Roosevelt dam, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_91">91</a>, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_110">110</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Roseburg, Oregon, <a href="#Page_323">323</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="ifrst">Sacramento, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>, <a href="#Page_224">224-8</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Sacramento River, the, <a href="#Page_215">215-227</a>, <a href="#Page_233">233</a>, <a href="#Page_241">241</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">dikes, <a href="#Page_226">226</a>, <a href="#Page_227">227</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">fishing industry, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>, <a href="#Page_221">221</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">homes along, <a href="#Page_223">223</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">house-boats, <a href="#Page_224">224</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">reclamation of banks, <a href="#Page_225">225-7</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">traffic, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">truck-gardens, <a href="#Page_221">221</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Salem, Oregon, <a href="#Page_312">312</a>, <a href="#Page_323">323</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Salmon fisheries, <a href="#Page_302">302</a>, <a href="#Page_348">348</a>, <a href="#Page_375">375</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Salt River Valley, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">San Antonio de Pala, mission chapel of, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">San Bernardino Range, the, <a href="#Page_241">241</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">San Buenaventura, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">San Carlos, Church of, Monterey, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">San Clemente, island of, <a href="#Page_151">151</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">San Diego, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>, <a href="#Page_107">107-112</a>, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_118">118</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">advantages, <a href="#Page_109">109</a>, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">climate, <a href="#Page_111">111</a>, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">geography, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">growth of, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">highway, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">history, <a href="#Page_107">107</a>, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">prospects, <a href="#Page_109">109-111</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">San Francisco, <a href="#Page_215">215</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Portola Festival at, <a href="#Page_201">201</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">San Joaquin River, the, <a href="#Page_221">221</a>, <a href="#Page_241">241</a>, <a href="#Page_242">242</a>, <a href="#Page_245">245</a>, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">San José, California, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">mission, <a href="#Page_195">195</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">San José, picture of, <a href="#Page_49">49</a>, <a href="#Page_50">50</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">San Juan Bautista, mission of, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">San Juan Islands, <a href="#Page_343">343</a>, <a href="#Page_344">344</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">San Luis Obispo, California, <a href="#Page_172">172</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">San Luis Rey, mission of, <a href="#Page_117">117</a>, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">San Mateo, California, <a href="#Page_198">198</a>, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">New Mexico, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">San Pedro, harbour of, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"><i>San Salvador</i>, the, <a href="#Page_171">171</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">San Xavier del Bac, mission of, <a href="#Page_91">91-94</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Sand-storms in Death Valley, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Sangre de Cristo Range, the, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Santa Barbara, <a href="#Page_166">166-172</a>, <a href="#Page_202">202</a>, <a href="#Page_217">217</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">architecture, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Arlington Hotel, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>, <a href="#Page_171">171</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">college, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">contrasts in, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Old Town section, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Plaza del Mar, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">State Street, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Santa Barbara Islands, the, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>, <a href="#Page_151">151-3</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Santa Catalina Island, <a href="#Page_146">146-151</a>, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Santa Clara Valley, the, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_190">190-210</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">air in, <a href="#Page_206">206</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">blossom-time in, <a href="#Page_192">192</a>, <a href="#Page_193">193</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">climate, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>, <a href="#Page_201">201</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">land values, <a href="#Page_204">204</a>, <a href="#Page_205">205</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">productiveness of, <a href="#Page_193">193-5</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">schools in, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">ultrafashionable colonies of, <a href="#Page_198">198</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Santa Clara Valley (southern), <a href="#Page_262">262</a>, <a href="#Page_263">263</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Santa Cruz Island, <a href="#Page_151">151-3</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Santa Fé, <a href="#Page_16">16-21</a>, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">governor’s palace, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">history, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Mexicans in, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">name of, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">possibilities of, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">scenery, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Santa Fé, Prescott &amp; Phœnix Railway, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Santa Fé Trail, the, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Santa Monica, California, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Santa Paula, California, <a href="#Page_263">263</a>, <a href="#Page_264">264</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Santa Rita Mountains, <a href="#Page_92">92</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Santa Ynez, inn near, <a href="#Page_180">180</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">mission of, <a href="#Page_179">179</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Santa Ynez Range, the, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>, <a href="#Page_216">216</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Saugus, California, <a href="#Page_262">262</a>, <a href="#Page_263">263</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Scenic Highway, the, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Schoolhouses in the Santa Clara, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Seals, of Santa Cruz, <a href="#Page_151">151</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Seaside resorts, California, <a href="#Page_142">142-4</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Seattle, <a href="#Page_202">202</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">compared with Portland, <a href="#Page_340">340</a>, <a href="#Page_341">341</a>, <a href="#Page_346">346</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Sentinel Hotel, the, <a href="#Page_249">249</a>, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_462"></a>[462]</span>Sequim Prairie, <a href="#Page_344">344</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Sequoia trees, the, <a href="#Page_254">254</a>, <a href="#Page_255">255</a>, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>, <a href="#Page_258">258</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Serra, Father Junipero, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>, <a href="#Page_180">180</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_181">181</a>, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>, <a href="#Page_184">184</a>, <a href="#Page_195">195</a>, <a href="#Page_198">198</a>, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>,
+    <a href="#Page_246">246</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Servilleta, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Sespe Valley, the, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Sheep-raising, <a href="#Page_26">26-28</a>, <a href="#Page_262">262</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Sherman, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Sierra Nevada Range, the, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>, <a href="#Page_232">232</a>, <a href="#Page_241">241</a>, <a href="#Page_265">265-7</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Silver City, New Mexico, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Siskiyous, the, <a href="#Page_324">324</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Siwash Indians, <a href="#Page_415">415</a>, <a href="#Page_416">416</a>, <a href="#Page_447">447-451</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Skeena, the, <a href="#Page_390">390</a>, <a href="#Page_394">394</a>, <a href="#Page_395">395</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Skylanders, <a href="#Page_42">42 <i>et seq.</i></a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">Smiley Heights, California, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Smith, Captain Jedediah, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Smithsonian Institution, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Sol Duc Hot Springs, <a href="#Page_344">344</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Southern California, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Spanish dominion in Mexico, overthrow of, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Sprockets, John D., <a href="#Page_109">109</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Stage-coaches, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Stanford, Leland, <a href="#Page_197">197</a>, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Stevenson, Robert Louis, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Stockton, California, <a href="#Page_244">244-6</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Stony Creek, B. C., <a href="#Page_415">415</a>, <a href="#Page_416">416</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Studebaker, John, <a href="#Page_229">229</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Suisun Bay, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>, <a href="#Page_221">221</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Summerland, California, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Summit, California, <a href="#Page_232">232</a>, <a href="#Page_233">233</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Superstition Mountains, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Susanville, <a href="#Page_277">277</a>, <a href="#Page_280">280-2</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Sutler, John Augustus, <a href="#Page_227">227</a>, <a href="#Page_228">228</a>, <a href="#Page_234">234</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Sutler’s Fort, <a href="#Page_227">227</a>, <a href="#Page_228">228</a>, <a href="#Page_234">234</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Swamp and Drowned Lands Act, <a href="#Page_260">260</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="ifrst">Tacoma, <a href="#Page_336">336-8</a>, <a href="#Page_346">346</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Tahoe. (See <a href="#Lake_Tahoe"><i>Lake Tahoe</i></a>.)</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Tahoe Tavern, <a href="#Page_268">268</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Tallac, California, <a href="#Page_232">232</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Taos, New Mexico, <a href="#Page_22">22</a>, <a href="#Page_55">55-58</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">houses, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Tehachapi Range, the, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>, <a href="#Page_241">241</a>, <a href="#Page_261">261</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Telegraph stations, frontier, <a href="#Page_403">403</a>, <a href="#Page_404">404</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Tennis Club, Ojai Valley, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Tent City, at Coronado, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Tête Jaune Pass, the, <a href="#Page_379">379</a>, <a href="#Page_380">380</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">The Dalles, Oregon, <a href="#Page_276">276</a>, <a href="#Page_277">277</a>, <a href="#Page_286">286-8</a>, <a href="#Page_291">291</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Tiles, Spanish, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Tillamook County, Oregon, <a href="#Page_326">326</a>, <a href="#Page_327">327</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Tingley, Madame, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Torrey pine, the, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Trail riding, <a href="#Page_260">260</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Trees, California Big, <a href="#Page_254">254</a>, <a href="#Page_255">255</a>, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>, <a href="#Page_258">258</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Trevet, Victor, <a href="#Page_293">293</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Truck-gardens, <a href="#Page_221">221</a>, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Truckee, California, <a href="#Page_233">233-5</a>, <a href="#Page_268">268</a>, <a href="#Page_269">269</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Tucson, Arizona, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>, <a href="#Page_92">92</a>, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Tucson Farms, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Tuna Club, the, at Avalon, <a href="#Page_150">150</a>, <a href="#Page_151">151</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Tuna fishing, <a href="#Page_140">140-151</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Turquoise deposits, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Tyler, President, <a href="#Page_296">296</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="ifrst">Union Pacific Railroad, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Universal Brotherhood, the, <a href="#Page_103">103</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">University of California, Greek Theatre at, <a href="#Page_202">202</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">University of New Mexico, the, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="ifrst">Vallejo, California, <a href="#Page_219">219</a>, <a href="#Page_220">220</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Vancouver, B. C., <a href="#Page_116">116</a>, <a href="#Page_349">349</a>, <a href="#Page_350">350</a>, <a href="#Page_363">363-7</a>, <a href="#Page_369">369</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Vancouver Island, <a href="#Page_345">345</a>, <a href="#Page_370">370-6</a>, <a href="#Page_442">442</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">fish and game, <a href="#Page_375">375</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Island Highway, <a href="#Page_371">371-4</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">motoring on, <a href="#Page_372">372</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">railway, <a href="#Page_381">381</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">scenery, <a href="#Page_373">373</a>, <a href="#Page_374">374</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">van Dyke, Dr. Henry, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Vargas, De, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Venice, California, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Ventura, California, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Victoria, B. C., <a href="#Page_346">346</a>, <a href="#Page_363">363-370</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Harbour, <a href="#Page_367">367</a>, <a href="#Page_368">368</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Visalia, California, <a href="#Page_246">246</a>, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>, <a href="#Page_258">258</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"><i>Vittoria</i>, the, <a href="#Page_171">171</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Vizcaino, <a href="#Page_181">181</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="ifrst">Wagon-trains, <a href="#Page_20">20</a>, <a href="#Page_21">21</a>, <a href="#Page_398">398</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Wah, the brothers, <a href="#Page_7">7</a>, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Walla Walla, <a href="#Page_295">295</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx"><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_463"></a>[463]</span>Wallace, General Lew, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Washington, <a href="#Page_331">331 <i>et seq.</i></a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">character of the country, <a href="#Page_334">334</a>, <a href="#Page_335">335</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">climate, <a href="#Page_335">335</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">land clearing, <a href="#Page_334">334</a>, <a href="#Page_335">335</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">names of towns, <a href="#Page_333">333</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">roads, <a href="#Page_331">331</a>, <a href="#Page_332">332</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">sign-posts, <a href="#Page_333">333</a>, <a href="#Page_334">334</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">water-power, <a href="#Page_335">335</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Water discovery in the Mimbres Valley, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Waterfalls of the Columbia River, <a href="#Page_300">300</a>, <a href="#Page_301">301</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Wawona, California, <a href="#Page_254">254</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Webster, secretary of state, <a href="#Page_296">296</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Well-digging in New Mexico, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">White Rock Cañon, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Whitman, <a href="#Page_295">295</a>, <a href="#Page_296">296</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Willamette River, the, <a href="#Page_309">309-311</a>, <a href="#Page_317">317</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Wood, Mr., <a href="#Page_150">150</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Wool industry, the, <a href="#Page_26">26-28</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="ifrst">Yavapai Club, the, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Yosemite Valley, the, <a href="#Page_246">246-260</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Indian settlement, <a href="#Page_250">250-2</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">Sentinel Hotel, <a href="#Page_249">249</a>, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>;</li>
+<li class="isub1">variety of recreation, <a href="#Page_253">253</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Yukon Telegraph Trail, <a href="#Page_395">395</a>.</li>
+
+<li class="indx">Yuma, Arizona, <a href="#Page_83">83-85</a>, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>.</li>
+
+</ul>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp50" id="map" style="max-width: 87.5em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/map.jpg" alt="">
+  <figcaption class="caption"><p>MAP OF THE FAR WEST, FROM NEW MEXICO TO BRITISH COLUMBIA,
+SHOWING THE ROUTE FOLLOWED BY THE AUTHOR</p></figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75697 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
+
diff --git a/75697-h/images/cover.jpg b/75697-h/images/cover.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9527899
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75697-h/images/cover.jpg
diff --git a/75697-h/images/illus01.jpg b/75697-h/images/illus01.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..5dcf30d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75697-h/images/illus01.jpg
diff --git a/75697-h/images/illus02.jpg b/75697-h/images/illus02.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1f8f035
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75697-h/images/illus02.jpg
diff --git a/75697-h/images/illus03.jpg b/75697-h/images/illus03.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..5ca703b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75697-h/images/illus03.jpg
diff --git a/75697-h/images/illus04.jpg b/75697-h/images/illus04.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9cada2b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75697-h/images/illus04.jpg
diff --git a/75697-h/images/illus05.jpg b/75697-h/images/illus05.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c7727cd
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75697-h/images/illus05.jpg
diff --git a/75697-h/images/illus06.jpg b/75697-h/images/illus06.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..98bd6b3
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75697-h/images/illus06.jpg
diff --git a/75697-h/images/illus07.jpg b/75697-h/images/illus07.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2e4cd84
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75697-h/images/illus07.jpg
diff --git a/75697-h/images/illus08.jpg b/75697-h/images/illus08.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d029fdc
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75697-h/images/illus08.jpg
diff --git a/75697-h/images/illus09.jpg b/75697-h/images/illus09.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ef6fddd
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75697-h/images/illus09.jpg
diff --git a/75697-h/images/illus10.jpg b/75697-h/images/illus10.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3aa824f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75697-h/images/illus10.jpg
diff --git a/75697-h/images/illus11.jpg b/75697-h/images/illus11.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8449c38
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75697-h/images/illus11.jpg
diff --git a/75697-h/images/illus12.jpg b/75697-h/images/illus12.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..bc5b41f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75697-h/images/illus12.jpg
diff --git a/75697-h/images/illus13.jpg b/75697-h/images/illus13.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1449c52
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75697-h/images/illus13.jpg
diff --git a/75697-h/images/illus14.jpg b/75697-h/images/illus14.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..bc25ac5
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75697-h/images/illus14.jpg
diff --git a/75697-h/images/illus15.jpg b/75697-h/images/illus15.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..45ff1ba
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75697-h/images/illus15.jpg
diff --git a/75697-h/images/illus16.jpg b/75697-h/images/illus16.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..006f4eb
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75697-h/images/illus16.jpg
diff --git a/75697-h/images/illus17.jpg b/75697-h/images/illus17.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..063fbd2
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75697-h/images/illus17.jpg
diff --git a/75697-h/images/illus18.jpg b/75697-h/images/illus18.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e8824b9
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75697-h/images/illus18.jpg
diff --git a/75697-h/images/illus19.jpg b/75697-h/images/illus19.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..acc6d44
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75697-h/images/illus19.jpg
diff --git a/75697-h/images/illus20.jpg b/75697-h/images/illus20.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..33b1ff7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75697-h/images/illus20.jpg
diff --git a/75697-h/images/illus21.jpg b/75697-h/images/illus21.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4dedb18
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75697-h/images/illus21.jpg
diff --git a/75697-h/images/illus22.jpg b/75697-h/images/illus22.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b2bb09e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75697-h/images/illus22.jpg
diff --git a/75697-h/images/illus23.jpg b/75697-h/images/illus23.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0a55116
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75697-h/images/illus23.jpg
diff --git a/75697-h/images/illus24.jpg b/75697-h/images/illus24.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..023752c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75697-h/images/illus24.jpg
diff --git a/75697-h/images/illus25.jpg b/75697-h/images/illus25.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..587a802
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75697-h/images/illus25.jpg
diff --git a/75697-h/images/illus26.jpg b/75697-h/images/illus26.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..67fde5c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75697-h/images/illus26.jpg
diff --git a/75697-h/images/illus27.jpg b/75697-h/images/illus27.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..73e6f8f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75697-h/images/illus27.jpg
diff --git a/75697-h/images/illus28.jpg b/75697-h/images/illus28.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d5af21b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75697-h/images/illus28.jpg
diff --git a/75697-h/images/illus29.jpg b/75697-h/images/illus29.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d252a93
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75697-h/images/illus29.jpg
diff --git a/75697-h/images/illus30.jpg b/75697-h/images/illus30.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..5cbf5ad
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75697-h/images/illus30.jpg
diff --git a/75697-h/images/illus31.jpg b/75697-h/images/illus31.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0648a5b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75697-h/images/illus31.jpg
diff --git a/75697-h/images/illus32.jpg b/75697-h/images/illus32.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9cfc1aa
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75697-h/images/illus32.jpg
diff --git a/75697-h/images/illus33.jpg b/75697-h/images/illus33.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..eac55c4
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75697-h/images/illus33.jpg
diff --git a/75697-h/images/illus34.jpg b/75697-h/images/illus34.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7d70dc6
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75697-h/images/illus34.jpg
diff --git a/75697-h/images/illus35.jpg b/75697-h/images/illus35.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d7873cd
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75697-h/images/illus35.jpg
diff --git a/75697-h/images/illus36.jpg b/75697-h/images/illus36.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0196654
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75697-h/images/illus36.jpg
diff --git a/75697-h/images/illus37.jpg b/75697-h/images/illus37.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ecde32f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75697-h/images/illus37.jpg
diff --git a/75697-h/images/illus38.jpg b/75697-h/images/illus38.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3290b2d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75697-h/images/illus38.jpg
diff --git a/75697-h/images/illus39.jpg b/75697-h/images/illus39.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..eee56a3
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75697-h/images/illus39.jpg
diff --git a/75697-h/images/illus40.jpg b/75697-h/images/illus40.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..341343b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75697-h/images/illus40.jpg
diff --git a/75697-h/images/illus41.jpg b/75697-h/images/illus41.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6abbe56
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75697-h/images/illus41.jpg
diff --git a/75697-h/images/illus42.jpg b/75697-h/images/illus42.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..bdba172
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75697-h/images/illus42.jpg
diff --git a/75697-h/images/illus43.jpg b/75697-h/images/illus43.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a9a5178
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75697-h/images/illus43.jpg
diff --git a/75697-h/images/illus44.jpg b/75697-h/images/illus44.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e403717
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75697-h/images/illus44.jpg
diff --git a/75697-h/images/illus45.jpg b/75697-h/images/illus45.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..24edb8d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75697-h/images/illus45.jpg
diff --git a/75697-h/images/illus46.jpg b/75697-h/images/illus46.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..249fd4d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75697-h/images/illus46.jpg
diff --git a/75697-h/images/illus47.jpg b/75697-h/images/illus47.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a9ec151
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75697-h/images/illus47.jpg
diff --git a/75697-h/images/illus48.jpg b/75697-h/images/illus48.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..185ef36
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75697-h/images/illus48.jpg
diff --git a/75697-h/images/map.jpg b/75697-h/images/map.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c3386b1
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75697-h/images/map.jpg
diff --git a/75697-h/images/signet.jpg b/75697-h/images/signet.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..52efc35
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75697-h/images/signet.jpg
diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b5dba15
--- /dev/null
+++ b/LICENSE.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@
+This book, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
+the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org.
+
+No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in
+jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize
+this book outside of the United States should confirm copyright
+status under the laws that apply to them.
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..32c6585
--- /dev/null
+++ b/README.md
@@ -0,0 +1,2 @@
+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+book #75697 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/75697)