James Strohn CopleyThe
California Limited exclusively for first-class travel.
We have three other daily California trains —en route such interesting places as Grand Canyon, National Park, Petrified Forest, Indian Pueblos, etc. The only Line under one management “all the way.”
Fred Harvey serves all the roads.
Booklets of Trip and Trains upon request
W. J. BLACK, P. T.M. Santa Fe System Lines 1118 Railway Exchange CHICAGOYellowstone National Park
Through Gardiner Gateway
Nature’s masterpiece and the world’s greatest Geyserland in the heart of the American Rockies. Good hotel and transportation facilities. An ideal place for your summer vacation. From the park you may travel via Northern Pacific, crossing three ranges of mountains to Spokane and the inland empire, North Pacific Coast Points, Rainier National Park and Alaska.
Great Northern Pacific S. S. Co. between Portland-Astoria, San Fran-cisco, San Pedro and Honolulu Shasta Rail Route from Portland or steamship lines from Puget Sound Points to San Francisco.
Send for free Park, travel literature, and information.
A. M. CLELAND, Gen’I Pass. Agt, ST. PAUL, MINN.Finding the Worth While in California
BY
CHARLES FRANCIS SAUNDERS Author of “Under the Sky in California,” “With the Flowers and Trees in California,” etc.
WITH MAPS and
ILLUSTRATIONS
Second Edition. Revised.
NEW YORK
ROBERT M. MCBRIDE & COMPANY 1923Copyright, 1916, by Robert M. McBride & Co.
Revised Edition Copyright, 1923, by Robert M. McBride & Co.
Published November, 1916TO
THE MANY FRIENDS
WHO HAVE HELPED ME IN FINDING THE WORTH WHILE IN CALIFORNIA—
THEMSELVES THE MOST WORTH WHILE-THIS BOOK IS GRATEFULLY INSCRIBEDPREFACE TO SECOND EDITION
California is a land very much alive, in the process of settlement—a fact that surrounds the task of the compiler of its guide-books with some perplexity. Where towns and orchards and oil wells spring up like magic out bf yesterday’s solitude, what, one wonders, is permanent in such a region, and what is but the dream of a day? It is a satisfaction to the author to realize that in the seven momentous ^־׳ears that have gone by since the first edition of this book was published, no essential change has overtaken the subjects selected for treatment. Nevertheless some changes have naturally enough occurred, mainly as to rates and prices, modes of procedure, names of places, and similar secondary matters. In this new edition such emendations have been made as bring the work up to date in these particulars, and make it as generally helpful as possible to the traveler both in California and while on the way.PREFACE
What may be deemed worth while in any region is naturally to a great extent a question of individual taste and temperament. If this little book, written from personal observation, deals but lightly with city sights in California, it is because of the writer’s belief that American cities east and west are pretty much alike. What interests most people in California, both visitors and residents, are outdoor matters, the zest for which is increased by the State’s incomparable climate. Upon such sights of the open the following pages particularly dwell, accessibility by the average traveler being a factor in the selection.CONTENTS
CHAPTER	PAGE
I	By Way of Prologue. Some Sights
Along the Route to and from California ..............................i
II	Los Angeles and Round About ... 26
III	The San Diego Country................57
IV	About Santa Barbara..................76
V	Monterey, California’s Spanish Capital 91
VI	Stopping Off at San José............108
VII	San Francisco and Across the Bay .	. 120
VIII	North of San Francisco..............141
IX	Some Big Things of the Mountains . 154 X Summer Camp Life.......................176
XI For the Practical Man — Being About
Petroleum, Mines and Agriculture . 191
XII Climate, Clothes and Cash .... 206 A Brief List of Works on California 217
Maps..............................219
Index	225LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING
PAGE
The Mission of San Antonio de Pala ... 72
In the Padres’ Garden of Santa Barbara Mission .................................78
The Beach at Santa Barbara..............88
A Road in California	Redwood Park .	.	.102
The Yosemite Falls.....................158
In the High Sierra.....................168
A Summer Camp in the Sierra Madre ... 180CHAPTER I
BY WAY OF PROLOGUE. SOME SIGHTS ALONG THE ROUTE TO AND FROM CALIFORNIA
A California tour is, of course, a sufficient end in itself, and once on your transcontinental sleeper, you may, I suppose, feel justified in pulling down the blinds and playing bridge going and coming. Nevertheless, if you can spare the extra time and money, there is much along the way worth some expenditure of both.
It seems appropriate, therefore, to preface this handbook with some allusion to certain side trips en route which the California-bound traveler may easily and profitably take into consideration when making up his itinerary. The transportation companies issue round-trip tickets with stop-off privileges, going by one route and returning by another, so that the tourist is not necessarily restricted to the sights along one highway of travel.2 Finding the Worth While in California
Those to which attention is here called are mainly in the longitude between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierras.
On the Santa Fe Route
There is, for instance, the city of Santa Fe, quaintest of our state capitals, and retaining to a marked degree the atmosphere of leisure, dignity and romance with which old Spain never failed to envelop her colonies. Its authentic history begins about 1605, antedating both Jamestown and Plymouth, but not St. Augustine, although as early as 1540 Coronado and his conquistadores camped on or near its site. The ancient adobe Palace of the Governors, with its sunny old portal looking on the Plaza, is one of the most interesting public edifices in the United States. For quite three centuries it was the home of New Mexico’s governors — Spanish, Pueblo Indian, Spanish again, Mexican, and finally American. Gubernatorial cares concern it no longer, however, it being occupied now by the New Mexico Historical Society and its Museum and the School of American Archeology, which is a branch of the Archeological Institute of America.The Route to and from California 3
Spend a day in these rooms and get rid of the notion all Americans seem born with, that America has no antiquities. The vicinity of Santa Fe, indeed, is particularly rich in the remains of the Ancient Cliff Dwellers, and their easy accessibility makes one of the city’s especial attractions. The most famous are in the canons of the Pajarito Plateau, 35 miles to the west across the Rio Grande. Here is the charming gorge known as Canon del Rito de los Frijoles (Little River of the Beans), the scene of Adolph Bandelier’s ethnological romance, “ The Delight Makers.” In a different setting are the ruins of Puye, ten miles west of Espanola (30 miles north of Santa Fe). If any spirit of romance resides in you it cannot fail to be touched by the sight of these silent homes of a people vanished and without history. The walls still retain the soot of prehistoric fires, and are adorned with the drawings of artist hands that were dust before Columbus stood his egg on end.
The contemporary life of Santa Fe, still showing markedly the Spanish influence, is hardly less interesting. The Sunday crowd promenading around the Plaza when the band4 Finding the Worth While in California
plays is quite suggestive of anywhere in Spanish America. The streets of low adobe houses with their retired gardens, shady plazitas and old-fashioned walls; the donkey trains loaded with firewood; the Indian pottery sellers; on every hand the rolling rs and liquid vowels of Spanish speech — it is all very foreign and delightful. Then there are the many fine drives across the surrounding mesas and into the wild gorges of the lofty mountains which rim the city round. The highway to the north passes through several of the remarkable villages of the town-building or Pueblo Indians, and if the trip can be extended to Taos, the most northern of all and the most perfect example extant in our country of the pyramidal pueblo, it will be an excursion whose memory will be a life-long pleasure.
Santa Fe has an altitude of 7000 feet, a bracing winter climate, with some snow, and temperature at times as low as zero. These facts should be borne in mind by the traveler, and his time of stopping over decided upon accordingly. I like autumn there myself, but summer is delightful, too.
Seventy miles west of Albuquerque is theThe Route to and from California 5
station of Laguna, the starting point for the wonderful sky city of Acoma. (You might as well start right with this name and pronounce it as it should be pronounced, to-wit, Ah'coma.') Of all the towns of the New Mexican Pueblo Indians, none is more poetic in its situation, perched upon the rocky summit of a huge barren mesa rising abruptly 350 feet out of a solitary, treeless plain. It lies 15 miles south of the railway line. In full sight is the famous Enchanted Mesa, the prehistoric home of the Acoma Indians, from which tradition says they were cut off by a violent storm that destroyed the only trail to the top, while the able-bodied inhabitants were at work in the fields below. The town was promptly rebuilt on this neighboring rock of Acoma, and here in 1540 Coronado and his Spaniards found it, pretty much as it exists to-day, except that now a massive Catholic church of rock and adobe adjoins the pueblo. This church, which dates from about 1700, is said to have been forty years in the building, as the material had all to be brought up from the plains below on the backs of Indians. A hint of how tedious that labor was may be6 Finding the Worth While in California
had by the visitor to-day, as he pulls himself up the all-but-perpendicular trail to the town, holding on by hand- and foot-holds cut in the cliff.
The round trip to Acoma from Laguna is easily accomplished in a day. There is a stopping place for travelers at Laguna Station, where an automobile can be hired for the trip, which, though it may seem a bit rough, is filled with beauty and the breezy spirit of the Far West. On September 2 of each year is the Fiesta de San Estevan (the feast of St. Stephen, the patron saint of Christian Acoma), when after mass in the church the day is given over to Indian dances and festivities.
Ninety miles more of westering and you are at Gallup, an important entre-pdt for the trade in Navajo blankets and silverware and Pueblo pottery. It is a good starting point for the extensive Reservation of the Navajo Indians, those alert and interesting Bedouins of our New Mexico and Arizona semi-deserts. A month would be none too much for a trip through this fascinating country (for which arrangements either by automobile or team could be made in Gallup). It is a wild, sunlit,The Route to and from California 7
wind-swept land, affording glimpses of aboriginal weavers at work on outdoor looms beside their hogans, of wandering shepherds and their flocks, of Navajo silversmiths hammering out bracelets and necklaces from Mexican pesos, and of dusky horsemen and horsewomen riding the sagey plains with the grace and sureness of centaurs. You may extend your trip if you care, to Canon de Chelly with its deserted cliff dwellings, and farther to the villages of the Hopis, where in August1 each year the Snake Dance takes place.
If all this seems too large an order, the
traveler may, at least, at the expenditure of
a couple of days, visit from Gallup the ancient
pueblo of Zuni, 40 miles south of the railway;
or, if in much of a hurry, an automobile will
take him there in a few hours and return him
to Gallup the same day. Of all the Pueblo
towns, Zuni is perhaps the best known to the
general reader, through the writings of Lieut.
F. H. Cushing, the poet-ethnologist, who made
1 The date differs from year to year depending upon some occult aboriginal, calculation, and is only made public nine days in advance. Intending visitors should ascertain the exact date from the railroad officials. Holbrook, Winslow and Canon Diablo are other railroad points from which the Hopi country may be reached.8 Finding the Worth While in California
it his home for several years. It is the largest of all the pueblos, and the traveler, threading its winding, narrow streets and covered ways opening on secluded plazas, where women burn pottery and donkeys doze and the sound and fragrance of the grinding of corn on indoor mealing stones, float on the air, can hardly believe he has not somehow been whisked to the Orient. If he is so fortunate as to be in Zuni about the last of November he may be in season for the Shalako Dance—(the date is a movable one) —an annual ceremony as impressive in its way as the Snake Dance of the Hopis. It is part of the excitement of visiting all Indian villages, however, whatever the season, that you may happen upon some native fiesta in progress. If you do, and feel like photographing, be sure you ask permission first. It may save you serious trouble. Indians have their rights and their feelings, just as you and I.
At Adamana, two hours by train west of Gallup, is a modest hotel, which will gather you in and set you comfortably forth to visit the Petrified Forest hard by — that shattered rainbow in stone, Is it laid away, one won-The Route to and from California 9
ders, against some Great Day when all things once animate shall awake? As a matter of fact, it is a forest in half a dozen sections, scattered on both sides of the railway. To see all, two days should be allowed; though by automobile a very satisfactory sight of the characteristic features may be had in a single day. It is a unique and rather sobering experience to stroll for an hou-r among the kaleidoscopic chunks and trunks of fallen trees — none ar’e any longer upright — on whose once succulent twigs dinosaurs and other old-fashioned lizards aforetime probably lunched, and took mesozoic naps in the shade of them.1
Then the Grand Canon of the Colorado in Arizona, of course. It is a world-famous sight in a class to itself, and of all the Santa Fe’s side attractions is the most visited. So it deserves to be, both for its own sake and for ease of acc'omplish'ment. Unfortunately the demons of haste and economy force most tourists to give altogether too little time to it. The railroad schedules are arranged so that one may reach the rim in the morning and
1 The most western section of the Forest is readily reached from Holbrook, a railway point 20 mile? west of Adamana,io Finding the Worth While in California
leave the same evening. On the principle of half a loaf, even a day at the Canon is better than no time at all; but as a matter of fact, the stupendous gorge with its marvelous sculpturing, colors and shifting light effects, all so absolutely different from anything the average traveler has seen before, requires time to make a place for itself in his pigmy being. Three days at least should be given to it. One may be devoted to leisurely walks about the rim within a few miles of the hotel (and do not forget Hopi Point for the sunset) ; another day to the horse back trip down the mile-deep trail to the river, unless you prefer to walk — an easy enough feat for hardy people with a taste for mountaineering upside down; and a third day to trips by automobile or horse back through the beautiful Coconino Forest to Grand View Point, and over the so-called Scenic Boulevard to Hermit’s Rest; you can do one in the morning and the other in the afternoon. For pedestrians the Grand Canon is an ideal place, because of the excellence of the trails and roads, and many days could be delightfully spent afoot with a new objective for each. As to the best sea-The Route to and from California n
son of the year, it is to be borne in mind that, like all of northern Arizona and New Mexico, the plateau region at the Grand Canon’s rim is subject during, the winter to spells of low temperature and more or less snow — a risk on which visitors at that season must take a chance. July and August are the months of greatest precipitation — it comes in passing showers and rain-bursts — when some of the most superb atmospheric effects are to be seen.
On the Southern Pacific (Sunset Route)
New Orleans, of course, is a prime feature on the southern route to■ California. Its fame is too far spread to need more than a passing mention here, and its appeal to all sorts and conditions of travelers — the lover of the picturesque, the seeker after the quaint and unusual, the student of history and of literature, the adventurer in alien cookery, even the prosy man of business•—makes it a stop-over not to be omitted except for the weightiest reasons. Then twenty hours further west is another famous city, San Antonio, “ the Cradle of Texan liberty,” with a flavor as distinctively Spanish as that of New Orleans is French.12 Finding the Worth While in California
Here the high point of interest to the man on the wing is, of course, the Church of the Alamo (ah'-lamo). While time has dealt hardly with it in the nearly two centuries of its checkered existence, it is one of the most cherished of our national monuments; and the tragedy enacted here in 1836 (when after a siege of 12 days, its handful of American defenders who refused to surrender, were killed out of hand by the enveloping army of Santa Ana), is known to every school child. South of the city from two to nine miles distant are four fine examples of old Spanish Missions, dating from the early part of the eighteenth century.
At Bowie, Arizona (if westbound, or at Maricopa, if on the eastbound journey), an interesting detour from the main line may be made over what is known as the Apache Trail — a trip which includes a day of auto-mobiling, linking up Phoenix and the mining town of Globe. It gives the traveler a varied taste of Arizona scenery off the railroad, and a sight of the stupendous Roosevelt Dam, which impounds the irrigation water for the fertile Salt River Valley of which Phoenix is the commercial heart, About 4 miles east of the Dam,The Route to and from California 13
and a mile or so off the main automobile road, are two groups of Cliff Dwellings (the Tonto National Monument), in a fair state of preservation. As in the case of all Cliff Dwellings, the approach to these necessitates some walking and climbing at the last, and to see them with any approach to satisfaction a day’s stop-over should be arranged. If you take the Trail trip, however, you must forego what many find more interesting — a stop at Tucson (you are to pronounce it Too-son''), in the heart of the southwestern desert country. Here is located the Desert Botanical Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution, devoted to the scientific study of the remarkable desert flora — a richer field than the man-in-the-street dreams of. Without hardship, the visitor at Tucson has a chance to observe in their natural habitat such unique plants as the giant cereus (or sahuaro, Arizona’s state flower), the huge, cylindrical cactus known as the bisnaga or desert water barrel, the airy green-barked trees called palo verde (Spanish for green tree), the flame-flowered candlewood or ocotillo, the Spanish daggers, agaves, and scores of others, some curious, some grotesque,14 Finding the Worth While in California
many surprisingly lovely. Then, too, Tucson has history; for the valley of the Santa Cruz River in which it is situated was, from Coronado’s time onward, in the direct line of travel between Old Mexico and her provinces of the north. Within a few miles of Tucson is the old Jesuit Mission of San Xavier del Bac
—	one of the most beautiful examples of Spanish mission architecture extant. Formerly, and indeed as late as 1850, Tucson was a walled town, and people slept with one eye open for raiding Apaches; but Tucson’s own Indians were and are the peaceful Papagos, immemorial weavers of baskets, bakers of pottery and raisers of beans. There is a reservation of them, a few miles away. The tourist with a taste for natural science, who has time to stop a few days at Tucson, will gain a brand-new idea of what the word desert means
—	a respect and perhaps a real affection for one of earth’s primitive aspects entirely misunderstood by the arm-chair traveler.
Two hours by rail west of Tucson is the station of Casa Grande, whence for five dollars the mail carrier will take you in his autostage to the unique ruins of the same nameThe Route io and from California 15
(it is Spanish for Great House) on the Gila River, sixteen miles distant. Extensive excavation by the Government has been done here in recent years, revealing the existence of what in prehistoric times was evidently a walled city of no mean importance, built of pounded mud, wattle and caliche (this last a mixture of mud, lime and pebbles), and comprising temples, citadels, reservoirs, plazas, etc. There is reason to believe that the builders were of a type older than the Cliff Dwelling people of farther north — possibly ancestors of these. The Casa Grande ruins are the only remains of their class in the United States, and are a National Reserve.1
The Denver and Rio Grande Route
Travelers by this picturesque route (which, by the way, reaches the heart of California by one of the most magnificent of gateways, the Canon of the Feather River, traversed by the Western Pacific line) have the choice of sev-
1 Intending visitors will be better prepared to appreciate the significance of these ruins, if they read beforehand Dr. J. W. Fewkes’s comprehensive monograph on the subject, printed in the 28th Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, which may be consulted in most public libraries.!6 Finding the Worth While in California
eral famous sights, and, the management assures you, mountain trout every day in the diner. There is, for instance, after leaving Denver, the pleasant city of Colorado Springs, the comfortable base for numerous fine automobile drives and for excursions to Manitou, Cheyenne Mountain and Canons, the grotesque rock wonders of the Garden of the Gods, and the 14,000-foot summit of Pike’s Peak. Five hours south and west of Colorado Springs is Salida, where, if you have never had a sight of Cliff Dwellings or hunger for more, you may change to the narrow gage and after crossing the Marshall Pass (10,856 feet elevation) and traversing the Grand Gorge of the Gunnison, alight at Mancos for a trip to the Mesa Verde National Park, in the extreme southwestern corner of Colorado with Utah, Arizona and New Mexico crowding about. Until recently, these ruins — counted among the very finest examples of the architecture of the vanished peoples of our Southwest — could be reached only by a rather arduous horseback journey; but to-day a good government road from Mancos leads to the Park, and the 25 miles can now be done by automo-The Route to and from California 17
bile in about three hours. There are hundreds of the dwellings, built in the cañón walls. Several have been cleaned up under the supervision of government scientists, and put in such order as shows them approximately as the builders left them, how long ago no man can say. At the terminus of the road near one of the most impressive of the ruins, called Spruce Tree House, is a tourist camp where accommodations may be had by the sensible folk who choose to stay awhile and get really acquainted. Owing to the elevation of the Park, about 8500 feet above sea level, July to September is the season generally recommended for a visit, though one may enter as early as late May.1
While on the D. & R. R., the traveler is wise to stop over a day at Salt Lake City. The attraction here is the vast establishment of the Mormon Church, but this, including the Sacred Square, the Tabernacle and the Tem-
1 The principal scenic features of the Rocky Mountain region traversed by the D. & R. G. are covered by a trip called “ Around the Circle.” It occupies 4 days, and holders of through tickets to or from the Pacific Coast may at present make the “ Circle ” from Salida and back to starting point on payment of $36. The same rate obtains for east-bound passengers desiring to make the trip from Montrose.18 Finding the Worth While in California
pie, is the only thing of its class in the world and correspondingly interesting. The city is also on the lines of Western Pacific and the Los Angeles and Salt Lake division, Union Pacific, as well as of
The Union Pacific System (Ogden Route)
This route has the advantage of giving one a remarkable view of the Great Salt Lake — in fact, crosses it about its middle so that the traveler has the unusual experience of a sea trip by train. The Union Pacific also will deliver you, if you like, after a night’s ride from Ogden, at the western gateway of the Yellowstone National Park. This is the largest and in some respects the most wonderful of our national parks —“ a big, wholesome wilderness on the broad summit of the Rocky Mountains,” as John Muir puts it. While rather removed from the usual routes of travel to and from California, access to it is ease itself, and it should not be lightly passed by. The principal points of entrance are this of the Union Pacific’s at the station of Yellowstone, and the Northern Pacific’s gateway at Gardiner, Montana, on the northern border.The Route to and from California 19
To see the Park with any approach to thoroughness, at least a week should be allowed — a month would be more to the point — but the local transportation companies will, I believe, arrange to give you a three or four days’ whirl around, if you cannot afford more. The season for visitors is from June 15 to September 15, with warm middays and cool, even frosty nights. It would be superfluous here to go into a description of the particular wonders of the Park, which are matters of national report. For the poetry of the case, the intending visitor is referred to John Muir’s delightful Yellowstone chapter in “ Our National Parks,” and for practical details to the comprehensive folder issued by the railway company. Automobiles are now admitted.
The Union Pacific also passes within a few miles of the beautiful Lake Tahoe on the high eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada. It is reached by a short spur from Truckee. While regarded usually as a California sight, it really should share the honor with Nevada, as the line of division between the States bisects its lovely expanse, and in its clear emerald and azure depths the snow-capped crests of moun-20 Finding the Worth While in California
tains in both commonwealths are reflected. With Californians, particularly, Tahoe is a favorite resort. Its forested shores are dotted with hotels and camps, and every summer thousands from all over the State flock to its cool borders for rest and pleasures both aquatic and sylvan. Travelers by the Union Pacific between Salt Lake and Los Angeles may leave the line at Lund for a sight ( from mid-May to October) of the magnificent scenery, colorful rock temples and pyramids of Zion National Park, Utah. At least 3 days should be allowed, and if possible enough more for a trip from the Park to the north rim of the Grand Canyon.
The Great Northern Route Travelers by this route to or from the Pacific
Coast have the opportunity of stopping off at one of the very finest sights of the West, Glacier National Park, in northwest Montana at the Canadian line. There are two points of entrance (and exit), Glacier Park Station and Belton. The region is remarkable for its magnificent high mountain scenery with stupendous, wonderfully colored rock formations, Alpine lakes great and small, livingThe Route to and from California 21
glaciers, waterfalls, unspoiled wild gardens, a rich natural fauna, some Indians and splendid fishing. The Continental Divide is within the limits of the Park, and you will be shown the spot where waters from the same source separate for their long trips to the Pacific, to Hudson’s Bay and to the Atlantic via the Gulf of Mexico. Some automobile roads have been made through the Park and an extensive system of good trails for horses and pedestrians. In order to make anything like a comprehensive round of the Park, the horseback or pedestrian trip is necessary, occupying from one week on. This may be done with one’s own outfit, or the itinerary may be arranged so as to ensure reaching each night one of the Park hotels or lodges where accommodations are provided. For those limited as to time, a very good three-day trip is arranged by automobile and launch, going in at one entrance and out at the other. The season is practically limited to July and August.
Circling Around the United States
You may, if you like, cut out the United States entirely on your California tour. I once22 Finding the Worth While in California
made the round trip by way of the Canadian Pacific and Panama, and for varied interest such a swing-round may safely be commended to any one who has plenty of time, and enjoys a bit of sea — 5500 miles of it, to be specific. On the Panama leg, I succeeded in using up 51 days between New York and San Francisco—to-wit, 6 from New York to Colon, 17 on the Isthmus (my Pacific Coast Steamer was ten days late — Panama, you know, is in the great land of Mañana—) and 28 from Panama to California. Of course that was rankly prodigal, for express steamers have a schedule of some 16 or 18 days from New York to Los Angeles or San Francisco, via the Canal, with twelve hours or so for the passenger to look over the Zone. But a large part of the characteristic joy of a trip up the West Coast is lost, if you miss the stops at the ports of Central America and Mexico. To achieve this, one must take a passenger-freighter scheduled to make such calls, and very comfortable accommodations may now be had on steamers of this sort. The compensation is the leisurely voyage full of color, through tropical waters, coasting loveliest of landsThe Route to and from California 23
upon which from time to time you have a chance to set foot, as the steamer stops to discharge and take on cargo and passengers. You saunter about under cocoanut palms and banana trees; you listen to the band in drowsy plazas; you lunch on turtles’ eggs and tortillas, and sip your coffee in the shady patios of squat adobe hotels with red-tiled roofs; you dicker with swarthy Indians in the open-air markets for papayas, and parrots, and granadillas, or for ravishing bits of pottery; and all the while you are making progress towards the United States which you have left. Whether it is all worth the skipping of any of those “ America First ” sights I have been hinting at earlier in the chapter, will of course depend upon the individual traveler’s tastes and previous experience.
As for the Canadian part of the program, the big feature of the western end is of course the opportunity it offers for a view of the grandeurs of the Canadian Rockies. The C. P. R. through trains are obligingly scheduled so that the traveler can arrange to stop over each night if des-ired at the more important Mountain resorts, as Field, Glacier, Banff,24 Finding the Worth While in California
Lake Louise, and resume the trip by a corresponding train in the morning, if a longer stay is not convenient. My own experience at Lake Louise was such that I feel like recommending it as the one place— if you have time for only one — that should be marked for a stop-over. Make this at least two days if possible. The retiredness and perfect peace of its location (a few miles by narrow gauge off the main line), its fine glacier, its forest walks and rugged mountain climbs, its alpine wild gardens, all contribute to give one in small compass a satisfactory taste of what the Canadian Rockies offer to the visitor. The C. P. R. hotel, Chateau Lake Louise, is no small part of the pleasure, as it should be at the metropolitan rates asked, and is open from about June i to September 30.
And do not omit a day or two at Victoria, B. C., if you can spare the time — which is like a bit of old England, thrown up on this far Pacific shore.
As to the expense of such side trips, it is scarcely practicable here to give fixed figures. In a few instances (as the Grand Canon, theThe Route to and from California 25
Apache Trail, Around the Circle, and Lake Tahoe) the specific cost of the transportation may be learned on application to the railway companies. In most cases, however, the trips are by automobile, and the charge per person depends upon variable factors, as the number in the party, the desired duration of the trip, the price of gasoline, etc. In a general way, at present, a return of $20 to $25 a day from a 7-passenger car with driver pays the owner. Travelers with limited funds should write ahead for rates, addressing the postmaster at starting point, or the local Board of Trade, with the request that the letter be handed to some one whose business is the handling of tourist travel. A stamped, self-addressed envelope for the reply should be enclosed.CHAPTER II
LOS ANGELES AND ROUND ABOUT
You would naturally think it a misfortune to bear a name that half your friends and most of the world at large mangle so outrageously in speaking it, that you must keep the correct pronunciation standing in the morning paper. Nevertheless, in spite of this handicap, if it be one, Los Angeles has been a marvel of urban growth. You need not be twenty-four hours in this metropolis of southern California before you are chatting with people who can remember it as the rather bad little Spanish Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles,1 when adobe was the only building material, and when you were out of the swim if you could not ride horseback at breakneck speed, speak California Spanish, dance the
1 That is, “ City of Our Lady, the Queen of the Angels,” which it was christened in 1781—the second town to be officially incorporated in California, then a province of New Spain.
26Los Angeles and Round About 27
jarabe, and roll your own cigarette. That was in the 1870’s, when the population numbered less than 10,000. In 1900, the census gave the city 102,000; in 1910, 319,000; in 1920, 576,000; and in 1923 this is officially estimated to have increased to over three-quarters of a million, while the space covered by the original little adobe town is as a fly speck on the city map of to-day. And how should you pronounce the name? Los Ang'-he-les, the purists maintain; but enough people of respectability call it Los An'-je-les to have influenced some lexicographers to back them up. After that follows in diminishing influence a trail of half a dozen versions till we come to the simplified “ Los ” of the baseball fans and hobos.
But, however you say it, it is Los Angeles to which all roads lead south of Tehachapi1— and the base from which the tourist in southern California can most readily set forth to see what he came for. The city possesses the usual assortment of palatial residences, beautiful parks, flowery private grounds, and public institutions of all kinds, common to Ameri-
1 A principal mountain range separating Central California and Southern.28 Finding the Worth While in California
can municipalities of metropolitan pretensions (for Los Angeles is that and by no means either wild or woolly), and in addition the especial tinge that rose-embowered bungalows, rustling palms and an ostrich farm or two communicate. Unless he is fond of towns for their own sake, there is not much in the city itself that need engage the attention of the tourist with a limited schedule; though, if of a democratic cast, he will enjoy making a “ Seeing Los Angeles ” round in a rubberneck. Furthermore, if he can work it in, he will find it a profitably spent hour or two to take a Garvanza car and climb the steps to the Southwest Museum, a noble piece of architecture in the Spanish style, fitly placed upon a commanding hill. From the caracol tower a magnificent view is had of the city and its surroundings, including the majestic sweep of the Sierra Madre. The building is open to the public only in the afternoon.
Personally, I have found the neighborhood of the Old Plaza a fascinating loitering ground for spare half hours, with its shifting and picturesque Mexican street life; the shops with their stocks of queer Mexican edibles, Guadala-Los Angeles and Round About 29
jara pottery and cholo hats; the restaurants often with a proper name, as La Zacatecana, La Simpatía, La Mexicana, and each with its surprising window display of tamales, tortillas, and ruddy enchiladas. There is one of these eating houses, I remember, called La Esperanza, which means Hope — a choice bit of Hispanic humor, that.1 It was about the Plaza that the original pueblo took shape, and within a few blocks of it for nearly a century was all of Los Angeles that there was. A few of the old adobe buildings of ante-gringo days still stand, incongruously mingled with modern structures, trolley tracks and electric lines. The most noteworthy of the old time edifices is the Spanish Church dedicated in 1821 to Our Lady, Queen of the Angels, and facing the Plaza. It is not, nor ever was, a Mission,
1Visitors to Los Angeles interested in testing Spanish cookery ־will find entertainment in motoring or taking the Glendale electric car to the end of the line on the outskirts of Glendale, at the foot of the Verdugo hills, a pretty ride of three quarters of an hour. There, half hidden in trees and roses, is a restaurant that makes a specialty of Spanish dinners, served al fresco if desired. They will serve you up a salad (always well up on well regulated California menus); soup and ripe olives; chili con carne with rice á I’espagnole ; brown frijoles (done almost to liquidity and a revelation in the possibilities of the homely bean); an enchilada tasting (like the cheese, which is a component part) better than it smells; a dessert; and black coffee.30 Finding the Worth While in California
but you will, I think, enjoy a visit to it. You are expected to enter first the little historical museum adjoining, in the quarters of the cheerful Spanish Brothers who are domiciled on the church property. If you fail to follow this order, the lynx-eyed guardian of the Museum will no doubt promptly fish you out of the church, as he did me, and put you right. The church is always open for worshipers, and throughout the day quiet little Mexican women in their black rebosos and somber, work-stained garments, steal mousily in and out. On December 12, the Feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe, when a gorgeous silken banner portraying this heavenly Patroness of Mexico is displayed at the altar, and at Christmas, when the church is ablaze with scarlet poinsettias — the native Christmas flower of Mexico — the kneeling crowds of transplanted peons arrayed in such finery as their poor circumstances afford, are a picturesque reminder of southern California’s distance from New England.1
1 The Chinese quarter, occupying several blocks, adjoins the Plaza on the east, and is worth strolling through. Unlike the larger and more famous one in San Francisco, it has never made any special bid for sightseers — a fact which renders it the more interesting to the student of alien ways.Los Angeles and Round About 31
Among the pleasant anticipations of most Easterners visiting the Coast for the first time is a sight of the Pacific Ocean. The heart of Los Angeles is a bare 20 miles from it1 and electric cars and jitneys a-plenty will carry you in three quarters of an hour to any one of six or eight beach resorts, where even in midwinter you may take a surf bath, albeit a chilly one, in plain view of snow-capped mountains. Of these beaches one takes one’s choice according to taste — and all tastes are catered to. There is, for instance, gay little Venice with its mild flavor of Coney Island and its gondolas on real canals, which the streets cross on bridges; and there is Redondo, where you hunt for moonstones and may really find some; and there is Long Beach, loved of quiet, retired Middle Westerners, who have settled there by the tens of thousands and made of it a sort of Iowa-by-the-Sea. It is a well ordered, spacious little city, where living is good and cheap, and where the city band plays on the beach every afternoon except Monday.
1 The municipality of Los Angeles now includes the seaport of San Pedro, with which it is connected by a narrow strip of territory popularly known as “ The Shoestring.” This makes Los Angeles officially a port of entry.32 Finding the Worth While in California
One of the pleasant domestic sights of California is the Long Beach municipal market, held three mornings a week in the open air along three sides of a large public square to which eucalypts, acacias and palms give a touch of foreignness. Each dealer has a space of ten feet marked off on the curb, within which to display his wares and for it pays 15 cents. Here of a winter’s morning, when the East is shoveling snow outdoors and coal within, one sees the housewives of Long Beach promenading, purse in hand and basket on arm, in front of mountains of oranges and grapefruit, lakes of crisp lettuce and snowy cauliflower hemmed in with banks of blushing rhubarb, hillocks of ruddy beets and golden carrots, mounds of green peas melting into rosy plains of strawberries — all this cheek by jowl with bunches of acacia blossoms, callas, roses and fragrant flowers of as many hues as Joseph’s coat. It is a pretty picture in the mellow-winter sunshine worth a little journey to see, and all the more enjoyable because the low prices mean a lifted finger of the hand of hard circumstance that bears so many of us down.
I had almost forgot to mention SantaLos Angeles and Round About 33
Monica, the pioneer of all the southern beaches, and still one of the most delightful. Sceni-cally it is, I think, the best of all, being set well above the sea with the protecting arm of the Santa Monica Mountains flung half above it. In front lies the lovely Bay of Santa Monica, a graceful crescent whose western tip — a spur of the mountains — is Point Dume (named by Vancouver in 1793, with a little slip in the spelling, for one of the kindly padres of San Buenaventura Mission) and whose eastern tip, 30 miles down the coast, is Point Vincente, christened by the same old navigator for another of the San Buenaventura Fathers. The brown mud cliffs at Santa Monica, seamed by rain and wind, are curious at all seasons and in spring when the pink-flowered mesembry-anthemum, with which the crests have been planted, is in bloom, they are especially beautiful. The Pacific Electric Railway, whose remarkable system of tracks gridirons all the country around Los Angeles, runs daily personally conducted trolley trips to Santa Monica and neighboring beaches, part of a larger itinerary which includes Mission San Gabriel and34 Finding the Worth While in California
passes through Los Angeles’s beautiful suburb of Hollywood (not showing the best of it, however) and gives a sight of the interesting oil belt of this part of California, which has invaded many residence lots and is menacing at least one golf course. Even more varied are the itineraries offered by the various sightseeing auto-bus companies with departures at intervals throughout the day. Their advertisements and folders may be had at every hotel desk.
Of quite a different sort from the beaches just mentioned, is Laguna, 20 miles from the town of Santa Ana. This is an old-fashioned country beach, with picturesque rocks and dashing surf, and waters blue and green streaked with the brown of floating kelp. It is reached by Santa Fe train to Santa Ana and auto-stages thence, which in summer make three trips daily. If you have your own car, it is a delightful run of three easy hours from Los Angeles or Pasadena, traversing one of the richest and most beautiful agricultural regions of the State (where the orange, lemon, English walnut, grape and avocado flourish) through the pretty towns of Whittier,1 Fuller-l A few rods from the Boulevard on the east side of theLos Angeles and Round About 35
ton, Anaheim and Santa Ana; then across the sunny expanse of the great San Joaquin ranch, and by gentle grade down the Laguna Canon, enclosed by the rounded, treeless lomas so characteristic of the Southern California coast country. In spring the region is entrancing in its almost unbroken green, starred with wild flowers, and in summer hardly less charming in the russet of its ripened pastures relieved by the emerald of thousands of acres of bean vines. There are a number of little cottages at the Beach, an unpretentious inn or two, and pure seashore unvisited as yet by merry-go-rounds and roller coasters. Adjoining Laguna on the south is Arch Beach, where the rocks and coast line are even more picturesque, and where artists and gulls are about equally numerous. An added interest to the trip may be secured by proceeding down the road that skirts the bluffs overlooking the sea, and at a point some 7 miles south (near the famous scene of the hide loading described in “ Two
San Gabriel River, at the edge of Whittier, is the old adobe mansion of Don Pio Pico, the last Mexican governor of California. It is open to the public on payment of a nominal fee and is an interesting example of the architecture of the pre-gringo period.36 Finding the Worth While in California
Years Before the Mast”) turn inland a couple of miles to the Mission San Juan Capistrano, and then homeward by the Los Angeles-San Diego Boulevard.
From the beaches on every day when the sea is clear of fog, the eye is attracted by a twin-peaked island lying low in the offing. It is Santa Catalina and is distant from two to three hours by steamer from either Los Angeles harbor (San Pedro) or Long Beach. The little ocean trip is pleasant enough usually (though in certain occasional moods of the sea if develops unsuspected possibilities of sea-sickness) and there is always the exciting chance of sighting a whale or a school of flying-fish or porpoise on their travels. It is one of the resorts which you can reach and get home from in a single day, and so, if an ingrained American, you are tempted to do it up in that day and be done with it. If you must do that, Avalon, the one little town of the island, will be all of Santa Catalina to you, with a stroll of a mile or so in each direction along the rocky, curving shore, or up the hill for a comprehensive view of the charming bay — blue with the blueness of the South Seas — and backedLos Angeles and Round About $7
by the far-away mainland mountains, their snowy peaks in winter floating island-like in the upper air. The preeminent matter, however, is the little voyage in a glass bottom boat over the marine gardens of the bay. The waters are transparent so that you thus look down as through a skylight upon the private life of an unearthly, lovely, noiseless world. There are forests of long-fronded, swaying kelp, and shrubberies of seaweeds of many forms and hues, rooted in the rocky clefts and gravelly slopes of the submerged mountain of which Santa Catalina is, in fact, the unsubmerged crest. Brilliantly colored fish in red, orange, blue and motley, of sorts you probably never dreamed of, dart hither and yon. Starfish, sea cucumbers and sea anemones loll about the sea bottom’s mysterious dingles and caverns; palpitating jelly fishes, trailing liquescent wings and veils, float under the boat. Ten to one, when the steamer whistles in the early afternoon for the return to “America”—as the islanders jocularly style the mainland — you will wish you had arranged to stay longer.
It would at least have got you better ac-38 Finding the Worth While in California
quainted with some of the island characters, such as Bill, the sedate pelican, who loves to lounge on the wharf and have his ridiculous head stroked, and Ben the sea lion who barks about the incoming fishing craft, poking his wet nose and whiskers even into the boat itself in quest of his toll of fish. But more than that, there are the trails into the island’s mountain heart, with its interesting floral life, its wild goats, and its magnificent ocean views. And there are the many possible trips by launch along shore, as to the rookeries of the sea lions; to the lava caves about the Isthmus and the Isthmus itself; to Empire landing with its prehistoric quarry where the Indians once chipped out their steatite ollas and cooking pots, leaving behind them, to this day, the marks of severance and even some half-fashioned jars still joined to the mother rock. Then there is the famous deep sea fishing. Of course you may put in an hour or two at that, during your three-hour stay, but you really need to take at least a day to it. Gasoline launches are employed, the boatman tending the engine, baiting the hooks, and gaffing the fish brought to the boatside, while the pas-Los Angeles and Round About 39
senger does the fishing from the stern. The angling is with a light rod and reel, and a light line — and therein lies the sport of it. To play a 50-pound yellowtail or albacore or a 300-pound swordfish for hours and land him with an outfit resembling that used for trout, is worth staying over night for; and the quest of the leaping tuna, Santa Catalina’s most famous game fish, brings anglers from even the other side of the globe.	_
Touching Los Angeles on the north is Pasadena, a city of 50,000. It lies at an altitude of about 1000 feet upon a shelf-like mesa at the foot of the Sierra Madre overlooking the wide San Gabriel Valley; and is so embedded in gardens, lawns and semi-tropic trees as to seem built in a vast park. It has a national reputation as the winter home of an imposing list of millionaires, captains of industry and retired men of affairs — American and Canadian. A drive through the sections given over to their estates — as Orange Grove Boulevard, San Rafael Heights, Altadena1 and Oak Knoll, can safely be counted on to bankrupt
1 A foothill section just outside the city limits of Pasadena, but practically allied with it.40 Finding the Worth While in California
the visitor’s stock of laudatory adjectives. Oak Knoll, with its fine old live oaks reenforced by a profusion of exotics about every home, its palatial residences of varied architecture notably Spanish and Italian adaptations, its superb views of mountain and valley, its winding roadways — there is not a straight street in the district — is one of the most beautiful suburbs in America, and a monument to the far-seeing genius and good taste of Mr. Henry E. Huntington, who planned it out in detail before he sold a foot of the land.
It is not to be supposed, however, that Pasadena is hospitable only to the very well-to-do; for as a matter of fact its population is mainly made up of people of modest circumstances. These are the dwellers in the bungalows, the fame of which as a California architectural specialty is pretty far spread. After all, I am not sure that it is not preeminently the miles upon miles of these rosy little homes each in the midst of its garden, rather than huge show places, that make for tourists the lasting charm of so many southern California towns. Visitors withLos Angeles and Round About 41
leisure and a love of quiet, find Pasadena quite as convenient a base for their operations as Los Angeles. There is an abundance of accommodations running all the way from light-housekeeping apartments to furnished bungalows and luxurious suites at smart hotels. On New Year’s Day is held annually the outdoor pageant of flowers known as the Pasadena Tournament of Roses, attracting visitors from throughout the country. It is the most famous of the many open-air festivals which form so notable a feature of the California year.
I have spoken of the Sierra Madre. This is the impressive mountain range to the north of the great valley in which Los Angeles lies, and an ascent to the crest back of Pasadena makes a pleasant one day’s outing. There are two peaks which are easily reached, Mount Lowe and Mount Wilson, each about 6000 feet above sea, and affording magnificent views. The trip to Mount Lowe is by the cars of the Pacific Electric, leaving Los Angeles via Pasadena several times a day, and is a unique combination of cable-incline, trolley, and mule back, that never fails to delight. A bright day!
42 Finding the Worth While in California
should be chosen for the best enjoyment of the ever widening views as the cars lift you above the valley. As the line ascends, it also penetrates deeper and deeper into the canons of the mountain, which one is surprised to find becoming more and more wooded as the trip progresses. Finally at an altitude of 5000 feet the rails end, at the Alpine Tavern, a first class hotel in the midst of a fine bit of forest, mostly evergreen oak and big-cone spruce.
From this point to the summit of Mount Lowe is about two miles by a winding trail, which may be readily done afoot by a good walker, but if you are not that, you will not regret the dollar asked for the hire of a horse to carry you up and back. For those content to forego this last leg of the trip entirely, there is a fine valley outlook (but less comprehensive than that from the summit) from Inspiration Point, a short half mile from Al-pine Tavern. There are many good trails radiating from Alpine Tavern, and visitors with a taste for the mountains will find them pleasant traveling either afoot or ahorseback.
If you stay over for this purpose, you will enjoy being housed in one of the numerous lit-Los Angeles and Round About 43
tie tent cottages, each with a balcony overlooking a leafy cañón where birds and squirrels and murmuring waters make sylvan music. One night should, if possible, be spent on the mountain, for the sake of the sight of the valley at night — the blackness illumined by the myriads of electric lights in Los Angeles, Pasadena, San Fernando Valley and the beach towns. A sight of another sort is frequently observable in the early morning, when the fog lies a white billowy sea, submerging the same valley, with an occasional outlying peak thrust up above it like an island.
Mount Wilson is done in different fashion. There is an automobile road up its side from Pasadena, and you may make the trip either in your own car, or on the auto-stage which plies daily between the peak and Los Angeles. There is also a trail for animals and pedestrians that starts at the town of Sierra Madre (a pretty foothill settlement reached by electric cars from both Los Angeles and Pasadena). Horses or burros may be hired at Sierra Madre (it is well to reserve them in advance by telephone), and the primitive character of this mode of travel makes the trail44 Finding the Worth While in California
trip (about three hours each way) an interesting experience to many. There is a good hotel at the summit, which is less of a peak than Mount Lowe and opens up a somewhat different but no less interesting country to the view. Here is the Carnegie Solar Observatory, famous over the world. On Friday nights visitors are given a sight through the big telescope and for an hour or so each day access may be had to the little museum with an exhibition of astronomical photographs and whatnot that will surprise you into a sense of what a small fiddle our earth plays in the orchestra of the spheres. The night and morning effects on Mount Wilson are similar to those on Lowe, and, if anything, rather more extended. Both Lowe and Wilson are subject to snowfall in winter — a fact less appreciated by Eastern tourists than by the California valley folk who enjoy ascending for snow balls and returning to oranges and strawberries the same day.
Perhaps no one feature of southern California surprises and pleases the visitor more than the excellence of the roads. In the last six or eight years, millions have been spent upon macadam and rock and gravel surfac-Los Angeles and Round About 45
ings, making the region a paradise for motorists. Fine broad boulevards radiate from Los Angeles in all directions and tourists who pass the winter in the State and can afford it find their pleasure increased by bringing their cars with them. Those who cannot do this, have no trouble in hiring, as they need, on reasonable terms. Seven-passenger cars of good makes, for instance, are rentable on the basis of from two to three dollars an hour, including driver; and small parties are thus enabled to enjoy a full day’s outing at comparatively small expense per person. The extent to which the good roads system has been developed enables motorists to reach most of the prominent points of interest by one road and return by another, ensuring fresh views both ways. One of the most delightful of one-day motor trips from either Los Angeles or Pasadena is by the Foothill Boulevard to San Bernardino, Redlands and Riverside.1 The road, smooth as a floor, skirts the famous “ Lucky ” Baldwin ranch (now being subdivided), and passes through many charming little hill towns
1 Steam and electric car lines also have excursion trips to these cities for such as prefer it.rpr
46 Finding the Worth While in California
— as Monrovia, Duarte, Azusa, Glendora, Claremont and Upland. It is a beautiful run at any season, but in the spring, either in March when the orange groves are in redolent blossom or in April or early May when the countryside is one great flower garden and miles of blooming roses hedge the road, or in early June when the jacaranda trees are a cloud of blue, ft is nothing short of entrancing. After a leisurely drive through Redlands, a beautiful little city looking out from the midst of orange groves upon the fine San Bernardino Sierra, snow crowned in winter and spring, there will be left two or three hours for rest and luncheon at Riverside. These you will do well to pass at the Glenwood Mission Inn there, one of the country’s noteworthy hostelries, combining perfect comfort with a unique artistry based on the Old Mission motive. You will get a good luncheon, too, served in an open air patio, with Spanish songs from an overhead balcony. The return, after a drive through some of the famous avenues of Riverside, may be made by the Valley Boulevard, partly through a more primitive California, the road threading its way through bil-Los Angeles and Round About Arf
lowy lomas, bare, save for grass, as when the first Spaniards with lance and cross came pioneering upon them; and you will have a sight perhaps of moving bands of feeding sheep, with shepherd and dog lounging in the wake.
Riverside, long famous as the center of the navel orange industry, has acquired a special touch of fame in recent years from its Easter Sunrise Service, held annually upon the summit of Mount Rubidoux, a smallish rocky hill or barrow of moderate elevation on the outskirts of the town. Here some years ago was planted a cross to commemorate the labors of Fray Junipero Serra, the heroic and devoted Franciscan who was the founder of the remarkable Mission system in California, and with it white civilization there. Kindly Jacob Riis, of “ How the Other Half Lives ” fame, is said to have suggested the idea of an Easter procession to this mountain top, and in 1909 the first sunrise service was held there with less than a hundred worshipers present. Annually since then a non-sectarian service has been held with increasing attendance, until this last Easter (1922) it is esti-48 Finding the Worth While in California
mated that 20,000 people braved the dawn, in automobiles and afoot. California statistics are constitutionally exuberant, but that there was an immense crowd was proved by the photographs. The service is very simple, merely a cornet solo, a prayer, a familiar hymn or two, a responsive Scripture reading, and always the recital of Henry Van Dyke’s fine and appropriate poem, “ God of the Open Air.”
No other single man has left so permanent an impress upon the California coast country as that gray-gowned, limping Padre Serra, who walked wherever he went (unless he went by sea) and who had not a dollar in the world. He was the peaceful instrument made use of by the Spanish Crown in the late eighteenth century to bring into subjection the aboriginal population of California, and so pave the way for white occupation of the province. Of Serra’s famous system of Missions none remain in anything like their former estate, when the buildings covered acres and the houses of Indian converts arranged in streets like a town adjoined them. To-day all that remains of any of them is a building or two at the most, usu-Los Angeles and Round About 49
ally the church part.1 Three of these Mission remains are within easy distance of Los Angeles, and a visit to them well repays travelers with an interest in the picturesque. Of these, Mission San Gabriel is the most visited, as it lies at the edge of both Los Angeles and Pasadena and an electric car line passes its ancient doors. The one building standing is in good repair, and is regularly used for church services, a community of Spanish priests being in charge. A stroll around the little town itself will be found of interest, as the population is largely Mexican. Indeed, though most of its ancient adobes are now gone, San Gabriel (dating from about 1775) is an older town than Los Angeles by several years; and, because of the Mission, was long an important stopping place for travelers bound coastward from the desert and the interior basin and plains.
Two hours’ run by Santa Fe train carries
1 The Missions were usually built four square about a central open court. The church occupied one side of this square, the convento part (that is, the living quarters of the two resident padres and the guest rooms) another side; while the remaining two sides were given over to shops, storehouses and monjerio, where the unmarried Indian women of the Mission spent the night,50 Finding the Worth While in California
you from Los Angeles to a flowery old-fashioned village mothered by the most poetic of all the Mission ruins, that of San Juan Capistrano. A portion of the vast establishment —■ in its prime, perhaps the finest link of the Mission chain — has been carefully restored, but most of the place is still a ruin, time stained and crumbling, well beloved of artists and poets. One of the rooms is used as a chapel, where religious services are regularly held — a resident priest occupying another part of the building as his living quarters. Visitors are made welcome and a guide who knows his business shows them about the lovely, broken corridors ivy-clad and rose-entwined, opens up musty old rooms with charming bits of hand-wrought decoration, and before the desolated altar piece of the roofless church, tells the story of the great catastrophe that brought ruin to the Mission on the day of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, 1812. As San Juan Capistrano is halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego, the traveler may, if he choose, stop over en route between those cities. The evening and morning lights show the ruins to the best advantage, and most peopleLos Angeles and Round About 51
who care enough for such effects to stay a night will be correspondingly rewarded. There are good accommodations in the village.
The third of the old Missions near Los Angeles is San Fernando. It lies at the edge of the fertile valley of the same name, some 25 miles northwest from the heart of the city, and is accessible by either steam or electric railway. It also makes an objective point for a very delightful motor trip from either Los Angeles or Pasadena. The Mission buildings are not occupied at present, except by the caretaker’s family. The best preserved is the convento part with a fine corridored front flush with the road. At right angles to this and to the rear, a long row of melting adobe buildings leads to the old church, badly ruined and so much off the road that many visitors never notice it. Beyond is the site of the olive orchard, where two picturesque date palms of the Padres’ planting still thrive.
It was in the mountains about 15 miles northwest of Mission San Fernando that Francisco Lopez, a vaquero of the Rancho Camulos,1
1 This, one of the few old ranches now remaining in the hands of Spanish-Californian families, has acquired fame as a literary landmark — being the original of the Señora Mo-52 Finding the Worth While in California
digging wild onions with a sheath knife one spring day of 1842, incidentally turned up some flakes of gold. This proved the starting of California’s first gold rush, antedating Marshall’s epoch-making strike in the north by several years.
On your way to or from San Fernando, you may stop off at Universal City, which stands on the bank of the Los Angeles River and at the western end of the Cahuenga Pass on the outskirts of Hollywood. This unique place is the plant of a huge moving picture concern — a business in which millions are invested in the vicinity of Los Angeles — and is a real little city (if anything may be called “real” that is grounded so essentially as this is on make-believe). It has its local government and police force, a postoffice, telegraph and express offices, restaurants, a hospital and what not — but no churches, as the work goes on every day in the week. There are about 1700 acres within its limits, including besides the “ city ” buildings a varied terrain of mountain, plain, canon and riverside for the setting
reno's estate in Helen Hunt Jackson’s novel “ Ramona.” A station Camulos, near the ranch house, is a flag stop on the Southern Pacific’s Coast Line,Los Angeles and Round About 53
of any kind of outdoor scene. The one business followed is the staging and manufacturing of moving picture plays. Formerly the public were allowed inside upon the payment cf a small fee, but now admission is only by special pass. The café at the entrance, however, is open to any one (as is the case at some of the large studios in Hollywood) and at noon when the actors, without changing makeup, flock in to lunch, the sight is quite interesting. Such a motley scene is probably not elsewhere to be enjoyed in this world, outside of a fancy-dress ball. The tables are crowded with mock representatives of pretty much all sorts and conditions of men and women known to history or romance. There are, for instance, soldiers of a half dozen nations, cowboys in spurs and gaudy bandanna neckerchiefs, clowns in motley, Don Cossacks in astrakhan caps, and Turkish ladies in bangles and pantalettes; Spanish bull fighters, members of the royal family, Indians, ladies in Elizabethan ruffs, fairy children in gauze, bad men from Texas, Arab camel drivers, Mexicans in tight inexpressibles with buttons to burn. Here they are all eating beef and potatoes in peace and54 Finding the Worth While in California
contentment, and most of them smoking cigarettes, and chatting together affably. If you are anything of a mixer, they will talk to you, too, and altogether you feel like Alice in Wonderland. Yet there is a touch of pathos in it, as when, for instance, you see the Lord High Chancellor of the British Empire in flowing wig and a Roman nose, bearing in his own aristocratic hands a tin waiter with the meal for which two bits has just been rung up on the cash register.1
A unique trip out of Los Angeles is by automobile to the Colorado Desert. Of recent years this region, which lies a hundred miles or so southwest of Los Angeles, between the San Jacinto mountain range and the Colorado River, has been attracting increasing attention from pleasure seekers. For such, the time to go is winter or early spring when the climate is
1 If one has an extra couple of hours to devote to it, a delightful extension of a visit by motor car to the Mission San Fernando or Universal City, is to return to Los Angeles by way of the Topanga Canon. This is an open gorge that bisects the Santa Monica Mountains, and from the San Fernando Valley is entered at a point on the State Highway between Owensmouth and Calabasas. After an easy climb of 3 miles, the road winds downward through increasingly impressive scenery for nine more, eventually coming out upon the sea beach which is followed for 3 miles to Santa Monica. Thence there is a choice of roads into Los Angeles.Los Angeles and Round About 55
singularly delightful. At other seasons the heat and likelihood of sand storms change the face of the matter. At several points in this desert, such as Palm Springs, Indio, and Mecca, there are comfortable hotels; and a good automobile road — part of the ocean to ocean system — is at this writing building across the desert to the Imperial Valley and Yuma. This highway is already completed out of Los Angeles as far as Palm Springs, which may be reached in half a day. The object of a desert trip is the novel scenery, with its wonderful colors and strange vegetation.
The Washingtonia or California Fan Palm is indigenous in certain parts of this desert; and in March the sandy wastes are gay with wild flowers of great variety and beauty and of every conceivable color. Palm Springs, which lies at the base of the San Jacinto mountain, makes a good headquarters for any one interested in getting a bit of desert experience at least cost of comfort. At Mecca, some forty miles further east, and 200 feet below sea level, one is in the sink of the desert and close to the Salton Sea, with quite a different sort of scenery. The stretch from Indio56 Finding the Worth While in California
to Mecca is known as the Coachella Valley, and is the center of the California date growing industry, which is now assuming commercial proportions. A Government Experiment Station, specializing in date culture, is at Mecca, and quite worth a visit, particularly in the autumn when the huge golden clusters of fruit are ripe. The entire region from Indio to the Colorado River is the bed of a prehistoric sea, and the ancient beach line is still clearly marked along the mountain base.
To the north of Los Angeles, beyond the Sierra Madre, is the Mojave Desert, which in April and early May is also attractively flowery. A pleasurable motor trip thither is to Lancaster (80 miles from. Los Angeles) crossing the sierra by Mint Canon; then westward out of the desert to the Bakersfield highway; and back to Los Angeles by the so-called Ridge Route, a notable paved road that follows in a general way a winding crest of the Ventura Mountains whose cañón depths and sylvan heart are marvelously bared to you. The trip is of possible accomplishment in one day, but it is better to take two to it, stopping over night at Lancaster or at Lebec in the Tejón Pass.CHAPTER III
THE SAN DIEGO COUNTRY
That of San Diego (Dee-ay'-go) which lingers most lovingly in my memory is what San Diegans call Old Town — the crumbling adobe precinct seen on the left from the car windows, a mile or two before the train pulls into the smart new station of to-day.
Old Town is hopelessly out of date, with a frowsy litttle plaza where Mexican children play in excited Spanish, an ancient cannon or two, a few date palms of Padre Serra’s time, and a dozen adobe houses in various stages of dilapidation — all except one, whereof more anon. Yet Old Town, for all its poverty, is rich in one matter that its big American daughter, modern San Diego, around the curve of the hill, is lacking in — that is, history. For here at Old Town in 1769 was planted the first flower of white civilization on the United
5758 Finding the Worth While in California
States’ Pacific Coast, watered painfully for years and fertilized with some blood. On the hill at its back stood the first presidio in California,1 and hardby, the first of the Missions of Serra’s founding. Of the presidio, all trace is gone, but the site of the Mission is marked still by some indistinct remains and a memorial cross built of remnant tiles and imprisoned within a hideous iron railing, to save the memento (O the pity of it!) from Twentieth Century American vandals. It was Old Town, too, that was the San Diego of Richard Henry Dana, who had some adventures here as narrated in “ Two Years Before the Mast,” and it was here in Old Town that the marriage of Ramona and Alessandro was staged by Mrs. Jackson in her perennial romance. Principally to this fact, I believe, is due the present interest of the tourist public in Old Town; and the street cars that run thither every fifteen minutes are prominently labeled “ Ramona’s
11 use California in its present day application. Originally the name, usually pluralized, covered the peninsula as well, and for distinction, the terms Upper California and Lower California were employed. Under Spain the peninsula was long the more important and began to be dotted with Missions 70 years before a beginning was made in our California.The San Diego Country	59
Marriage Place.” They land you at the Plaza and beside that one adobe house, of which a few lines back I made an exception in my allusion to Old Town’s dilapidation. You will, I am sure, enjoy that house, which is really a sort of Museum of old San Diego, and old California. A trifling fee is charged for admission. It is, indeed, a former Spanish home, belonging originally to the well known family of Estudillo. After long abandonment, it was taken in hand some years ago and carefully restored in the Spanish California manner by competent artists and workmen; with the result that its rambling old rooms and kitchens, its tiled inner corridors and lovely retired patio opening to a sunlit garden of old fashioned flowers, are a delight to every visitor.
If you are in an automobile, or enjoy a pleasant country walk of five miles, you may from Old Town proceed up the valley of the San Diego River to the architectural ruin which is advertised as the Old Mission. Historically, this site is not the first but the second selected by Serra for the spread of gospel light among the heathen Dieguenos, and
! I!
60 Finding the Worth While in California
dates from 1774 — the first, at Old Town, not having proved satisfactory. Indeed, the present church building, what remains of it, is of even later construction, having been dedicated in 1813. None the less, it is a connected part of that first settlement of 1769, and it is no credit to the rich Commonwealth whose cradle is here, that the old walls are allowed to melt away year by year, for lack of money to stay the decay. The olive orchard of the Padres, a remnant of their cactus hedges, and some interesting bits of their irrigation system, still stand to reward the curious.
The hills on which modern San Diego is built, with unlimited ocean in front and misty mountains at the back fading south into Old Mexico, make it a city of magnificent views. The cream of these is to be had from Balboa Park, the site of the Panama-California Exposition of 1915-16 — a park that remains a perpetual exposition of the beautiful in Spanish-Colonial architecture, and of the finest in landscape gardening. To the lover of plant life this charming spot, artificial though its charm be, is particularly appealing. The exquisite gardens and landscape effects, in whichThe San Diego Country
6i
the botanic wealth of practically the entire world has representation, are an object lesson in the possibilities of horticulture in California’s climate when backed with money, knowledge and good taste; for this paradise of Balboa Park, trees and all, was evoked from a hilltop of unadulterated gravel and grease-wood in about four years. Not to be neglected, either, is the less extensive view up and down the peaceful Mission Valley from the flowery bluff of Mission Cliff Gardens, at the terminus of one of the city electric car lines.
Among the score of sight-seeing trips radiating from San Diego, whose advertisements assail the visitor on every hand, is one that ends in another particularly fine view. This is the trip by motor car to Point Loma, the tip of the majestic headland that half encircles the entrance to the beautiful harbor of San Diego, Here by the old Spanish lighthouse one gets not only an almost limitless view of sunny blue sea and surfy curving coastline, but also, looking landward, a panorama of the city and bay with a mountain background extending from San Gorgonio and San Jacinto, snow-crowned in winter, to the flat-topped Table Mountain62 Finding the Worth While in California
in Lower California. Charles Dudley Warner, who fell powerfully under the spell of the San Diego climate and scenery, speaks in “ Our Italy ” of this Point Loma outlook, as “ one of the most remarkable views in the accessible civilized world, one of the three or four really great prospects which the traveler can recall, astonishing in its immensity, interesting in its peculiar details.” The Point is so remote from public haunt and the view so altogether worthy, that the few minutes grudged it by the usual sight-seeing crowd, are by no means its due. Better dream away a morning there in the companionship of cheerful wild flowers and the complaining seabirds; or make an afternoon of it if you enjoy sunsets.1 A half acre at the Point was set aside by the Government in 1913 under the title of “ The Cabrillo National Monument,” to commemorate the fact that this was the first of California sighted by the discoverer, Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, who landed here in 1542. A feature of the automobile trip to Point
1 Since the Great War and the enlargement of the military and naval base at San Diego, much of Point Loma is shut off from the public and its charm for the quiet-minded correspondingly lessened.The San Diego Country
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Loma is a brief stop at the extensive homestead of the Theosophical Society with its Raja Yoga School, its purple-domed buildings, and its Greek theater open to the sky and looking on the sea as Old Greece would have approved.
A ferry conveys the visitor from San Diego to Coronado across the bay, an umbrageous little city at the north end of a narrow peninsula which forms the barrier between San Diego Bay and the ocean. It is a seaside resort, with all that that implies and the luxurious Hotel del Coronado thrown in. This is a huge, rather quaint timber structure, with red roofs and turrets, gables and dormer windows. It is built about a spacious patio which is a garden of old exotics and upon it the rambling balconies of the upper stories look pleasantly down. Coronado has always been famous for its devotion to sport, and enthusiasts in anything of that sort, all the way from archery and tennis to polo and aeroplaning, find here a congenial atmosphere.
A seaside town of a quieter kind, also contiguous to San Diego is La Jolla, the most surprising thing about which, to people unaccus-64 Finding the Worth While in California
tomed to the oddities of California nomenclature, is that the name is pronounced La Ho'-yah. You may readily make the trip there from San Diego and back in a day — it is only 16 miles distant, and a stage line connects it with the city. The cliffs here jutting on the sea are curiously hollowed and honeycombed, and to sit on the neighboring rocks and watch the tide as it thunders in and out of these wild caves of Neptune, is an interesting entertainment. One of these has been opened from the land side, so that it may be explored without a wetting, and an unusual view of the ocean framed in the cavernous blackness may be had. Travelers with a taste for studying sea life, which is interesting and abundant at La Jolla, will find entertainment at the Marine Biological Laboratory — a station of the University of California — a mile or so up the beach.
San Diego’s nearness to the boundary line of Mexico’s territory of Baja California — about 15 miles — affords an excuse for a trip by sight-seeing automobiles across the border. The objective is a village called Tia Juana, a mile over the line. It is an amorphous codec-The San Diego Country
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tion of board structures, mostly curio shops, saloons, and joints of divers shady sorts, the whole sprawled over a dusty, treeless plain, and frankly existing for what it can make out of the American tourists. These, to give the place its due, seem to enjoy the experience, particularly, the mailing of postcards in a Mexican casa de correos. Nevertheless, it should be understood, Tia Juana is by no means representative of even the average Mexican village, to say nothing of the better sort. Neither is the country traversed to reach it of especial interest, though the return by way of the Coronado Peninsula•, with the ocean on one side and the bay on the other, is pleasant enough. There is, however, another trip, much less known, to Mexican territory, that is unique for a day’s outing, and enjoyable by all lovers of the unconventional whose stomachs can stand a little sea-going in a small boat. That is to Los Coronados, the group of small islands lying about 20 miles, west of south from San Diego, and plainly visible from the shore. They are the peaks of a submerged mountain chain of which the Santa Catalina group and those of66 Finding the Worth While in California
the Santa Barbara Channel are believed to be part. Though Los Coronados are in Mexican territory, they are uninhabited by man and therefore they and their visitors are quite unaffected by the political ups and downs of that troubled republic. You will find an interesting and somewhat turbulent life there, nevertheless — represented abundantly by sea lions, seals, pelicans and gulls which find a congenial home about the rocks and cliffs. The largest of the islands rises to a peak 672 feet above the sea. All are waterless, and support a sparse vegetation, amid which cactus is noticeable. The surrounding waters have long been famous fishing grounds, and one of the features offered by the trip from San Diego (which occupies about 2% hours in each direction), is the privilege of fishing from the boat as you travel. A two-hour stop is made at the largest island for luncheon (if you have brought it with you) and for a stroll about the land.
The San Diego back country has some features of particular interest. The country is poorly served by railways; but to make up for this, automobile stages over good roads runThe San Diego Country	67
pretty much everywhere. Its general character is mountainous, diversified with small valleys devoted to agriculture or grazing, all very different from the region around Los Angeles. A couple of hours out of San Diego one is among apple orchards, stone walls, and rocky hillside pastures where goldenrod blooms in late summer, and snow is not infrequent in winter. A pleasant round for one day, if you have your own car, is to Pine Hills, a resort in the Cuyamaca country, going by Ramona, Santa Ysabel and Julian; and returning by Cuyamaca Lake, Descanso and Alpine. It is a run of perhaps 120 miles for the round, and may be done between breakfast and dinner, with three or four hours for luncheon at the Pine Hills Inn and the enjoyment thereabout of the coniferous and oak woodlands and the extended views of an unspoiled region 4000 feet above the sea. Nearby is the beautiful valley of Santa Ysabel, where a century ago the Franciscan padres of Mission San Diego set up a chapel the better to minister to the Indians whose rancherias were then numerous in the neighborhood and are not yet entirely gone.68 Finding the Worth While in California
By auto-stage one may also go to Mesa Grande, in the mountains northeast of San Diego some 55 miles. Here you will find a hotel that is out of the usual — Powam Lodge, whose sign is a broken arrow symbolizing the broken estate of the vanishing aborigines. The hotel, which is of adobe and constructed somewhat on Spanish lines, occupies an oak-dotted hill top 3,350 feet above the sea, commanding fine views. The interior of the house is unique, a veritable treasury of Indian handicraft— baskets, pottery, blankets, fiber nets, mortars and whatnot; and in the finishing the nearby desert as well as the mountain has been tastefully drawn upon. Utilization has been made of agave, yucca, cactus, incense cedar, and even the native gems for which San Diego County is famed. When cherries are ripe, the proprietor has a jovial way of extending the freedom of his big orchard to his guests; and at all times from April to November (for during the winter months, rain and snow must be reckoned upon and the hotel is closed) Powam Lodge makes a favorite objective for motorists and week-end parties from San Diego. The adjacent country isThe San Diego Country
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sparsely settled, and is full of beauty, if rather lacking in the dramatic. For horseback it is ideal, with numerous lovely trails whose charm is increased by the fact that they are not artificial bridle paths but part of the natural expression of a primitive life that still lingers in these mountains. Stock raising with all its picturesque features is a prime occupation. You meet upon the road vaqueros in “ chaps ” and with lariats coiled at the saddle horn, and you are safe in taking them for the real thing, not moving picture actors. Winding down the mountain grades, you come often upon retired green valleys where cattle by the thousands graze, and the possibility of stumbling upon a rodeo is one pleasant incentive to your outings. The region has a particular charm in the spring when the hillsides are all glorious with the bloom of the wild lilac.
Five miles from Mesa Grande begins the beautiful Warner’s Ranch, an estate of 48,000 acres with an historic past. Originally it was a Mexican grant to Jonathan T. Warner, one of those venturesome Yankee pioneers who for fifteen or twenty years before our Mexican war״ would now and then disturb the pastoraljo Finding the Worth While in California
peace of California by slipping unasked within her borders. Warner married a lady of Spanish blood, became Don Juan — or more intimately Juan Largo (that is, Long John), by which term old Spanish Californians still refer to him — and for years lived a sort of baronial life here. The ranch is famous for its extensive pasture lands, watered by the sources of the San Luis Rey River, and for certain Llot Springs which from time immemorial had been cherished by the Indians for their medicinal properties. Under Spain and even “ barbarous ” Mexico, the aboriginal rights in these sulphurous waters were not questioned. It was reserved for our Great Republic, consecrated to the principles of justice and human freedom, to evict the Indians by force some years ago, and vest the title to their ancient heritage in some present day American. The memory of it makes an ugly blot upon that corner of the fair demesne, but as neither you nor I were party to the transaction, I suppose there is no reason why we should not enjoy a canter or a motor drive through the rancho’s park-like spaces, which are particularly freshThe San Diego Country
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and lovely in April and May. In all California, you will scarcely find more magnificent specimens of encina; or coast live oak, than some which stand here. The ranch has recently changed hands and with the completion of the great Henshaw Dam on the western border the pastoral aspect that is now so great a charm will doubtless disappear, to be replaced, perhaps, by another sort of beauty.
At Warner’s is a parting of the ways. You may continue northward past the Hot Springs Hotel through Oak Grove and Aguanga to Riverside, or — and this is better — turn westward and follow the beautiful valley of the San Luis Rey River some 60 miles to Ocean-side, where you will be on the ocean automobile highway or the railway connecting San Diego and Los Angeles. This route from Warner’s takes you through a bit of Indian country, skirting the three small reservations, of La Joya, Rincon and Pauma, at any of which you may perhaps have the fun of dickering with good-natured fat basket weavers for their craft.1 Then there is Paia, where
l As a matter of fact, the inexperienced will as a rule72 Finding the Worth While in California
stand the picturesque white-walled, red-tiled buildings of San Antonio de Paia, once an asistencia or outpost of the Mission San Luis Rey, and still used in part as a Catholic church. I The remarkable detached bell tower, with its two ancient bells, still stands and summons as of yore an Indian congregation; for here at Paia are now assembled on a Government Reservation, the evicted Indians from Warner’s Ranch — a picturesque settlement of about 300. Each of the Indian rancherias in southern California is a cure of the Catholic ¡1 Church, and on its saint’s day — which generally falls in some summer month — there is a fiesta, which formerly lasted for days and was the occasion of games, races, and Indian dances. The particular flavor of these festivals has been recently flattened by the Government’s prohibition of the time-honored institution of gambling, but there is still an element of the picturesque about them that is attractive to lovers of the unusual.
I
do much better buying articles of Indian handicraft from reliable American traders, than from the makers, who are generally sophisticated enough nowadays to drive a pretty shrewd bargain. Nevertheless, it is interesting to see the Indian in his home.THE MISSION OF SAN ANTONIO DE PALA The remarkable bell tower of the old mission still stands and summons its Indian con gregation as of old, for at Paia there is a picturesque settlement of about 300 India#The San Diego Country
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Twenty miles further down the river the road passes in front of the old Mission San Luis Rey, at one time the very king of the Franciscan establishments in California. This and Mission Santa Barbara are the only ones now in charge of the Franciscans; and as at Santa Barbara, the brothers of San Luis Rey are glad to show visitors about. Unfortunately they have restored the convento for their community uses with more zeal than artistic taste, but the church, which was never entirely ruined, is still of great interest. Travelers of leisure and a humble heart do well to attend a service here or indeed at any one of the Missions that are still made use of. To-day the congregations are noticeably Mexican ; but kneeling with these, one seems to get a livelier appreciation of the spirit that actuated the remarkable founders of these churches in the wilderness. In the garden of Mission San Luis Rey there stands a large pepper tree (Schinus Molle} which is believed to be the oldest in California, dating from about 1830. The pepper is one of the most cherished of California shade trees, its drooping branches clothed with long, pendant leaves,74 Finding the Worth While in California
somewhat suggesting the weeping willow. The species is native to Peru, and has been extensively grown in Mexico for three centuries. How it reached California is not positively known; but there is a well authenticated tradition that the first seeds were given to the Padres of San Luis Rey by a visiting sailor from southern waters.
Eastward from Warner’s runs a road — by no means ideal for automobiles, though traveled by them to some extent — which leads down to the Colorado Desert, and across it to the Imperial Valley. It is interesting as one of the routes traveled in pre-railway days by the pioneers; but for the traveler more interested in good roads than in history, there is a better way of reaching the desert from San Diego. And that is a trip worth doing, if you have a couple of days to give it. There are numerous auto-stage lines making the 125 mile run from San Diego to El Centro, the county seat of Imperial, in eight hours. The road followed is a capital highway with a surface of decomposed granite. Some 15 miles out of San Diego, it turns towards the Mexican border and for 60 miles rises and dips, cork-The San Diego Country	75
screws and climbs again over or around the shoulders of chaparral-covered mountains. These, a few miles beyond Jacumba, suddenly seem to turn to tumbled stone and cactus, and lo, the desert simmers at your feet, with the Imperial like a green ribbon gleaming in the haze 40 miles ahead. Then down the Mountain Springs grade, cut like a shelf in the mountain side, you go twisting and dropping until Coyote Wells is passed and you are on the floor of the desert, thanking heaven for being a man, if you are one, because you can shed your coat and vest and breast the warmth in your shirt sleeves! If you are interested in agriculture and irrigation, the Imperial will be a marvel to you. A few years ago it was a hopeless, waterless, uninhabited waste; to-day it is like a slice of Kansas, with liberal green pastures dotted abundantly with cattle, horses, sheep and hogs; orchards, cotton fields, truck gardens and melons, world without end.1
1 A railway—the San Diego and Arizona, built to link San Diego with Yuma and the Imperial—crosses the mountains by the fine gorge of Carrizo Creek. It cannot, however, compete with the peculiar pleasure of this motor trip.CHAPTER IV
ABOUT SANTA BARBARA
It is probably the fame of the old Mission that most attracts tourists into a stop-off at Santa Barbara, but it is Santa Barbara itself that keeps them there. If it has grown more deliberately than some other southern California cities — the census of 1920 gave the population as 19,400, which may now (1923) have increased to 22,000 or more—it has at any rate grown entirely along beautiful lines, and as befits its fine natural setting. At its back extends the noble length of the Santa Ynes Sierra; in front are the sparkling waters of the Channel of Santa Barbara separated by an interrupted barrier of low-lying islands from the blue Pacific which stretches without limit southward — the South Sea of the old Spanish navigators. Upon San Miguel, the westernmost of these islands, Cabrillo, the discoverer 76Abolit Santa Barbara
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of the California coast, died in 1543 from the results of an accident. He was buried there, according to the record, but his grave has never been found.
Always a rather aristocratic little town in its adobe days under Spain and Mexico, Santa Barbara is still distinguished by an atmosphere of dignified leisure, not to say aloofness from the vulgar scrambles of life. Little now remains of the old Spanish buildings, though here and there the stroller about the lower part of town, particularly east of State Street, will stumble upon some picturesque adobe looking out from amid vines and flowers, and hinting of a day that is gone. I shall always remember the kindly courtesy shown me at one of these old-time places, perhaps the best preserved of all — the house of the De la Guerra family — built about three sides of a front court, and standing on a street bearing the family name, just off State Street. This was the scene of the famous wedding in 1836 described in Richard Henry Dana’s “ Two Years Before the Mast.” The modern city is a place of much wealth; beautiful estates are numerous ; and in a State renowned for floral wealth,78 Finding the Worth While in California
the Santa Barbara gardens are famous for their variety and luxuriance. This is no doubt largely attributable to the situation of the city, which, besides enjoying the equalizing influence of the sea, is sheltered on the north by mountains, and faces due south. Even in Mission days the gardens of Santa Barbara and Ventura, its sister city of the channel, were a source of delight to visiting travelers, as their records testify. To this genial situation has been joined the unflagging enthusiasm of plant-loving citizens like Dr. F. Franceschi and his son, whose acclimatization nurseries are here, and who for 30 years or more have ransacked the world for floral and arboreal novelties wherewith to enrich the State of their adoption.
As the Mission has brought you to Santa Barbara, you naturally take the first opportunity to call there — a feat easily accomplished, as a street car carries you within a stone’s throw of the fine old fountain in the plaza that fronts the corridors. Of all the Franciscan chain in California, this of Santa Barbara is the best preserved, and the only one that has never been without resident Francis-IN THE I’ADRES’ GARDEN OF SANTA BARBARA MISSION
Of the entire Franciscan chain in California, Santa Barbara is the best preserved and the only one that has never been without resident FranciscansAbout Santa Barbara
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cans under its roof though not always in control. In the bitter years following Secularization, when under the rule of Mexico the Missions were shorn of their lands, reduced to parish churches and their Indians scattered, hither to Santa Barbara came more than one old padre of the “ Conquest,” 1 to die, and lay his worn frame to rest. In 1842, the Mission establishment became the official residence of the first Catholic Bishop of California; but since 1856 the Franciscans have had it again and maintain here a college for the propagation of the faith. They live in community, women tabooed, and the visitor of to-day finds a certain enjoyment in seeing the Brothers in their cowled, brown gowns briskly engaged at various secular occupations about the buildings and gardens, such as sweeping, scrubbing, hoeing, laying bricks and whatnot. They make it a part of the day’s work to induct visitors into what is lawful and expedient to be shown them, and do it with courtesy and cheerfulness, between stated hours of morning and afternoon. It is an interesting round they
1 “ La Conquista ”—so did the Franciscans call the christianizing of the Indians; that is, the conquest of the devil’g dominion over them.80 Finding the Worth While in California
take you, with informative chat about the pictures, architecture, flowers and dead Indians. As a final touch there is the climb into the high tower whence is a view of city, sea and fertile plain that you would be sorry to miss. Though the Mission was founded in 1786, the present building is the fourth upon the ground, and was not completed until 1820. In the old days when people more often traveled to Santa Barbara by sea than by land, the twin-towered church, set as it is on rising ground, was a famous landmark, comparable in its stateliness to some medieval castle.
Across the Santa Ynes Mountains 45 miles from Santa Barbara, is another old Mission, that of Santa Ynes.1 It may be visited in one rather hard day’s trip by automobile, and is a picturesque drive. You may cross the range by the San Marcos Pass, zigzag down into the spacious Santa Ynes Valley with its lovely oaks, traverse a great cattle ranch, cross the Santa Ynes River, and 4 miles west of the village of Santa Ynez the white tower and corridors of the red-tiled Mission come into view.
1 You pronounce it Sant-ee-nes ; it is Spanish for Saint Agnes — whose Eve gives the name to Keats’ immortal poem.About Santa Barbara
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The building as it now exists is largely a careful restoration, much of it done by the hands of the parish priest himself, Father Alexander Buckler, and his competent niece and housekeeper, who lives with him in the Mission. The Father, while not a Franciscan, has the heart of one and a keen interest in all that pertains to the Mission’s history. The stock of relics which he has industriously accumulated throws an interesting light on the missionaries’ ancient activities and way of life. The return from Mission Santa Ynes may be made by the slightly longer but better road over the Gaviota Pass to Gaviota,1 and thence eastward 30 miles along an ocean-skirting highway with exquisite views out to sea. A better plan than hurrying through this trip in one day is to proceed from the Mission to Los Olivos (6 miles) where is a wayside inn famous for its good cheer, and affectionately known to motorists as “ Matty’s place,” (“Matty” is, I believe, an Italian and spells his name Mattei). Next day you may jog
1 A station on the Southern Pacific Coast Line. Travelers so desiring may reach the Santa Ynes Mission by taking this train to Gaviota, whence there is a daily !nail stage passing the Mission gate.82 Finding the Worth While in California
back to Santa Barbara by easy stages. The whole trip is full of beauty, and there is a pretty waterfall on the Gaviota road, called Nojogui (it is called no-ho-wee, save the mark!), to which it will pay you to devote an hour at noon.
The roads in the vicinity of Santa Barbara afford many delightful prospects, and there are certain stock drives which if you are of a melting heart to the seductions of the public drivers, you can hardly escape. But, indeed, do not try to — all are good — but two short ones, each about 12 miles the round, are particularly deserving of mention. One is the Cliff Drive to the west of the city, past the neighborhood of the light-house, and takes its name from the run along the summit of the cliffs that form one boundary of the Hope Ranch, with the surf breaking at their base and a limitless view seaward. The other is the Mountain Drive, which starts near the Mission and at a general altitude of about 1000 feet, worms its way along the mountain side, now in and out wooded, flowery, ferny canons and now in the sunny open with orchards and beautiful homes in plain view below you, andAboiit Santa Barbara
83
the exquisite sea beyond; for always it is that inescapable, blue, sparkling sea — when it is not provokingly in a fog — that gives the finishing touch of perfection to all the views about Santa Barbara. The Mountain Drive drops to earth at Montecito, famous for its fine homes, and brings you back to the city by the Ocean Boulevard, and if you please, Miramar— where is a charming little hotel half buried in flowers and looking on the sea.
For riders ahorseback and sturdy pedestrians, there are numerous trails which make the nearby mountains easily accessible. Riding has always been a feature of Santa Barbara life, and the automobile has not yet quenched the earlier love. Saddle ponies may be had on the basis of $3.50 to $4 per day, and so long as one keeps on the ocean side of the mountain range, there is no chance to get seriously lost. A main trail known as “ The Ridge ” extends along the summit of the range, now on one side, now on the other, for 60 miles or more — and to it are many laterals leading up out of the lower country. Some will carry one north into the maze of mountains in that direction, and these a stranger84 Finding the Worth While in California
had best keep out of unless with a guide; but on the south declivity all trails lead ultimately to the coast and make the return to Santa Barbara a foregone conclusion.
A favorite run for motorists from Santa Barbara is to the Ojai Valley, some 40 miles, by way of Carpinteria1 and its huge grapevine, Shepard’s Inn of choice renown, and the beautiful Casitas Passes. You can do it more prosily by train, if you prefer — following the seacoast, as the Spanish pioneers did, from Carpinteria to Ventura. Thence a branch line along the Ventura River rattles into the Valley. In the summer the Ojai (which, by the way, is pronounced O-hF) is a hot little box in spite of its shady oaks, and is rather deserted at that season; but in winter and spring California holds nothing much lovelier in the way of pastoral beauty. There are several good hotels, and motoring, golf, tennis and horseback riding are the side attractions to a climate and vistas of natural charm that are in themselves reason enough for a visit. Each spring
l It is pronounced carpinter-ee'-a and is Spanish for carpenter shop. The locality was so named in 1769 when the Spanish pioneers found an Indian village here and some Indians making a wooden boat.About Santa Barbara
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there is held at Ojai, the valley’s one little town, a famous tennis tournament that draws from far and near crowds of enthusiasts in that gentle sport. It is a pretty scene with the spectators’ seats banked with wild flowers, and a background of great oaks that encircle the courts.
For such as enjoy a bit of roughing it, the mountains that rise to the north of the Ojai — the Topatopas, the San Rafaels, the Pine Mountain range and many another — offer adventure. They form part of the Santa Barbara National Forest Reserve, and in their wild canons flow picturesque creeks abounding in trout. The very names of many of these mountain streams are fascinating — the Ma-tilija, the Sespe, the Piru, the Castaic, the Agua Blanca. Your tenderfoot tongue cannot pronounce them at first sight of course, but you can pay for a fishing license,1 make up a little party, hire horses and a packer, and some spring day after the trout season opens, set out for any one of a score of good places they will tell you about at Nordhoff. Make
1 Obtained of County Clerk or deputies; $i per year for resident Californians, and $3 per year for non-residents.86 Finding the Worth While in California
a week of it, if you can, and when you are not whipping the pools and riffles, clamber through the sage and greasewood up Darien peaks for far Pacific views; ride your pony along trails cut in the canon’s• sides, flower-bordered and musical with birds, steeping yourself the while in the glorious sunshine, the pungent fragrances, the silence; sleep under the stars, and rise to greet the morning star; and you will in this brief week learn more of what California really means to the body and soul of man than in a year of hanging around tourist hotels, undeniably pleasant as such a year could be.
If circumstances deny you an outing of that sort, you may at least board the auto-stage at Ojai for any one of several plain but comfortable resorts from 5 to 8 miles distant in the canons of the Matilija (Matil'-ee-hali) Creek — as Matilija Sulphur Springs, Lyon’s Springs, and Wheeler’s. There you may w'ear your old clothes without exciting comment (indeed, you will excite comment if you do not), and your total expense need be only a couple of dollars or so a day. The M’atilija region is famous for its wild and ruggedAbout Santa Barbara
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beauty,1 and offers you moreover, medicinal waters to drink and hot springs to dabble in. As the altitude of these resorts is only about 1500 feet, they usually remain open throughout the winter as well as summer.
The islands of the Santa Barbara Channel cannot fail to excite the traveler’s curiosity as he watches them from his bench on the city’s Plaza del Mar. They are, however, private property given over mostly to sheep raising, and as a rule strangers are not welcomed unless on business, or provided with a permit previously obtained from the owners. Santa Cruz Island, famous in years agone for its fine wines, affords an exception in that the privilege of landing is given a Santa Barbara boatman who carries visitors to this island in his gasoline launch. In summer a small camp is operated at Pelican Bay, for the convenience of such as do not wish to return to the mainland the same day. The shores of Santa Cruz are cut into numerous caverns and arches by the persistent sea, and it is the remarkable char-
1 It is the Matilija Canon that gives the name to the Matilija poppy (Romneya Coulter¡) the most regal of all California wild flowers. It is rather abundant in this canon but is found wild in some other parts of southern California as well.88 Finding the Worth While in California
acter of some of these that induces most travelers to make the 25-mile trip. The most famous are Cueva Valdez and the Painted Cave — the latter so called from the varied and striking coloration of the walls. The late Charles F. Holder’s description of this cavern is so graphic1 that I cannot do better than quote it:
“ The first room opening from the sea,” he writes, “may be sixty or seventy feet high, the walls beautifully colored or painted. From this room we pushed the boat in and in until we came to a dark door opening somewhat but not much larger than the boat. As we approached, a wave came rolling in, sobbing, hissing, groaning in a strange uncanny manner, and I noticed that, as it swept in, it almost closed the entrance. It was not an alluring prospect, and I did not wonder that the men displayed so little curiosity. There was but one thing to do. We pushed our boat as near the hole as possible and waited for the next roller, and as it filled the entrance we pushed in immediately after it and got through before its successor came along, a proceeding easily accomplished. At once we were in almost absolute darkness, a small vivid eye of light representing the entrance. It has been my good fortune to hear some singular noises in my day, but the pandemonium, worse confounded, in this cave under the mountain of Point Diablo at times exceeded anything I had ever heard.
1 “ The Channel Islands of California.”THE BEACH AT SANTA BARBARA
Santa Barbara is built on a cove at tlie foot of the beautiful Santa Ynës Sierra, and its shore is protected from the storms of the Pacific by a barrier of low-lying islandsAbout Santa Barbara
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“We had made a flambeau of waste, and tying this to a stick endeavored to see the roof or ceiling; we also attempted to sound the cave, but all to no purpose. I should imagine it was one hundred feet across. I found on the side a ledge, and beyond and under this were other caves or passages through which the water went roaring, hissing, and reverberating in a series of sounds which I could easily understand would demoralize any one with weak nerves. There were two ladies with us. Captain Burnham and I rowed, and our fair passengers were animated with a desire for investigation. I am rather inclined to explorations myself, yet I could not but think that if a particularly heavy earthquake should occur at that time and lower the entrance a foot or two, we should be imprisoned beneath the mountain. As I stepped out on the shelf, screams, yells, and shouts seemed to come from the dark unfathomed caves far beyond, and all the evil demons of this sea cave apparently sprang to life. At the same time a particularly big wave came in, filling the entrance completely, and as it went reverberating on into countless other caves, it released myriads of reverberations and echoes until the sound was deafening, confusing, and appalling.
“ The cave was a sea-lions’ den. When I stepped onto the ledge I dislodged several by almost stepping on them in the dark, and their barking protests as they dashed out added to the volume of sound. As they swam beneath us the water blazed with phosphorescence, turning the place into a veritable witches’ caldron. I crashed two planks together to find out what sound really was, and we could hear it bounding off and far away into the interstices of the mountain in an appalling series of sounds.90 Finding the Worth While in California
“ Watching our chance, we reversed the operation ; the moment a wave came in we pushed the boat through into the dazzling sunshine.”
Besides its caves, Santa Cruz Island offers the attraction of an interesting wild life to any who will stay long enough to get acquainted with it. There is a rather abundant tree growth including the exceedingly rare island ironwood or Lyonothamnus, found only on certain of these islands off the southern California Coast; while in the numerous canons carrying little creeks down to the sea, the plant-lover will find delight in the luxuriant growth of ferns and flowers. The bird life, too, combining both sea and land species, is alluring; and if your taste is for barbecued pig, there is the hunting (with a dash of danger in it) of the wild hogs that are found both on this island and the neighboring Santa Rosa. For this, however, permission must first be had of the owners.CHAPTER V
MONTEREY, CALIFORNIA’S SPANISH CAPITAL
Everybody likes Monterey. If, for instance, you are satisfied with taking your ease in your inn, with an occasional go at golf on a breezy course overlooking the Pacific, there is the Hotel Del Monte in the midst of a charming woodland park, pretty enough in itself to spend a month or two in. If history interests you, there are picturesque old buildings of Spanish and middle American times, many of which some Civic Club has obligingly labeled so that there be no mistake as to their significance — as the Spanish custom house, the first California theater, the first American capitol building; and there is the charming old parish church with its whalebone footway to the door, and its many interesting relics of Padre Serra’s day, while 5 miles distant is the Mission of San Carlos where Serra is buried. 9192 Finding the Worth While in California
If you are literary, you may walk the paths that Stevenson so often trod, when in the autumn of 1879, his frail, wracked body “ all to whistles,” he came hither and spent three months, and here between spells of desperate illness wrote “ The Pavilion on the Links ” (which you will find in his “ New Arabian Nights”), began “The Amateur Emigrant,” and planned “ Prince Otto ”;1 and you will see the house he is said to have lodged in. If your bent is picture making or taking, Monterey— town and surroundings — is brimful of subjects; and if you are just a plain American citizen on a tour there are delectable broiled cutlets of fresh salmon and the Seventeen Mile Drive.
Next to Del Monte, this Seventeen Mile Drive is the most advertised feature of Monterey. It deserves every praise. Unfortunately, the automobile has so much shortened the time consumed that a 20-mile appendage has been thought needful, twisting about the
1 See Mrs. Osbourne’s ״ Stevenson in California ” for an extended account of Stevenson’s life at Monterey. He left this town for San Francisco just before Christinas, 1879, and never returned. In “ Across the Tlains ” he has a chapter on Monterey as he knew it, but it seems not to have been written until after his departure.California’s Spanish Capital
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upper hills, but it seems to me a sort of anticlimax. For the cream of the business is in the original seventeen. One strong feature of the drive is the variety of its beauty; new sorts of scenery are continually unfolding, like a dissolving panorama — forest, grassy flower-dotted downs, beach and open sea, rocky headlands where the surf seethes and tosses, majestic dunes and woods again. On this drive one passes through groves of the wonderful windswept old cypresses at Cypress Point. These trees are of a species — Cupressus macrocarpa— that is found nowhere indigenous in all the world except along a few miles of this bit of coast, though it is now widely distributed in cultivation. A little further on, in the pines at Pebble Beach is Del Monte Lodge, a rustic sort of stopping place of the first order, where I once had an abalone chowder that I have always remembered as a culinary masterpiece. The abalone, it may not be out of place to say, is a Pacific Coast shellfish, the meat of which, in its native condition, might easily deceive a cobbler into using it for sole leather; so that, though highly prized as an edible by Mongolians and Japanese, it re-94 Finding the Worth While in California
quires expert treatment of peculiar skill to render it palatable to Americans. Del Monte Lodge at the time of my visit had an artist of the kitchen who fully measured up to that requirement, and for aught I know it still has. If you are interested in oddities of the table, a steak or chowder of abalone is a feature of the Pacific Coast worth becoming acquainted with. Many Pacific Coast fishes, by the way, are invested with names that strike Easterners as novel, and bills of fare list such items as barracuda, sand dab, bonito, albacore, pompano and yellowtail. Do not be afraid of them — all are delicious. Oysters, however, you will do well to pass by in California; the native variety is poor, and those imported from the Atlantic, disappointing. As for lobster, what is called such is no lobster at all, but crayfish. Nevertheless, it is a capital substitute. The crab of the Pacific is famous for its delicate flavor, and some of the clams, too, are particularly good.
Like so many places that charm the traveler with their picturesqueness, the town of Monterey is rather short of home comforts for transient visitors and they are best domiciledCalifornia’s Spanish Capital
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outside of it. Those whose pocketbooks cannot stand the drain of the Del Monte prices, find a good hotel at more moderate rates run on the European plan at Pacific Grove, a sort of Hesperian Asbury Park that immediately adjoins Monterey on the south. You may, too, at Pacific Grove rent rooms in private families and board yourself as desired. It is a pleasant little town situated on a sunny, breezy bluff, at whose foot is a bathing beach, and from it all the sights of the Monterey peninsula are of convenient access. Five miles from the coast, and reached by stage, is another and rather unique beach resort, Carmel-by-the-Sea. It would be equally appropriate to call it — Carmel-in-the-Wood, for it is in the midst of a pine forest, whose borders extend to the edge of the surf. If you enjoy quiet, retired beauty, you have it at Carmel, with its picturesque, flowery dunes, its twilight forest streets, its pretty gardens, its exquisite views seaward and across the charming little bay to the green sierra of Santa Lucia, melting far southward in haze and mystery. The place is a favorite resort of artists and writers, several of whom have unpretentious bunga-C)6 Finding the Worth While in California
lows under the pines, and support an open air Forest Theater in a natural amphitheater of the wood for the production of plays new and old. Visitors at Carmel have the choice of a pleasant hotel, or of renting furnished bungalows by the week or month, and either boarding themselves or buying their meals in the town.
At the southern edge of the Carmel woods, you look down upon the sunny Carmel Valley through which the little Rio Carmelo winds its leisurely way to the crescent bay of Carmel, whose sparkling waters also lie before you, backed by the low bulk of Punta Lobos creeping seaward — the Point of the Sea Lions. That little valley is one of the centers of California history. It was named by Vizcaino, the navigator, in 1602, in honor of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, to whose order his accompanying friars belonged. Then for 167 years no white foot touched it until, in 1769, Portola, on his famous march from San Diego to San Francisco Bay and back again, camped here; and most important of all, here in 1771 Junípero Serra established the second of his Missions and dedicated it to St. Charles Bor-California’s Spanish Capital 97
romeo. He founded it first at Monterey the previous year, but after a brief trial transferred it hither. For 13 years, until the time of his death, which took place here in 1784, this San Carlos on the Carmelo was Serra’s especial Mission; and for long afterwards it continued to be the official home of the Fathers President of the California Missions — the effective heart of such Christian civilization as California then had. Hither came all visiting travelers of importance to pay their respects to the Padres; as the Count de la Perouse in 1786, with his present of Chilean potatoes — the first white potatoes to be brought into California, it is thought; and, a few years later, Captain George Vancouver, who has left us the only sketch of the Mission as it looked in the early days, and who presented the Fathers with the solace of a tuneful barrel organ.
This Mission of San Carlos on the Carmel is one of the most interesting of the chain, with a star-shaped window in its front and an egg-shaped dome over the belfry. Being of stone, it has better withstood the neglect and vandalism succeeding the Secularization than98 Finding the Worth While in California
have most, though unfortunately the old tile roof fell in long ago. This has been replaced by a shingle covering, more useful than ornamental. There is a caretaker who lives in a nearby house adjoining the ancient pear orchard of the Padres (of which some trees are still in bearing), and for a small fee shows visitors through. Before the altar are interred the remains of four of the first Franciscans, Serra one of the three, Padre Juan Crespi another. The latter was a wide-awake, sympathetic friar, whom Serra especially loved, and at whose side he desired that he should be buried. Crespi was a diarist of the Portola expedition in 1769, and his journals are invaluable to the student of early California history. Mass is held in the church on the fourth Sunday of each month; and annually on San Carlos Day, November 4 (or the next Sunday following), are more elaborate services including an outdoor procession that goes chanting around the church with acolytes in scarlet and white bearing the cross and a relic of the saint on a litter. Country people come from far and wide, a picturesque assembly of American ranchers, vaqueros, soldiers fromCalifornia’s Spanish Capital
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the Presidio, Spanish people, Mexicans, and some tourists. Readers of Stevenson may recall his sympathetic description of the service which he attended in this Mission when there were still Indians to participate.1 Owing to the solitary situation of this Mission, it has been deemed wise in the interest of safety to keep the old time relics of Carmel in the parish church at Monterey. And by the way, people who get their history from newspapers will tell you that that Monterey church was also a Mission; but it never was — being merely a successor to the Spanish soldiers’ chapel of the Presidio, and of later founding than the Mission on the Carmel. There is a very illuminating little guide book to the Mission San Carlos by L. S. and M. E. Slevin of Carmel, which is well worth its small price to the visitor. It possesses the distinction of painstaking accuracy.
Among the drives around Monterey the one to Point Lobos, a couple of miles beyond Carmel, is enjoyable for a short airing; and the noble point itself with its storm-tossed cy-
l “ Across the Plains ”— in the chapter " Monterey ” (“ An Old Pacific Capital ” of the early editions).ioo Finding the Worth While in California
presses, fine rocks drenched with surf and spray, and magnificent ocean outlook, is an ideal place to while away a day. Another trip which may be taken by the mail stage, or by private automobile if you do not mind bumping some, is to Arbolado on the Big Sur River, about 13 miles south of Carmel, among the toes of the Santa Lucia Mountains. The road for much of the way skirts the sea, which is sometimes a blue duplicate of the Mediterranean, sometimes a gray battleground of wind and fog, but always alluring, whatever its mood. You are here at about the southern limit of the redwood belt, and in places the road passes through groves of these magnificent trees. At Arbolado is an unconventional stopping place frequented principally by hunters, anglers, and summer campers. If you go by stage you will probably have to spend the night there; but if in your own automobile, you may do as you please. In its entirety this drive, unkempt as it is, is one of the best and most accessible that I know of, to give the traveler a taste of the exhilaration and joy of the wild coast scenery of California.
The sequoias are among the rich naturalCalifornia’s Spanish Capital ioi
legacies of California, and no lover of trees can afford to leave them unvisited. There are two species — this redwood of the coast country (Sequoia sempervirens) never found out of reach of the ocean fogs, and the Big Tree (Sequoia gigamtea) found only in the Sierra Nevada.1
The most accessible of the redwoods for the tourist in a hurry, are those in a small private grove at Big Trees Station on the Southern Pacific line between Monterey and San Francisco that runs via Santa Cruz. The trees are close to the station 6 miles north of Santa Cruz, and are unusually large specimens of the species, the largest having a base diameter of 23 feet. The train service is frequent enough to permit a satisfying stop-over. Better if you have time, though, is the trip to the California Redwood Park in the Big Basin — a state reserve of 7,800 acres — where is a fine forest of the glorious trees, and where, any time from May 1 to October 1, you may
1 As an instance of the unreliability of popular names, you are quite likely to hear the Big Trees called redwood in the Sierras, while the redwoods are called Big Trees at Santa Cruz! These glorious trees were an object of veneration by the Rumsen Indians of the Monterey region.102 Finding the Worth While in California
live under them in a hotel or your own camp; and learn somewhat at first hand of the exquisite wild flowers of the redwood forest. The reserve is reached by a 12-mile automobile ride from Boulder Creek Station, which is an hour’s run from Santa Cruz on the Southern Pacific. Or you may do the trip from Monterey all the way by automobile, if you prefer — about 60 miles.
A pleasant automobile outing from Monterey for a single day — a round of about 70 miles — is across the broad Salinas Valley and the Gavilan Mountains into the San Benito Valley to the picturesque little village of San Juan Bautista. This is the seat of the old Franciscan Mission of the same name. There is a charming old-fashioned garden in the Mission quadrangle; and the church, now in a somewhat precarious state from earthquakes, possesses two features of interest rather out of the ordinary. The altar piece was decorated by the first American that officially settled in California — a Yankee sailor named Thomas Doak, who became a Catholic and a Californian about a century ago. He seems to have had a knack at painting and “ byA ROAD IN CALIFORNIA REDWOOD PARK Redwood Park is a State Reserve of 7,S00 acres, wherq from May 1 to October 1, hotels and camps are open
to the touristCalifornia’s Spanish Capital 103
the help of God and some Indian boys ” (as the record quaintly puts it), he did the altar decoration. The other feature of interest is the wall pulpit, from which sturdy Padre Arroyo de la Cuesta, who served at this Mission between 1808 and 1833, preached the gospel in 13 Indian dialects, as a label on the front affirms. Near the church is an old pear orchard, which had a great reputation in early times for the excellence of its fruit, and still bears. San Juan Bautista may also be reached by a short stage ride from Sargent’s Station on the Southern Pacific. There are some famous flower seed farms in the vicinity, and a view of acre upon acre of blooming garden flowers in broad ribbons of blue, red, pink, white, lavender and whatnot, is a pleasant possibility in the late spring or early summer.
One other sight, not difficult of achieving from Monterey, may be mentioned here — the remarkable rock formations known as the Vancouver Pinnacles, about 12 miles east of Soledad. The latter is a little town in the Salinas Valley on the Southern Pacific Coast Line, attainable by a rail journey of 50 miles from Monterey, or 46 by automobile (2104 Finding the Worth While in California
hours). The road to the Pinnacles from Soledad is only a fairly good mountain highway, with a stiff grade at times and some bad spots, on which account it is preferable not to attempt it with an automobile, but to hire a team and guide at Soledad. The trip thence to the Pinnacles and return will require 8 or 9 hours, including time for luncheon (which must be taken with you) and for exploring the region. The services of an experienced guide are necessary for this, as the ins-and-outs of the rocks and caverns are devious and very puzzling to the stranger; and you must remember that the guide had better be brought from Soledad or other valley town as few live near the Pinnacles, which are wild and primitive in the extreme.
The Pinnacles are now a National Monument, and are called Vancouver’s from the fact that that famous navigator made them known to the world, having visited them from Monterey in November, 1794. The sight so impressed him—״the most extraordinary mountains I ever beheld,” he writes — that he had his draughtsman make a sketch of it, a full page engraving of which may be foundCalifornia’s Spanish Capital 105
in the folio edition of “ Vancouver’s Voyages,” supplemented by a graphic pen picture by the Captain himself. The most noticeable features of the Pinnacles are the spire-like formations rising from 600 to 1000 feet from the ground, and suggesting the descriptive name.1 Quite as impressive to me are certain stupendous, terraced domes fluted with perpendicular grooves as clean as though cut out by titanic gouges, and carrying after storms streams of descending water whose fall echoes and reverberates from the neighboring rock walls with a remarkable clamor. Natural tunnels and narrow passages with perpendicular sides, sometimes all but blocked up by fallen boulders caught in the crevices, lead into the bowels of the mountain. Here are caves whose only light is from slits in the rocks hundreds of feet above you. Progressing from one to another, you scramble over crags and around ledges that seem more fitted for goats than men, and you crawl under others on hands and knees. It is no place for the fat and not much of a place for skirts, though I am told
1 The term “ Palisades ” has also been applied to them, and by this name they are known to many Central Californians.io6 Finding the Worth While in California
ladies are frequent visitors and enjoy the experience. By one rocky, precipitous passageway, as black as Erebus and descending as though to Avernus, you twist and drop and squirm your way until a far-away eye of sunlight guides you into a great cavern, called, I believe, the Banquet Hall, as big as a house, where there is the murmur of hidden waters and a delicious spring. You suddenly realize, then, that these caves and subterranean passages are remarkable in their dryness, whereas most caverns elsewhere are moist, if not actually wet. But then the Pinnacles formation is not of limestone as is usual in a region of caves, but a sort of pudding stone. There is more or less vegetation and tree growth about the base and lower sides of the rock masses; and for those who enjoy camping the adequate way to get acquainted is to come prepared to spend two or three days in this stupendous world of stone. You may then be your own guide, but be sure you bring a flashlight for the dark places. There is a lovely amphitheater somewhere there, whose existence you would never suspect unless you were shown it, or came upon it by accident, so hid-California's Spanish Capital 107
den is the entrance by a thicket of buckeye, wild cherry and live oak, and they call it the Bridal Chamber. Its walls rise like the sides of a well a sheer 500 or 600 feet to the blue sky, its only roof, and down one mossy, ferny side there drops, all spring and usually part of the summer, a slender waterfall to a basinlike pool. Try not to miss this when you visit the region, and pitch your camp there if you do camp. If there is anything of the poet in you, you will go away richer in enduring wealth than a lucky turn in the stock market could make you. And let the time be April or May, when all the way to the Pinnacles is green and flowery, and the wild roses and the buckeyes that line the watercourses are a mass of fragrant bloom.
Note: Four miles from Soledad on the western side of the Salinas River are the remains of the once famous Franciscan Mission of Nuestra Señora Dolorosísima de la Soledad. Unless one has a special interest in Mission history, there is now nothing there to make a visit worth while, as only a few roofless, half-melted adobe walls are left — a melancholy sight.CHAPTER VI
STOPPING OFF AT SAN JOSE
San José,1 while of later founding than several of the Mission establishments, was the first settlement in California to be regularly set up under Spanish law as a pueblo or town. That was in 1777, but there is nothing about the thorough-going little city of to-day to suggest such preeminence of age. In the present-day tourist’s itinerary it figures principally as the starting point for one of California’s star trips, to the summit of Mount Hamilton (4209 feet), 26 miles distant, where the Lick Observatory, famous for its 36-inch refracting telescope under the management of the University of California, is an object of interest to the astronomical. For the general traveler, however, the exhilarating drive to the top and back again is the thing, and in itself worth the few dollars charged for it. An auto-stage
1 It may not be amiss to call attention to the pronunciation, which is San Ho-say’.
IO8Stopping off at San José
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makes the trip every day but Sunday, departing from San José in the morning and returning about 4 p. m. On Saturdays there is a second run, leaving the town at 4:30 p. m., and getting back at 11 the same night, thus allowing visitors an opportunity to look through the telescopes, which are open to the public that one evening of the week. The road is a good one of easy grade, with little tree growth near it, so that the magnificent view is unobstructed, first over the lovely Santa Clara Valley with its millions of deciduous fruit trees, then of nearer and smaller valleys in the hills which the road threads, where comfortable little ranch houses nestle, and wild flowers of many sorts nod you welcome. Finally there are the wider views fro'm Hamilton’s upper altitudes whence, under favorable atmospheric conditions, you get a fine sight of the sweep of the blue Santa Cruz Mountains, of the Pacific’s flat expanse, of San Francisco and its noble Bay, of Mounts Tamalpais and Diablo, the San Joaquin and Sacramento Valleys, and the snowy crest line of the Sierra Nevada. Even Mount Shasta’s white crown, 200 miles away, has been observed. Do not be disap-no Finding the Worth While in California
pointed, however, if you do not see all these matters, for not even a day in June is rarer than those times of perfect clarity needful for such conquests of the eye. Seven miles short of the summit, at Smith’s Creek, is a hotel where meals are obtainable, and where, if you like, you may remain the night and enjoy the deliciousness of early morning on the mountain. There is a steep foot-trail to the summit from this point, which about quarters the distance by the highway; but those ultimate 7 miles of road are a feature of the trip not to be missed, they so abound in loops and bends and exquisite outlooks. There are said to be 365 curves between Smith’s and the Observatory, one for each day in the year; and when taken in a machine at a smart rate of speed they create a roll that is almost as disturbing to a sensitive stomach as a sea voyage. The down trip, particularly, with the car careering around the corners and doubling on itself at about 20 miles an hour, is, I am sure, quite as thrilling as when in the old days the horses did the same road at a frightful trot to keep the stage from running them down.
Another mountain trip that may be madeStopping off at San José hi
from San José as a base, is into the Santa Cruz Mountains with the Big Basin and California State Redwood Park, 40 miles distant, as an objective. This is the same trip referred to in the chapter on Monterey, but from a different angle. It is not suitable to make it during the rainy season, but in late spring and summer it is full of beauty. Auto stages are run in summer from San José to the inn in the Park, but if you can afford to rent a car outright and make a day of it at your own gait, this will be preferable. The road is a good one, and' after passing through Los Gatos, a charming little town in the Santa Cruz foothills some 10 miles southwest of San José, it climbs and winds: through a delightful region forested with redwoods, madronos, tanbark oak and Douglas spruce. If the season be late May or early June, the air will be fragrant with the delicious perfume of the California buckeye, which brightens the roadsides and stream borders with its stately thyrses of white bloom. Azaleas, wild honeysuckle, thimbleberry, the graceful evergreen huckleberry,1 and lush ferns, make a tangle that
1 The botanists’ Vacciiiiuin ovatum, very different from the112 Finding the Worth While in California
reminds you of the woods of the humid East; for wherever the redwoods make a forest, there must be abundant moisture׳ in both soil and air, and here the latter is o'ften drenched in fog. Then, too, there are many low-growing woodland wild flowers quite of other sorts from those in the drier inland country — tril-liums, clintonias, oxalis huge of leaf and blossom, chocolate fritillarias and dainty yellow violets, whose creeping vines hang over the edge of roadside banks and capture your heart entirely. Even foxgloves may be seen growing wild in the forest, escaped from some old-time garden. Little villages, camps, and pretty woodland bungalows are scattered throughout these mountains, whither people come to summer from as far away as San Francisco, and lend a pleasant touch of humanness to the wildwood. After Boulder Creek is passed, the road runs for awhile through a lumbered region — more cheerful than many such, however, as the desolated area is hopeful with the thrifty young sprouts of a
Eastern huckleberry. The long slender branches, with leaves of shining green, are a favorite indoor adornment with central Californians.Stopping off at San José
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fresh redwood growth. Then crossing a ridge, you coast down into the Big Basin, a huge bowl in the mountain’s heart, filled with a primitive redwood forest which the State has set aside for all time for the pleasure of the people. Many of the trees are of gigantic proportions, approximating 300 feet in height and 15 in base diameter. Of the 7800 acres owned by the State in the Big Basin district, 2500 are virgin timber, the redwoods (as usual wherever they occur) being more or less associated with other trees, as Douglas spruce, madrono, and oaks.1 At the heart of the Big Basin forest is a modest hotel, where meals may be had — and lodging, too, if desired. The return may be made without retracing your tracks, by continuing northward, and by the beautiful Congress Springs Canon, through Saratoga into San José.
1 The Coast redwood is not credited with the great longevity of its cousin the Big Tree of the Sierra Nevada. The oldest redwood recorded by Mr. Geo. D. Sudworth, Government dendrologist, in his “ Forest Trees of the Pacific Slope,” is 1373 years, ascertained by counting the rings of the stump, 21 feet in diameter. A pronounced habit of the tree after being cut down, is to seek to reproduce itself by sending up sprouts from the spreading roots, thus forming in time a circle of fine, large trees around the remains of the original individual. Such groups are called “ redwood circles,”114 Finding the Worth While in California
That little village of Saratoga is associated with a local fiesta known as Blossom Day, which occurs here every spring at a date fixed afresh each year when the fruit trees are at the high tide of bloom. I do not think there is anything about the ceremonies themselves that would pay the non-Californian to go much out of his way for them, but the sight of the Santa Clara Valley at that time in full bloom of prune, pear and cherry, is certainly worth traveling a hundred miles to see. This fine valley, one of the most famous for fertility in all California, specializes in deciduous fruits ; and in late March its millions on millions of trees, set orchard by orchard, are for several days an almost solid sheet of white bloom. At that time sight-seers from far and near come by steam train, trolley, and automobile to enjoy the ride through the shining miles of blossom.
San José has some Mission interest, too. Three miles distant is what is left of the Mission Santa Clara de Asis, founded in 1777, and in its day one of the most famous of the chain. There for nearly 40 years (1793-1830) officiated Padre Magin Catalâ, the onlyStopping off at San José 115
one of all the Franciscan brotherhood in California that has been made a candidate for beatification. His case is still pending, I believe. The saintliness of his character was so marked, and his spiritual powers so pronounced, that even to this day, long years after his decease, his offices are invoked by pious Spanish-Californians as though he were a saint indeed. He was a strange, medieval character, gifted, it is claimed, with a remarkable spirit of prophecy, which enabled him to predict, among other matters, the discovery of gold in California, the passing of the province to American rule, the rise of San Francisco; and the great earthquake and fire.1 Unfortunately the present buildings at Santa Clara, which are occupied as a Jesuit College, preserve nothing whatever of the original edifice, except some walls which have been boarded over, and a bit of the original cross encased in another on the campus. Nevertheless, a spare hour may be pleasantly employed by taking the street car or private conveyance thither, by way of the Alameda — a broad avenue lined
1 See “ The Holy Man of Santa Clara,” by Fr. Zephyrin Engelhardt,Ii6 Finding the Worth While in California
with some fine old trees, and dating from early Mission times. This was then the road to church from pueblo San José, and on Sundays and feast-days must often have presented a picturesque sight as the townfolk in Spanish garb rode back and forth, or lounged and promenaded in the shadow of the trees. The college garden with its arbored walks is very charming.
There is also a San José Mission — not, however, as one would assume, in San José city, but a dozen miles away, embosomed in vine-clad hills to the east of San Francisco Bay. It is only a remnant, but unlike Santa Clara, what exists of it looks like a Mission, and whether you care for these relics of California’s romantic past or not, I feel like recommending a visit to it for such as have a taste for “ the harvest of the quiet eye.” The way thither makes an enjoyable outing in automobile from either San José or San Francisco; or, if you travel by train, leave this at Irvington, where a bus is usually waiting and for a quarter will take you the couple of miles to the Mission, at the heart of one of those drowsy half-Latin villages which the traveler so oftenStopping off at San José
117
comes upon in central California. This one is called Mission San José, and the Portuguese element is an ascendant one. The only part of the Mission standing is the convento wing — the church part vanished long ago — and it offers nothing to the visitor unread in Mission history, but a few empty, dusty rooms, facing the village street. To the student, however, these crumbling chambers speak of one of the most famous of the Franciscans, Padre Nar-ciso Duran who ruled at the Mission for a large part of its existence. He was an accomplished musician, and his orchestra of 30 Indians, with flutes, violins, trumpets and drums, made Mission San José renowned in its day as a fount of sweet sounds.
Beside the Mission building, half hidden in trees, is a steepled Catholic church, with an old graveyard shadowy under Monterey cypresses. Passing through this — where if you know a bit of Spanish or a trifle of Portuguese, you will find an interest in deciphering the epitaphs on the time-worn headstones and crosses, all so different from our curt American mortuary literature — you come in a moment to a wicket that lets you into the lovelyn8 Finding the Worth While in California
garden of the Dominican Sisters’ convent and orphanage adjoining. It is a garden of old-fashioned flowers, palms, fruit trees — figs, apricots, almonds, lemons, oranges — and abounding olives, some of the Padres’ setting out — such a garden as befits
—“pensive nun, devout and pure,
Sober, steadfast, and demure.”
There are shady walks, a-twitter with birds, and one, olive-lined, is marked with rose-entwined shrines, corresponding in number to the mysteries of the rosary, which, as you know, was instituted by St. Dominick. A life-size statue of the saint, his feet in a bed of growing ferns, stands in a little kiosk in the cemetery of the Sisters, which occupies a hedged-in corner of the garden. It is the cheerfulest little campo santo imaginable, rioting in flowers and sunshine, with a background of olives and cypresses. A row of trim white crosses, each bearing the simple name of a sister departed — Soror Cecilia, or Stanislaus, or Hyacintha, may she lie in peace — marks the resting place of the mortality here awaiting immortality. And every grave is itself a miniature garden,Stopping off at San José
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neatly bordered, each like the other. T think the Sisters cannot be much disturbed by tourists ; for they still are most hospitable to visitors and whenever I have met them at their tasks about the grounds, they have made me smilingly welcome.
As this chapter seems to be resolving itself into a record of cemeteries, I may as well mention one more connected with this Mission San José. A quarter of a mile away on the road to Irvington and on what was formerly Mission land, is a wall with a gateway of striking but modern construction. It is the old neophyte burying ground and within upon a little knoll stands a cross and a granite block, the latter bearing this inscription
HERE SLEEP
FOUR THOUSAND OF THE OHLONE TRIBE,
WHO HELPED THE PADRES BUILD THIS MISSION SAN JOSE DE GUADELUPE SACRED BE THEIR MEMORY
It is a kindly and unique tribute to the memory of some of the first Californians.CHAPTER VII
SAN FRAN'CISCO AND ACROSS THE BAY
To begin with, don’t say Frisco, which is second rate; and if you must refer to the disaster of 1906, please do not call it the earthquake but the fire. The observation of these simple rules will start you right in the Pacific Coast metropolis.
While there is a certain sameness about all cities, San Francisco has a marked individuality; and if you first arrive there from the south, you are struck at once with the atmosphere of stirring business (if there is not a strike on) that pervades its down town streets — which of course is to be expected of the commercial and financial center of the Coast. It is a very cosmopolitan city, as much so, in kind, as New York, and being much smaller (the population is not very much over half a million) is comparatively easily seen. I do
120San Francisco and Across the Bay 121
not consider the sight-seeing auto-car in its present stage of development an attained ideal, and the vaudeville jokes and surprising misinformation imparted by the conductors make it needlessly worse; nevertheless, it is about the best existing way for the stranger of modest means to get a concrete notion of the physical aspects of San Francisco. You will find the stands of several of these conveyances about the hotels and along lower Market Street. One of the trips, occupying a couple of hours and conducted by the Peck-Judah Company, 672 Market Street, embraces a run through the shopping and business district, the beautiful Golden Gate Park,1 and a short stop at the Cliff House (famous among bon vivants} with a view, through its windows, of Seal Rocks and the Pacific knocking at the Golden Gate. The return is through the residential and hotel districts to the point of starting. It is as comprehensive as any, and costs a dollar and a half.
1 An interesting historical feature of this Park is the Prayer-book Cross, erected a few years ago to commemorate the first Protestant service on this coast, held by doughty Sir Francis Drake and his chaplain in 1579. The actual place of the religious rite, however, was not here but on the shore of Drake’s Bay, some 20 miles to the north.122 Finding the Worth While in California
For visitors who do not need a leading string and who have an eye for the picturesque, a pleasanter way to get into the atmosphere of San Francisco, is to take the democratic street cars. This has the advantage of putting you face to face with the San Franciscans themselves, who will probably prove more interesting to you for the time than your fellow Kansans, Chicagoans and New Yorkers on the “ rubberneck.” Ask a policeman and he will show you a choice of cars to the Golden Gate Park, to the Cliff House, or Sutro Heights (with its fine Pacific view) ; and you can go one way and return another. From the Ferry house at the foot of Market Street, there are a score of different lines to other points about town, as Chinatown, the Mission Dolores, Russian Hill and so on. Be sure to include in this street car itinerary some of the little cable cars which are constructed for service up and down the city’s famous hills. San Franciscans are rather apologetically proud of them, as one is of a donkey in the paddock, and almost any resident will tell which are best for the most exhilarating climbs andSan Francisco and Across the Bay 123
coasts. Personally, I am fond of one that starts on O’Farrell Street at Market (marked O’Farrell and Hyde, I think), and passes over Nob Hill and Russian Hill to the North Beach district. The cable cars are open at each end, the seats placed lengthwise along the car and back to back, facing outward as on an Irish jaunting car. Sit firmly on a front seat with your back to the gripman and when he shouts “ curve,” hold on tight to avoid being spilled out as he rounds a corner. As the car climbs and grinds its way up the steep hills there is spread before you the wonder of magnificent views gradually unfolding, of housetops and bay, and the Golden Gate, of vessels in the harbor, and of misty mountain tops beyond. Then, the summit attained, you are appalled to see ahead your tracks plunging nearly straight on end down the other side of the hill, and the gripman, putting on the brakes, nonchalantly sends the car spinning down the grade, as though it were the most natural thing in the world for street cars to run on their heads. Of course you are at first half breathless from fright, but in a moment, fright!24 Finding the Worth While in California
gives place to the exhilaration of the mad coasting, and safely arrived at the bottom, you are eager for a fresh whirl.
Another interesting trip of this hilly sort is to take the “ Market and Powell, Bay and Taylor” car on Powell Street at Market, which lands you within a block of Meiggs and Fisherman’s wharves, a quaint, foreign, fishy region where Portuguese and Italian are more spoken than English. Returning, take the car (No. 15) on Powell Street, that runs via Kearney Street, and it will give you a passing glimpse of the Latin Quarter, Portsmouth Square and Chinatown. It is a simple, inexpensive joy, this of doing the San Francisco hills in a cable car; but my word for it, if there is anything of your wholesome childhood left in your make-up, you will remember that nickel or two’s worth of fun as long as any pleasure that happens to you in California.
A chief feature among San Francisco’s attractions to tourists is Chinatown, a few minutes’ walk from the business center. Every California town of any size has its Chinese quarter, but this of San Francisco is by farSan Francisco and Across the Bay 125
the largest on the Pacific Coast — a compact city within a city, with queer oriental smells, architecture turned up at the eaves, fascinating window displays of goods strange, fantastic and beautiful, and a population of some 20,000, who seem to live mostly in the streets. The entire district has been rebuilt since the great fire, and to those who remember the old Chinatown, the present one lacks something of the fascination that went up in the smoke of 1906? Part of this shortcoming is due to the relative newness, but more I think to the change that since the revolution has come over the aspect of the Chinese people themselves — the operation of that spirit of New China which wills not of queues and is prone to invest itself in American clothes. None the less, it is a very interesting quarter, the like of which is not to be seen elsewhere in America. Of course the sight-seeing companies will want you to go with them in the evening and trapse about in the wake of a voluble guide; but if one’s tastes are not for that kind of thing, and
1 Something of that fascination is preserved to us in a volume entitled “ Old Chinatown,” a collection of remarkable photographs of street scenes by Dr. Arnold Gentlie, with text by Will Irwin.126 Finding the Worth While in California
if one is not afraid of Chinamen, a far better time may be had sauntering about by one’s self, or with a congenial companion or two. Whether day or night, you will be just as safe as anywhere in the city, and there is pleasure in noting things for yourself. Stand in some shadowy corner and watch the people come j and go on their various errands — the natty young Chinamen in their sack coats and derbies, the older men in broad brims, sandals and chintz blouses, the women and girls in pantalettes, and the jolly little children, their moonlike faces smiling at one another’s infantile jokes in Chinese. Enjoy the sight of the open to-the-air grocery shops and the curbstone markets with their queer vegetables, the druggists’ windows with their displays of desiccated remedies, the street walls red with scrappy bulletins in Chinese lettering, the pungent smell of punk sticks. Drop into a tea house and have sugarless green tea in handleless little cups, and rice cakes and ginger and lichi nuts, served by almond-eyed damsels in sandals.
See the movies in Chinese, if you like; and linger over the wonderful showcases of the dozens of oriental shops which allure you atSan Francisco and Across the Bay 127
every turn.1 Stroll through the narrow alleys, and look into the joss-houses ; nobody will interfere with you, if you behave decently; and it will all be a feast of the picturesque.
Adjoining and half enclosed by Chinatown on the east is Portsmouth Square. This is the site of the plaza of early San Francisco, and here in 1846, when San Francisco was still Yerba Buena,2 a Mexican village of 150 people, Captain Montgomery of the U. S. Sloop-of-War Portsmouth, raised the American flag, and took possession in the name of the United States. To the literary it is of interest because it was a haunt of Robert Louis Stevenson, and here is a memorial to him standing against a banking of poplar trees — the first monument ever erected to him, I believe. It serves a double purpose, a fountain of water to the thirsty, and a well of inspiration to such drooping spirits as will take to heart the brave message cut upon the stone:
1	Connoisseurs in oriental goods and artwork will find quite outside of Chinatown — at Gumps’ on Post Street a few blocks from the St. Francis Hotel — a remarkable stock of such matters quite worth a visit. This establishment is one of the show places of the San Francisco shopping district.
2	The name San Francisco was not adopted for the town until after the American occupation, namely in 1847. Previously it had been applied only to the Mission.!28 Finding the Worth While in California
To be honest, to be kind; to earn a little, to spend a little less ; to make upon the whole a family happier by his presence; to renounce when that shall be necessary and not be embittered ; to keep a few friends but these without capitulation; above all on the same grim condition to keep friends with himself — here is a task for all that a man has of fortitude and delicacy.
I am afraid the preachment is aimed rather high for the habitués of Portsmouth Square, which seems to be principally a rendezvous and lounging place for down-and-outs, the unemployed, and the yellow little folk of Chinatown, who enjoy rolling about the grass just as if they were white. Still, who knows ?
From the Square one sees to the north a steep hill bare at top but with houses clinging thickly to its sides and innumerable lines of drying clothes flung to the breeze. That is Telegraph Hill, the center of the Latin Quarter, and long beloved of artists and Bohemians, who still find there inspiration for their brushes and pens,1 and six-course Italian din-
1 William Keith is said to have once had a studio on this Hill. It derives its name from the fact that from it in the days of the Argonauts the arrival of vessels off the Golden Gate was signaled over the town.San Francisco and Across the Bay 129
tiers at a price within the reach of all. The neighborhood for blocks around is inhabited by Italians, French, Portuguese, Mexicans and Greeks, but principally Italians, and is picturesque accordingly, and with a genuine flavor of its own. In‘ the little shops — here not run for tourists, but for the bona fide requirements of a foreign population that has scarcely begun to be Americanized — will be found many things typical of European home life, but not offered in the more pretentious establishments that cater to American trade. Here are pasta factories (where what careless Americans lump as macaroni is created in a score of different forms) ; shops where cheeses of astonishing sorts — made even from milk of asses, goats and mares — are sold; tortilla bakeries; candles for the saints. The Hill is an easy walk from Portsmouth Square, and if there is anything of the vagabond in you, you will want to take it. Going up Kearney Street you soon come to Broadway, the Hill’s principal business street, where you may turn off for the sights of the shop windows and open doors, and for a dish of tagliarini or ravioli at the “11 Troyqtore” or the “Fior130 Finding the Worth While in California
d’Italia ”;1 or you may keep straight ahead up the street, which is now so steep that you mount it on stone steps, in the wake perhaps of leisurely, gossiping Italian women, who make you think of Naples. It is a region of cheap flats and tenements, of multicolored laundry, of bird cages swinging at doorways and of abounding children all over the streets. It is slatternly, of course, but picturesque, with a picturesqueness differing from such quarters in other cities just as California differs from other States — sunny, clean-swept of the wind, and open to the kindly sky. At the very top is a dilapidated little park, where you may lean upon the parapet and dream, and enjoy a fine view of city, bay, and Golden Gate.
To the west of Telegraph Hill, a walk of
1 San Franciscans are a pleasure-loving class with a pronounced taste for good dinners served in restaurants. The restaurant life of San Francisco is a subject to itself, hardly within the scope of the present work. The city has long been noted as a good place to dine, and cafés of distinction are not only numerous but comparatively reasonable in their prices. Outside of the big hotels several of which have chefs of national reputation, there is, I am told, a restaurant to every 700 of the population. French and Italian preponderate, but the enforcement of the Eighteenth Amendment has caused some of the famous ones to close. For a now historic presentation of the subject, the curious are referred to Mr. Clarence E. Edwords’s entertaining little book “Bohemian San Francisco, its Restaurants and their Most Famous Recipes.”San Francisco and Across the Bay 131
half a dozen blocks, is Russian Hill, which we crossed a while ago in the cable car; but it is worth spending a little time on for the sake of a different sort of picturesqueness and for its beautiful outlook. Aim for the intersection of Taylor and Green Streets. You must be sound of wind to climb the precipitous streets and stairways, but the reward is an acquaintance with a choice residential section — flats and private homes perched upon the hillsides, and charming little tilted gardens walled in carefully to keep them, I suppose, from slipping into the bay. This is rather higher than Telegraph Hill, and the view, while similar, is more extended.
When I have added a word about the Mission, I shall have done with the matters of particular concern to the average tourist in the city itself; and I am not sure that he will care for the Mission. In fact he will not, unless historic remains appeal to him, for this little church of San Francisco de Asis,1 on Dolores Street around the corner from Sixteenth, is a modest affair and now put quite
1 Commonly known as Dolores Mission, from its situation near a pond called Laguna de los Dolores, long since dried up and built over.132 Finding the Worth While in California
into the shade by a huge modern church building that adjoins it. The Mission is, nevertheless, the most historical relic that the city contains, and was unharmed by the catastrophe of 1906. Founded in 1776, it with its adjacent village of Indian neophytes and the presidio (3 or 4 miles away, where a few soldiers were housed), formed for half a century all of San Francisco. What now remains is only a part — the church part — of a large quadrangular group of buildings covering several acres. Somewhere here, between 1776 and 1784, was written the first book in California — Padre Palou’s “ Life of Junípero Serra,” composed, as he plaintively remarks, “ amid the heathen surroundings of the port of San Francisco.” A card tacked on the door informs visitors that the Mission is open between 10 a. m. and noon, and from 2 to 5 r. m. The interior, though possessing features of antiquarian interest, is largely dismantled and no longer used for regular religious services. In the neglected cemetery (of which Bret Harte has sympathetically written) is the monument of Don Luis Antonio Argüello, first governor of Alta California under Mexico, and brother of that DoñaSan Francisco and Across the Bay 133
Concepcion Arguello, the heroine of California’s most famous romance. Her grave, however, is not here, but in the cemetery of the Dominican Sisters’ Convent at Benicia beyond the bay.
A visit to San Francisco is not complete without certain out of town trips, which may here be mentioned. One of these, for half a day, is the famous run by automobile down the peninsular highway to Palo Alto (about 35 miles). You may take sight-seeing cars or auto-bus for this, if you want to do it as economically as possible. The road traverses a beautiful region, shaded with magnificent eu-calypts, cypresses, and live oaks, and passes through many charming suburban towns, such as Burlingame, Atherton, San Mateo, Menlo Park and Los Altos, where wealthy San Franciscans maintain estates. For about ten miles the road is an almost unbroken avenue of the huge eucalyptus and cypress trees, lining both sides of the way. This is San Francisco’s favorite week-end and holiday drive, plentifully sprinkled with roadhouses for the entertainment of the hungry and thirsty, and unless you enjoy motoring in a crowd, I would134 Finding the Worth While in California
suggest making the trip any time but Saturday afternoon or Sunday. The Automobile Club of California were recently moved with curiosity to take a census of the cars passing a given point on this boulevard in an hour on an average Sunday afternoon in the spring, and found, I am assured, the total to be 900 odd — that is, 15 a minute. At Palo Alto the feature most insistent of attention is the Leland Stanford Jr. University, whose remarkable buildings modeled on the architecture of the Missions, are in the midst of a fine estate, just to the west of the town. If you have time and inclination to drive down this boulevard again, an interesting variant is to turn off at San Mateo by the road to Half Moon Bay on the sea, and return to San Francisco by the Ocean Shore Boulevard through an open, rolling country with a succession of beautiful marine outlooks.
Another half day drive by automobile is to ferry to Oakland and thence follow the road to Mount Diablo, which stands bare and bald, a solitary peak, some 30 miles east of San Francisco. There is a good automobile toll road to the summit (3855 feet) offering a viewSan Francisco and Across the Bay 135
somewhat similar to that from Mount Hamilton. The return may be made by another way. The round from San Francisco to the top and back may be done in about 5 hours, and with a little more time, one may include the beautiful Highland Drive along the hills back of Oakland and Berkeley, which are to San Francisco geographically as Jersey City and Hoboken to New York.
Berkeley is worth more time, however, than a few fleeting minutes in a motor car. The sight-seeing companies have realized that, and offer a half-day trip from San Francisco, that includes the various cities across the bay. The feature, outside of the attractive homes amid their flowers and trees, is the University of California at Berkeley, in its lovely setting upon a leafy hillside overlooking San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate. To get into the atmosphere of the place you had far better eschew the crowd and go independently, taking the Berkeley Ferry across the bay and a street car that will land you at Telegraph Avenue and Bancroft Way, within sight of the Sather Gate and Campanile. The grounds, which occupy 250 acres, are very beautiful,136 Finding the Worth While in California
and numerous winding ways lure you along under the shadow of conifers, eucalypts, acacias, bays, hoary writhing live oaks (the Quercus agrifolia of the botanist) and across broad sunny interspaces of lawn bordered with beds of herbaceous flowers glowing with color. In a grove of eucalypts and Monterey cypresses is the famous Greek Theater, the pioneer, I believe, of a number which now exist in various parts of the State. The theater was completed in the autumn of 1903, since which time it has been the scene of many remarkable open air productions. Professional actors of worldwide fame — such as Sarah Bernhardt, Julia Marlowe, Maude Adams, E. H. Sothern, the Ben Greet Players, to mention a few — as well as the amateurs of the student body, have made this theater an influential center for the inculcation of a healthy appreciation of the best in dramatic art — the whole line of dramatic literature, from the Greek tragedy writers to Ibsen and Yeats, having had worthy representation here. Throughout the year not only plays, but concerts of the best music both vocal and orchestral are given, to which the public have access. The Library of the Uni-San Francisco and Across the Bay 137
versity, containing among other treasures the rich Bancroft collection of books and manuscripts bearing on Far Western history, will interest the bookish.1
A day’s trip from San Francisco, much less known than it deserves to be, is to Moss Beach 25 miles south of the city. It is a quaint, rocky, rather bleak seaside resort, more or less foggy and wind-blown, but with an especial appeal to naturalists and surf-anglers. The sea-edge is underlaid here with extensive reefs, which, when the waters have withdrawn at low tide, are stirring with a varied marine life — sea mosses, molluscs, crabs, starfishes; sea-urchins, anemones; besides yielding shells of many sorts. Biological classes from Stanford and Berkeley find it a rich ground for collecting and study in situ.
The terrestrial flora on the bluffs overlooking the beach is also very interesting, and as the place is comparatively unfrequented, the
1 Apropos of this University, the anthropological collections of the Affiliated Colleges (a part of the University) situated on Parnassus Avenue, San Francisco, are noteworthy. It is claimed to be the largest museum of its kind west of Chicago and one of the most complete in the world, particularly rich in the remains of ancient American civilization, and of the work of Californian Indians. The collection of Indian baskets is perhaps unsurpassed.138 Finding the Worth While in California
flowers grow and bloom undisturbed. Lavender beach asters, golden gummy grindelias, yellow bush-lupines of delicious fragrance, dainty owl’s-clover with pretty, white-tipped bracts, pink armeria, native dandelions, poppies, evening primroses, stemless white thistles, purple godetias and fig marigolds — I can only begin to name them. There is a modest hotel or two, and lovers of the unconventional would find the world wag along very delightfully here for days. On the beach is a little inn which specializes in “ shore dinners,” where you can get abalo-ne served in a dozen ways, if you want it, and more kinds of fish than you probably ever heard of before — including conger eel and “ capezony.”
“ And what is capezony ? ” I asked Mrs. Mac at the ticket office, when I first learned of this fish.
She was a rotund little lady who sold the railroad tickets, and was whiling away the time in affable chat with such as waited for the train. Her weather-beaten complexion betokened her a follower of the sea.
״ Some calls it sculpins,” she replied leaning comfortably on the half door of her little boxSan Francisco and Across the Bay 139
of a room and tilting back her Panama hat; “ and it’s fine eating, is capezony. Take out the eyes; stuff with bread crumbs, pepper and salt and some onion, maybe a chopped olive or two, and plenty of garlic; and lay a few strips of fat bacon on the outside and set in the oven to bake — and it’s a tasty bit — believe me.”
It was a convincing picture, and I did believe her.
To reach Moss Beach you take the Ocean Shore Railway from 12th and Mission Streets. It bears you through a breezy outlying district of San Francisco which you would hardly see otherwise, given over to the market gardens of the Italians and their queer windmills; and then follows the ocean by a winding road cut for miles like a shelf out of cliffs that overhang the pounding surf. Now and again, the rails, cross a tiny valley opening to the sea, where are more market gardens on terraced slopes and in dimples of the hills, and little pleasure resorts on the bit of beach. In the main it is a wild, lonely sort of ride, quite unique and quite fascinating in its isolation, suggesting pirates and smugglers. You may140 Finding the Worth While in Californio,
also travel to Moss Beach by an automobile stage that leaves 121 Fifth Street two or three times a day, and follows the same general route as the train, but more inland, by the Ocean Shore Boulevard. It is a first class roadway abounding in exhilarating curves and dips and climbs, with extensive views of ocean and grassy lomas, radiant in their season with wild flowers. A pleasant combination is to use the train in one direction and the stage the other.CHAPTER VIII
NORTH OF SAN FRANCISCO
A notable feature of the San Francisco transportation service is the ferry-boat system connecting the city with the east and north beyond the bay. There are a number of these ferries all leaving at or close to the foot of Market Street. The shortest, I believe, is the one to Oakland, requiring 15 to 20 minutes for the passage; others, as to Sausalito and Tiburon on the Marin County shore, about half an hour; and one running to Vallejo (Val-a'~ Jio'} at the upper end of San Pablo Bay — though perhaps this link of communication is too dignified to be properly called a ferry — is nearly 2 hours in the doing. I make specific mention of these ferries because they are worthy of especial consideration by visitors to San Francisco, as affording the readiest means of getting acquainted with the noble bay of 141142 Finding the Worth While in California
San Francisco, which experts class as one of the five finest harbors in the world. The tide of travel that daily flows through the ferry gates is very large, and warrants a type of boat which in many cases is little short of palatial, equipped with good restaurants and spacious observation saloons glassed in for protection from the chilly winds.
Northern California is of quite another aspect from the region south of San Francisco, and much of it is untouched by railroads as yet. The further one goes above the Golden Gate, the more there is in the parts opened up to travel to suggest the East, and the less there is apparent of those characteristics which give to the State that touch of foreignness that forms a considerable element in its attraction for tourists. Northern California is rich in beauty, but it is the wild beauty of great forests, of lakes, and of rivers that really run water — not those rivers of sand which are among the stock jokes of the central and southern parts of the State, “ rivers that flow bottom side up ” for most of the year. The Russian River, for instance, is a stream of rare beauty, with reaches of quiet, pastoral love-North of San Francisco
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liness that are captivating to artists, though people familiar with Eastern river scenery, will perhaps find them reminiscent of the Susquehanna and Mohawk, for instance. The little rural towns are often very charming, but it is rather the charm of New England or Pennsylvania, in white paint and hollyhocks and the dear old gingerbread trimmings about eave and gable, with maples and locust trees lining the quiet old-fashioned streets, and the gardens with their rows of cherry trees and pears. Of course there is• the flowery touch that only California makes possible, the profusion of roses, the oleanders, the corpulent old fig trees, but the general effect seems Eastern, and there is no obvious bid for the tourist. The climate, too, is different from further south. There is much more rain in the wet season, with a deal of mud, and some snow even at the low elevations; and the summers are pretty hot and dusty, since the mountains along the western coast line shut out much of the ocean’s cooling influence.
For reasons such as these, the traveler who finds less enjoyment in suggestions of home than in those things which are novel and in-144 Finding the Worth While in California
spirational of fresh ideas, will perhaps see from the car windows as much as he needs to see of the northern end of the State. I want to note a trip or two, however, easily accomplished from San Francisco, for those who have the leisure and desire for something more intimate than a long view.
There is, first, Mount Tamalpais (Tarri-al-pice'), a rocky peak of 2600 feet reached by a 20 mile ride from San Francisco in a couple of hours. It is possible to make the round trip between breakfast and a late luncheon, with 20 minutes at the top, but give it a day if you can. Better still would be an afternoon and night, so as to secure the evening and morning effects. The route is by ferry to Sausalito and the line of the Northwestern Pacific Railroad. The ascent of the mountain is by a queer little railway with a queer little engine, and it twists and winds and loops itself into bowknots, then unties itself and does it all over again, to your great amazement and delight, through a matter of 8 miles to achieve a rise of less than half a mile. It finally comes to a complete stop at a nice little hotel with a marvelous, unobstructed view to the fourNorth of San Francisco
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quarters of the earth. This railroad makes a virtue of claiming to be the crookedest in the world, and I fancy none of its patrons will dispute the claim. The return trip to the base is made by gravity, which is a pleasant experience, too. There is a complete system of trails over and about the mountain’s summit and a series of tubes, like spy-glasses each labeled, enabling one to locate the various distant points of interest without a loquacious guide. As to the view, one must remember the customary fickleness of atmospheric conditions around mountain tops, and chance it; but at its best this from Tamalpais is a remarkable one, embracing San Francisco and a score of lesser cities, San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate, the Pacific to the Farallones and beyond, the Santa Cruz Mountains, the Sierra Nevada, the great central valley of California, and many another thing. At night there is the glittering panorama of millions of electric lights in the towns, and in the morning the probability of a rolling sea of fog with the sunshine’s benison upon it.
In a lap of the mountain, and reached by a branch of the railway, is a 295-acre reser-146 Finding the Worth While in California
vation of primeval redwood forest, the Muir Woods, presented by Mr. William Kent some years ago to the nation for the public enjoyment. The tourist who has not already acquainted himself with the beauty of a natural redwood grove should by all means make this side trip, which may be done with entire convenience for an extra dollar, either on the way up or the way down the mountain.
Then there is the Napa Valley. If you are a devotee of Stevenson, you will like to follow him on that famous wedding journey and honeymoon of which he has written in “ The Silverado Squatters.” The best way thither, I think (a little different to-day, as to the bay leg of the journey, from that which he followed), embraces first a 25 mile steamboat ride (by the Monticello Steamship Co. from the north end of the Ferry Building, foot of Market Street) across the upper corner of San Francisco Bay and the length of San Pablo Bay, to Vallejo, whence the electric train does the remaining 40 miles up “ the long, green strath of the Napa Valley ” to Calistoga. The first half of the rail trip is without especial distinction, but after the town of Napa isNorth of San Francisco
147
passed the country becomes more interesting; the low, oak-dotted hills that bound the valley close in, and the fruit orchards and vineyards for which the region is famed give a comfortable, human touch to the scene. Calistoga (which you reach in 3% to 4 hours from San Francisco) is a rather pleasant little country town, where Stevenson stayed for a little while and used the telephone for the first time in his civilized career, as he tells us. Here three courses are open to you. You may, for instance, get your luncheon there and promptly return to the city by the way you came; or you may decide to stay over a day or two and see the sights. Among these is that Mount St. Helena which dominates the little town, an extinct volcano rising conspicuously in the north to a height of 4345 feet. It may be ascended by trail, about 25 miles the round trip. Stevenson, who from the first seemed greatly impressed by the mountain, speaks of it, quite in the California style, as the Mont Blanc of that section of the Coast Range, and guessed that from its summit you must have an excellent lesson in geography, as in truth you do. Then upon a ranch 5 miles from Calis-148 Finding the Worth While in California
toga, there is still that Petrified Forest which inspired a chapter in the “ Silverado Squatters.” It is by no means in the same class as the more famous one of Adamana in Arizona, but is interesting in its own way. Also of easy access, though more distant, are the misnamed Geysers, of which you hear soon after your arrival, really springs of boiling mud vomiting steam rather than water. In fact the general region for miles around is peppered with natural oddities, but principally springs warm, hot and medicinal.1 The hole of the old Silverado Mine on the side of St. Helena, whither the Stevensons finally transferred themselves, still exists, “ in the nick just where the eastern foothills joined the mountain, and she herself began to rise above the zone of forest.” The remains of their old shack, I am told, have been marked with a commemorative tablet. Directions to reach the place may be obtained at Calistoga, from which it is distant about 10 miles.
The third course, of which I spoke as open
1 Calistoga is also a point of departure for auto-stages to the numerous health and summer resorts clustering around Clear Lake, a fine sheet of water, 20 miles long and some 3 or 4 broad at the widest, in Lake County.North of San Francisco	149
to you at Calistoga, is to take the auto-stage, and ride 24 miles over the low mountains to Healdsburg in the mid-Russian River Valley. It is a pleasant drive, traversing some peaceful valleys, until you drop into that of the Russian River picturesque with hop-yards and hop-drying houses. At Healdsburg, a train may be had the same afternoon back to San Francisco by the Northwestern Pacific. If you can spare another day, however, a better thing to do is to leave the train 15 miles south of Healdsburg at Santa Rosa,1 and take the stage thence across the hills a lovely way to Glen Ellen at the head of the Sonoma Valley. This is the Indians’ “ Valley of the Moon,” of which Jack London has written in his romance of that name, and that erratic genius had a home there. Here is the railroad again, and 2% hours will put you by it in San Francisco, unless an interest in history impels you to stop off between trains at the quaint old town of Sonoma. There you will see some
1 Famous of recent years as the home of Luther Burbank; but you will not see either him or his work, which is carried on nowadays a few miles away at Sebastopol, where he receives none but the elect. The Luther Burbank Society has an office in Santa Rosa on a 2-acre experiment garden which you may look at over the fence.ISO Finding the Worth While in California
lingering evidences of the original Mexican occupancy; the plaza where the Bear Flag Revolution came to a head just before the formal American occupancy of California in 1846; and some remains (largely restored) of the Mission San Francisco Solano, dating from 1823, the last of the Franciscan Missions to be established in the province. To San Francisco is about 2 hours more, with a glimpse of the pretty town of San Rafael (Ra-fer~), where once was a Mission, too, but no vestige of it now exists, the site being occupied by a modern Catholic church and Sisters’ school.1
The Northwestern Pacific has recently completed its main line through to Eureka in Humboldt County, a distance of 284 miles from San Francisco. The journey occupies a whole day in each direction but affords an easy opportunity to secure an idea of the scenery of western northern California, from
1 This same trip embracing the Napa and Sonoma Valleys via Calistoga, Healdsburg and Santa Rosa, about 125 miles (not counting the ferries) may be done very comfortably by automobile, the roads being very good. Spring is the best season for it. A visit to the Sonoma Mission by Northwestern Pacific train may be made from San Francisco in half a day,North of San Francisco 151
the chicken yards of Petaluma through the vineyards and hop-fields of the middle Russian River country, into the magnificent redwood forests of the Eel River basin, and so to Eureka, the wide-awake metropolis of Northern California on Humboldt Bay. Upon the worshiper at the shrines of the departed great, Eureka holds a claim as having been for a time the residence of Bret Harte and of Lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant. More potent, I think, is the contemporary claim of the wilderness of Humboldt County which lies about Eureka, and makes the town a cherished objective for sportsmen. Bear, deer, quail and grouse, as well as many sorts of water-fowl, are abundant, and fishing is good and varied. Eel River has a special reputation among anglers for its fine steelhead fishing, some of the best pools being close to the railroad within 20 miles of Eureka.
Of all the summer tourist attractions north of San Francisco, Lake Tahoe is the most compelling. As stated in the preliminary chapter of the present work, this fine resort is easily treated as a side trip of the Union Pacific route east or westbound. Visitors in the
152 Finding the Worth While in California
State, not using that route, may reach the southern end of the lake at Tallac (you accent the lac}, by a 60 mile auto-stage ride from Placerville on a branch line of the Southern Pacific running out of Sacramento; or the entire trip from Sacramento may be made by automobile in about 8 hours. This south end of the lake is scenically exceedingly attractive, and its numerous lodges are not marked by the “ style ” which is a rather noticeable feature at Tahoe Tavern, where the railroad comes in. You will find at Emerald Bay and Fallen Leaf excellent camps providing accommodations at $3-5° upward per day; and Glen Alpine Springs, 7 miles from Tallac, makes a capital center for excursions on horseback or afoot into the virgin wilds of the high country. It is a feature of most of these trips that each is readily accomplished in a day, thus obviating the need of pack animals and camp outfit. Desolation Valley is a remarkable field of glacial action within easy access of Glen Alpine; and there is a wealth of glacial lakes, cascading streams, dizzy peaks, and meadows gemmed with exquisite sub-alpine flowers, to exercise the legs and fancy of the lovers ofNorth of San Francisco	153
high mountain scenery, for as long as they choose to stay. In a general way, however, this northern Sierra scenery is less dramatic than that further south, as about the Yosemite and in the Kings’ and Kern country. The elevation of Lake Tahoe is 6240 feet, which limits the season practically to July and August, though June and September are finer in some respects, if the weather then could be considered dependable. June, however, is rather sloppy underfoot.CHAPTER IX
SOME BIG THINGS OF THE MOUNTAINS
The mountains are so essential a feature in the California landscape — wherever you travel you are in sight of them, if not in the midst of them — that a visit to the State is not complete without an experience at close range of some of their big sights. Of these the most famous, and I believe, worthiest of its fame, is Yosemite. Emerson’s oft quoted remark that it is the only place he had ever found that equalled the brag, still expresses the sentiment of the majority; and expend adjectives as you may on other wonders you come back to this wonder of the Yosemite as the most satisfying of all, both in sublimity and pure loveliness. Moreover it is now as easy to reach as Coney Island, and the accommodations in the Valley for the physical man are numerous and exceedingly comfortable. !54Big Things of the Mountains 155
At Merced (a town on both the Southern Pacific and the Santa Fé valley lines between San Francisco and Los Angeles) a stop-over is granted on all through tickets, and the Yosemite Valley Railroad carries you thence in 3% hours to El Portal at the edge of the Yosemite National Park. The 15 miles to Yosemite village in the Valley is then done by automobile stage in 2 hours over a capital Government road which, following up the foaming, murmurous Merced and its wild cañón, passes through splendid forest scenery that is a foretaste of still better to come. The entire trip from either San Francisco or Los Angeles to the Valley may be made between after supper and 2:30 the next afternoon. Once in the Valley you may, if a disciple of Lucullus, put up at the Sentinel at $6 or $8 a day. If money is an object, you register at one of the several public camps where the rates are substantially lower and the accommodations, if lacking in frills, are thoroughly adequate as to essentials. In these156 Finding the Worth While in California
camps which are villages of tents or canvas cottages, you sleep in neatly furnished floored tents, or compact little bungalows provided with electric lights; meals are served in a general dining room; and the Government watches over the sanitation.
I suppose it is useless to recommend you to allow in your itinerary for at least a week in the Yosemite. Yet in less you can hardly get any just conception of what it has to offer. It is so absolutely of another spirit from that “ world which is too much with us,” that most of us must undergo a sort of regeneration before we are fit to receive the grace of its holy places. That takes time. Still one may with the outward eye see somewhat of the larger matters in a couple of days. These big features are so grouped that from the floor of the Valley, most of them can be seen without other exertion than walking or short drives. Among these are preeminently those marvels in stone, the cliff El Capitan rising 3600 sheer feet above the Valley floor, the splintered Cathedral Spires, the toppling peaks of the Three Brothers, the Royal Arches under the North Dome, and, most compelling ofBig Things of the Mountains 157
all, the Half Dome, which dominates the Valley at the eastern end and holds each evening beneath its hood the last lingering light of day. Then there are the superb waterfalls that plunge down the Valley wall to swell the Merced River, which in itself is an important item in Yosemite’s charm. Of the waterfalls, the Yosemite Fall is fifteen times the height of Niagara. It carries the melted snows from Mount Hoffman 18 miles away, and when in flood drops in triple leaps of thunder that shake the earth. Of tenderer beauty is the Bridal Veil Fall at the western end of the Valley in whose gauze-like spray, which sways with the wind, one is pretty sure to find a rainbow caught, if one comes here a little before sunset. Of another sort of beauty in water is the exquisite sheet of Mirror Lake at the Valley’s eastern end. At about sunrise, there is shown in its transparent depths as in a looking glass, a perfect reflection of the surrounding forest, mountain and sky; and at this hour before the morning breeze has awakened the still surface into ripples, the ancient Indian name Ahweiya, the Sleeping Water, seems strikingly apt. You may make shift in158 Finding the Worth While in California
one day to get a taste of these various sights of the Valley floor, and incidentally besides of noble trees, of wild flowers, perhaps new to you, and of birds 1 of many sorts.
But one needs to look down upon the Yosemite and out upon the wilderness of mountains that encompass it. For this a day’s trip ahorseback should be taken (unless one prefers to walk), following the trail along the upper cañón of the Merced to the Vernal and Nevada Falls, which carry the volume of the Merced River in successive wild plunges of foam and uproar, the former dropping it 300 feet and the latter 600 feet. The return should be by way of Glacier Point where a magnificent view of the snowclad high Sierra, as well as of the Valley and its approaches, is had. A trail of 4% miles descends thence to the village which may be reached the same day. There is a good hotel at the Point (7300 feet elevation) which ent bles any who has the time and desire, to remain the night and see the sunrise over the High Sierra. From Glacier Point, it is about a mile
1 Visitors interested in these subjects should consult for the plant life Hall’s “ Yosemite Flora ” and Bailey’s “ Handbook of Birds of the Western United States.”THE YOSEMITE FALLS
The Upper Fall is over nine times as high as Niagara, and the total drop from crest to river measures approximately half a mileBig Things of the Mountains 159
to Sentinel Dome, a bald eminence 8200 feet above sea level, whence there is a view that embraces not only the high country but also on the west the Sierra foothills and the San Joaquin Valley. The return to Yosemite Village may then be made by the Pohono trail that follows the rim of the Valley, with many beautiful outlooks, to Inspiration Point, where through the titanic gateway formed by El Capitan and the Cathedral Rocks you look upon perhaps the most satisfying of the views of Yosemite in its length and breadth. By this route (20 miles from Glacier Point to Yosemite) it will be evening when you are back at the village.1
As to the best season for visiting Yosemite,
the Valley floor is nominally open to travel all
the year, though in winter there is impending
the possibility of one’s being storm staid for a
greater or shorter period, which risk may or
may not outbalance the marvelous beauty of the
snow effects. The high country about the
1 Travelers sometimes arrive in Yosemite with an allowance of one day for it. For such the most satisfactory plan, I think, is to devote that day to the horseback or pedestrian trip to the Vernal and Nevada Falls returning by Glacier Point and the short trail to the village. It is a round of about 15 miles and enables you, if not to taste, at least to have a glimpse of Yosemite’s good things, as did Moses of the Promised Land from the top of Pisgah in Moab,160 Finding the Worth While in California
Valley’s rim is inaccessible from the beginning of the winter storms (which may be late October) until the suns of May have melted the snows and the shovels of Uncle Sam have repaired the damage to trails and roads. For the average traveler June is usually the best month. Then the flowers and vegetation are at their freshest, the waterfalls at their fullest, and the roads freest from dust. July is good, too, and August; though the late summer finds the smaller waterfalls dried up, and the dust of travel lies gray on much of the foliage.
It is to be borne in mind that there are the Yosemite Valley and the Yosemite National Park. The Valley comprises some half dozen square miles at the heart of the Park’s eleven hundred. For those who have time for the Park’s other attractions — its alpine peaks, its glacial meadows and lakes — the Valley is the logical outfitting point. Until a few years ago, the beauties of the Park were a sealed treasure to all but hardy knapsackers or travelers by animals and with pack trains. This plan of course may still be followed, and is the most independent and delightful of all ways to get at the worth of the mountains; but for lessBig Things of the Mountains 161
strenuous visitors, public camps are now established on the shores of Merced Labe, and at Tuolumne1 Meadows. Both these places are in the midst of beautiful scenery and offer the angler good sport and the mountain climber plenty of exercise for his legs. From Tuolumne Meadows the ascent of the 13,000 foot peak of Mount Dana may readily be accomplished, affording superb views of sierra and desert. Merced Lake (19 miles east of Yosemite village, and 13 beyond the Nevada Fall) is reached only by trail. Tenaya Lake and the Tuolumne Meadows may be achieved by trail (13 and 21 miles respectively from Yosemite village) or you may in summer reach them in a round about fashion by automobile (60 and 68 miles respectively from the village). The automobile route has the advantage of permitting a visit en passant to the Tuolumne grove of Big Trees,2 17 miles from the Valley. The grove numbers only a score or so individuals, but is very interesting and includes the famous Dead Giant’s trunk 100 feet
1	Pronounced Tn-ol'-um-nee.
2	These and the somewhat nearer Merced Grove of sequoias (less than 100 individuals) may be made the object of a day’g special carriage or BIQtor trip from the Valley.162 Finding the Worth While in California
high, through which a tunnel has been cut that you may drive through. Then crossing the South Fork of the Tuolumne River the road joins the old Tioga road, originally built to reach a mine on the crest of the sierra. The road has recently been repaired by the Government for the use of vehicles and motor cars, and permits a magnificent trip across the High Sierra and through Tioga Pass to Mono and Lake Tahoe. The snows release the road for travel from early July to about the last of September. The Yosemite Transportation System maintains a sightseeing service to all points accessible by machine, or will supply guides and horses for camping trips.
Apropos of Big Trees, the finest near the Yosemite Valley are those of the Mariposa Grove, near Wawona at the southern edge of the Park, and distant from Yosemite village 35 miles. There are two divisions of the grove, one comprising about 360 trees and the other 180. From Yosemite and return may now be done comfortably inside of one day by automobile, but the road is closed by snow between November and May. The trip is an interest-Big Things of the Mountains 163
ing one aside from the marvel of the colossal trees, and affords a glimpse of the sights at the Valley’s western end as well as the views of the Valley in its entirety from Artist’s and Inspiration Point.
The opening of Yosemite to automobiles (there were 2,200 cars that entered in the summer of 1915, and the number last summer— 1922—reached 19,500, while the total of visitors somewhat exceeded 100,000) has brought a new atmosphere into the Valley; and people who like leisure and quiet with their mountains and dislike gasoline and hurry, try to find a substitute for Yosemite in the Kings’ River Canon. This wonderful region, which is about 100 miles south of Yosemite, reproduces many of the features of the latter — the same flat floor (5000 feet above sea level) with sheer cliff sides rising 3000 to 4,800 feet above that; the same rushing river with more abounding trout; the same magnificent trees and more of them; the same stupendous rock formation and glaciated domes, though no Plalf Dome; some fine waterfalls, though none to compare with the Nevada or the Bridal Veil. But it is wild, wild, wild, and the getting to it is an adventure in itself, including (after leav-164 Finding the Worth While in California
ing the railroad) a forty mile automobile ride, and a day and a half by pack train. It is therefore a trip that requires some toughness of frame and a taste for roughing it; also 8 or 10 days of time, at least.
There is as yet no hotel in the Kings’ River region, and only one public camp. The latter, open from June to September, is called Kings’ River Canon Camp and is carved literally out of the forest — its cabins, store, dining room and furniture being split out of the neighboring pines and cedars. It is primitive, but delightful from its very primitiveness, and you may either board and lodge here outright for a modest sum per day; or camp under the sky and board yourself out of the store, with the addition of such meals in the dining room as you may elect. This is the camp long known as “Mother” Kanawyer’s, from its former owner, who added to such specifically feminine gifts as the ability to mend torn garments, make delectable doughnuts and elderberry jelly, and bind up the wounded human anatomy, the more masculine accomplishments of riding, shooting, handling a pack-train and catchingBig Things of the Mountains 165
the limit of trout any morning in season before breakfast.
To reach the King’s Canon, there are at least three ways. If you are traveling with your own outfit you may leave the railroad at Sanger or Reedley and follow the auto-highway to the General Grant National Park and thence to the lumber camp at Hume where a trail begins that leads through a magnificent forest to Horse Corral and the Canon. Or you may start into the mountains from Independence, a town at the desert base of the Sierra Nevada, reached either by the Southern Pacific Railway or by your own automobile. Here you secure a pack outfit and guide, and crossing the Sierra by the Kearsarge Pass reach the Kings’ in a couple of days if you do not stop to fish. For the average tourist, however, dependent upon public conveyance, the usual plan at present is this: First reduce your luggage to a suit-case or two (for you are bound now to the sure-enough wilderness) and take the electric line at Visalia or Exeter for Lemon Cove, whence an auto stage will bear you in a few hours to Giant Forest Post-office in the heart166 Finding the Worth While in California
of the Sequoia National Park. After a night in the shadow of glorious sequoias—a rare experience—you are mounted on a horse and join the pack train for the Canon of your quest.
This is a picturesque experience and typically western. Civilization is left behind, and the primeval forest swallows you up. Joe, the packer, on his wiry cow pony heads the procession, leading his string of pack animals with jingling bells and tightly cinched burdens. The tourists file close behind on motley mounts upon which the exuberant fancy of the West has bestowed many a quaint name—as Hooli-ann and Pussfi Angel Face and Fly-away. The trail strikes at once into the Sequoia National Forest, through unspoiled woodlands of Big Tree and sugar pine, Douglas spruce and silver fir, whose feathery crowns mingle a hundred feet above you to make an airy roof through which the sunlight sifts in tempered radiance. Now and then the twilight of the wood lightens to clear day, and you cross a grassy meadow where wild flowers, in purple, scarlet and yellow, riot in the sun. All along is the joy of abundant water—cool springs gushing by the
Big Things of the Mountains 167
trail side, and brawling brooks tumbling to the unseen river. You spend the night at Horse Corral Meadow, camping out, enj oying the hospitality of a typical National Forest inn, whose roof is the starry sky, whose walls are the encompassing pines, and whose landlord!— Uncle Sam — exacts no charge for lodging. That is, you may do this unless you prefer to take advantage of the accommodations offered by a camp maintained there by the Kings’ River Parks Co., and hide away from the stars and the perfume of the tamaracks in a tent. The next morning, a few miles further on, there comes the first glorious view of the Canon of the Kings1 with the High Sierra at its back. It looks Yosemite’s double; and zigzagging down to the river you arrive in the early afternoon at the Canon’s one camp. A shorter route, to consume but one day from Giant Forest, is contemplated, but is not yet developed.
The diversions in the Kings’ River Canon are
1 The name of this river is erroneously assumed by many to commemorate Clarence King, the geologist, who is associated with its latter-day history. As a matter of fact Kings is all that is left of the English translation of the original Spanish name, el rio de lus Reyes Santos — the River of the Holy Kings who did obeisance to the infant Christ.!68 Finding the Worth While in California
fishing (remarkably good), hunting in season (deer, quail and grouse), mountain-climbing and just camping. The trails are few and primitive compared with Yosemite’s, and there are no roads whatever. The high spots in interest may be summed up as follows: Roaring River Falls, which you pass as you come in (3 miles west of the Camp), but it and the lovely river walk to it are worth giving a half day to; Paradise Valley, a remarkable little Yosemite, about 7 miles from the Camp, which may be done in one day, with a stop en passant at the beautiful Mist Falls; Goat Mountain summit (12,000 feet), one hard day’s trip, but repaying, because of the magnificent view over the High Sierra; the Copper Mine on the mountain side back of the Camp, for a comprehensive sight of the Canon at near range; the Grand Sentinel peak (8500 feet) in front of the Camp, a tough scramble but ex-hilirating for hardy climbers.
The star trip of all is that to the High Sierra by the Bubb’s Creek trail to Bullfrog Lake, Kearsarge Pinnacles, Kearsarge Lakes, Kearsarge Pass, and Mount Gould. It is 40 miles, the round, from the Camp and requires 3IN THE HIGH SIERRA	,
There is as yet no hotel in this region but an excellently run public camp makes satis• xueie	J׳ factory headquarters for a number of mountain tupsBig Things of the Mountains 169
days at least for proper enjoyment of it. Outfit must be arranged for at Giant Forest. The trail threads the basin of one of the Kings’ most picturesque tributaries, and, though hard going at times, there is compensation in the gradual unfolding of superb views, first of the Kings’ and Paradise Canons, and then of the colossal cliffs and buttresses, the jagged pinnacles, the glaciated pavements and domes of the higher Sierra. It is a silent and, in some respects, an austere world up there 10,000 to 13,000 feet above the sea, where on the chill, timberless slopes snow lies in patches throughout the summer, and your camp even in August is fringed with frost of mornings. From this trail you obtain splendid views of Mount Brewer, a noble, symmetrical peak which has not inaptly been called the American Matterhorn —- its two broad shoulders abruptly lifted midway into an equilateral peak in the lap of whose northern side lies a field of perpetual snow.
Yet all here is not rock. There is the charm of the glacial meadows gay with golden-rod, scarlet paint-brush, lupine, blue monkshood and brown-eyed helenium; while in the170 Finding the Worth While in California
folds and dimples of the universal granite lie multitudinous little lakes of crystal-clear water, reflecting with mirrorlike faithfulness sky and clouds and the peaks that hem them in. Bullfrog Lake is one of the loveliest of these. It lies open to the sky two miles above the sea, fringed about with a straggling growth of the rare foxtail pines and an emerald green ribbon of turf where gentians, sierra asters, shooting-stars and crimson bryanthus tell the tale of altitude. You are likely to reach Bullfrog in the forenoon, having camped the previous night at Junction or Vidette Meadows; and, if so, do not on any account let some demon of hurry send you down the trail again without camping at least one night by this exquisite Alpine tarn. It is in the evening light, when the Sierra’s jagged crest flushes with alpenglow, and again in the virgin light of early morning, that the lake reveals its heart to you. Kearsarge Pass, through which the trail crosses and drops down to the desert and to Independence, is in plain sight, and the climb to the Pass and the ascent of Mount Gould (which rises immediately at the left of the Pass), may be done from Bullfrog in three or four hours. The view fromBig Things of the Mountains 171
the summit of Gould, an elevation of 13,001 feet (about a thousand feet above the Pass), is stupendous — north and south along the backbone of the Sierra, westward to the San Joaquin Valley, and eastward down upon the desert with its irrigated checkers of cultivation amid hot, dry wastes of sand and alkali. The return to the Kings’ may, if desired, be made by way of the beautiful Rae’s Lake and Paradise Valley.
The least time, therefore, that the traveler should allow himself in the Canon is a week; but for leisurely enjoyment 10 days or 2 weeks would be better, and July or August is the best season. The likelihood then of any rain to interfere with plans is negligible, though the electric storms that are not infrequent in the High Sierra in summer bring to the Canon occasional dashes of rain of 20 minutes’ or half an hour’s duration. Rainy weather of longer duration has, however, been known.
The Muir trail now under construction from Yosemite to Mount Whitney crosses the Kings’ River Canon near the Camp and offers a ready means of making the ascent of that, the highest mountain the United States (out-172 Finding the Worth While in California
side of Alaska). Barring the draught on one’s wind the ascent is not difficult, once the mountain itself is reached. From its windy, snow-packed, granite peak, 14,501 feet above the sea, one looks down upon the hot Mojave Desert 2 miles below, and if atmospheric conditions permitted could see 88 miles eastward the dreadful sink of Death Valley. The latter lies 276 feet below sea level, and is the lowest dry land in California and all the United States.1 It is an interesting coincidence that the highest and lowest points in the United States are
1 Mount Whitney is most speedily reached from the village of Lone Pine, on the Mojave Desert branch of the Southern Pacific, 240 miles north of Los Angeles; or from Independence 10 miles further, once the home of Mary Austin whose books on the California desert are classics. The railway for over 100 miles skirts the eastern base of the Sierra Nevada, giving the traveler a fine view of this superb mountain range. At either point horse, guide, and camp outfit may be obtained for the ascent (which should be made in July or August), the expense being on the basis of about $1 per day for pack and saddle animals, and $5 per day for packer and guide. From Lone Pine the round trip to the peak may be made in 3 days; from Independence in 5. The Lone Pine trail necessitates walking from about 10,000 feet elevation, the Muir trail from 12,000. The run to Lone Pine or Independence may, if desired, be made by automobile over a good desert road, which diverges from the Los Angeles —< San Francisco highway at the town of Mojave.Big Things of the Mountains 173
both in California, and within so short a distance of each other. From the Kings’ River Camp to Whitney’s peak is about 55 miles, and a week should be allowed for the round trip.
Contiguous to the Kings’ River region on the south is the Sequoia National Park, harboring within its limits, a dozen groves of giant sequoias (Big Trees), comprising a total, according to Government estimate, of over a million individuals, of which 12,000 exceed 10 feet in diameter. About half the total number are found in the Giant Forest Grove, at the heart of the Park, on the divide between the Marble and Middle Forks of the Kaweah River, and here is a delightful public camp, which every lover of fine trees and sylvan scenery should include in his California itinerary. The Giant Forest is reached from Visalia on either the Southern Pacific or the Sante Fe, and Exeter on the Southern Pacific. From both Visalia and Exeter, an electric railway runs to the town of Lemon Cove in the Sierra foothills, whence auto-stage or private automobile carries the visitor 40 miles to Giant Forest, where
1!74 Finding the Worth While in California
he dines and sleeps in the shadow of colossal trees which were there when Christ walked in Galilee.
The trees are scattered singly or in small groups of rarely over ten or a dozen, among other magnificent conifers, yellow pines and sugar, Douglas spruces and stately firs, a cheerful woodland of mellow light, opening occasionally to the full light of meadows, where, amid the sunny grasses, lilies, shooting-stars, golden-rod and helenium make a happy family. So numerous are the sequoias, and so comparatively unvisited is the Forest, that the disgraceful custom of ticketing the mammoth trunks with the names of fallible men is happily but little affected here.
From the camp as a base, there are numerous walks or horseback trips that may be taken (horses and guides, if needed, are to be had in the Forest), to the various beautiful meadows, to the Moro Rock with its superb view of the Kaweah basin, to Alta Peak or Mt. Silliman for other views of a different sort. The Park is filled with bird life, and as no shooting of any sort is allowed, many wild animals are becoming fearless and even approachable.Big Things of the Mountains 175
Among them, the California mule deer is very abundant and the beautiful animals with their fawns make a pleasant picture in the forest glades. Brown bears are daily visitors at the garbage dump a half mile or so from the camp, and are exciting marks for patient ko-dakers.CHAPTER X
SUMMER CAMP LIFE
The open season for trout in California is from May I until November, and accordingly on May I half of California finds itself in the mountains whipping the streams and laying plans to come again in the summer with the whole family. This it does, more or less, and soon the 8oo-mile length of the State from Del Norte County to the Mexican line is dotted in the mountains with camps, public and private, to close only when the frosts of autumn begin to nip. Going to the mountains is not as much of an undertaking here as in lev-eler states for it is a poor California community that has not a 4000 or 5000 foot peak within sight of its back door; and in these motoring days it is but an hour or two after the shop is closed on Saturday before John and Mary may be playing Phyllis and Corydon by mountain 176Summer Camp Life
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brooks under the shadow of primeval oaks and pines. This joy of the mountains is part of the unclassified wealth of the Golden State; and its citizens, rich and poor, male and female, have the wisdom to know it. Camping is a confirmed habit with them, no longer a man’s peculiar diversion, but to be participated in by the whole family.
Not everybody, however, cares to have the responsibility of a private camp, even in a climate like California’s, where the camper’s summer outfit may be pared down to a blanket, a fishing rod, a frying pan, and a jack knife. To accommodate the class who possess a little spare cash and like to have things done for them, there are numerous public camps throughout the mountains. Many of these are within an hour or two of large cities, others require longer to reach by train and autostage. Not infrequently they are conducted by soundly organized companies who own or control hundreds of acres around their resorts. The general plan followed is to have a central building, with assembly hall, dining room, kitchen, and offices, and near by, under the trees and beside the woodland waters, are

178 Finding the Worth While in California
furnished tents or rustic cottages for the housing of guests. Generally, too, there is a grocery store for the accommodation of visitors who prefer to prepare their own meals. Here in surroundings as primeval as Eden, telephones, electric lights, post and express offices, laundry, bathing pools, golf courses and tennis courts are adjuncts of the more elaborate camps. The rates are on the basis of $4 to $5 per day, including meals; $1.50 without.
In previous chapters reference has been made to the location of certain of these camps in the Sierra Nevada and within San Francisco’s sphere of influence. Within easy reach of Los Angeles are also several notable ones, which the transient visitor will find easy of access and enjoyable. They are to be found in the upper altitudes of the Sierra Madre, the San Bernardino Mountains and Mount San Jacinto. Trout-stocked waters abound near them all.
One of the oldest of these resorts, combining unconventionality with comfort, is Switzer’s, in the heart of the Sierra Madre. It is about 12 miles north of Pasadena (22Stimmer Camp Life
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from Los Angeles), and is one of those places the getting to which is so varied as to make an attraction in itself. If you are in Los Angeles, there is first a io mile ride in the electric cars to Pasadena, where you are transferred to an automobile stage. That bears you out of Pasadena and up the beautiful Arroyo Seco Canon, splashing back and forth time after time across a murmurous boulder-strewn stream under the shade of great alders (which in California are trees, not shrubs as the alders of Eastern brook sides are). Eight and a half miles of that and the road ends, and you have the choice of a picturesque walk of 3%' miles by mountain trail, or doing it on horse-, mule-, or burro-back (but only quite light weights may have a burro) and if there are babies in the party, they are put in baskets. Switzer’s itself is in a shady mountain bowl, 3000 feet above the sea, at the brink of a fine gorge down which the little river pitches into a ferny basin, and goes cascading onward in the shadow of oaks, big-cone spruce and bay, towards the San Gabriel Valley. It is the center of numerous trail trips, by foot or saddle-180 Finding the Worth While in California

animal, but is utterly out of the automobile belt. The climb of Strawberry Peak1 (about 6100 feet), 3 miles distant, makes an interesting excursion, the last couple of hundred feet being risky enough to be thrilling. The view from the peak, embracing sierra, valley and ocean, is superb.
The canon of the San Gabriel River cleaves the Sierra Madre, about 20 miles east of Pasadena, and is supplied with a dozen good camps, the point of departure for all being Azusa, 24 miles from Los Angeles by Pacific Electric or Santa Fe Railway. One that can hardly fail to delight a nature lover is Camp Cold Brook, 20 miles from Azusa, reached thence by a combination of autocar and 4 horse stage, up the majestic gorge of the river. It is situated at an altitude of 3000 feet at the junction of two tributaries of the San Gabriel’s North Fork, and it surprises you to encounter here in the parched summer of the South, such luxuriance of fern and flower as will be found at Cold Brook — fountains of stately woodward-ias the height of a man, sheets of exquisite
1 Not to be confused with another Strawberry Peak in the San Bernardino range.A SUMMER CAMP IN THE SIERRA MADRE In many places permanent fireplaces of rough stone have been built by the Forest Servicf■
to lessen the danger of fires and facilitate camping outSummer Camp Life
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maidenhair, rare Parry lilies, columbines, spotted leopard lilies, cardinal mimulus, forming beautiful wild gardens bathed by the spray of tumbling water falls. The star mountain climb at Cold Brook is of Mount Islip {Eye'-slip} about 7 miles distant by way of Crystal Lake. From the easily reached summit (8240 feet) there are views melting away both to the Mojave Desert and the Pacific Ocean.
Fifteen miles further east, and still in the Sierra Madre, is the San Antonio Canon, which heads under Mount San Antonio, popularly known as “ Old Baldy,” whose snow-capped summit is a familiar and cherished sight to winter visitors in the vicinity of Los Angeles. The snow is gone (except in isolated spots) by the first of July, and in summer the fine mountain is easily ascended on horseback or afoot to the very top (10,080 feet). The summit is bare save for a few wind-blown tamarack pines (Pinus Murray ana}, flattened to the ground. A few hundred feet lower you pass through stately groves of the same clean-barked, purplish trees, 40 or 50 feet high. The point from which the ascent is usually made182 Finding the Worth While in California
is Camp Baldy (4700 feet). This camp is 45 minutes by automobile from the terminus of the San Antonio Park Electric Railway running out from Upland (on the Santa Fe) and Ontario (on the Southern Pacific). The entire trip to Camp Baldy from Los Angeles (about 50 miles), may be made by automobile, if desired — a delightful drive via Pasadena and the Foothill Boulevard to Upland; thence north up the San Antonio Canon.
The San Bernardino Mountains are a camping ground of especial resort because the region is accessible for motor cars. There is a famous automobile roadway known as the “ Crest Drive,” or more recently, “ The 101 Mile Drive on the Rim of the World,” which, beginning at the city of San Bernardino,1 climbs the mountainside by a remarkable series of zigzags (from 6 to 20 per cent, grade, averaging perhaps 12 per cent.) called “ The Switchbacks,” to the crest of the range at an altitude of about 5000 feet. It then follows
1 North of San Bernardino you pass near Arrowhead Hot Springs. The name is due to a remarkable patch, plainly visible against the mountain side, perfectly simulating an arrowhead. It is not artificially made but is due to natural differences of soil and vegetation.Stimmer Camp Life
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the general crest eastward for 40 miles, at an elevation varying from 5000 to 8000 feet, until Big Bear Valley is reached. There the road turns southwesterly and, descending by multitudinous curves the open, rocky canon of the Santa Ana River, emerges into the foothills and orange groves back of Redlands and so into San Bernardino 1 once more.
In spite of the rather grandiose name, this 101 mile trip is in itself a thoroughly delightful one of varied interest offering a succession of beautiful views of forest, lake and canon. The road winds continually, with outlooks now over the Mojave Desert, now over the vast plain of San Bernardino and the mountains that border it. The one fly in the amber is a dozen miles of the road, about midway of the crest run, where it traverses a region from which the large timber was lumbered some years ago, and the roadbed itself cuts up rather badly under the season’s continuous travel. Still, one forgets this in the glorious unspoiled forest of pine
1 The floods of January, 1916, destroyed part of the road in the Santa Ana Canon, and pending plans for its reconstruction, a detour has to be made via Mill Creek Canon and Redlands. From Big Bear Valley a roundabout return to San Bernardino may be made via Baldwin Lake, the Mojave Desert to Victorville, and through the Cajon Pass.184 Finding the Worth While in California
and fir into which one enters, once this lumbered area is past. Owing to the high elevation, snow lingers in places as late as May, and early travelers may have trouble, particularly getting over the rim of Big Bear Valley; but from the cessation of the storms of the wet season until these begin again, which may be in November or possibly not until December, this road is one of the liveliest in southern California. The round may be done in two days from Los Angeles, or in one day from San Bernardino, Riverside or Redlands; though the enjoyment of the trip is greatly enhanced by a night spent at one of the public camps on the mountain top.
The crest of the San Bernardino Mountains is a sociable place in summer, what with motorists, trampers, anglers, folk ahorseback and campers. The eastern division of the Angeles National Forest covers most of the region, and a large part of it is a State-established game refuge, where it is unlawful to kill any wild birds except water-fowl or any wild animals except the predatory. There is an abundance of water, and numerous trails lead by sylvan ways to all sorts of pleasant places in the wild.Summer Camp Life
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As the reserve is the Government’s, the public is welcome to free camping privileges under the supervision of the Forest Rangers, from whom permits for lighting fires must be obtained — a reasonable provision, intended to assist in preventing the firing of the forest. The region throughout the summer is sprinkled with the camps of vacationists, many of them young folk from distant schools or colleges. Of permanent camps for the public there are several good ones. “ Pine Crest,” near the western end of the crest and a few miles from Arrowhead Lake, is a tastefully constructed rustic inn of the first order, situated on a piny knoll with beautiful outlooks. “ Thousand Pines ” and “Skyland,” near but not directly on the road, are less pretentious resorts in the same general region. In Big Bear Valley (elevation 6700 feet), “Knight’s Camp” and “Pine Knot ” display the bush of good cheer, overlooking the lovely expanse of Big Bear Lake. Both the lakes are artificial, though you would not suspect it, made by damming the natural drainage of their respective valleys; and both are stocked with salmon trout. Big Bear is much the larger water, some 4 miles long with186 Finding the Worth While in California
a winding shore line beautifully diversified with bays and projecting headlands. The fishing, which is really excellent, is done principally from small boats; either still or trolling. In autumn the lakes, but principally Big Bear, are visited by flocks of wild duck, and the wild duck’s immemorial pursuer, hunter man.
Traveling the San Bernardino region one gets sight of two noble mountain tops that rise above the general mass at the easternmost end of the crest — San Bernardino peak (10,630 feet) and San Gorgonio (11,485 feet). They are just 6 miles apart in an airline — snowcapped and unapproachable throughout the winter and spring, but easily ascended during the summer. If you are ambitious to climb them — and there is something distinctive about going to the top of San Gorgonio at least, for it is the highest mountain of southern California — the ascent of either is most comfortably made from a pleasant summer camp called “ Forest Home,” in the Mill Creek canon, 17 miles east of Redlands. Of the two climbs, that of San Gorgonio — or “ Grayback,” as local parlance has it — is the more interesting, I think; and it is very interesting. The roundSummer Camp Life
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trip from Forest Home is about 25 miles; and a feature of a stay at the camp is a two days’ horseback trip to the summit in charge of a guide to see the sunrise, the party camping out over night, an hour or so short of the top. There is, however, no reason why a pedestrian of sound wind and limb may not do the round comfortably enough between an early breakfast and sunset of the same day, as the trail, though a little dim here and there, is of an easy grade and without precipices to disturb the nerves. At about 10,000 feet, one emerges suddenly from the forest into unobstructed sun and begins the approach to the gravelly rounded summit. An interesting feature of the trailside here is the presence of Limber pines, which at three feet or less above the ground, stream away horizontally, their crowns blown so by the savage winds and pressed down by the snows of no one can say how many fierce winters. Charming high-mountain plants greet you, as you walk — draba, hulsea, bryanthus. In September I found alpine buttercups blooming there beside a bank of snow. The view is unobstructed in most directions and particularly fine over the deserts, both!88 Finding the Worth While in California
Mojave and Colorado (including the Salton Sea) the whole San Bernardino range to the west, and the pass that separates San Gorgonio from the second highest of the southern California peaks — San Jacinto (10,805 feet), in plain view 25 miles southeast as the crow flies.
Half way up San Jacinto is Strawberry Valley, with a good mountain inn of the tent-and-cottage sort, known as Idyllwild. An automobile road leads there (2j^ hours) from Hemet, and another from Banning. At Idyll-wild the trail to the peak begins, a trip that will require two days, and three would be better, the return including a detour to visit the beautiful Hidden Lake. Horses and guide may be secured at the inn. The summit is quite of another sort from San Gorgonio, rocky and tree-grown to the very top, and the steep pitch of the mountain to the desert 2 miles below is a unique sight — the greatest drop of any mountain face in the United States, I believe; even that of Whitney’s eastern side being less.1 It is usual to make the overnight camp beside a little woodsy meadow about a
1 Whitney drops from 14,501 feet to 6500, in a horizontal distance of 5 miles; San Jacinto from 10,805 to 800 in about the same.Summer Camp Life
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thousand feet below the peak; but if one is hardy enough to risk the probable wind and certain cold of the very top, one has a chance of seeing many beautiful dawn effects when the night fog of the coast side is being torn and driven by the warm breath of the desert.
The upper reaches of Mount San Jacinto, being inaccessible except by hard trails, are distinguished by some particularly fine primeval forest growths and flowery, wild meadows. Besides the mountain’s general appeal to the lover of such unspoiled scenery, there are Indian associations which give an especial touch of human interest to it. It is, for instance, the abode of a demon of the Indian way of thought — one Tauquitz, who is imprisoned in the bowels of the mountain, and manifests his anger in thunder, lightning and occasional subterranean rumbles of a disturbing nature. Moreover, it was on the slope of San Jacinto, you will remember, that the final tragedy in the life of Ramona is staged, and you will find to-day at Cahuilla, Saboba and Vandeventer’s Flat (all within more or less easy access of Strawberry Valley), the present day rancherias of the Indians with whose earlier history the pathetic19O Finding the Worth While in California
romance treats. For the historian, too, San Jacinto holds an especial interest, for across its snowy shoulders in December, 1775, came the Spaniard Don Juan Bautista Anza, with soldiers and cattle and a priest or two, convoying a band of colonists from Old Mexico, to found the city which was to become in another century our Pacific Coast metropolis — San Francisco. Anza had made a preliminary trip a year before to locate a route, and was the first white man to enter California from the desert side.CHAPTER XI
FOR THE PRACTICAL MAN —BEING ABOUT PETROLEUM, MINES AND AGRICULTURE
To the business man and the traveler whose interests are of the practical sort as well as the esthetic, one of the striking features of a California visit is petroleum. The locomotives that draw his trains are petroleum burners, and the roadway is sprinkled with oil to keep down the dust; the furnace in his hotel (if it has one) is oil-fed; many of the country highways are oil-surfaced. In certain residential sections of Los Angeles (but not the best), he finds oil wells in people’s yards; and glancing out of the car window as he travels by train to Santa Barbara he rubs his eyes at the sight of oil derricks in the sea (at Summerland) calmly pumping black streams of oil out of the ocean. California at times has, in fact, become the 191192 Finding the Worth While in California
largest producer of petroleum in the United States, the output being at present about 25 per cent of this country’s total, or about a sixth of the entire world’s?
In marked contrast to most of our Eastern oils whose base is paraffin, the petroleum of California has an asphalt base. It is not unusual to come upon the thick, black crude oil oozing out of the ground in some parts of the State, forming tarry puddles and sluggish brooklets. The observant aborigines used it as a glue to fasten arrow and spear heads on, to mend broken utensils, and to attach the basketry rims to certain of their mortars; while the Spanish Californians found it could be made serviceable for flooring and roofing their one-storied adobe dwellings. Neither Indian nor Spaniard, however, concerned himself with going any deeper into the subject than digging
1 In the presence of this fact, it is illuminating to turn to the report of the State Geological Survey made in 1865 and read that the existence of petroleum in the State in anything like the quantity that was then causing wild excitement in Pennsylvania was extremely unlikely; and that if considerable flowing wells were ever developed, they would be north of San Francisco Bay, as they could not be expected in the Coast Range south of the Bay of Monterey. Alas for the shortcomings of scientific prevision! It is only in the coast ranges and south of Monterey that the oil strikes have been made.For the Practical Man
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over the surface of the ground for the gummy “brea” (&ray-o) as they called it. The most noteworthy of these brea pits is on the outskirts of Los Angeles, on the Hancock Ranch, in the midst of what is now a busy belt of oil wells. Here close to the Wilshire-Santa Monica Boulevard, just south of Hollywood, the brea crops out in a field, forming an irregular chain of small ponds. In several of these water overlies the oil deposit, the latter’s presence being manifested by the constant rising of gas in bubbles that break upon the surface. Eight or ten years ago, casual grubbers in the old pits began to turn up strange bones that corresponded to no known living animals ; and it transpired that the place was a mine of hidden paléontologie treasure. Scientists took a lively interest in exploiting the spot, and the careful work of the last few years has brought to light an unsurpassed collection of skeletons of prehistoric rarities such as elephants, sabre-toothed tigers, mastodons, camels, bisons, and innumerable birds and reptiles,1 many of them heretofore unknown except by incomplete frag-
l Complete specimens may be seen at the public Museum of History, Sciencç and Art, in Exposition Park, Los Angeles,!94 Finding the Worth While in California
ments. To the eye of fancy, these pits reveal many an ancient tragedy. It would seem that the existence here of such masses of faunal remains can only be accounted for by the supposition that the animals had been lured (or perhaps driven by a pursuing enemy) into the waters, ignorant of the underlying beds of asphalt, in which they became mired, gradually sinking into an agonized death.
The commercial development of California petroleum began in 1894, with the discoveries near Los Angeles and at Summerland (on the seashore 12 miles south of Santa Barbara). The principal fields are along the southwestern edge of the San Joaquin Valley (in Kern County) reached from Bakersfield; near Santa Maria in Santa Barbara County; in the Santa Clara Valley of Ventura County; and the Los Angeles district, including the Puente Hills near Whittier. The oil is pumped through pipe lines from the fields to various shipping stations along the seacoast, as at Point Richmond on San Francisco Bay, Monterey, Port San Luis (near San Luis Obispo, where are enormous storage tanks visible from the railway, if you ask the conductor to show you whereFor the Practical Man	195
to look for them), Gaviota, Ventura, and El Segundo (near Redondo Beach).
Gold, which made California famous, plays not even a poor second to-day to petroleum, running about $20,000,000’s worth annually to petroleum’s $160,000,000. Yet $20,000,000 per annum is not to be sniffed at; but the methods of getting it are very different to-day from the placer-mining of the Forty-niners. Nearly half is had by dredging in the waters of the upper Sacramento Valley, where gold-bearing streams debouch, as at Oroville on the Feather River, near Marysville and at Auburn. The dredges are run by electricity and employ an endless chain of steel buckets that dig far below the bed of the water in which they work. For modern quartz mines, the Southern Pacific will take you into Nevada County, where at Grass Valley and vicinity, 70 miles from Sacramento, are numerous active mines. The district (now known as the Mother Lode) which furnished the scene of many of Bret Harte’s stories, is further south, much of it in Calaveras and Tuolumne Counties. There you will still find Angel’s and Jimtown (dignified as Jamestown on the map), and may reach them196 Finding the Worth While in California
by the Southern Pacific in 8 hours from San Francisco.1
California holds no monopoly of the orange, but this fruit plays a very important part in the agricultural activities of the State, and most visitors are vastly interested in seeing it grow. Its introduction is due to the Franciscan Missionaries of the eighteenth century, but its cultivation on a commercial scale dates from about 1880. In 1873 the first navel orange trees in California were planted near Riverside. One of the two original trees still stands, a moribund, much cherished memorial, in the courtyard of the Glenwood Mission Inn at Riverside,2 where it is photographed annually by admiring visitors. Riverside, San Bernardino, Los Angeles and Orange Counties form the principal orange belt of California, and in March and April are one vast garden of de-
1	A readable account of a walking trip through this region, as it is to-day, is Thomas Dykes Beasley’s “ A Tramp Through the Bret Harte Country.”
2	The navel variety is seedless, and is named from the abnormal orifice at one end containing an excrescence like a small abortive fruit. It was in the first place a natural sport, and a tree growing in Brazil furnished the cuttings from which our trees have descended. It is, however, by no means a new thing. An old book on the orange published in 1646 by an Italian monk, one Ferrarius, contains an engraving, photographic in its fidelity, of a navel orange.For the Practical Man
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licious perfume, extending from the sierra to the sea, and embracing some 80 per cent of all the orange trees in the State. It is not to be supposed, however, that the north cannot raise oranges, too. As a matter of fact, they are grown in certain inland sections as far up as Tehama County, 700 miles north of San Diego; and along the western foothills of the Sierra Nevada in Kern, Tulare and Fresno Counties, as well as in the Sacramento Valley, there are important groves. Indeed the earliest to ripen are those of the central and northern valleys, where the greater summer heat quickens the maturing. To know the California orange at its best, one needs to eat it perfectly ripe. That in the south is not until March or April for the navel and other early varieties. As for the summer Valencias, I never realized their luscious possibilities until I picked some half withered from a tree at Christmas. That was 20 months after flowering, and they seemed concentrated nectar.
In a general way the lemon companions the orange in California, but it is less tolerant of frost by 2 or 3 degrees. It has not been so generally raised as the orange, but its culture198 Finding the Worth While in California
of recent years has been on the increase. One sees very fine groves of it in the neighborhood of Whittier in Los Angeles County; and near Santa Paula in Ventura County, the Limoneira groves represent, perhaps, the high-mark of scientific management. The grapefruit has not taken to California as kindly as to Florida, but of late the desert has been found to be to its liking, and there are groves in the Imperial Valley producing as mellow, juicy fruit as the palate could desire. But again, as in the case of the orange, the finest flavor must be waited for, until the fruit is thoroughly matured.
There is a Palestinian touch about California ranch life, due to the wide prevalence of such distinctively Bible fruits as the grape, the fig, the olive, the almond and the pomegranate, all of which were introduced in Mission times by the indefatigable Franciscans. Their presence gives a special interest to the tourist’s travels about the State, whether by railroad or motor car; and whatever the season, the ranches present scenes novel to his Eastern eyes. The bloom of the almond — the earliest of all the trees to blossom — lends an unforgettable note of beauty to the countryside in late January orFor the Practical Man
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in February. In June the pomegranate’s vermilion flowers are like tongues of flame in the midst of its glossy green foliage, and autumn finds the rather scrawny little trees hardly less picturesque, hanging with the russet balls of fruit. The olive tree is noticeable as far away as the eye can reach, because of the gray green leafage which it wears throughout the year. It was among the first fruits of Missionary planting, and the fine old trees at Mission San Diego are probably the oldest in the State. The olive yard was a prominent feature of every Mission, and as the tree is a famous drought resister, it was well fitted to stand the neglect following the secularization of the Mission properties. The vicinity of practically all the Missions, even the ruined ones,1 reveals gnarled old trees that date from the days when these lands were the only cultivated spots in the province. At San Juan Capistrano the remains of a crude olive mill of the Padres may still be seen. Southern California has some famous modern olive orchards, the largest,
1 At San Rafael, where no vestige of the Mission buildings now remains, there is, nevertheless, a row of old olive trees a few hundred yards distant from the Mission site, which were no doubt set out by Padre Amoros.200 Finding the Worth While in California
known as the Sylmar, being near San Fernando on the! boulevard that leads to Saugus and San Francisco. Two thousand acres of trees are under cultivation there, and visitors (who are able to get in) will find entertainment in see' ing the gathering of the fruit, its pickling, and its manufacture into oil. From May until the last of October, however, there is little doing as the crop is then developing on the trees. The olive ripens in the late autumn, when it is a tempting black-purple morsel to look at, like a neat little plum, but surprisingly bitter. When the bitterness is extracted, however, there is no olive so satisfying to the California taste as the ripe one, and one of the achievements well worth while in your California trip is to learn to add that item to your menu.
The fig is in common cultivation throughout most of the State, and every ranch, little or great, where frost is not severe, has its fig trees, if only for family use. They attain their best development in the San Joaquin and Sacramento Valleys, when trees may be met with as much as 3 feet in diameter at the base and casting a shade 25 or 30 feet around in every direction. The most noted of these big figs isFor the Practical Man
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on General Bidwell’s ranch near Chico, in Bufl e County. This is 75 feet high, with a spread of branches of over a hundred feet. It has a habit of lowering its under branches to the ground, where they take root. One of the principal limbs measures 2 feet through. Unfortunately this noble tree, which was set out in 1851, is now showing the infirmities of age. The fig planted by the Franciscans and still in extensive cultivation is known as the Mission — a luscious dark-purple variety which is highly prized in its fresh state. The first crop reaches maturity in the early summer; then, after a breathing spell, a later begins to ripen in August and continues uninterruptedly until November. The unfertilized fig is a poor keeper even after drying, and it was not until 1900 that California growers succeeded in establishing here the blastophaga wasp, which is an essential factor in fertilizing the queer hidden flowers. Since that time the drying of the Smyrna variety has become an established industry in the vicinity of Fresno.
Fresno County, in the heart of the San Joaquin Valley, is a hot place in summer, but it possesses then many sights of interest to the202 Finding the Worth While in California
looker-on at agriculture. It is the center of large fruit-drying and canning industries, as well as of extensive vineyards, including those of raisin grapes (which, by the way, are green when they are ripe). The drying of figs, peaches, raisins, and other fruits, is a picturesque sight, the fruit being placed on trays that are laid side by side in the blazing sunshine and make great checkers of color on the ground. Grapes in California, by the way, strike the Easterner as having changed their habits on coming to the Coast. For instance, they do not pop from their skins as Concords and Delawares do, and the vines are not grown on trellises and arbors, but stand like dwarf trees, quite independently, each with a short stub of a trunk a couple of feet high and sometimes a foot through. As a matter of fact, the Eastern grape is American, and the Californian is of imported European stock, specifically different. Every winter the year’s growth is cut back to within a couple of eyes of the trunk, which gives a California vineyard at that season the look of a wood-lot cut to the ground. The vineyards form a conspicuous and beautiful sight in the California land-For the Practical Man
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scape, clothing in spring and summer large sections of the foothill regions from San Diego to the upper Sacramento, with living green that gradually changes to old gold in the autumn.
Among the picturesque agricultural sights of California, the contribution of the prune and apricot orchards should have mention. The apricot is pretty well distributed throughout both central and southern California, and its smooth-cheeked, ruddy-yellow fruit, picked thoroughly ripe from the tree, will be a revelation to you who have only known it after a transcontinental journey in wooden boxes or in tin cans. In July, as you drive about, you will find the vicinity of the apricot orchards lively with the airy camps of women and children splitting and stoning the fruit for drying, while acres of trays covered with the brilliant halves of fruit lie steeping in the sunshine. The prune — more delicious in its fresh state, by the way, than when dried — is a specialty of the Santa Clara Valley. In the chapter on San José mention has been made of the wonderful sight this valley presents at the time of the blossoming of the prune in March. With the ripening of the fruit in August come the pick-204 Finding the Worth While in California
ers, who again are mostly women and children, generally Italians and other Latins, to camp in the orchards and do their leisurely work; for the prune is not picked until nature drops it full-sugared, so that even infantile hands can gather it.
The baby among California fruit industries is the culture of the date. This tree, too, was planted by the Franciscans at many of the Missions, but it bore for them little fruit, and matured none. Of recent years, the experiments of the United States Department of Agriculture, with the cooperation of a few intelligent desert ranchers, have developed the fact that the Colorado Desert of southern California possesses ideal conditions for maturing a fine quality of date. Shoots of the best oriental varieties were imported and set out in different parts of the desert, with the result that for the last year or two, dates of good varieties — the Deglet Noor, for one — are now being produced in commercial quantities — small as yet, but likely soon to increase rapidly. In fact, so extensively are the trees being grown, both from seeds and offsets, that there is a strong probability of the general aspect of partsFor the Practical Man	205
of the desert undergoing a complete transformation within a dozen years, by the rising of the date-palm groves above what is now a monotonous level of sand and stunted wild growths of the desert. The region best fitted to the date seems to be the Coachella Valley, between Indio and Mecca, directly reached by the Southern Pacific Railway, or it may be made the objective of a motor trip1 from Los Angeles. The dates ripen from August until December, and most varieties dry on the trees. To eat them directly from the bunch is worth the trip. There is at Mecca an experimental grove of the Government’s, to which visitors are admitted; and the Johnson Ranch where, I believe, the first private success in California dates was registered, is easily reached a short mile from the railroad station at Indio.
1 See Chapter II, “ Los Angeles and Round About.”CHAPTER XII
CLIMATE, CLOTHES AND CASH
Nothing is more famous among the attractions of California than its climate, yet I doubt if anybody has ever been able to tell the exact truth about it. This is principally because climatic conditions differ exceedingly in different sections of the State, and secondarily because they sometimes vary markedly in successive years. Old Californians, therefore, are noticeably chary about committing themselves to positive statements concerning their climate —further than that it is the finest on earth! —averring that the longer one lives in it the less one knows about it. “ See that fellow over there ? ” they will say to you, with a twinkle of the eye, “ He’s been here six weeks and knows all about it. Ask him.”
There are however, certain features that can be broadly stated, the knowledge of which
206Climate, Clothes and Cash
207
will be of value to the visitor. The year on the Coast may be described for practical purposes as of two seasons, the wet and the dry; and in a general way the duration of the wet season and the amount of precipitation increase as one goes north. This precipitation in the valleys and at the lower mountain elevations (say up to 3000 feet) is normally in the form of rain; but in the high mountain regions it is more frequently snow. In the parts of the State most frequented by tourists, the rainy season may set in any time after September, and continue until May or even June. Usually, however, storms of magnitude are not expected before November, and April sees them over. It is not to be supposed, however, that during this period it rains all the time or anything like it. The precipitation comes usually in the form of storms of 2 or 3 days duration (averaging perhaps an inch or two a day); these, succeeded by days of brilliant, sunny weather, after which the clouds again, and then more sunshine. To put it broadly, a lowland California winter has about the same rainfall as an Atlantic Coast summer, and it is similarly distributed. At Los Angeles, the average sea-208 Finding the Worth While in California
sonal rainfall in a period of 40 years has been about 16 inches; but in that time there have been three or four winters with between 30 and 40 inches recorded (which means local floods) and as many with about 5 inches (which means serious drought). At San Francisco the Weather Bureau has recorded as high a seasonal precipitation as 49 inches and as low as 7%, the average there being about 22% inches per year.
As to temperature, a marked characteristic is the wide daily range between that of midday and that of night throughout the year. This is particularly the case in the south, and indifference to it on the part of the newcomer is pretty sure to bring on a severe cold. At Pasadena, for instance, a winter midday temperature of 8o° Fahr. may be recorded, and by bedtime the mercury will be at 45°. This does not mean a “ cold wave ” but just the natural cooling off of night. Not infrequently the daily variation amounts to 40°. At Los Angeles and at places directly on the seacoast, as San Diego and Santa Barbara, this difference between day and night is less great, but still ranges around 25°. San Francisco in this re-Climate, Clothes and Cash
209
spect is something of a law to itself, the coolness — not to say chilliness — of the days even in summer1 bringing the range down to about io°. That is, if it is 6o° on the shady side of the street at 2 p. m., the mercury will probably not go below 50° during the ensuing night.
The difference between sunshine and shadow is also very noticeable, and experienced people after exercising do not sit down in the shade but in the sun; or if it must be shade, they throw something over their shoulders. “ There is always a nasty little breeze in this climate to make trouble,” I once heard a tourist complain. She had caught cold from ignorance of the risk she took in sitting on a shady bench to watch a tennis game after walking in the pleasant winter sunshine. Automobilists should especially be careful to carry an abundance of wraps for use when the evening chill sets in, as it invariably does when the sun approaches the horizon.
Among the permanent residents it is a moot question whether winter or summer in Cali-
1 From June until early September is San Francisco’s most disagreeable season, cold fogs and searching winds from the ocean sending those who can go, to the mountain resorts to keep warm!2io Finding the Worth While in California
fornia is the more agreeable season. Each has its good points, but a great deal depends upon the part of the State one is talking about. Relation to the sea is an important factor. The ocean exerts a modifying effect upon the temperature wherever its influences reach, and such sections are on the whole the pleasantest at all seasons. The interior valleys, being shut away from the sea, are as a rule too hot for comfort in summer as well as too frosty in winter. O yes, there is frost in California,1 sometimes. Californians are apt to be sensitive on the subject; though really such as they have is no disgrace, but rather a useful contribution to the invigorating quality of a winter climate that is a good deal like an Eastern October at its best. I mention the subject here for the purpose of emphasizing the fact that California is in no sense a tropical State, and it is not Florida. Winter visitors should bring with them the
1 You read of ״ frostless belts ” in California, particularly in the advertising literature of real estate dealers. This can only mean that such belts have ordinarily no frost that damages. It is very doubtful if there is a place in California that is not touched by at least some degree of frost in an ordinary winter. It is to be noted, however, that the low night or early morning temperatures that bring frost often last but a few minutes, and are so quickly succeeded by a rapid rise that damage to growing plants is prevented.Climate, Clothes and Cash
211
same sort of clothing that they would wear in the East. They will not, of course, want all their wraps all the time, but they will some of the time. Even during the summer months, tourists will do well to keep a light wrap at hand, particularly at the beaches, where a strong wind from the sea is a regular afternoon occurrence. Summer midday temperatures in the interior valleys run pretty close to ioo°, or even over, but owing to the low degree of humidity prevalent when the mercury stands highest, the heat is much less oppressive than the figures indicate to the Eastern mind. Nevertheless it is oppressive enough. Summer visitors should seek as far as possible those places (say not more than 25 or 30 miles inland) where the occasional morning fogs and the steady trade-winds operate as a cooling influence, or those resorts in the higher mountains where the altitude is a guaranty of comfort. It is a fact, however, that throughout California, the summer night brings a refreshing-coolness with it (though this is the later in arriving the farther from the coast you are) and one starts each morning with the strength! that comes of a full night’s rest. One is spared¡212 Finding the ¡Forth While in California
in California that wretched sleepless tossing on a hot, prickling mattress, which comes to most in certain breathless nights of almost every “ Back East ” summer.
The tourist’s expenses in California will be about what he chooses to make them. His railroad ticket has stop-off privileges that will admit of visiting most of the important centers without additional outlay for transportation. For side trips the railway fare may be reckoned on about the same basis as in the East; and auto-stages at moderate rates, are numerous on all routes of travel. I have already referred to the rates at which automobiles with driver may be hired for private trips — $2 to $3 per hour, with often a substantial concession, if trips of several days are arranged for. Hotels in the larger cities, as San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, are usually conducted on the European plan, and single rooms may be had at a dollar and a half a day (two dollars with bath) and upward. The crack tourist hotels such as the “Huntington,” ‘5Raymond” or “Maryland” at Pasadena, the “Glenwood Mission Inn” at Riverside, the “Arlington” at :Santa Barbara, the “ Coronado ” at Coronado,Climate, Clothes and Cash
213
are usually conducted on the American plan at metropolitan rates. In small towns, the American plan hotels charge from $4 to $5 per day. The cost of meals at restaurants does not differ materially from the East, and of course depends upon one’s tastes and need. A peculiar style of restaurant known as a cafeteria (properly pronounced cafetaree-a'), in which all dishes are displayed before the eye and one is one’s own waiter, originated, I believe, in Los Angeles many years ago and has spread throughout the Coast. It is the old-fashioned lunch counter raised to the distinction of a satisfying hot meal. The cooking, as a rule, has a home flavor, and at the best establishments (as in Los Angeles where they have proved particularly popular) the variety and excellence of the dishes are all that any reasonable taste could ask for. You pay for each individual item and for a modest sum you may have the best in the land.
For those who are not continually on the wing, but have leisure to remain a couple of weeks or more in one situation, furnished apartments are economical and pleasant. These may be had in many private families, or214 Finding the Worth While in California
in apartment houses, which are numerous in all California places of resort. In many, there are small suites of two or three rooms, with bath and kitchenette for light housekeeping, the rates ranging from $12 or $15 a week upward, with a concession if taken by the month. Such light housekeeping rooms are very convenient for many tourists, who are enabled thus to get their own breakfasts at home and their other meals wherever their jaunts through the day may take them. In selecting such rooms in winter, it is wise to secure them with a sunny exposure (south or east) if possible; and make diligent provision at the outset for heat of evenings and on wet or cloudy days. Californians as a rule keep their houses colder than Eastern Americans, which inspired in some chilly tourist years ago the epigram that “ California has the biggest liars and the smallest stoves of any State in the Union.” Of late years the renters of apartments have realized the wisdom of giving in to tourist whims about heat; and rooms, if not warmed by furnace, are usually provided with heating stoves. The stoves are generally more satisfactory than de-Climate, Clothes and Cash 215
pendence on the landlady’s furnace, as you can control the heat yourself.
Families remaining a month or more in one place will find it pleasant to rent furnished bungalows of 4 or 5 rooms, which are procurable at rates varying with the location and the season. Often such bungalows are grouped in sunny, flowery courts, with charming surroundings, all care of the grounds being assumed by the landlord.A BRIEF LIST OF WORKS ON CALIFORNIA
HISTORY
California, by Josiah Royce. (A compact narrative in one volume.)
History of California (4 volumes), edited by Zoeth Skinner Eldridge.
California Under Spain and Mexico, by Irving Berdine Richman.
The California Padres and Their Missions, by Charles Francis Saunders and J. Smeaton Chase.
DESCRIPTIVE
Our Italy, by Charles Dudley Warner (as California was 25 years ago).
Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada, by Clarence King.
Romantic California, by Ernest Peixotto.
The Mountains of California, by John Muir. Yosemite Trails, by J. Smeaton Chase.
California Coast Trails, by J. Smeaton Chase.
217218 A Brief List of Works on California
The Land of Little Rain, by Mary Austin (the Desert).
Under the Sky in California, by Charles Francis Saunders.
NATURE AND SCIENCE
Trees of California, by Willis Linn Jepson.
Wild Flowers of California, by Mary Elizabeth Parsons.
With the Flowers and Trees in California, by Charles Francis Saunders.
Birds of California, by Irene G. Wheelock.
Bird Notes Afield, by Charles A. Keeler.
Field Days in California, by Bradford Torrey.
Nature and Science on the Pacific Coast, edited under the auspices of the Pacific Coast Committee of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
NOMENCLATURE
Spanish and Indian Place Names of California, by Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez.MAPS222223224INDEX
A
Acoma, N. M., 5. Adamana, Ariz., 8.
Alta Peak, 174.
Angel’s, 195.
“Apache Trail,” Ariz., 12.
Arbolado, 100.
Arch Beach, 35.
“ Around the Circle ” trip, Colo., 17.
Arrowhead Hot Springs, 182.
Arroyo Seco, 179. Auburn, 195.
Azusa, 180.
B
Bakersfield, 194. Banff, Canada, 23.
Bear Valley, Big, 185.
Little, 185.
Berkeley, 135.
Big Basin, 113. Boulder Creek, 112. Bullfrog Lake, 170.
C
Calistoga, 147.
Camulos Rancho, 51. Carmel, 95.
Carpinteria, 84.
Casa Grande, Ariz., 14.
Casa Verdugo, 29. Casitas Passes, 84.
Chelly, Canon de, 7.
Cheyenne Mt. and Canons, Colo., 16.
Coachella Valley, 56. Cold Brook, 180.
Colorado Desert of California, 54, 204.
Colorado Springs, Colo., 16.
Congress Springs Canon, 113•
Coronado, 63. Coronados, Los, 65. “Crest Drive,” 182.
Cuyamaca, 67.
D
Death Valley, 172.
Del Monte, 91. Drake’s Bay, 121.
E
Eel River, 151.
225226
Index
El Centro, 74.
Enchanted Mesa, N. M.,
5•
Eureka, 151.
Exeter, 173.
F
Feather River, 15.
Field, Canada, 23. Foothill Boulevard, 45. Forest Home, 186. Fresno, 201.
G
Gallup, N. M., 6.
Garden of the Gods,
Colo., 16.
Gardiner, Mont., 18. Gaviota Pass, 81.
General Grant National
Park, 166.
Geysers, 148.
Giant Forest, 173. Glacier, Canada, 23. Glacier National Park,
20.
Glen Ellen, 149.
Grand Canon, Arizona,
9•
Grass Valley, 195.
“ Grayback ” Mountain,
186.
H
Hancock Ranch, 193. Healdsburg, 149.
Hidden Lake, 188. Hollywood, 34.
Hopi Indians, Ariz., 7. Hume, 165.
I
Imperial Valley, 75. Independence, 172.
Indio, 55.
Idyllwild, 188.
J
Jimtown, 195.
K
Kanawyer’s, 164. Keweah River, 173. Kearsarge Pass, 170. Kings’ River Canon, 163
L
Laguna, N. M., 5. Laguna Beach, 34.
La Jolla, 63.
La Joya, 71.
Lake Louise, Canada, 23 Lake Tahoe, 19, 151. Lone Pine, 172.
Long Beach, 31.
Los Angeles, 26.
Los Gatos, hi.
Los Olivos, 81.
M
Mancos, Colo., 16.Index
2Q-7
Manitou, Colo., 16. Mariposa Big Trees, 162. Marysville, 195.
Matilija Canon, 86. Mecca, 55.
Merced Big Trees, 161. Mesa Grande, 68.
Mesa Verde National
Park, Colo., 16.
Mill Creek Canon, 186. Miramar, 83.
Mission San Antonio de
Paia, 72.
San Carlos, 97.
San Diego, 59.
San Fernando, 51.
San Francisco (Dol-
ores), 131.
San Francisco Solano
(Sonoma), 150.
San Gabriel, 49.
San José, 116.
San Juan Bautista, 102. San Juan Capistrano,
c36׳t5°: n San Luis Rey, 73.
San Rafael, 199.
San Xavier del Bac,
Ariz., 14.
Santa Barbara, 78. Santa Clara, 1x4.
Santa Ynés, 80. Soledad, 107.
Mojave Desert, 172. Montecito, 83.
Monterey, 91.
Moro Rock, 174.
Moss Beach, 137.
Mother Lode, 195.
Mount Brewer, 169. Dana, 161.
Diablo, 134.
Gould, 170.
Hamilton, 108.
Islip, 181.
Lowe, 41.
Saint Helena, 147.
San Antonio, 181.
San Bernardino, 186. San Gorgonio, 186.
San Jacinto, 178, 188. Silliman, 174. Tamalpais, 144. Whitney, 172, 188. Wilson, 41.
Muir Trail, 171.
Woods, 146.
N
Napa. Valley, 146. Navajo Indians, 6.
New Orleans, 11. Nordhoff, 85.
O
Ocean Shore Boulevard, 139•
Ojai Valley, 84 “ Old Baldy,” 181. Oroville, 195.
P
Pacific Grove, 95. Pajarito Plateau, N. M.,
3•
Paia, 71.
Palm Springs, 55.228
Index
Palo Alto, 134.
Panama, 22.
Paradise Valley, 168. Pasadena, 39.
Pauma, 71.
Peninsular Highway, 133. Petrified Forest, Ari-
zona, 8.
California, 148.
Pike’s Peak, Colo., 16. Pinecrest, 185.
Pine Hills, 67.
Pinnacles, Vancouver, 103. Point Lobos, (Monte-
rey), 99•
Point Loma, 61.
Pueblo Indians, 5, 6, 7. Puente Hills, 194.
Puye, N. M., 3.
R
Redlands, 46.
Redondo, 31.
Redwood Park, California State, 101, 113•
Reedley, 165.
Rincon, 71.
Rito de los Frijoles, N. M,. 3.
Riverside, 47, 196. Roosevelt Dam, Ariz., 12. Russian River, 149.
S
Salt Lake City, Utah, 17.
Saltón Sea, 55.
San Antonio, Tex., 11. San Antonio Cañón, 181. San Bernardino, 45.
Mountains, 182.
San Diego, 57.
San Francisco, 120.
San Gabriel, 49.
Cañón, 180.
San José, 108.
San Luis Rey River, 71. San Marcos Pass, 80.
San Miguel Island, 76. Sanger, 165.
Santa Ana Cañón, 183. Santa Barbara, 76.
Santa Catalina Island,
36.
Santa Clara, 114.
Valley, 114, 203. (Ventura Co.), 194.
Santa Cruz, 101.
Island, 87.
Mountains, ill.
Santa Fé, N. M., 2. Santa Monica, 33.
Santa Paula, 198.
Santa Rosa, 149.
Santa Ynés Mountains,
S3•
Santa Ysabel, 67. Saratoga, 114.
Sequoia National Park,
173•
Sierra Madre, 43.
Range, 178.
Soledad, 104.
Sonoma, 149.
Valley, 149.Index
229
Strawberry Peak, 180.
Valley, 188. Summerland, 191. Switzer’s, 178.
T
Tahoe, Lake, 19, 151. Taos, N. M., 4.
Tia Juana, 64.
Tioga Road, 162.
Tonto National Monu-
ment, Ariz., 13. Topanga Canon, 54. Tucson, Ariz., 13. Tuolumne Big Trees,
161.
Soda Springs, 161.
U
Universal City, 52. University of California,
135•
Leland Stanford, Jr., 134•
V
Vallejo, 146.
Vancouver Pinnacles,
103.
Venice, 31.
Victoria, B. C., 24. Visalia, 173.
W
Warner’s Ranch, 69. Wawona, 162.
Whittier, 34.
Y
Yellowstone National Park, 18.
Yosemite National Park, 160.
Valley, 154.
Z
Zuni, 7.PARTIAL LIST OF ANNUAL FESTIVALS AND OTHER PUBLIC STATED EVENTS IN CALIFORNIA OF LIKELY INTEREST TO TOURISTS.
(For specific dates when not given below the newspapers should be consulted.)
Tournament of Roses at Pasadena, New Year’s Day. (See p. 41)
National Orange Show at San Bernardino, in February.
Blossom Day at Saratoga, Santa Qara County, usually in late March. (See p. 114.)
Mount Roubidoux Sunrise Service at Riverside, on Easter Sunday. (See p. 47.)
California Rodeo at Salinas, in July. Exhibition of cowboy life and feats.
Egg Day at Petaluma, Sonoma County, a locality noted for the poultry industry. Held in August.
Grape Day, September 9, at Escondido, San Diego County, famous for its fine Muscat grapes, tons of which are customarily given away free at this festival.
California State Fair, at Sacramento, in September.
California Industries Exhibition, at San Francisco, in October.
Annual National Livestock Show, at San Francisco, in October.
Northern California Orange and Olive Exposition, at Oroville, Butte County, in November.
Pilgrimage Play, an outdoor representation of the Life of Christ, held in a natural depression of the hills on the outskirts of Hollywood, Los Angeles, during the summer months.
Mission Play, a dramatic presentation of the story of the Franciscan Missions in California, given during the winter and spring in a theater built for the purpose at San Gabriel near Los Angeles.־ake the
Sunser Route
to California
Every mile a scene worth while
SUNSET LIMITED
New Orleans San Antonio El Paso Tucson San Diego Los Angeles San Francisco
Through Observation and Dining Cars and other comforts of modern travel. Daily Through Tourist Sleeping Car Service between Washington, D. C. and San Francisco. Convenient service for the 120-mile detour by automobile over the APACHE TRAIL Highway between Globe and Phoenix, passing ancient Cliff Dwellings, famous Copper Camps, magnificent gorges and the gigantic Roosevelt Dam. Tri-Weekly Service between New Orleans and San Diego via the San Diego and Arizona Railway for San Diego through the CARRISO GORGE.
For information and literature address
SOUTHERN PACIFIC LINES
New York	New Orleans
165 Broadway	Pan-American Bank Bldg.
Houston	Tucson
Southern Pacific Bldg. Score Bldg.
San Francisco, Southern Pacific Bldg.
Impressive scene a¡ on g the Apache Trail Highway of Arizona