Part 10
We slept in Los Angeles with our windows wide open and felt no chill in the dry, balmy air, although a gentle breeze from seaward sifted through the lace curtains all night long. The sun was streaming in when at last we awoke to the sound of New England church bells. We breakfasted on plates piled high with big, red, sweet strawberries, dead ripe, evenly ripe, but not one whit over ripe. A ripeness and sweetness we have never before tasted, even in Oxford. In Seattle and Tacoma we met the royal crab of the Puget Sound, and found him big and bigger than the crabs of England and of France--big as dinner plates, all of them, and now we find in the great, luscious strawberry of Los Angeles another American product as big as those that grow in the gardens of merrie England.
Los Angeles! How can I tell you of it and of the lovely region of the American Riviera all round about it? My ideas of Los Angeles had been indefinite. I had only heard of it. I only knew that up in Dawson and in Alaska the frost-stung digger for gold dreams of Southern California and the country of Los Angeles, and when, during his seven long months of winter and darkness, he assures himself of his stake and his fortune, he talks of the far south and prepares to go there and to end his days among these orange groves and olive orchards and teeming gardens. And when he dies--so it is said--every good Yukoner and Alaskan has no other prayer than to be translated to Southern California! So I had imagined much for this perhaps most charming of all regions of the semi-tropics, within the immediate borders of the United States. But I had not yet conceived the fine, modern city among all of this delight of climate and of verdure. A city with broad, asphalted business streets, built up on either side with new, modern sky-scrapers far exceeding in bigness those of San Francisco. The edifices bordering Market Street in San Francisco are fine, but old in type--most or all erected thirty or forty years ago--while the many huge blocks of Los Angeles are as up to date as those of New York. It possesses two hundred miles of modern electric tramways, and H. E. Huntington has sold out his holdings in the Southern Pacific left him by his uncle, C. P. Huntington, and has put and is now putting his millions into the electric tramway system of Los Angeles.
During the morning we rode some thirty miles upon the tourist's car, seeing the city, its many fine parks, its public buildings, its business blocks, its extraordinary extent of imposing residences. And when we might ride no longer, we strolled on through Adams Street and Chester Place and St. James Place, and among those sections of the residence quarter where no tramways are allowed to profane the public way. And here among these modern palaces, perhaps, we learned to comprehend the real inwardness of Los Angeles' astonishing growth, for many of these superb homes are not built and owned by the business men making fortunes out of the commerce of the city, but are built and owned by those who have already acquired fortunes in other parts of the United States and of the world, and who by reason of the genial climate of Southern California, have come here to live out the balance of their days. Their incomes are derived from sources elsewhere than in California, and they spend freely of those incomes in the region of their new homes. The exquisite lawns, the flowering shrubs, the tropical and semi-tropical palms and palmettos, all kept and cared for by means of the constant use of water and expert gardeners' skill, give to the city a residence section of marvelous charm. Water does it all, and man helps the water.
Los Angeles possesses many fine churches and schools and two flourishing colleges. One run by the Methodist Church; the other under the control of the State. From a city of twenty-five thousand in 1890, Los Angeles is now grown to one hundred and twenty-five thousand, and is still expanding by leaps and bounds. It is the center of the gardens and orchards and citrus fruit trade of Southern California, and is the Mecca toward whose environs comes in perpetual procession the unending army of the world's "One Lungers," and their friends.
Of an afternoon we rode out to Pasadena in the swift, through electric train. Once a separate community, now already become a suburb of the greater growing city. "The finest climate on the earth," they say, and mankind from all parts of the earth are there to prove it. A large town of residences, each standing apart in its own garden; many surrounded by oranges and pomegranates and figs. Lovely homes and occupied by a cultivated society.
We did not tarry to see the celebrated ostrich farm, which is one of the famous sights of Pasadena, but went on toward the mountain chain beyond and north of Pasadena to the base of towering Mount Low, and climbed right up its face a thousand feet on an inclined plane steeper than any of Kanawha's, and then another thousand feet by five miles of winding electric railway. A wonderful ride into the blue sky, with a yet more wonderful panorama stretching for many miles beneath our feet. All the valley of the Los Angeles, the innumerable towns and villages and farms and groves and orchards and vineyards stretching far as the eye could see until bounded by the mountains of Mexico to the south, and the shimmering waters of the Pacific to the west, and to the north and east a limitless expanse of scarred and serrated volcanic mountain ranges, like the gigantic petrified waves of a mighty sea. Below us the perfect verdure of irrigated land, the patches and masses of greenness everywhere threaded and interspersed by the irrigating ditches and pools and ponds whereby the precious water is impounded and distributed when used.
Los Angeles lies very near the center of an immense cove, whose sea line marks the great indenture on the southwest of the United States, where the coast bends in from Cape Conception and curves southeastward to the borders of Mexico, a total coastal frontage on the Pacific Ocean of near three hundred miles.
On the north, the mountains of the Coast Range, and the westward jutting spurs of the Sierra Nevada come together and form a barrier against the cold northern airs. Eastward their extension forms a high barrier against the colder airs of the Rocky Mountain region. Los Angeles lies at about the point where these protecting mountain ranges recede to near sixty miles from the sea, itself some twenty and thirty miles from the twin ports of Santa Monica and San Pedro, and is the commercial center of this rich alluvial and sheltered region, of which Santa Barbara, on a lovely bay, is the chief northern center, and San Diego, one hundred and fifty miles to the south, upon the second finest harbor in California, is the most southern port and trade outlet. A vast "ventura," as the Spaniards called it, upon this fertile plain and rolling upland anything will grow if only it has water. For three or four months in the year, from early November to March, the skies pour down an ample rainfall, and the world is a garden. During the other eight months, man--the active American--now irrigates the land with water stored during the rainy season, and thus a perpetual and prolific yield is won from the fecund soil. Here the famous seedless orange was discovered, perpetuated, and has become the most coveted citrous fruit. Fortunes have been made from the raising of these oranges alone. The immense and fragrant strawberries ripen every month the year round. Figs and pomegranates abound. Apples, pears, olives and grapes yield enormous and profitable crops. No frosts, no drouths. Last year Los Angeles and its contributing orchards shipped twenty-five thousand carloads of citrous fruit. This year they reckon to do yet more. Their capacity is only limited by the markets' demand, and both seem boundless.
The air is dry like that of the Yukon Valley, and similarly, extremes of temperature are easily borne. It is never unpleasantly hot in Southern California, they say, just as the Yukoner vows he never suffers from the cold. "Only give us water to wash our gold;" "water to irrigate our crops," cries each, "and we will become richer than the mind of man can think." But the types of men and women are somewhat different in the two extremes. A sturdier race wins fortune from the soil in the Klondike land; there the children have rosier faces and are more alert. On the crowded streets of the southern city the pale presence of the "one lungers" is at once remarked. But for this, the people might be the same.
We left this gracious garden land, with its gentle climate, by the midday train, this time leaving the coast and following the interior San Joaquin Valley route. Just at the outskirts of the city our train halted a moment, and, looking from the window, I saw a most astonishing spectacle--an extensive enclosure with a large, wide-roofed building in its midst, and enclosure, roof and air all thick with myriads of pigeons. Here is the greatest pigeon roost of the world, where an enterprising bird lover raises squabs by the thousands, cans them in his own factory, and sends them all over the earth to the delight of the epicure. Just why such myriads of birds should not fly away, I do not know, but there they were covering the ground, the roof, and filling the air in circular flights, and seemed rarely or never to leave the borders of the enclosure.
For a few hours we retraced our way and then turned eastward across the edge of the great Mojave Desert. Crossing the barrier of the San Fernando Mountains on the north, through a mile-and-a-half-long tunnel, we left the greenness of olive grove and orange orchard behind, and came out into a continually more and more arid country. Cactus and yucca began to appear and to multiply, the dwarf shrunken palmetto of the Mexican plains grew more and more plentiful, and then we came through dry, parched gulches and cañons, out onto a dead flat plain stretching away toward the eastern horizon as far as the eye could see--sand and sage brush and stunted cactus; a hundred miles or more away a faint blue mountain range showing in the slanting sunlight against the eastern sky. Dry and arid and hopeless to man and beast. A terrible waste to cross, or even to enter, and lifeless and desolate beyond concept.
During the night we crossed over the high, arid Tehachapi Mountains and descended into the San Joaquin Valley, traversing that wonderfully fertile garden land until in the morning we were at Oakland. We then crossed the five miles of wide harbor and took our last breakfast in the city of the Golden Gate.
After night had fallen and I sat with my cigar, I chanced to fall in with an interesting young Jap, "R. Onishi," on his first visit to America, correspondent of the "Jije Shimpo," Tokio's greatest daily newspaper. He had come over to investigate the growing rice plantations of Texas, with a view to Japanese capital becoming interested in development there. He had been much impressed with the opportunity there offered, and should report favorably on the proposed enterprise. Not to use Japanese labor, but for Japanese capital under Japanese management to use American labor. So does the opportunity and natural wealth of our country begin to attract the investment of the stored wealth of Asia as well as of Europe. Like the rice dealer I met on the "Kaiser Frederich," crossing the Atlantic two years ago, Mr. Onishi said that American rice brings the highest price of any in the markets of the world, and he looks for a large export trade to Asia of American rice, as well as wheat. And America, how vast and rich and hopeful a land it seemed to him!
I have now seen almost the entire Pacific Coast of our Northern American Continent. From Skagway, from Dawson to the sight of Mexico. Its old and its new towns and cities, its ports and trade centers have I visited, and greatly has the journey pleased and profited me. The dim perception of our future Pacific power that first dawned upon me at Vancouver has now become a settled conviction. We are just beginning to comprehend the future dominance and potency of our nation in Oriental trade, in commerce, in wealth, in enlightened supremacy. And it fills the imagination with boundless sweep to contemplate what are the possibilities of these great Pacific States.
Among the cities of the future upon the Pacific Coast, Seattle and Los Angeles are the two that impress me as affording the wider opportunity and certainty of growth, wealth and controlling influence in trade, in commerce, in politics. If I were a young man just starting out, I should choose one of them, and in and through Seattle I believe there is the larger chance. Or if I were on life's threshold and, say, twenty-five and vigorous, I would pitch my tent within the confines of the continent of Alaska, and by energy, thrift and foresight, become one of its innumerable future millionaires.
SIXTEENTH LETTER.
SAN FRANCISCO AND SALT LAKE CITY.
SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH, October 14, 1903.
We left San Francisco on the "Overland Limited" train, taking the ten o'clock boat across the bay to Oakland and there entering our car. It was a lovely morning; the sky, blue, without a cloud; the sun, brilliant, and not so hot as at Los Angeles. The city, as we receded from it, lay spread before us, stretching several miles along the water and quite covering the range of hills upon which it is built. Many great ships were at the quays, many were anchored out in the blue waters awaiting their turn to take on cargo, and among these several battleships and cruisers of our navy and one big monitor. Above the city hung a huge black pall of smoke, for soft coal--very soft--and thick asphaltic oil are the only fuels on this coast. We had come to San Francisco by night, and marveled at the myriad of electric lights that illumined it; we now left it by day, and yet more fully realized its metropolitan and commercial greatness.
The ride, this time, was not along the northern breadth of the Sacramento Valley, but by the older route through the longer settled country to the south of it. Still many immense wheatfields, hundreds of sheep browsing among the stubble, and yet more of the orchards of almonds, prunes, apricots, figs and peaches. A monstrous fruit garden, for more than one hundred miles; and everywhere fruit was drying in the sun, spread out in acres of small trays.
At Sacramento, we crossed the river on a long iron bridge, and noted the many steamboats along the wharves--the river is navigable thus far for steamboats--boats about the size of our Kanawha packets, and flows with a swift current.
After leaving San Francisco, we began that long ascent, which at last should carry us over the passes of the Sierra Nevada Mountains some 6,000 feet above the sea. The grades are easy, though persistent, the track sweeping around mountain bases and along deep valleys in wide ascending curves. All the day, till evening, we were creeping up, up, up, following one long ridge and then another, the distant snow summits always before us and seemingly never much nearer than at first. The lower slopes were, like the Sacramento Valley, everywhere covered with well-kept orchards, and everywhere we noted the universal irrigation ditches of running water, constantly present beside us or traversing our way.
As we climbed higher we began to see evidences of present and past placer mining, many of the mountain-sides being scarred and riven by the monitor-thrown jets of water.
Just as the shadows began to fall aslant the higher valleys, we commenced that long and irksome journeying through the snowsheds that, for so many miles, are necessary on this road. Coming over the Canadian Pacific, we met few snowsheds through the Rockies, and not more than two or three of them in the Selkirks, but here they buried us early and held on until long after the fall of night.
This road, you know, was originally the Central Pacific, remaining so until swallowed by its stronger rival of the south, the Southern Pacific, which now owns and operates it.
As we rode along, I could not help recalling its early history, the daring of its projectors, Huntington, Crocker, Stanford and Hopkins, and how it never could or would have been built at all but for the aid of the thousands of Chinese who, under their Irish bosses, finally constructed it.
This morning, when we awoke, we had long passed Reno in Nevada, and were flying down the Sierras' eastern slopes through the alkali deserts of the interior basin, and all day long we have been crossing these plains of sand and sage brush and eternal alkali. We read of things, and think we are informed, but only when we see the world face to face do we begin to comprehend it. Only to-day have I learned to comprehend that Desert and Death are one.
On the Canadian Pacific Railway we had beheld the great Columbia River plunge between the facing cañon cliffs of the Rocky Mountains and the Selkirks where they almost touch, the very apex of that vast interior arid basin that stretches thence all across the United States and on into Mexico. At Yakima, in Washington State, we had crossed the Cascade range and found the arid valley made to bloom and blossom into a perpetual garden by means of the melting snows that there fed the Yakima River and adjacent streams. Now we were again descending from the crests of the Sierra Nevadas, down into this same vast basin where no Columbia cuts it through and no Yakima irrigates its limitless and solitary aridness. For more than three hundred miles have we now been traversing this expanse of parched and naked waste. No water, no life, no bird, no beast, no man. Two thousand miles and more it stretches north and south, from Canada into Mexico. Five hundred and forty miles is its narrowest width. We beheld a spur of it the other evening when we crossed the edge of the Mojave desert in Southern California; we should have traversed it two days or more if we had taken the Southern Pacific route through Arizona. As wide in its narrowest part as from Charleston to New York, or to Chicago! What courage and what temerity did those early pioneers possess who first ventured to cross it with their lumbering prairie-schooners or on their grass-fed bronchos from the Eastern plains! And how many there were who perished in the attempt! Yet water will change even these blasted wastes, and, at the one or two stations where artesian wells have been successfully sunk, we saw high-grown trees and verdant gardens.
Late in the afternoon we began to approach high, barren hills and mountain spurs, all brown and sere, save the sage brush. No cactus or even yucca here, and after climbing and crossing a long, dry ridge, we found ourselves descending into flat, sandy reaches, that bore even no shrubs or plants whatsoever, save a dead and somber sedgy grass in sparse, feeble bunches, and while the land looked wet we saw no water. Then far to the southeast glimmered a silver streak, so faint that it seemed no more than mist, and the streak grew and broadened and gleamed until we knew it to be, in fact, Utah's Great Salt Lake. Later, we came yet nearer to it for a few miles, and then lost sight of it again. But the face of the land had changed. We saw cattle among the sage brush; cattle browsing on the sweet, dry grass that grows close under the sage-brush shadow on the better soils. Then we came to an occasional mud dugout hut and sometimes a wooden shack, and the country grew greener, grass--buffalo bunch grass--became triumphant over the sage brush, and then, right in the midst of a waste of sere yellowness, was an emerald meadow of alfalfa and a man driving two stout horses hitched to a mowing-machine cutting it, two women raking it and tossing it. We were in the land of Mormondom, and beheld their works. Now, the whole country became green, irrigating ditches everywhere, substantial farmhouses, large, well-built barns and outhouses, and miles of thrifty Lombardy poplars, marking the roadways and the boundaries of the fields.
At Ogden, where we were three hours late, our sleeper was taken off the through train to Cheyenne and attached to the express for Salt Lake City. We made no further stops, but, for an hour, whirled through a green, fruitful, patiently-tilled landscape, whose fertility and productiveness delighted eye and brain. Many orchards, large, comfortable farmsteads; wide meadows, green and abundant, as in Holland, with cattle and horses feeding upon them; stubble wheatfields, with flocks of sheep; great beet fields and kitchen gardens in full crops; and water--water in a thousand ditches everywhere! Big farm wagons, drawn by large, strong horses, we saw upon the highways; and farmers, in well-found vehicles, returning from the city to their homes.
Then, far away, towering above all else, loomed a group of gray spires, like the distant view of the dominating pinnacles of the minsters and cathedrals of England and of France, and of Cologne. They were the spires of the great towers of the Mormon temple, that strange, imposing and splendid creation of the brain of Brigham Young.
It was dusk when we reached the city. Electric lights were twinkling along the wide streets as we drove to our hotel. We have not yet seen the city, except for a short stroll under the glaring lights. But already it has made an indelible impression on our minds. Only two cities upon this continent--cities of magnitude--have ever been created and laid out, by systematic forethought, before being entered and occupied by men. One, Washington, laid out according to a comprehensive and well-digested plan; the other, Salt Lake City, the creation--as all else here--of Brigham Young.
The streets of Salt Lake City are all as wide as Pennsylvania Avenue. The blocks, of ten acres each, immense. But these streets--the chief ones are perfectly asphalted; running water flows in every side gutter; great trees, long ago planted, shade every wide sidewalk; the electric tram-cars run on tracks along the middle of the thoroughfare; and the two wide roadways, on either side, are quite free from interfering wires and poles. Many great blocks of fine buildings now rise along the business sections, and the stores present as sumptuous displays of goods and fabrics as anything we have seen in San Francisco, Los Angeles, or New York. The town bears the marks of a great city. Great in its plan, great in its development, great in its destiny. Truly, a capital fit for the seat of power of the potent and comprehending Mormon church.
All the morning we have been viewing concrete, practical Mormondom, and the sight has been most instructive. High above the buildings of the city tower the imposing spires and pinnacles of the Temple, the most immense ecclesiastical structure on the North American continent. Thirty years was it in building, all of native granite, and costing more than four millions of dollars. It stands in the central square of the city, surrounded by a high adobe wall, and a Gentile may view only the exterior.