Part 9

Here we are flying due south from Portland, crossing the entire State of Oregon. We have left Portland on the 8:30 morning train--"The Southern Limited"--and shall be in "Frisco" at eight o'clock to-morrow night. We are now ascending the beautiful valley of the Willamette, "Will-am-ett;" with a fierce accent on the _am_. Flat and level as a table--ten to twenty miles wide and two hundred miles long, lying between the Coast Range on the west and the higher Cascade Mountains on the east. A land of perfect fertility, so gracious a country as I have never yet beheld. In winter, rarely any snow, plenty of rain and very much moist Scotch air. In summer, a sunshine that ripens fields of wheat, a moisture that grows the biggest apples and prunes and small fruits. Everywhere neat, tidy farmhouses, big barns. Great stacks of wheat straw and as big ones of hay, and these generally tented in with brown canvas. We are passing, too, extensive fields of hop vines, an especially lucrative crop at present prices--twenty-five cents a pound, while seven cents is reckoned as the cost. Everywhere we see flocks of chickens, turkeys and some geese plucking the stubble fields, for the crops are all cut and harvested. And every now and then we espy a superb Mongolian pheasant in gorgeous plumage, for they have become acclimated and multiply in this salubrious climate. Herds of fine cattle and sheep are grazing in the meadows, and the horses are large and look well cared for. A rich, fat land, filled with a well-to-do population. I have just fallen into talk with a young lawyer who lives at the port of Toledo, where Uncle Sam is dredging the bar at the mouth of the Yaquina River, and to which city new railroads are coming from the interior, and where they expect a second Portland to grow up. He tells me that east of the Cascade Mountains lie other fertile valleys west of the Rockies, and where also is the great cattle and stock raising region of the State, and where moisture is precipitated sufficient to save the need of irrigation.

Now we are just coming to the Umpqua River and the town of Roseburg--a garden full of superb roses blooming by the station--where stages may be taken to the coast at Coos Bay, another growing seaport section, where extensive coal mining and timbering prevail. And as the dusk grows we are passing over the divide to Rogue River and its verdant valley, which we shall traverse in the night. Oregon is green and the verdure much like that of England--the same moist skies, with a hotter summer sun urging all nature to do its best.

In the night we shall climb over the Siskiyou Mountains, and by dawn will be in sight of Mount Shasta. At Portland we were amidst mists and fogs and drizzling rain, so we caught no glimpses of Mt. Hood and Mt. Adams and Mt. St. Helena and Mt. Jefferson, all of whose towering snow-clad cones may be seen on a clear day. We hope that to-morrow Mt. Shasta will be less bashful and not hide her white head.

SUNDAY A. M., October 4th.

In California! We were called at six o'clock that we might see Mt. Shasta, and also have a drink from the famous waters of Shasta Spring. Mt. Shasta we did not see, so great were the fog masses and mists enshrouding her, but we have had a drink from the elixir fountain. A water much like the springs at Addison, in Webster County, W. Va., but icy cold.

Now we are coming down the lovely valley of the Sacramento. A downgrade all the way to "Frisco." The verdure is growing more tropical. The undergrowth of the forests is more and more luxuriant. I see big, red lilies by the swift water-side. The air is milder. We have descended already 1,600 feet since passing Shasta Spring. We have five hundred feet more to drop to Oakland. We are now in a ruggedly volcanic mining country, many iron, lead and copper mines and once placer diggings for gold, these latter now pretty much worked out, only a few Chinese laboriously washing here and there.

Now we are at Keswick and see our first groves of figs and almonds and some wide-reaching palms and the spreading umbrella-trees, and many prune orchards. The valley is widening, the air is warmer than we have known it for many days. We are surely in California.

I have just been talking with the brakeman. He has been in Dawson and on the Klondike. "Mushed" through the White Pass, but, after reaching Dawson, he lost heart and came back again without a stake. The man who failed! Another, a big man, with a strong jaw and keen eye, has just climbed on the rear platform. He, too, has been in Dawson, stayed one day, bought a claim in the morning for $1,000, and sold it in the evening for $15,000, and then came right back to his almond groves to invest his make and thereafter rest content with California. The man who won.

Near us sits a black-eyed Russian woman, young and comely, whose husband was one of the discoverers of gold in Nome, and with her the loveliest blue-eyed Norwegian maiden just arrived from Hammerfest. "My husband's sister who is come to America to stay," the Russian says in perfect English. She is learning to talk American, and wonders at the huge cars, the multitude of people, the distances--"only a few hours from Trondhjem to Kristiania, but over four days and nights from New York to Seattle!" she exclaims. And her blue eyes grow big with wonder at the half-tropical panorama now unrolling before us.

I am writing this letter by bits as we travel. We are now on a straight track, as from my improved handwriting you may detect. A stretch of thirty-seven miles straight as the crow flies. We are past the smaller fruit farms of the upper Sacramento Valley; we are out on the interior plain that from here extends all down through California, a thousand miles almost to Mexico. We are in the wonderful garden land of the State. On either side of us stretches away, as far as the eye can see, a flat, level plain. It is one monstrous wheat field, and fences only at rare intervals mark it into separate holdings. On the east, far on the sky line, extend the snow-tipped summits of the Sierra Nevada Mountains; on the west, the Coast Range. We have passed out of the region of mists and clouds, and are now in a clear, warm sunshine, the heavens an arching vault of cloudless blue. As clear as on the Yukon almost, but with many times the warmth. This is the region of the Mammoth Bonanza wheat farms you have so often read about. And one feels that man hereabouts does things in a big way.

In Oregon, they tell me, the climate is so equable that a single blanket keeps you warm of night the year round. You need it in summer; you do not need more in winter. Here, I fancy, you scarcely need any at all, so much further south have we already come.

Even yet we are passing through the wide stretches of wheat lands, wheat now milled in California and sent in many big ships to the Orient. The Chinaman is just learning the joy of an American flap-jack or a loaf of wheat bread--and he can't get enough.

Dusk has come down upon us before we have reached Carquinez Strait, over which our train--a long train--is carried by a monstrous ferry boat, and then, skirting San Francisco Bay, we are soon among the suburban illuminations of Oakland. Across the five miles of water lies San Francisco, its million glittering electric lights stretching several miles and covering the hills on which the city is built, while far out on the right flashes the intermittent gleam of the light-houses marking the entrance of the Golden Gate. The ferry-boat taking us across is said to be the largest in the world, and the Norwegian lass's big blue eyes grow all the bigger as she looks about her on the multitude of fellow-passengers. And then we are ashore and are whirling through broad, well-lighted streets to our hotel, "The Palace," where now we are.

FOURTEENTH LETTER.

SAN FRANCISCO.

LOS ANGELES, October 12, 1903.

We slept in the old, famous, and yet well-patronized Palace Hotel, and on which the Fair estate has just renewed a mortgage for another term of years.

In the morning we essayed to have a look at the city, and so took a long, wide electric car devoted to that purpose. A ride of thirty miles, and all for the price of only "two bits"! We circled around the city, we traversed its streets and avenues, climbed and descended its multitude of hills, went everywhere that an electric car might dare to go, and were given the chance to try the cable trams when the declivity was too steep for anything to move that did not cling.

The sunshine was delicious, the watered lawns and watered flowers superb, the unwatered, blistered sand spaces, vacant lots and dust-laden winds dreadful.

The city pleased and disappointed me. It is an old city--half a century old--old for the driving West, and mainly built of wood. Miles and miles of small, crowded, two-story, wooden dwellings, sadly needing a coat of paint, and mostly constructed thirty or forty years ago. A town once replete with vigor, that has slumbered for several decades, and is now reviving into life again. The vast mansions of the bonanza kings, the railway lords on "Nob Hill," are now all out of date and mostly empty of their former occupants. The Fairs, the Mackeys, the O'Briens are dead, their heirs scattered to the winds. The Crokers, the Stanfords, the Huntingtons are reminiscences. The street urchins know them no more. Fashionable San Francisco has moved to another hill. The tenement quarter of the town has crept to their very doors. But the business section of the city has not moved as it has in New York. It stands just where it always stood. The Palace Hotel, once the glory and boast of the Pacific Slope, is still the chief hostelry of the town; and yet the city is instinct with a new life. Its lively, hustling thoroughfares are full of a new vigor; a new tide of Asiatic and Oriental commerce has entered the somewhat somnolent city. All this, the magic result of the battle of Manila Bay, and the new relation of the United States to the far east. Where the Pacific Mail S. S. Co. sent a single monthly ship across the Pacific five years ago, now six lines of great freight and passenger steamships are unable to satisfy the increasing demands of trade. Now twenty steamers and a multitude of sailing craft come to deliver and take cargoes, where few or none came six years ago. On the land side, too, there is progress. The A. T. & Santa Fe Railway has broken through the monopoly of the Southern Pacific Railway Company, so cleverly and firmly fastened by Huntington and his friends; and there are hopes that other lines may yet establish independent relations with the city. Along with this new growth of commerce have come a new throng of energetic men, and new fortunes are being made--and more widely distributed. The city, the commercial center, the ocean port, are all growing at a steadier, healthier gait than in the ancient feverish days of bonanza kings and railroad magnates. For awhile, San Francisco was "in the soup," so to speak. Its rich men were leaving it, did leave it; its sand-lots proletariat threatened to gain the upper hand; its middle class, the people making and possessing only moderate incomes, were doubtful of a success that to them had not yet come. To the north, sleepy Portland had wakened up; Seattle and Tacoma had been born; and in the south, Los Angeles had risen, like a phoenix, from the torrid sands. But San Francisco did not stir. Then Dewey sank the fleet of Montejo; the nation quickened with a consciousness that she was a world-power; that the trade and commercial dominance of the Pacific lands and isles and seas were rightly hers, and in a night San Francisco found herself re-endowed with new life.

After the tramway ride, we spent an afternoon strolling about through the business streets and along the docks and wharves, viewing the many new shops, splendid modern stores, quite equaling, in the sumptuous display of their wares, the great trading centers of New York and Chicago, and noting the volume of wholesale traffic on the down-town streets, the jobbing center, and the busy stir along the waterfront for several miles.

No finer sight have we seen than when we stood near the surf-washed rocks, famous as the home of the sea-lions, and, turning our gaze toward the wind-tossed billows of the Pacific Ocean, beheld eight or ten full-rigged ships and four-masted barques converging on the narrow entrance of the Golden Gate, coming in out of the west, laden with the teas and silks and commerce of the Orient, their multitudinous sails all set before the breeze, like a flock of white-winged sea birds, while slipping among them a steamer from Honolulu and another from Nome came swiftly in.

Another day we were ferried five miles across the wide bay toward the north, to the pretty suburban residence section of Sausalito, and there taking an electric road were brought to the foot of Mount Tamalpais, and then changing to a climbing car were pushed ten miles up near 4,000 feet into the air, to the top of a volcanic cone that rises out of sea and bay, and dominates the landscape for many miles. Below us, at our feet, lay the great Bay of San Francisco and the city itself, with its green, garden-like suburban villages, the many islands, the ships of war and of commerce, the narrows of the Golden Gate; and, westward, the Pacific Ocean, with the distant Farallon Islands, outposts of the Orient, while far to the east, peeping above the clouds, gleamed the snow-capped summits of the Sierra Nevadas.

Another day, we visited the Presidio, and rejoiced to see the blue uniform of Uncle Sam after the many weeks of red coats upon the Yukon. Say what you may, it quickens the blood to catch a glimpse of our boys in blue. I well remember how good it seemed when we met them in command of the fortress of El Moro, at Havana, two years ago.

We also spent a night in Chinatown--or part of the night--for we were bound to see its horrors and its joys. The opium dens--a picture of Hop Sing and his cat, the beast also a victim of the habit--I bring home to you; the theatre, where the audience and the actors were equally interesting; the Joss house or temple; the lady with the tiny feet, one of whose midget shoes I took off and have to show you; the barber shop where they shave the head and scrape out the ears and nose; the many handsome shops and almost priceless curios; and the swarms of bright-eyed, laughing, friendly, gentle children.

While the Chinese upon the Pacific Coast, and in San Francisco more particularly, have been greatly lessened in number the last few years, it is interesting to note how many of the more progressive Japanese are now to be seen in all of the great cities along the Pacific coast. In Vancouver, all of the bell boys and elevator boys in the large Hotel Vancouver were bright-eyed Japs. Keen, intelligent, wide-awake little fellows, speaking good English, dressed in American style, and seeming to know their business perfectly. We saw them at Seattle and Tacoma and Portland, and now we find them in large numbers in San Francisco. They get along well with the white man. They dress like him, eat like him, walk like him, and try to look as much like him as possible. They seek employment as servants, as day laborers, and are also getting extensively into trade in a small way. They keep prices up like a white man and join labor unions like the white man, and sympathetically act with him to a degree that eliminates the prejudice that hedges in and drives out the Chinaman. The Japanese seem to supply a genuine want in the Pacific slope. I learned, also, that Japanese capital is now coming into California and making substantial investments, the expenditure of their money giving employment to American white labor.

Coming down the Sacramento Valley the other day, I noticed that all the labor gangs employed by the Southern Pacific Railroad were Greeks, dull-looking Greeks who could speak no English. It seemed to me as I looked into their semi-Oriental faces, that they gave less promise of satisfactory American citizenship than did the up-to-date, alert, intelligent Japanese. The one represented a semi-Oriental country, whose greatness was destroyed by Rome two thousand years ago; the other expressed the awakened intelligence of the new Orient, the new Japan whose great modern navy to-day ranks first upon the Pacific.

That night when we first crossed the bay toward the long line of glittering city, the tall Norwegian said to me: "I have sailed all about this world and visited many cities, but San Francisco suits me the very best of them all." And his black-eyed Tartar wife from Moscow exclaimed: "Ah, I will never leave here till I die." All who visit San Francisco feel this subtle charm. There is a certain something in the air that soothes as well as stirs. Its lawns and flowers where water is applied; its sunshine, never too hot, for it is tempered by the breezes from the sea; no winter, rarely a dash of snow; no torrid sun; an atmosphere almost gentle, yet not destroying energy.

Leaving San Francisco, we took the little narrow-gauge railway that leads out south of the city, skirts the bay and climbs the Coast Range through the famous grove of immense redwood trees that comes down to the sea at Santa Cruz. A pretty village among gardens and orchards of prunes and apricots and almonds, famous for its flowers and its fish. On the long pier we watched the Italian fishermen mending their nets and loading them into their lateen-sailed boats. Here the rainbow-hued Barroda is caught in the deep sea and shipped to the city; while, sitting all along the pier, were old folks and young catching smelts with hook and line. An old man with long, white beard said to me, as he took off a smelt and put it in his creel, "If a man has nothing to do but just to live, this is the most salubrious spot along this coast. I've tried them all."

From Santa Cruz we went over to the quaint old Spanish town of Monterey, once California's capital, now the barrack sanitarium of Uncle Sam's soldier boys, and upon whose quiet main street still dwells the Mexican-Spanish beauty to whom Tecumseh Sherman once made love, and in whose garden yet grows the pomegranate he planted in token of their tryst. She has never wed, but treasures yet the memory of her soldier lover.

Near Monterey is that marvelously lovely park, surrounding the great Del Monte Hotel, built by Crocker and Stanford and Huntington in their days of power, and where, among groves and lawns and gardens, winds the seventeen-mile drive of which the world has heard so much. Imagine the parks of Blenheim and Chatsworth and Windsor all combined, but filled with palmettos and palms and semi-tropical verdure--giant live oaks and Norfolk pines and splendid redwood, with all the flowers of the earth, with ponds and fountains, and you will have some faint conception of the beauty of Del Monte, an object-lesson of what the landscape gardener may do in California. We regretted leaving this superb place, but were glad to have had even a glimpse of it.

All the day we now hastened south on the flying "Coast Limited," bound for Santa Barbara. First ascending the broad valley of Salinas River, the Coast Range close on our right, a higher range of mountains on our left, until, converging, we pierced the barrier by a long tunnel and slid down to San Louis Obispo and then to the sea. Many monstrous fields of sugar beet, miles of prune and almond and apricot trees, thriving orchards all of them; then mile after mile of wheat stubble, stacks of wheat straw, piles of sacked wheat at the by-stations; then herds of cattle and many horses as we reached the head of the valley. A rich and fecund land, held originally in big estates, now beginning to be cut up into the smaller farms of the fruit growers.

Toward the end of the afternoon we were skirting along by the breaker-lashed coast of the Pacific. A clear sky, a violent wind and tempestuous, foam-covered sea. We sat with the windows open, not minding the heat of the sun. The tide was at ebb, and upon the sand we saw many sea birds, gulls in myriads, snipe, plover, yellow-legs, sand-pipers in flocks, coots and curlew. We also passed a number of carriages driving close to the receding waters.

The country grew constantly warmer, the soil responding to cultivation with more and more luxuriant crops; among these, fields of lima beans, miles of them, which are threshed out and shipped in enormous quantity. It was dark when we drew in at Santa Barbara, and we did not know what hotel to go to, but, tossing up, chose the Potter. Many runners were calling their hostelries; the Potter porter alone was silent. As we drove in his 'bus through the palm-bordered streets, a cozy home showing here and there in the glare of an electric street light, we wondered what our luck would be. Imagine our delight when we drew up at the stately portal of a modern palace, built in the Spanish style and right on the borders of the sea. The moon was almost full, the tide near flood, the sunset breeze had died, the sea air soft and sweet, and the palace ours! A new hotel, two millions its cost, no finer on the Pacific Coast. And in this off season the prices were most moderate. Nowhere yet have we been so sumptuously housed. In the lovely dining-room we sat at supper by a big window looking out over the moonlit sea.

In the morning we wandered far down upon the beach, watching the breakers beyond the point, and later went up to the famous old Franciscan Monastery, a mile beyond the town. A shrewd yet simple father in brown monk's robe who asked many questions of the outside world, showed us all about, and in the garden stood for his photograph, quite pleased at the attention. No more charming wintering spot have we yet come to than Santa Barbara.

In the late evening we entrained again and took the local for Los Angeles. For quite an hour and a half we ran close to the ocean, the perpetual breaking of the crested waves upon the shore sounding above the roar of the moving train. A yet greener land we now passed through, everywhere watered by irrigation, everywhere responding with seemingly greater luxuriance. It was just dusk as we turned inland, and quite dark when we came through the big tunnel into the head waters of the Los Angeles Valley. Just then a bright young fellow sat down beside me, and, talking with him, I was pleased to find him from West Virginia. A. Judy, from Pendleton County. A few years ago the family had come to this southern land and all have prospered. He was full of the zest of the life that wins.

Presently we came to many lights among shade trees, mostly palms, then houses and more lights, wide streets showing themselves. We were in Los Angeles, the metropolis of Southern California, the furthest south that on this journey we shall go.

FIFTEENTH LETTER.

LOS ANGELES.

LOS ANGELES, October 13, 1903.