Part 22
Thirty miles from Grant’s Pass, in the fastnesses of the Siskiyous, are the recently discovered mammoth caves, which some genius in the art of appellation has christened “The Marble Halls of Oregon.” It needed an inspiration to conceive a name like that! Such a name would induce one to make a trip to see a hole in a sand-bank. As a matter of fact, these Oregonian caverns are decidedly worth the journey. Though they are very far from having been completely explored, sufficient investigations have been made to prove conclusively that they are much superior, both in size and beauty, to the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky, a visit to which was considered as essential for every well-travelled American half a century ago as to have seen the Virginia Natural Bridge and Niagara Falls.
* * * * *
Oregon, with its fish-filled streams, its game-filled forests, and its coast-line rich in bays and coves and beaches, possesses all the requisites for one of the world’s great playgrounds, but some years must pass before it will possess the luxuries demanded by that class of summer vacationists who travel with wardrobe trunks. With less than one fifteenth of its sixty odd million acres under cultivation, it is still to a great extent a frontier region, with many of a frontier’s crudities and discomforts and, for a man who knows and loves the open, with all of a frontier country’s charm. I am perfectly aware, of course, that the farmers who are growing such amazing quantities of big, red apples in the valleys of the Hood and the Rogue and the real-estate boosters who are so frantically chopping town sites out of the primeval forest within cannon-shot of Portland will resent the statement that this is still a frontier country; but it is, nevertheless, and will be for a number of years to come. Barring the system which parallels the coast from north to south and the one which cuts across its northeast corner, there are no railways in Oregon; the scantiness of population and the peculiarly savage nature of a great portion of the country having offered few inducements to the railroad builders. This condition is changing rapidly, however, for the transcontinental systems which enter the State are working overtime to give it population, cities and towns and villages are springing up like mushrooms along its many waterways, the vast grants held by the railway and trading companies and by the pioneers are gradually being cut up into small farms, and a rural situation is being slowly created which is bound to effect a marked change in the conditions which have heretofore prevailed. But it has not yet, thank Heaven, reached that stage of civilisation which is characterised by summer hotels with miles of piazzas and acres of green lawns and oceans of red-and-white striped awnings. Taking the place of these sophisticated and ostentatious summer resorts are the unpretentious inns and camps and summer colonies which are sprinkled along the Oregon shore from the mouth of the Columbia to the California line.
The easiest way to reach this summer land is to take the little jerk-water railroad which meanders eastward from Hillsboro, a main-line townlet fifty miles or so south of Portland, through Tillamook County to the sea. For many miles the train follows the tumultuous Nehalem, stopping every now and then, as the fancy seems to strike it, at shrieking sawmills or at groups of slab-walled loggers’ shacks set down in clearings in the forest, where bearded, flannel-shirted men come out and swap stories and tobacco with the engineer. After a time the woods begin to dwindle into tracts of stumps and second-growths, and these merge gradually into farms, with neat white houses and orderly rows of fruit-trees and herds of sleek cattle grazing contentedly in clover meadows. Quite soon Nehalem Bay comes in sight and the lush meadows give way to wire-grass and the wire-grass runs out in beaches of yellow sand so much like those which border Cape Cod and Buzzard’s Bay that it is hard to believe that one is not on the coast of New England. From the names of the towns and from the types of faces that I saw, I gathered that much of this country was settled by New Englanders, who must have found in its hills and forests and fertile farm lands and alternate stretches of sandy beach and rock-bound shore much to remind them of home. Oregon is, as a glance at the map will show you, in exactly the same latitude as the New England States and has the same cool, invigorating summer weather that one finds in Maine, though its winters, thanks to the warm Japan current which sweeps along its shores, are characterised by rains instead of snow. From Nehalem to Tillamook the railroad hugs the coast. On one side the bosom of the Pacific rises and falls languorously under a genial sun; on the other the line of rugged hills, in their shaggy mantles of green, go up to meet the sky. Here and there some placid lake mirrors the crags and wind-bent trees, or a river, complaining noisily at the delay to which it has been subjected, finds a devious way through the hindering hill range to the waiting ocean. Nor are the attractions of the Tillamook country those of the sea alone, for within a dozen miles of the coast bear, panther, wildcats, deer, partridge, pheasant, duck, and geese are to be found, while the mountain streams are alive with trout waiting to be lured by the fly. It is a storied region, too, for thousands of moccasined feet have trod the famous Indian trail which was once the only route from the wilds of southern Oregon to the fur-post which the first Astor established at the mouth of the Columbia and which still bears his name, and here and there along the coast are the remains of the forts and trading stations which the Russians, in their campaign for the commercial mastery of the Pacific half a century ago, pushed southward even to the Bay of San Francisco. The lives led by those who summer along this shore would delight such rugged apostles of the simple life as John Muir and John Burroughs and Colonel Roosevelt, for there is a gratifying absence of fashionable hotels and luxurious camps and cottages, though there is an abundance of unpretentious but comfortable tent colonies and inns. The people whom I met in Portland and elsewhere apologised profusely for Oregon’s deficiencies in this respect and assured me very earnestly that in two or three years more the State would have a complete assortment of summer hotels “as good as anything you’ll find at Atlantic City or Narragansett Pier, by George.” All I have to say is that when their promises are realised, Oregon’s chiefest and most distinctive charm—its near-to-nature simplicity—will have disappeared, and, so far as the traveller and the pleasure seeker are concerned, it will be merely an indifferent imitation of the humdrum and prosaic East. At present, however, it is still a big, free, unfenced, keep-on-the-grass, do-as-you-please, happy-go-lucky, flannel-shirt-and-slouch-hat land. Even as I write I can hear its insistent, subtle summons in my ears: the whisper of the forests, the chatter of the rivers, the murmur of the ocean, the snarling of the sawmills, the chunk-a-chunk of paddles, the creak of saddle gear, all seeming to say: “Cut loose from towns and men; pack your kit and come again.” And that’s precisely what I’m going to do.
XII
BREAKING THE WILDERNESS
“They rise to mastery of wind and snow; They go like soldiers grimly into strife To colonise the plain. They plough and sow, And fertilise the sod with their own life, As did the Indian and the buffalo.”
XII
BREAKING THE WILDERNESS
When white men in Africa make long desert journeys on camel-back, they follow the example of the Arabs and wind themselves tightly from chest to hips with bandages like those with which trainers wrap the legs of race-horses. This, to put it inelegantly but plainly, is done to prevent their bursting from the violent and sustained shaking to which they are subjected by the roughness of the camel’s gait. When I said good-bye to the Sudan, taking it for granted that I would have no further use for my spiral corselet in the presumably civilised country to which I was going, I left it behind me in Khartoum. How was I to know that I would need it far more than I ever had in Africa while journeying in so essentially Occidental a conveyance as a motor-car through a region where camels are confined to circuses and Turkish-rug advertisements? But long before we had traversed the forty atrocious miles which make the distance between Portland, Ore., and Kalama, Wash., seem more like four hundred, I would have given a good deal to have had my racked and aching body snugly wrapped in it again. I have had more than a speaking acquaintance with some roads so bad that they ought to have been in jail—in Asiatic Turkey and in Baja California and in other places—but to the Portland-Kalama road I present the red-white-and-blue championship ribbon. Roll down a rocky hillside in a barrel; climb into an electric churn and tell the dairyman to turn on the power; ride a bicycle across a railroad trestle and you will have had but the caviare course of the dinner of discomfort that was served to us. As, after five hours of this sort of thing, we bumped our way down a particularly vicious bit of hill road, every joint and bolt in the car squealing in agonised complaint, I saw a prosperous-looking farmer in his shirt-sleeves leaning comfortably over the front gate, interestedly watching our progress.
“St-t-t-op a m-m-m-inute,” I chattered to the chauffeur, as we jounced into the thank-ye-marms and rattled over the loose stones, “I w-w-want to t-t-t-t-ell this m-m-m-an-n-n w-what I think of the r-r-r-oad.”
As we drew up in front of the gate, the farmer, taking a straw out of his mouth, drawled:
“Say, stranger, you might like to know that you’ve just come over the most gol-damnedest piece of road north o’ Panama.”
So, unless the gentlemen who have the say in this portion of the State of Washington have repaired the road since we passed over it, I would advise those automobilists who are Seattle-bound to keep on the Oregon side of the Columbia as far as Goble (I think that is the name of the tiny hamlet), where they can put their car on a barge and hire the ferryman to tow them across the river to Kalama. This will cost them five dollars, but it’s worth it.
Were one to prejudge a country by the names of its villages and towns and counties he would form a peculiar conception of Washington, for I do not recall ever having heard anything quite so outlandish as the names which some one—the Siwash aborigine, presumably—has wished upon it. How would you like to get this sort of a reply to your question as to some one’s antecedents? “Me? Oh, I was born near Wahkiacus, down in Klickitat County, and I met my wife, whose folks live up Snohomish way, in Walla Walla, and later on we moved to Puyallup, but I’ve a sort of notion of goin’ into the cannery business at Skamokawa, over in Wahkiakum County, though the wife, she’s been a-pesterin’ me to buy an apple orchard up in the Okanogan.” Still, it’s more interesting to motor through a country like that, always wondering what bizarre, heathenish name is going to turn up next, than to tour through a region sprinkled with Simpson’s Centres and Cranberry Crossroads and New Carthages and Hickory Hollows until you feel as though you were an actor in “The Old Homestead.”
Throughout our trip through Washington we were caused untold annoyance, and in several instances were compelled to travel many weary and needless miles, because of the wanton destruction of the sign-posts by amateur marksmen. Up in that country every boy gets a gun with his first pair of pants, and, when there is nothing else to shoot, he makes a target of the enamelled guide-posts which have been erected for the benefit of tourists. More than once, coming to a crossroads in the forest, we found these placards so riddled with bullets that we were compelled to guess which road to take—and we usually guessed wrong. “I wish to goodness,” said my friend in exasperation, after we had gone half a dozen miles out of our way on one of these occasions, “that they would declare a close season on sign-posts, just as they have on elk, and then give the man the limit who is caught shooting them.”
It would be a grave injustice to place undue emphasis upon the crudities and inconveniences which annoy the traveller in certain portions of Washington, for, when you get down to bed-rock facts, its farmers are still wrestling with the wilderness—and in most instances they have had to put up a desperate resistance to keep the wilderness from shoving them off the mat. We passed through many a community, far removed from the railway (for the railway builders have done little more than nibble at the crust of the Washington pie) where the people were living under conditions almost identical with those which confronted the Pilgrim settlers of New England. Many a farmstead that we passed was chopped out of the virgin forest, the house being built from the trees that had grown upon its site. Cleared land, as an Eastern or Middle Western farmer knows the term, seemed almost non-existent. Black and massive stumps rose everywhere, like gravestones to the dead forest. “There’s so danged many stumps in this country,” one of these pioneer farmers remarked, “that sometimes I think that the Lord never intended for it to be cleared at all.” The problem of getting rid of these stumps is one of the most perplexing with which the Northwestern farmer has to contend, the expense of clearing land averaging in the neighbourhood of seventy-five dollars an acre. So inimical to colonisation has the question of land clearing become, indeed, that the State has found it necessary to step in and finance the stump-pullers in districts established in accordance with recent legislation. Though Washington is a country of hustle and hard work, no one who spends any length of time in it can fail to be impressed with the belief that it has a promising future. The climate is, as a whole, attractive. Though the cold is never extreme, the climate does not lack vigour, and, as a result of the Oregon mists, there is plenty of moisture. “We call ’em Oregon mists,” a farmer explained to me, “because they missed Oregon and hit here.” They are really more of a fog than a rain, and no one pays the slightest attention to them, even the womenfolk scorning to use umbrellas. These mists, taken with the verdancy of the vegetation and the pink-and-white complexions of the women, constantly reminded me of Ireland and the south of England. In striking contrast to the _arroyos secos_ to which we became accustomed in many parts of California are the streams of Washington, which flow throughout the year, enough water-power going to waste annually to run a plant that would supply the nation.
As the Pacific Highway goes, it is close to a hundred and fifty miles from Portland to Tacoma, but we made a slight detour so as to see Olympia, which is the capital of the State. Beyond its rococo State-house, which is surmounted by a statue of a female—it might be Justice and it might be Mrs. Pankhurst in her peignoir—there is nothing to distinguish Olympia from any one of a score of other pretty little towns whose back doors open onto the primeval forest. Because there was a moon in the heavens as big and yellow as a Stilton cheese, we decided to push on to Tacoma, which is thirty miles from Olympia, that night. I’ll not soon forget the beauty of that ride. With our engines purring like a contented cat we boomed down the radiant path that our headlights cut out of the darkness; the night air, charged with balsamic fragrance, beat in our faces; the black walls of the forest rose skyward on either hand, the tree tops bordering with ghostly hedges a star-sprinkled lane of sky. I wish you might have been there ... it was so enchanting and mysterious.
The theatres were vomiting their throngs of playgoers when we rolled under the row of electric arches which turns Tacoma’s chief thoroughfare into an avenue of dazzling light and drew up beneath the grotesque and towering totem-pole in the square in front of our hotel. Tacoma is as up-and-doing a city as you will find in a week’s journey through a busy land. It does not need to be rapped on the feet with a night-stick to be kept awake. Magnificently situated on a series of terraces rising above an arm of Puget Sound, its streets, instead of defying the steepness of the hills, as do those of San Francisco and Seattle, sweep up them in long diagonals, like the ramps at the Grand Central Terminal in New York. Tacoma is peculiarly fortunate in being girdled by a series of so-called natural parks, a zone ten miles in width in which the landscape architect has not been permitted to improve on the lakes and woods and wild-flower-carpeted glades provided by the Creator. But Tacoma’s chief boast and glory is, of course, a mountain whose graceful, snow-capped cone, which bears an astonishing resemblance to Fujiyama, rises like an ermine-mantled monarch above the encircling forest. The name of the mountain is Rainier or Tacoma, according to whether you live in Seattle or Tacoma, an acrimonious dispute having been in progress between the people of the two cities over the question for some time, the citizens of Seattle claiming that the mountain is far too beautiful to be used as an asset in Tacoma’s municipal advertising campaign, while the people of the latter city assert that, as the British Admiral Rainier, for whom the peak was originally named, fought against the Americans in the Revolution, he does not deserve to have his name tacked onto an American mountain.
For thirty miles or more the road from Tacoma to Mount Rainier (for that is the name to which the Federal Government has given its approval) strikes across a wooded country as level as the top of a table, until, reaching the base of the mountain, it sweeps upward in long and graceful spirals which were laid out by army engineers, for the region has been taken over by the government under its new and admirable policy of protecting the beauty-spots of the country through the formation of national parks. Nowhere, not even in the Alps, have I driven over a finer mountain road, the gradients being so gradual and the curves so skilfully designed that one scarcely appreciates, upon reaching National Park Inn, in the heart of the reservation, that he has climbed upward of five thousand feet since leaving tide-water at Tacoma. We spent the night at the Inn, a low-roofed, big-fireplaced tavern which has an air of cosiness and comfort in keeping with the surroundings. Everything about it reminded us of hotels we knew in the Alpine valleys, and when I drew up the shade in the morning the illusion was complete, for the great peak, its snow-clad flanks all sparkling in the morning sunlight, towered above us, just as Mont Blanc towers above Chamonix, dazzling, majestic, sublime. Leaving the Inn after an early breakfast, we motored up the mountain road as far as the snout of the great Nisqually Glacier, which is as far as automobiles are permitted to go. Take my word for it, this glacier—the largest on the continent outside of Alaska—is one of the most worth-while sights in all America. A river of ice, seven miles long and half a mile wide, it coils down the slope of the mountain like a mammoth boa-constrictor whose progress has been barred in other directions by the encircling wall of forest. We left the car at the glacier’s snout, and, after an hour’s hard climbing over loose rubble and slippery rock, succeeded, in defiance of the danger signs, in reaching a flat shelf of rock from which we could look directly down upon the ice torrent, and there we ate the lunch that we had brought with us to the accompaniment of the intermittent crashes which marked the glacial torrent’s slow advance.
We descended to the road in time to catch the four-horse stage which runs twice daily from the Inn to Paradise Valley, which the Lady insisted that we must visit, “because,” she said, “there are snow-fields and fields of wild flowers side by side.”
“But you’ve seen much the same sort of thing in Switzerland,” I objected. “Don’t you remember that place above the Lake of Geneva, Territet, I think it was, where people in furs were skating on one side of the hotel and other people were having tea under big red parasols on the other?”
“I remember it, of course,” she answered, “but that was in Switzerland and this is in my own country, which makes all the difference in the world. Evidently you have forgotten that German baron we met at Grindelwald, who asked us if we didn’t think that the view from Paradise Valley was finer than the one from Andermatt, and we had to admit that we didn’t know where Paradise Valley was. I’m not going to let that sort of thing happen again. The next time I meet a foreigner I’m not going to be embarrassed to death by finding that he knows more about my own country than I know myself.”
So she had her way and, leaving the car behind us, we took the creaking stage up the steep and narrow road to the valley, where we gathered armfuls of wild flowers one minute and pelted each other with snowballs the next, and peered through the telescope—at a quarter a look—at the thirteen glaciers which radiate from the mountain’s summit, and aroused perfectly shameless appetites for supper, and slept as only healthily tired people can sleep, and the next morning, half intoxicated with the combination of blazing sunlight and sparkling mountain air, we rattled down again to the Inn and the waiting car.