Part 4
The ride down the western wall of the Sierras is one of entrancing interest. At the summit during the winter of 1907 were many feet of snow. Ravines were filled with it, snow-sheds covered with it, and trees made snow mounds by it; and yet scarce three hours’ ride away, roses brightened porches and roofs, the scent of orange blossoms filled the air, early peaches and almonds bloomed in the orchards, the fields were vividly green with foot high grain, and the hills aflame with wild poppies. It is this transition from snowy winter to blooming spring that is perhaps the most delightful experience of the westbound traveler during the colder months over the Overland Route as the train glides swiftly from the summit to the sea.
At Cape Horn the road follows a shelf hewn around the face of the mountain; sheerly below, 1200 feet, is the American river in its winding canyon, while above the mountain wall rises to the clouds.
From Cape Horn the Sacramento Valley, fair and fruitful, is spread below as a great relief map of orchards, villages and cities, and winding rivers and green slopes. Past Emigrant Gap, Cowles, Dutch Flat and Gold Run—historic names—these mark the center of the greatest excitement America ever knew over placer mines. Colfax has interest partly in golden fruit and partly in gold. Twenty miles away, and reached by the Nevada county Narrow Gauge, are the thriving cities of Grass Valley and Nevada City, once great mining camps, and yet owning much mineral importance. They are now among California’s most important cities with prospects of advancement still bright before them.
All down this slope of the Sierra, past beautiful Auburn, a modern town, and yet with a touch of ancient days, half hidden in foliage and flowers, with orange and peach blossoms, are natural sanitariums where people suffering from asthma and other throat and lung troubles are surprising their home doctors continually by getting well. From Auburn, Newcastle (center of the great Placer County fruit belt) Penryn and neighboring stations, are shipped each year thousands of cars of green fruit, principally peaches, to the Eastern markets. No other section of the west ships so many cars of fresh peaches to market and its fame as an orange growing section is growing rapidly.
The Overland Route joins the Road of a Thousand Wonders (between Portland, Oregon, and Los Angeles) at Roseville, a great railway center to be, with fifty-seven miles of yards, round-houses of sixty-four stalls, machine and car shops, club house, icing plant and hospital. From Roseville to Sacramento the nineteen mile journey is made past horse ranches (a notable one at Ben Ali), and great dairy farms.
Sacramento, the capital city of California, is a manufacturing and wholesale center, with an ever increasing and diversified trade extending up to central Oregon on the North, and to central Nevada on the East. Its post office receipts, school attendance, and directory returns, indicate the city has a population of practically 50,000. The railway shops of the Southern Pacific cover twenty acres, and employ 3,000 people. The rich tributary country about Sacramento amounts to 600,000 acres in area. Its bank capital and resources are greater than in many cities of over a hundred thousand people.
Here was born the Central Pacific Railroad. Theodore D. Judah had been employed by a California company to build a road from Sacramento to Folsom (forty miles), but his eyes were ever turning Sierraward. At last he gained the attention of Stanford, Huntington, Hopkins, and the Crockers, and succeeded in interesting them in the stupendous project of building a railroad, which, in a hundred miles was to rise from about sea-level to almost half a mile; then to drop 3300 feet and then crossing ten ranges of mountains, was to find a way to meet the western end of a road from the Missouri, by the waters of Great Salt Lake.
It was done. The story of the doing cannot be told here. It is one of volumes, and simply the names of the men whose daring and genius solved its problems may be mentioned. It was a combination predestined, irresistible, a union of men for whom opportunity needed to knock but lightly, who saw the grandeur of the task before them and rose to its inspiration. Each had his allotted place to which he seemed peculiarly fitted and each, through the sheer love of the work and indomitable purpose made perfect his part in this modern conquest of America. Judah, the great engineer, saw the work through, and then, in a few months, died—but fame is his. Senator A. A. Sargent framed the laws that made the work possible. Senator Leland Stanford was the great political executive who handled the road’s relations with the Government—a many sided, brilliant man, and a mighty pioneer, in farming, fruit growing, and stock raising, as well as railroad building. Charles Crocker was the master mind in the field, and organizer of men and affairs, and withal, much beloved by all who knew him. Judge Crocker, the road’s first attorney, was of inestimable value to it, but so noiseless, modest and retiring, that his relations with the line are almost forgotten. Mark Hopkins was the trained man of business, who directed the office affairs, carrying in his brain every detail of the enterprise, and working upon it night and day. Collis P. Huntington, famous in every line of work he undertook, outlived his associates, and became one of the world’s greatest builders and financiers. To Mr. Huntington and to Edward H. Harriman (whose financial genius and constructive ability have contributed more in high class, modern railways to the advancement of the West than any other man), the empire beyond the Missouri and the Mississippi owes more than to any other two.
Sacramento has many places of interest; the capitol building and its fine grounds, Sutter’s Fort, and the Crocker Art Gallery being among them. The city has beautiful tree lined avenues, fine houses with flower gardens, lawns, and citrus and deciduous fruit, good urban and suburban electric line service, railways radiating in four directions, and three more—two steam and one electric—under construction; altogether a modern, charming city with such unusual out of doors attractions as only California can give.
Among public works is the handsome Government building, in which are the post office, land office, weather bureau, and other Government offices. In yards the magnolia blooms and the broad leaves of the plantain and banana arrest the eye. Palms are plentiful and with variety; orange and lemon trees are numerous. Camellias bloom in profusion.
The journey from Sacramento to San Francisco may be made over the ninety mile direct route via Benicia or the longer way through Stockton. The Benicia Route is through deciduous fruit sections, of which Davis and Elmira are business centers and junctions respectively for lines through the west side of the Sacramento Valley and up the beautiful Capay Valley. The Overland Route from Elmira follows along the marshes of upper Suisun Bay, where tens of thousands of wild ducks and wild geese find a home.
At Suisun, a branch line leads to the Napa and Sonoma Valleys, famous these forty years past for fruits and wine and rural loveliness. Suisun has many fruit establishments. Beyond, fifteen miles, is Benicia, with its Government post and arsenal.
Thence the great double ferryboat, the Solano, swallows the train, and moves across the picturesque Carquinez straits, a mile wide, to Port Costa. This is the largest ferryboat in the world, and perhaps the only double one. Its two paddle wheels may be made to revolve in opposite directions, turning the boat around almost in its own length. As one crosses, to the left lies Suisun Bay, to the right, San Pablo Bay. The ferry unloads its trains at Port Costa, place of mammoth grain warehouses with capacity for more than 350,000 tons. Thirty deep-sea ships may unload here at one time.
A few miles beyond Port Costa is Vallejo Junction; thence the ferry boat El Capitan carries passengers the intervening four miles to Vallejo, and to Mare Island Navy Yard. From the train you may catch a glimpse of the warships at anchor, of the wooded island where Uncle Sam has three thousand employees, and of Vallejo, upon its hills facing it, a lively city of 12,000 people.
The great tower opposite Vallejo Junction carries across the straits the transmission wires of the electric companies that gather the weight of falling water in the Sierra Nevada and deliver it to San Francisco and the bay counties to move street cars, light cities, and keep the wheels of industry whirring.
Along this water front from between Vallejo Junction and Oakland are great manufactories. Here are the Selby Smelting works where something better than alchemy brings gold from rough rock; here (at a safe distance) are powder works and soap factories, steel and wire works, sugar refining works, syrup, oil and borax refineries, canneries and tanneries and various wood working establishments.
Past Richmond, a manufacturing city, and Berkeley, a beautiful residence city of 40,000 people, the Overland Route leads to Oakland.
Berkeley is built upon the slopes of hills to a height of six hundred feet. It is the seat of the University of California, and the location of the State Asylum for the Blind, the Deaf, and the Dumb. The University grounds are beautiful and under the Bernard plans, involving an ultimate expenditure of $50,000,000, the buildings will have no second place in American architecture.
The city is growing very rapidly and in the high average of its home places is not excelled anywhere. The new tourist resort, the Claremont Hotel, may be seen from the train.
Oakland, third city of the State, has a population of 175,000. The cluster of cities of which it is the center—Berkeley, Alameda, Fruitvale, Elmhurst, and others—has a population of 240,000. Oakland’s bay water front extends fifteen miles and its estuary is being made into a great ship harbor, along which many industries are growing. The city is becoming a place of skyscrapers. It is a city, too, of homes; on the Piedmont hills and around Lake Merritt are beautiful drives with all the life of the country in the heart of the town.
Leaving Oakland, 16th Street, the Overland Route through the city skirts the bay shore and at the long “made” ground of Oakland Pier the rail journey ends.
Another route from Sacramento to San Francisco is along the foothill country of the Sierra, southward past Lodi and its great grape and peach lands to Stockton. Stockton, at the head of the bay navigation, is a prosperous city of 25,000 people with great natural resources near; gas, coal, electric power, and a million acres of as fat and fertile lands as may be found out of doors. Its manufactures are many and important, including flour and woolen mills, harvesters and other agricultural implements, mining machinery, street cars and railway cars, pottery and briquettes. It is in the heart of a great dairy section.
Westward from Stockton there is a choice of two routes; to the north along the bay shore through Lathrop and Tracy past Byron Hot Springs, under the brow of Mount Diablo and thence through Martinez to Port Costa; or westward and then northward through the vine and fruit valleys surrounding Pleasanton, Livermore, Haywards, and the series of towns that ends in Oakland.
Through the broad passageways of commodious ferryboats the last link, the water link, in the transcontinental chain is forged. Every twenty minutes the best ferry service in the world moves boats from each terminal between Oakland Pier and San Francisco. In crossing San Francisco Bay, to the left is noted Alameda Mole, with the Southern Pacific suburban trains and ferries. To the right, and almost ahead, is Yerba Buena Island (Goat Island), occupied by the Government naval training school, while fronting us are the picturesque hills and long waterfront, mast forested, of San Francisco.
Beyond Yerba Buena to the right is the bold rocky islet, Alcatraz (the Government prison); farther, Angel Island, a military post, and yet beyond the blue forest clad hills of Marin with Mount Tamalpais rising above them.
San Francisco, the new San Francisco, is not to be described in detail in this book. The story of it today with all the great progress made within the last two years would nevertheless be ancient and inadequate history within six months. The rebuilding of the entire business section of a great city in so short a time and the rehabilitation of its municipal utilities, is a marvel beyond description.
The San Francisco of today is a greater San Francisco than ever before. Imports have increased, trade expanded and new industries established since the fire. The traffic of the railroads is greater than in the days of the old San Francisco. The Southern Pacific is spending millions in new terminal facilities and has completed a new water-grade route up the San Francisco peninsula into the heart of the city at an expense of millions more. By the construction of a bridge at Dumbarton Point across the southern arm of San Francisco bay in 1908 the city has to all intents and purposes, from a traffic standpoint, been placed upon the mainland.
The business section of San Francisco, practically entirely recreated in two years, is in itself a marvel; no other city in the world possesses such an area of absolutely new business blocks with their equipments consequently modern in every respect, from elevator service to methods of lighting and heating. Nothing is out of date; all is new and the work has been on so large a scale as to justify the gathering of the very best ideas in construction at the command of the best architects of the world.
Notably is the hotel service of the city superior through this reconstruction. Scores of fine hotels have been built within the two years and many more are under way. The opportunity to embody every comfort and convenience, and the rivalry among the hotels to secure the best, have resulted in a series of up-to-date homes for wayfarers probably never equaled, for never elsewhere have circumstances been such as to permit the complete modernization of a great business city within two years.
Among the great hotels of San Francisco the Fairmont on Nob Hill is architecturally the most commanding feature of the city and of unsurpassed service. The Hotel St. Francis conducted on the same high plane of hospitality is noted for the excellence of its service and is in the heart of the down town business section, facing Union Square. It is one-half larger than before the new era. The new Palace Hotel will be opened in the fall of 1909 on the old site and is a magnificent structure. San Francisco has now in its hotels and apartment houses accommodations for 25,000 visitors.
San Francisco is the busiest of cities and among its features most of interest to visitors is the construction under way. Many of the new buildings are remarkable for their beauty, a great deal of marble having been used.
This cosmopolitan metropolis at the gateway to the Orient possesses now as it always has during the past thirty years, that fascinating variety in its life which has made it a place of great attraction for people from all over the earth. Hither come ships of all the seven seas with the flags of all the maritime nations flying over them; here, too, come the peoples of every land from far Cathay to Alaska, from Siberia to the Isles of Greece. Every nation favors California with immigration and every nationality of importance is represented by a colony in San Francisco of which the customs and manners help make up the cosmopolitan life of the ever growing city.
The great out-of-door attractions, such as Mount Tamalpais, lifting its volcanic crest 2596 feet above the city, the great Golden Gate Park with its animal and plant life drawn from all quarters of the globe, the Seal Rocks and Sutro Heights, Museum and Baths, the beautiful military reservation of the Presidio commanding the Golden Gate, the islands of the bay and the wooded Mann shores, the Muir woods, the old Mission Dolores built more than a century ago, and the neighboring valleys within short excursion distance laden with fruit and flowers; all these and many other attractions help make San Francisco a lodestone for the pleasure seeker.
The main line of The Overland Route ends at San Francisco where the great liners of the Pacific Mail, Toyo Kisen Kaisha and other steamship companies take up the work of transporting travelers by sea trails made pleasant by the sunshine and blue, placid waters of the mid-Pacific, to the islands of the South Seas and the great countries of the Orient.
Nearly four thousand miles of lines northward to Portland, Oregon, and southward to Los Angeles and beyond, carry Overland Route passengers to all important cities of California and Oregon. Indeed, the end of the transcontinental trip is at the open door to wonderland. North and south are the attractions of mountains, shore and valley; the greatest of coniferous forests, our highest mountain peaks outside of Alaska, the deepest and wildest of mountain canyons, the oldest and greatest of giant trees, the largest and most beautiful of mountain lakes; the long beaches with wooded uplands and mountains beyond marked here and there with resorts, flower embowered, delightful winter and summer; the semi-tropic fruit orchards of a sunshiny country surpassing in extent and variety those of any other section; altogether a wonderland not to be matched in all the world.
“_Lo! here sit we by the sun-down seas_ _And the White Sierra. The sweet sea-breeze_ _Is about us here; and a sky so fair_ _Is bending above, so cloudless, blue,_ _That you gaze and you gaze and you dream, and you_ _See God and the portals of heaven there._
“O seas in a land! O lakes of mine! By the love I bear and the songs I bring Be glad with me! lift your waves and sing A song in the reeds that surround your isles!— A song of joy for this sun that smiles, For this land I love and this age and sign; For the peace that is and the perils pass’d; For the hope that is and the rest at last!
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“A rush of rivers and a brush of trees, A breath blown far from the Mexican seas, And over the great heart-vein of earth! .... By the South-Sun-land of the Cherokee, By the scalp-lock-lodge of the tall Pawnee, And up La Platte. What a weary dearth Of the homes of men! What a wild delight Of space! Of room! What a sense of seas, Where the seas are not! What a salt like breeze! What dust and taste of quick alkali! .... Then hills! green, brown, then black like night, All fierce and defiant against the sky!
“At last! at last! O steed new-born, Born strong of the will of the strong New World, We shoot to the summit, with the shafts of morn, On the mount of Thunder, where clouds are curl’d, Below in a splendor of the sun-clad seas. A kiss of welcome on the warm west breeze Blows up with a smell of the fragrant pine, And a faint, sweet fragrance from the far-off seas Comes in through the gates of the great South Pass, And thrills the soul like a flow of wine. The hare leaps low in the storm-bent grass, The mountain ram from his cliff looks back, The brown deer hies to the tamarack.
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“On, on, o’er the summit; and onward again, And down like the sea-dove the billow enshrouds, And down like the swallow that dips to the sea, We dart and we dash and we quiver and we Are blowing to heaven white billows of clouds.
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“The Humboldt desert and the alkaline land, And the seas of sage and of arid sand That stretch away till the strain’d eye carries The soul where the infinite spaces fill, Are far in the rear, and the fierce Sierras Are under our feet, and the hearts beat high And the blood comes quick; but the lips are still With awe and wonder, and all the will Is bow’d with a grandeur that frets the sky.
“A flash of lakes through the fragrant trees, A song of birds and a sound of bees Above in the boughs of the sugar-pine. The pick-axe stroke in the placer mine, The boom of blasts in the gold-ribbed hills, The grizzly’s growl in the gorge below Are dying away, and the sound of rills From the far-off shimmering crest of snow, The laurel green and the ivied oak, A yellow stream and a cabin’s smoke, The brown bent hills and the shepherd’s call, The hills of vine and of fruits, and all The sweets of Eden are here, and we Look out and afar to a limitless sea.