Part 12

The appearance of the women and girls in this circus crowd did not seem to indicate that the climate of Carson Valley is invigorating, or its resources fattening. Though they wore white dresses, they looked so thin and sharp that it seemed a wonder the strong wind did not carry them off bodily. On account of the circus there were extra trains, but not enough cars, so that half the passengers had to stand. ’Twas always so, said a local privileged jester; “You never can get enough of Carson.” This train, en route for Virginia City, took home those who had attended the matinée. For the evening performance another extra train was to be sent down all the way from Virginia City, which appears not to have held out sufficient inducements to the circus company to come up, so that “it served them right if they got left and had to come down to Carson,” as one of the passengers remarked, with much feeling. This railroad from Carson to Virginia affords one of the most marvellous and entertaining rides in the world. The puffing of the engine would tell a blind man how steep is the grade all the way up; and how crooked and winding the road is, may be inferred from the printed notice to employees that fifteen miles an hour is the highest speed allowed. Sometimes the engineer might almost shake hands with a man on the last platform; and there is a story of an engineer who jumped off the locomotive on seeing a red light straight ahead, which proved to be the lantern on his last car. Some one has added these curves together and found that between Carson and Virginia passengers travel seventeen times round the circle. Several miserable shanty villages are passed, half buried in empty tin cans, and as we get up higher the outlooks become more and more desolate and rugged. Even Arizona has nothing more bleak and naked than these endless vistas of Nevadan mountains. No tree or other vegetation, except coarse sage bush. Yet the soil is said to be fertile, and to need only water to make it valuable. Deep down in the cañon below us, where the Carson River winds along, this statement is verified by the green fields and orchards which border it. Interminable wooden steps lead down from the railroad stations to these oases. “With water,” says a Nevadan, “all the mountain sides may be made veritable hanging gardens”; and all that is needed for this metamorphosis is to store the winter water in artificial cañon-reservoirs for summer tapping.

We are also told that between these forbidding bare mountain ranges lie valleys from one to thirty miles in width, but hidden by the intervening ridges, so that the State as a whole is really not so forbidding as it looks. Little, however, has been done so far in agricultural development, and Nevada is still almost exclusively a mining State. Were it not for the mines and the mineral deposit in dry lake-beds, there would be no railway except the Central Pacific; and as the mines now worked are much less productive than formerly, it is not surprising that Nevada should be the only Western State whose population is decreasing.

It cost about three million dollars to build the Virginia and Truckee Railroad, from Reno, on the Central Pacific, to Virginia City—a distance of fifty-two miles, although a bee-line would make it only about seventeen miles. Three millions may seem a big sum for so short a road, but it led to a region whence more than three hundred and fifty million dollars in gold and silver have been taken by mule, ox-team, stage, and rail, since the discovery of the Comstock Lode, thirty years ago. Should the mines ever become exhausted, it would be worth while, though it might not pay, to keep up the road as a scenic route. As we near the mining regions, the mountain scenery becomes more and more stupendous. We pass through a few tunnels, and suddenly a most unique view is spread out before us: a series of immense wooden buildings scattered picturesquely along the mountain sides, like mediæval castles, though without towers or other architectural features. Smoke is belched forth from the high chimneys, and by the side of every such building is a huge gray mound of waste ore,—the accumulation of years. Other mounds are seen where there are no buildings, but only holes into the mountain side, looking as if some gigantic animal had been burrowing and thrown out the soil. These mounds are graves in which some miners’ dreams of millions are buried.

As the train winds along and up the hill-side, these sights disappear and reappear repeatedly, in different groupings, till at last we come to Silver City, the first of the three towns which perch closely together on the side of the silver mountain, Mt. Davidson, about seventeen hundred feet above the river, and as far from the summit. Mining is not as profitable here as it was formerly, and as it is now a few miles beyond; but there are many small gold veins. “Nearly every head of a family in the town,” says the guide-book, “has his own mine; and when he wants money, he shoulders his pick, goes out to his mine, and digs it, as a farmer in the East digs a ‘mess’ of potatoes.”

Two miles beyond Silver City is Gold Hill, which once had as many inhabitants as Virginia City has now,—eight thousand,—but has only about three thousand at present. At Virginia City, many pleasant surprises are in store for us. In this aërial town, built like an eagle’s nest on the side of a rocky mountain, surrounded in all directions by similar bleak mountains without a sign of civilization or habitation on them, you naturally expect to take up lodging in a one-story shanty, eat canned beef, and sleep on a cot; but nothing of the sort. Crawling up the hill—everything is up and down hill here—a few hundred steps, you come to the International Hotel, six stories high, with elegantly furnished rooms, and fare good enough for the very reasonable charges. It stands in the principal business street, which is lined on both sides with not only such indispensable places as drug stores, grocers’ and butchers’ shops, but with fine jewelry and fancy stores, and even book and music stores. Elegantly dressed women, many of refined appearance, promenade the streets, bent on shopping; and, by way of contrast, there are groups of squaws sitting on the rubbish on corner lots, or following their lords and masters.

Every block, of course, has its saloon; for aside from the naturally bibulous propensities of miners, the great dryness of the air at this elevation creates an irresistible thirst every hour, so that the bar-keepers must do a thriving business. Excepting this elevation of over six thousand feet, there is little here to mitigate the action of the sun’s rays, which in summer must be intolerable. The trees are not high enough to afford much shade, having been destroyed, like everything else, in the great fire of 1875. But that fire, which annihilated the town, as usual taught a good lesson, and now there is a hydrant at every corner whence water can be forced high above the highest building by its own pressure, no engine being needed. The waterworks of Virginia are perhaps the most interesting in the world—both above and below ground. The pipe which bridges the Washoe Valley is seven miles long and has a capacity of over two million gallons a day. This water had to be brought over to Mt. Davidson from the main range of the Sierra Nevada, because there was not enough on the surface of Davidson. Below the surface, on the other hand, there was an ocean of unwelcome water, hot and cold, which constantly filled up the shafts and had to be pumped out at an enormous expense. To overcome this trouble, the Sutro tunnel was built 1650 feet below the surface, and almost four miles in length. Ten million gallons of water have passed through this tunnel in twenty-four hours. A day or two can be profitably spent in seeing these hydraulic wonders, besides the reducing mills, with their ingenious machinery, in which electricity is yearly playing a more important part, economizing power by transmitting it at different points from the Sutro tunnel, and preventing waste by superior processes of amalgamation. Of course no tourist must fail to don a miner’s suit in order to experience a sensation like that of falling from a balloon in descending a shaft, and to feel a heat more stifling than a desert blast. It is the strangest thing about this strange mountain city that you need only walk a block or two from any given point to find a place where you can descend from two to three thousand feet into the bowels of the earth, till the six-foot opening at the top appears no bigger than a hand.

The miners only work a few hours every day, and you understand why when you come back to daylight bathed in perspiration. After waiting long enough to cool off, climb to the top of Davidson. Contrasts are always pleasant; and none more so than this transition from half a mile in the dark interior of this planet to the summit of a mountain which rises a mile and a half above sea-level. Davidson is isolated, like the Rigi, and the view is therefore very extensive, embracing a large portion of Nevada. On one side is a fine circle of Sierra snow-peaks; on another, Washoe Lake, and the green meadows along the Truckee River; all of which, however,—snow, meadow, and lake,—form mere oases amid the barren wastes of illimitable gray mountain ranges. A flag-pole has been erected on the summit of Davidson, and the way in which it is fastened by means of granite blocks piled on high and iron chains on every side, indicates the strength of the winter storms at this altitude.

X.

MT. SHASTA AND CRATER LAKE.

THE OREGON AND CALIFORNIA RAILROAD—CALIFORNIA’S GRANDEST MOUNTAIN—ISOLATED PEAKS OF THE CASCADE RANGE—VOLCANIC REMNANTS—SISSON’S—INDIANS AT HOME—SOURCES OF THE SACRAMENTO—EFFECTS OF RAIN—OREGON’S NUMEROUS RIVERS—FISH AND CRAW-FISH—SOUTHERN OREGON—A MYSTERIOUS MOUNTAIN LAKE—THE OREGON NATIONAL PARK—THE WILLAMETTE VALLEY—OREGON WHEAT AND FRUIT.

With the exception of the Canadian Pacific and the Rio Grande, there is no railway on this continent which offers to tourists such a unique and imposing variety of mountain and forest scenery as the Oregon and California, or Shasta Route, which connects San Francisco with Portland. For many hours after leaving Sacramento, the train follows the banks of the Sacramento River, whose water in this upper part of its course is as clear as the Rhine in Switzerland. No fewer than eighteen times does the train cross the winding river, which at every turn offers a new picturesque view. But it is not till Mt. Shasta comes into view that the real grandeur of this route is made evident. Mr. Bryce, in his “American Commonwealth,” insinuates that there is little fine scenery in this country; but if there is another railroad in the world which skirts the base of an isolated snow-mountain over fourteen thousand feet in height, and so vast in circumference that it takes the train five or six hours to get around it, I have not seen it or heard of it; and Shasta is only one of half-a-dozen snow-peaks which may be admired on this route and its continuation north to Tacoma and Seattle. There is something absolutely unique about what may be called the Oregon System of mountain peaks (since Oregon once embraced all this region), beginning with Shasta (14,440 feet), in Northern California, and including the Three Sisters (8,500), Mts. Jefferson (9,000) and Hood (11,200) in Oregon, and Mts. St. Helen’s (9,750), Adams (9,570), and Tacoma (14,444) in Washington. Elsewhere, as in Switzerland, or along the Canadian Pacific Railway, snow-peaks are always adjacent or jumbled together in irregular groups; and this is the case even in the Sierra Nevada of Central California. But the ‘Oregon’ earth-giants, from Shasta to Tacoma, are all isolated peaks, separated by many miles from other peaks, with only a low range of mountains to connect them; and this gives them a grandeur and individuality which is lacking in peaks that simply form one of an irregular group. As Mr. Joaquin Miller poetically puts it: “Here, the shining pyramids of white, starting sudden and solitary from the great black sea of firs, standing as supporting pillars to the dome of intense blue sky, startle, thrill, and delight you, though you have stood unmoved before the sublimest scenes on earth.”

It is owing to this isolation that Shasta is the grandest mountain in California. Mt. Whitney is several hundred feet higher, but it stands in a region where there are a hundred peaks each over thirteen thousand feet in height, and therefore is not able to assert itself properly. Moreover, Whitney is several hundred miles further south, where the solar heat disposes of the snow-fields every summer, and does not compel them to seek the valley in the shape of glaciers; whereas Shasta has five glaciers, one of which is more than three miles long. Jefferson, Hood, and Tacoma also have fine glaciers, easily accessible.

As compared with the mountains of Switzerland, Shasta has this advantage: that whereas the former rarely, even in summer, have the advantage of standing out against a clear blue sky, which adds so very much to the sublimity of the scene, Shasta rears its snowy head day after day and month after month into the cloudless azure. Late in summer, however, it loses some of its grandeur through the melting of most of its snow-fields; and in this respect Mt. Hood is superior to Shasta, as it keeps its snow-mantle throughout the usual Oregon summer. Besides the California sun, the snows of Shasta have another enemy in the internal volcanic heat which has not yet subsided. Shasta has its big craters, and there are a score of smaller ones in the lower neighboring cones. A few hundred feet below the summit there is a hot sulphur spring, to whose heat John Muir and Jerome Fay, being caught in a snow-storm in 1875, owed the preservation of their lives.

One of the best ways to realize the great height of Shasta, is by noting the very long time the sun lingers on the mountain side after it has set at Sisson’s, in Strawberry Valley,—fully half an hour. After it has gone down, on dark nights in May, a solitary star will arise immediately over the summit, looking at first as if some venturesome climber had started a fire, dwarfed by the distance. One does not realize how jagged are the ridges of Shasta until the evening sun casts their gray silhouettes on the adjacent white snow-fields.

All this can be seen from the porch of Mr. Sisson’s hotel—the same hotel that used to feed the passengers and the horses of the stages so many years before the Oregon and California Railroad was built; and the same Mr. Sisson who, twenty years ago, served as Clarence King’s guide up the mountain. Mr. Sisson now has the satisfaction of seeing quite a respectable village which has grown up in the picturesque spot selected by him a quarter of a century ago; but he no longer has the strength to act as guide; nor does he need to, as he is well-to-do. Accordingly, I had to content myself with one of the Indians in his employ, as guide up the mountain side. May is too early to make the complete ascent, but we thought we could get above the timber line at any rate. But even this proved impossible, owing to the deep masses of snow which carpeted the sombre forest at a height of eight thousand feet. Yet the trip proved worth taking without the final climb. The path led through the densest imaginable forest, and was impeded every five minutes by a fallen tree. In looking at the millions of dead trees which rot on the ground in these California and Oregon forests, one cannot suppress the thought, “What a blessing this wood would be to the starving, freezing thousands in our large cities, during the winter months!”

It is this superabundance and natural waste of wood everywhere that breeds indifference in the people of this coast and the natives to the devastating forest fires which occur every summer. My Indian guide amused himself by setting trees on fire in several places, and to the question why he did this, I could get no satisfactory answer. He also very kindly tried to amuse me by rolling huge rocks down a tremendous precipice. I should have been less surprised than hurt had he thrown me down too, in retaliation for the injury inflicted on him and his race by the intruding white man, who has reduced the former lords of this region, where they could hunt and fish to their heart’s content, to the condition of day-laborers earning their bread by the sweat of their brow. How galling it must be to the noble savage to have to dig stumps and level roads while his squaws look on, because, forsooth, the perverse white man will not permit the squaws to do the grubbing, and him to look on!

Mr. Sisson took me to a small Indian camp near his house, where he wanted to engage a man for a job. The young buck was gorgeously arrayed in a pair of old trousers and a new linen shirt, evidently just arrived from San Francisco, with its bosom starched stiffly enough for a city dude. He was obviously conscious of this ornament, and, probably in consequence of it, wanted more money for the job than Mr. Sisson had previously paid him. _Noblesse oblige!_ The squaws, young and old, and the children, were all very fat, dirty, and stupid-looking, and were crowding around a fire, eating fried meat and flat, round cakes of dough baked in a pan, looking as if it would give chronic dyspepsia to an ostrich or a goat. I was also shown an Indian hut where there had been a dance on the preceding Fourth of July, white visitors being charged twenty-five cents admission.

One of the most interesting places Mr. Sisson has to show his guests is the source of the Sacramento River. About a mile from his house, at a place to which steps lead down from the railway track, the water rushes out from several springs in a great volume, forming immediately a trout-brook of respectable size, which hurries away in the new daylight, as if glad to have escaped its subterranean source. These springs issue from under Mt. Shasta, and doubtless owe their being to the melting of snow and glacier ice by the internal volcanic heat—a worthy origin of so romantic a river as the Sacramento. Near these springs is a valuable iron-water spring, which also belongs to Mr. Sisson, and is one of his most important possessions, now that the town founded by him is getting to be a regular resort for San Franciscans, Portlanders, and Eastern tourists, not only on account of the view of Shasta, but because of the beautiful forest scenery, and the excellent trout-fishing in the neighboring McCloud River. Six large rivers and many smaller ones are born of Shasta and neighboring peaks, and it is these icy streams that the trout and the salmon delight in. The Sacramento itself, however, does not afford any sport in this vicinity.

After leaving Sisson’s, Shasta still remains in sight for some time; for it takes some time even for a railway to get away from a mountain, of which it has been remarked that “if it could be sawed off at the four-thousand-foot level, or five hundred feet above the valley, the oval plain thus made would be eighty miles in circumference.” Some of the views of Shasta after leaving Sisson’s are even grander than at the station, and in certain atmospheric conditions the snow-cone may be seen floating, as it were, on a mystic haze resembling water. The aspect of the mountain gradually changes, and what had seemed smooth, gradual slopes are now seen to be rugged precipices rising one above the other.

We now approach that mammoth fragrant forest between the Pacific Ocean and the Cascade Mountains which is known as Oregon, and it becomes obvious at once that the chief difference between Oregon and California is comprised in the word RAIN. Shortly after crossing the Oregon line evidence begins to multiply that we have entered the rain belt. There are more deciduous trees, more ferns and mosses, more underbrush in the pine forests, and, most significant of all, more rivers. California has in its whole coast line of seven hundred miles only one navigable river, while Oregon, with a coast line of only three hundred and fifty miles, has four fine navigable rivers,—the Rogue, the Umpqua, the Willamette, and the Columbia,—with many smaller ones. All of these run from east to west, except the Willamette, which divides the State by flowing northward into the Columbia near Portland, thus creating the fertile Willamette Valley, to which Portland chiefly owes its wealth.

The Willamette has some tributaries which alone would make the fortune of several counties in Southern California, where nothing can be done without irrigation; whereas in Oregon no one but vegetable gardeners ever thinks of such a thing. One of these tributaries is the Pudding River, along the banks of which many charming scenes may be enjoyed, and which is full of fish, which, however, have the peculiarity that they never take a bait. In the Santiam and some of the other rivers the fishing is excellent, and the creeks are full of trout and of crawfish, which are delicious, and of which I have caught as many as a hundred in an hour, with three strings and three pieces of beef. A favorite form of picnicking in Oregon is to take a sauce-pan and salt, catch a few hundred of these tender and juicy crawfish, boil them, and enjoy a feast fit for prelates.

The rain, to which Oregon owes its numerous rivers and creeks, is not as abundant in the southern as in the northern part of the State. There is a gradual transition from thirty-two inches at Jacksonville to thirty-eight at Salem, fifty-three at Portland, and seventy-two at Astoria. The Rogue River Valley climate has been described as “a compromise between the droughts of California and the great rain of the Willamette Valley.” Grapes are raised here equal to the best in California, and the peaches have been known to fetch higher prices in the San Francisco market than the California varieties. Melons also are raised here in great abundance for the Portland market, Northern Oregon (where the thermometer sometimes does not register above 85° during a whole summer) being too cold for their successful cultivation. Southern Oregon is at present but thinly settled; but if its climatic, scenic, and agricultural advantages were generally known to immigrants, it would fill up rapidly.

Two large lakes, the Upper and Lower Klamath, will in course of time become popular resorts of Oregonians, and some miles north of the Upper Klamath is Crater Lake, which, although much smaller, is by the Oregonians considered the greatest curiosity on the Pacific Coast, and which used to be, and still is, regarded as holy ground by the Indians of the neighborhood. Local authorities tells us that “in the past none but medicine men visited it; and when one of the tribe felt called to become a teacher, he spent several weeks at the lake, in prayer to the Shahulah Tyee.”