Part 2

On the way to San Francisco we rode up the Rogue River valley, which we found not equal to its fame, and around Mount Shasta, grand and glorious in the sunshine that fell around its snow-covered peak. The next morning we were in the wheat belt of California, the wonderful Sacramento Valley. In August it is barren enough, nothing green in it except the fields of alfalfa, an occasional plum orchard and the wonderful live oaks scattered over the landscapes, always with the range of mountains in the perspective. Wheat growing in these valleys has about reached its limit. The continual cropping has left the soil impoverished and there is talk of cutting up the big ranches into individual small farms, watered artificially. What there may come out of this form of development is problematical. Some persons who had lived in the valley assured us that the heat is often so intense that it scalds the fruit on the trees. On the western slope of the coast range the climate is much better for fruit and also for gardening. Incidentally, it may be remarked that the American is hardly the race that will develop this form of intensive farming. They want to do things on a bigger scale and they shun the manual labor that is necessary to make it successful. Portuguese colonies are said to be prospering in the culture of fruit and the Japanese also are making headway. They are willing to do such work and to do it for wages that are not considered adequate by Americans. Under present conditions nothing seems to me more hopeless than the establishment of fruit farms, by American farmers from the Mississippi Valley, in the valley of the Sacramento, the Rogue River or even the Yakima and the Yellowstone.

San Francisco has recovered marvelously from the earthquake and the fire. It is a city in the process of rebuilding and the rebuilding is all along greater and better lines. Old Chinatown is no longer a city of rookeries, but of substantial brick and steel, with shops that would do credit to any city. The haunts of vice are fewer and the old devotees of oriental vices complain bitterly that the “town” has lost its “atmosphere.” If it has, it is so much for the better. San Francisco has been hampered and handicapped, but its business men are striving to retain the commerce of the Pacific for which so many other cities are now striving and for which Seattle has made so much headway.

VII

Los Angeles, August 27: At San Francisco our party was broken up. Mr. Jones and I proceeded to Los Angeles, while Mr. and Mrs. Pope elected to linger longer in that city and to make many breaks in their journey, to visit the seaside resorts.

Southern California in August is not an inviting place. There is drouth, and dust. The famed orchards are simply patches of trees in plowed ground, the trees covered with dust as well as with ripening fruit. When we think of orchards at home, we think of beautiful plats of grass, with trees. But that is not the California idea. They are far from being sylvan dreams. They are places for hard work and, from all reports, meager incomes. To pick and pack peaches for distant markets is laborious and hazardous. The vineyards were filled with distress over grapes at six dollars a ton. But in the real estate offices in Los Angeles, rosier views of fruit growing were to be had and that freely. Los Angeles is city mad. They have done wonders and they think of the future without dismay. All things seem possible to the promoters. On the one side they have “the back country” where the products are going to enrich all the people and on the other side they have the ocean on which they are going to carry the commerce of the orient, all paying tribute to Los Angeles. The ocean, at Long Beach and other points is beautiful, restful and invigorating, but the great ships have found no harbors in the vicinity of Los Angeles. The harbors must be made artificially and the commerce must be wrested away from San Francisco, Portland and Seattle and Tacoma. It will be a great struggle for supremacy. No American can ride down this great Pacific coast line without feelings of pride in the developments of this western country. It is all American, intensely American. They call it the Golden West, but the man who has to work for a living finds the conditions no easier here than “back east.” In many places he finds it harder, for he has Japanese competition and the climate of which they boast so much makes men lazy.

VIII

El Tovar, Grand Canyon, Arizona, September 3: We left Los Angeles yesterday morning. It was without any regrets that we turned our faces homeward. California in September has no charms that can be compared with those of September in Iowa.

From Los Angeles to San Bernardino is a matter of two hours, through the San Gabriel Valley, one of the famous valleys of the state. We were rather disappointed. Where we had expected to see an unbroken succession of cultivated groves and gardens, we found half of the land still in sage brush. Like most of the far west, the land is cultivated in spots only. They said there was not enough water for all the fields. After leaving San Bernardino we went through a mountain pass and emerged, early in the afternoon, on the fringes of the Mojave desert, perhaps the dreariest area on the American continent. Hundreds of miles of utter barrenness! The famous Death Valley, 400 feet below the top of the ocean, is part of this desert. It is on this journey that one learns the value of water. Water, the great alchemist, the creator and sustainer of life. How men and women follow the water, here in the semi-arid west! There is no place in the mountains where a bit of a stream trickles down that human beings are not found. A little house, a little garden, and a cow, all gathered about that bit of water which is all of life to them. In these regions water is everything and even real estate men do not sell land, but water. A hot, dusty, disagreeable ride this is, through the Mojave desert. Nothing of the kind could be worse. We were favored, too, for all afternoon thunder clouds were toying with mountain peaks, black clouds and vivid lightning and the deep reverberations of thunder--all so suggestive of copious falls of water, but only once did our train succeed in overtaking one of these showers. And of what use is a shower in a desert?

We retired for the night, after we had passed the Needles, on the Colorado River, between California and Arizona. When we arose in the morning we were in a green country again. The desert had faded away and trees and flowers had come in again. Strange freak of nature, that the clouds should pass over the intervening desert and drop their moisture in central Arizona, where July and August are the rainy months of the year. It was good to see the trees again, the big trees, and the grass and the flowers in the green fields. Our train reached Williams early in the morning. From Williams it is sixty miles to the rim of the Canyon, a side journey which one can make in the comfort of a Pullman car. I had heard so much about the Grand Canyon that I was afraid to look at it, though now within a stone’s throw of it--afraid of being disappointed. The disillusionments had been so many on this western journey, so many things had proved to be less than they had been reported in the guide books and in the letters of travelers that I was minded to save one dreamed of great thing from the wrecks of travel, at least a little while longer. So we sat down to breakfast first--the Grand Canyon would wait.

It was a beautiful morning, the heavens filled with sunshine, with just enough of autumn in it to give it a dreamy effect. Fifty steps from the hotel brought us to the rim of the canyon. Those fifty steps took one into a new world. Unlike mountains and oceans, unlike anything else in the world, is this first view of the great gorge which is called the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River. In that first moment one is bewildered--and still disappointed. One had anticipated a more instantaneous grandeur. But what is a first look here? Nothing, we learned afterwards. It is nothing more than a blinding of the eyes, a numbing of the senses. Before one lies an unutterable immensity of things that is appalling. You think you see everything, and yet you see nothing. You simply realize that you are looking on something that is beyond you, out of your grasp, out of your reach, beyond your comprehension. There is a certain dizziness in the air that you look through. The earth has suddenly opened up before you and instead of seeing mountains lifted in the air you see them in the earth beneath you. Everything is at first without form and void. It is a dream, a fantasy of the mind. But as you linger and look longer, gradually things begin to assume forms and shapes and they begin to be real. Objects begin to express themselves in colors also, in great masses of colors, all colors and all variations of all colors. It is a creation that is going on before you. The void begins to be filled with all manner of formations. It is some such hour as when God said, “Let there be light, and there was light.” In those first moments we are present at another creation, and it is a creation, that is enacted for every one who comes to partake of the glories of this canyon. To attempt to describe it further would be like trying to weave a garland of roses around a star.

The learned of the world, the poets, the painters and the writers have lingered on this same rim, not for a day, but for weeks, charmed, fascinated, bewildered, enthralled, but without being able to reproduce either in colors or in words what they saw. Each one has picked up a bit of color, where there are oceans of color. The scientist knows that through countless ages the waters of the Colorado River have cut this gorge into the earth, through the solid rock and the drifting sand alike. It is a mile deep, thirteen miles from rim to rim and over two hundred miles long. At the bottom of the gorge flows the creator of this wonderful masterpiece of nature, the Colorado River. It is a dashing, roaring river, maddened in its fury to get to the level of the ocean, through unnumbered obstructions, but of all the fury with which it lashes its sides, there is not a murmur that reaches you standing at the rim of the canyon--the river is a mile below you and six miles away. The deathlike stillness of dead ages hangs over the canyon. Before Christ was, before Adam was, this work was completed. Still a mighty river, in those primeval days the Colorado must have been infinitely mightier to have removed the mountains that stood in its course. To wear away the solid stone, disintegrate it and, in solution, to carry it with its own waters to the ocean, that was the work that the Colorado River had to perform to make this bed for itself. In the Mojave desert the thought came to us, how precious is water, the life of the world; here the thought comes to us, how mighty are the waters when they are assembled together, the might of the world. There glistening in the rainbow above the barren mountain peaks; here roaring in their fury, dark and mirky and foreboding at the bottom of the gorge.

As at the Yellowstone Canyon, so here every step brings a new view of the canyon. It is not the same from any two points of observation. Of its mere immensity one can form no adequate idea. The opposite side looks hardly a mile off, but it is thirteen miles, in fact. All of Pike’s Peak might be tumbled into it and hardly make a dam to hold the waters back. In the drowsiness of the afternoon’s sun I thought one of the mountains that stand in the bottom of the canyon looked like a huge pulpit. I thought I saw terrace rise above terrace, up the slopes, and fifty miles up and down the river. I thought how all the nations of the earth might be gathered there and seated, and how an archangel might speak to them and be heard by all. Not only terraces, but temples, pagodas, castles, battleships, everything that one has ever seen that is great or grand seems to be reproduced in this canyon, in such varied ways has the water chiseled itself upon the rocks. Every conceivable form of things, every imaginable color, has been worked out in this great gorge. The sun goes down upon it, throwing the shadows of ragged peaks across yawning chasms, multiplying the awfulness of things seen. The full sun can not light the depths of it. In the darkness of the night one walks on the rim of this canyon as on the shores of some unexplored world, a world still in the process of creation.

Day after day, little parties of sightseers go down into the canyon, down Bright Angel trail, on the backs of donkeys. It is thirteen miles by the trail and then the river is still far below them, so far that they can hardly hear the noise it makes between its rocky banks.

Many had said that when one has seen the Grand Canyon he has forgotten all about the Canyon of the Yellowstone. But I did not find it so. Nothing can ever make me forget the Canyon of the Yellowstone. The two canyons are so different and so distinct that comparisons are not possible, but contrasts are. In the Grand Canyon the colors are heavier; in the Yellowstone Canyon the colors have the brightness of the butterfly. The one is compact, the other immense. The one is definite, conceivable and comprehensible; the other indefinite, inconceivable and incomprehensible. The one produces the sensations of nearness and dearness; the other of aloofness and vagueness. The one is like a beautiful woman arrayed in many colors; the other like an angel clothed in austerity.

When one has seen these two canyons, the west has nothing more to offer him in the way of scenery. They sum up all the wonders that nature has wrought in these cyclopean regions of the continent. One wants to see them again, to see them many times again. In the last year of his life he might desire to take a last look at them. And, if in the providence of the theologians, we are all translated into angels, for one I shall often be tempted to desert the glories celestial for these glories terrestial, to hover over the scene where the Yellowstone River tumbles over its precipices into the gorgeous depths below and where the Colorado River roars at the bottom of the canyon which is the creation of its own might and fury.

Transcriber’s Notes

Page 29: “Portugese colonies” changed to “Portuguese colonies”