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UNDER THE SKY IN
CALIFORNIA
UNDER THE SKY IN
CALIFORNIA
BY
CHARLES FRANCIS SAUNDERS
Author of "The Indians of the Terraced Houses," ';
"A Window in Arcady," etc.
ILLUSTRATED FROM PHOTOGRAPHS
MAINLY BY
C. F. and E. H. SAUNDERS
NEW YORK
ROBERT M. McBRIDE & CO.
1919
Copyright, 1913, by
McBuiDE, NAST & Co.
Second Printing
June, 1913
Third Printing
April, 1919
Published, March, 1913
DEDICATED
TO
THE TENDERFOOT
WHOM CALIFORNIA LOVES TO EDUCATE
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Acknowledgment is made to the
Editors of Travel, The Church-
man, Country Life in America
and the Sunset Magazine, for
their permission to incorporate in
this volume portions of articles
contributed by the author to those
magazines.
PREFACE
While the following pages touch upon some mat-
ters with which the tourist who travels along con-
ventional lines in California is familiar, the main
concern of the author has been to draw attention
to an immensity of almost unexplored mountain,
desert, canon and flowery plain, which the average
tourist sees — if at all — from the car window. This
is the real California; and but for man's un-
ceasing battle with Nature, the artificial wonder-
land of palms and roses and orange groves which
his boundless energy and patient cultivation have
evoked, would relapse almost in a night into this
wild, majestic solitude. Like all genuine things, it
has the compelling charm of the primitive and to
the lover of the unartificial it appeals with fresh-
ness and power.
Hunters and anglers, forest-rangers and pros-
pectors know this region ; the cowboy and the miner
know it; above all, the Indian knows it, and when
he is taken from it, he dies. To the thousands of
travelers, however, who yearly visit the Golden
State, this California of Nature's doing is an un-
known country; and however much some of them
might wish to become better acquainted with it, their
mortal frames, accustomed to trains de luxe and
dining cars, would be absolutely helpless if sub-
jected to the rough conditions which are accepted
PREFACE
as a matter of course by the miner, the cow-puncher
or the iron-framed camper.
Yet with some foreknowledge of how to go about
seeing this lesser-known California, the task is not
difficult of accomplishment even for men and women
of delicate frame to whom some daintiness of living
is inseparable from enjoyment. This book, written
out of the personal experience of man and wife of
very limited physical strength, is designed to com-
bine with some hint of the beauties and interests
which lie outside the regulation sights, certain prac-
tical directions for travelers who may desire with
comfort and safety to taste something of Cali-
fornia's wilder side.
CONTENTS
THE DESERTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I INTRODUCTORY 1
II THE MOJAVE . 3
III THE COLORADO DESERT OF CALIFORNIA 19
IV IN PALM CANON 31
V SPRING FLOWERS OF THE DESERT . . 41
THE MOUNTAINS
I UNDER THE STARS AT CROCKER'S 49
II CAMPING IN THE YOSEMITE 63
III SUMMER IN THE CANONS 71
IV AMONG THE ACORN EATERS OF SAN DIEGO COUNTY ... 78
SPRING DAYS IN A CARRIAGE
I PRELIMINARIES 103
II CAMULOS, THE HOME OF RAMONA 105
III CAPISTRANO 110
IV RANCHO SAN FULANO 117
V SAN Luis REY, GUAJOME AND PALA 125
VI THE PRACTICAL SIDE OF IT 134
THE FRANCISCAN MISSIONS
I AFOOT ON THE PADRES' PATHWAY 140
II IN THE SANTA BARBARA BACK-COUNTRY 161
WINTER ON THE ISLE OF SUMMER
I UNEXPLORED CATALINA .176
II AVALON IN WINTER . 190
CONTENTS
TOURIST TOWNS
CHAPTER PAGE
I SAX DIEGO AND SANTA BARBARA 200
II TOURIST TOWNS OF THE ORANGE BELT 212
III MONTEREY 223
RESIDENCE IN THE LAND OF SUNSHINE
I LIFE IN A BUNGALOW 236
II MAKING A LIVING IN THE LAND OF SUNSHINE . . . .246
III SOME CALIFORNIANISMS 256
CONCERNING THE CLIMATE
I THE CLIMATE IN GENERAL (with specific reference to
Southern California) 262
II THE INVALID AND THE CLIMATE 275
CAMP COOKERY FOR THE XOX-PROFESSIONAL CAMPER
I WHAT OURS is NOT (with apologies to Mr. Stewart Ed-
ward White] 280
II THE COMFORTS OF HOME WHEN CAMPING 282
III SOME RECIPES TO FIT THE WILDS 287
IV THE DUTCH OVEN 295
POSTSCRIPT 299
THE ILLUSTRATIONS
Hidden Lake Frontispiece
Facing page
At the desert's edge
Grotesque tree yuccas 15
The Colorado Desert 20
Our Conchilla Desert camp 29
Interior of Santa Catalina 34
The Palisades, San Jacinto Mountain 47
Our camp near Crocker's 54
A camp in the Yosemite 66
One of the old-time ranches 81
San Diego Mission 96
The Night of the Candles 96
A wagon, a good team and a camp outfit 104
Typical California valley 114
San Luis Key Mission 126
A vineyard in winter 136
Mission San Antonio de Padua 149
At Santa Barbara Mission 156
The bean planter 161
The hills at Avalon 176
The beach at Santa Catalina 188
Golf links at Avalon 196
The Matilija Canon 208
The patio of the rancho at Camulos 218
Where Robert Louis Stevenson lodged in Monterey . . . 225
Carmel Mission 232
A bungalow court 240
Typical California bungalow 248
Santa Ynes Mission 259
Almond orchard in bloom 270
' ' Palms take the place of the shade trees of the east " . . 277
A beautiful ranch entrance 284
A Dutch oven 296
UNDER THE SKY IN
CALIFORNIA
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
THE DESEETS
I. INTRODUCTORY
WHILE your average California!! is talkative
to the verge of garrulity about most things
in his State, there are two features of it which he
does not voluntarily bring up. One is fleas, the
other is deserts. Of the fleas there is no authorita-
tive count; of the deserts there are two principal.
The one best known is the Mojave, which occupies
much of the southeastern part of the State, and lies
at an elevation of about 3,500 feet above sea-level.
To the south of this again, that is in the extreme
southeastern corner of California, is another
whose borders reach to the lower waters of
the Colorado Eiver, and is, therefore, known as the
Colorado Desert — a most confusing name, as people
hearing of it for the first time naturally think of it
as situated in the State of Colorado. There are
numerous local names for small sections of this
region, such as the Yuma, the Coachella and the
Conchilla Deserts, the Salton Sink, and so on.
Part of this great waste is the bed of an ancient
sea, and some of it lies below the level of the ocean.
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UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
It is from a strip of the Colorado Desert that the
productive Imperial Valley has been reclaimed.
These desert-stretches of California covering an
area about equal to the State of Pennsylvania, far
from being the monotonous, gray level of sand
which the word desert conveys to the popular mind,
are diversified with mountain ranges, clustered and
solitary buttes, gravelly valleys and plains dotted
with clumps of shrubbery, as well as heaving hum-
mocks of pure sand — all sun-scorched and moisture-
less, but clothed in a wonderful charm of color and
permeated with a life-giving quality of air.
Appreciation of the desert's charm is inborn, if
it exists at all. To one who is alive to its beauty,
who feels the fascination of its solemn silences and
its luring distances, no hardship is too great to de-
ter him from visiting it; no beating of wind or
scorching of sun experienced there too severe to
prevent his return to it. We once met at a little
desert post-office an old prospector who had
" packed " his burros up and down the barren rocks
of the desert ranges for thirty years and who now
held an open letter in his hand. His brother, a
well-to-do bachelor in New York, had just died, and
a firm of lawyers there had written the prospector
to come East, as his presence was needed to settle
the estate to which he was sole heir.
' ' Gosh!" he said disgustedly, "I reckon I'll have
to go, but you bet your life I '11 be back p. d. q. New
York! Say, I was there once, and if it come to
2
THE DESERTS
ehoosin' between livin' in that place with a million
to spend, and prospectin' the desert with old Jack
and Jinny on a grubstake, me for the desert I"
There is a host, however, to whom the desert does
not appeal, who scout the idea of visiting so dull
and comfortless a spot, and what is more disturb-
ing', who will absolutely doubt the honesty or the
sanity of the desert enthusiast.
"You want to stay in the desert !" such a one
says to you. "What under heaven for? Why,
man alive, it's a hundred and twenty in the shade,
and no shade! I could hardly stand it crossing on
the railroad, though I read and slept and played
cards the whole time. That anybody should take
his wife, and go by choice and live in that red-hot,
God-forsaken waste for even a day, shows a screw
loose here," and he complacently taps his own hard
head.
It is useless to argue with those who feel thus,
and the best advice to any who are otherwise than
positively drawn to this magic region, is by all means
to stay away. To one, however, who from the car
windows or through books has felt the drawing
cords of its grave beauty and its mystery, these
pages are designed to offer some practical help.
II. THE MOJAVE
At the outset, it is essential to the enjoyment
of a desert outing that you have some definite
purpose in view, other than mere pastime. You
3
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
cannot repair there successfully as you do to the
beach, for a stroll along the sands and then to your
hotel for a bath and a good dinner. You may go
to trace the still visible shore-lines of that prehis-
toric sea of the Salton Sink and to indulge your
fancy in a walk upon that beach which is now but
the ghost of a beach ; or to collect baskets from some
remnants of an Indian tribe; to study the plant life
of the desert, or its mineralogy, or its animals; to
paint or to sketch; or you may go just for the sake
of a trip to the Pickaninny Buttes and back, with Mo-
jave Jim for guide — but unless you know what you
are on the desert for, you are going to be badly
fretted inside of twenty-four hours.
Of our own visits to the Mojave Desert, taken
for the primary purposes of studying the flowers
and painting them, two may be taken as typical of
the sort that is entirely practicable for the average
traveler to undertake and enjoy. Both visits were
made during the season of the spring blossoming
which in that region extends, roughly speaking,
from mid-April to the latter part of May. Our
first sojourn was for four days, spent at Victor-
ville, a mining-supply village on the Santa Fe Rail-
road. Here we found a plain and fairly comforta-
ble hotel patronized by prospectors, miners and
railroad men, and were able to engage a horse and
light wagon which enabled us to take daily ex-
cursions out upon the illimitable waste that lay all
about us. Such a trip as this is comparatively easy
4
THE DESEETS
and requires little preparation; but it should be
borne in mind when packing for it, that the desert
sun will even in a few days destroy any fineness of
wearing apparel — therefore take your plainest
clothes; and that the desert air will impart an ap-
petite, which if you are none too strong can be but
poorly satisfied with rough fare — therefore take in
your trunk a few of the good things of civilization.
On this experimental trip we learned some simple
fundamental facts about the desert. Its most beau-
tiful hours are from dawn until ten in the morning,
and from four or five in the afternoon until night-
fall. During these periods at the season of the
year when we were there, the atmosphere was more
of heaven than of earth. The glowing sky, radiant
with sunrise and sunset glories; the unspeakable
opalescent tints on distant mountains; the brilliant
flowers blooming upon the sands at one's feet; a
sense of largeness and indifference to petty things
— these are gifts of the desert's mornings and even-
ings never to be forgotten. Then, to crown all, there
is the night — serene, starlit, full of peace, its solemn
stillness broken only by the lament of some owl far
or near, or the cry of coyotes hunting. And over
and beyond these recitable matters there is an un-
utterable something that tugs at the heart of the
true desert lover, and makes him long evermore for
its silent places. For it is not merely what the out-
ward eye takes in that urges us on to visit certain
regions — it is the residence there of intangible in-
5
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
fluences that feed our spirits with manna from the
secret storehouses of the universe, making us for
the time partakers of an unseen feast of life with
the Master Himself. During these night watches
on the desert, the veil between this world and the
spiritual seems thinner than elsewhere, and one in
some measure comprehends why prophets of all
time have found inspiration and strength in desert
regions. Here in these waterless wastes, the wine
of a spiritual kingdom is poured abundantly and
the awakened soul hears the summons to a new life.
The desert day, however, is apt to be another
matter. About ten in the morning — we are speak-
ing of the spring days — down comes the heat, and
often by noon the wind has begun to blow — a per-
sistent, intrusive, irritating wind. From then on
until the sun is well down the western sky, one ap-
preciates as never before the comfort of the shadow
of a great rock in a weary land ; and after prepar-
ing dinner in its shade one is content to remain
quietly there reading, or watching the play of light
and shadow on the far-off mountain ranges, or en-
joying a nap, until the elemental fierceness of the
midday melts into the evening coolness.
It is a rare experience, that first picnic in the
shady crevices of the Mojave rocks. Dobbin has
had his keg of water, which was brought along in
the spring wagon, and he is munching his truss of
alfalfa, making an occasional side nip at a sprig
of desert green; in the old mine-shaft that yawns
6
THE DESERTS
below us, some birds with open bills and drooping
wings pant and rest, refugees from the noontide
heat too dejected to bicker ; before us stretches, mile
upon mile, a shimmering expanse of brown and gray
earth, dotted with glistening upheavals of igneous
rock and clumps of dull-green shrubs, with here and
there a tree yucca thrusting up its bristling, shaggy
arms. Far to the westward the desert plain rises
to meet the great mountains stooping down — ma-
jestic peaks of eight, nine and ten thousand feet,
clothed in mysteries of pink and amethyst and pur-
ple, and crowned with dreamy fields of snow that
seem in those pure heights against the pale noon
sky, as parts of a spiritual landscape, the rest of
which lies beyond mortal ken. Off to the north a
slender green strip marks the sinuous course of the
Mojave Eiver, that strange stream which has its
source in the pure springs and snow crevasses of
the San Bernardino summits, but is without a
mouth, its waters being swallowed up in the in-
satiable sands not far from Victor. The mythical
region of the mystic's dream
" Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Down to a sunless sea" —
has a real existence here. Then when the sun has
gone to his setting, there is the drive home in the
quiet afterglow, with the palpitating light of the
first star burning in the twilight sky, and all the
7
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
earth, baptized for a brief space into a heavenly
peace, before the night shall shut in.
In these desert outings — even the little trips of a
day which we took around Victorville — there lies
one special danger. This is not rattlesnakes, of
which we caught sight of one, now and then, as
much frightened at sight of us as we of it; nor
"bad men," of whom we saw none; but it is the
ease with which one may lose one's way even within
a short distance of human habitations. There is a
"Deadman's Point" almost anywhere on the desert,
and lost men have died of thirst within calling dis-
tance of Victor. We have more than once stepped
aside to explore some spot a few rods from the trail,
and spent a good part of the morning searching for
the road again. The inequalities of the ground are
continually hiding what lies even a little way be-
hind, and bringing into view fresh glimpses ahead
so like every other part of the desert that the sense
of relation becomes confused, and one is lost before
he knows it. Even well-marked trails are not to be
counted upon, for the sand storms that may come
up any time, may obliterate them in half an hour.
The only safety is to fix thoroughly in your mind
the points of the compass, and carefully to note
large, well-defined landmarks as you travel — such
as a mass of rocks identifiable by some peculiarity
of formation, some solitary butte, a jutting promon-
tory or a particular snow-capped peak; and never
in any case venture many miles from your base on
8
THE DESERTS
an unknown way without an experienced guide.
Familiarized somewhat with desert conditions by
this brief Victorville excursion, we decided another
year to go to the Mojave for a longer sojourn,
camping remote from the haunts of men and there-
fore undertaking to carry with us from home every-
thing needed to sustain life for a period of three
weeks, except water.
We are not of the iron-framed class of campers,
and the Mojave is no respecter of persons, but piti-
less alike to weak and strong. So here was a prob-
lem. There is upon this desert a small town called
Hesperia, on the Santa Fe Railway. Years ago it
had been " boomed, " and the boom having burst
in due course of time, the place now abides amid the
pieces, weed-grown and silent. Eight miles from
this incipient Tadmor, we learned of. a spot beside
the beautiful Mojave River, where we might pitch
our tent undisturbed, and look across the desert
sands to the grandeur of snow-capped mountains.
There we would make our camp.
So when the winter rains were over, we got to-
gether our tent and blankets, packed a couple of
boxes of provisions,* put the cat out to board, and
* As a guide to the novice desiring to duplicate such an experi-
ence, a statement follows of the preparations:
We purchased a camp outfit in Los Angeles which should be suf-
ficiently strong to answer for this and many another camping trip
to follow. This outfit will be found described in the chapter en-
titled "Under the Stars at Crocker's." For convenience of handling,
the stove, dishes and many smaller articles wore packed in two
medium-sized boxes with rope handles — the handles made them
9
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
with sufficient variety of clothing in our bag-
gage to provide for both extreme heat and extreme
cold — for the desert can dispense you both within
thirty minutes — we locked the door behind us, and
checkable as baggage — each weighing about one hundred pounds;
and the tent with its especial belongings, including the folding-
chairs, axe, shovel, etc., was rolled into a snug bundle, covered with
burlap and stoutly roped. This also was checkable as baggage. It
is advisable to divide your luggage into numerous small packages
rather than to have it consist of one or more bulky ones, especially
if transportation by burro is part of the program, as is often the
case through the West. As to provisions, a visit to a first-class
grocery and the confession of the nature of our trip to an obliging
clerk enlisted his sympathetic interest, for like all Californians, he
liked the same sort of thing himself. With his cooperation we had
the following list of articles securely packed in a strong box, and
we found by experience that they just about supplied the physical
needs of man and wife for a three weeks' outing.
Flour 10 Ibs.
White Corn Meal 10 Ibs.
Crackers, various kinds 1 dozen boxes
Shredded Wheat Biscuit and Triscuit 6 boxes each
Soups, (Franco-American) assorted 1 dozen small cans
Bacon, not sliced 2 Ibs.
Dried Beef, in chunk 2 Ibs.
Corned Beef, Deviled Ham and Tongue, boned
Chicken and Turkey 2 cans each
Salmon and Sardines 2 cans each
String Beans, Asparagus Tips, Corn, Ripe
Olives 2 cans each
Tomatoes 6 cans
Rice and Lentils 2 Ibs. each
Dried Lima Beans, Navy Beans and Pink
Beans ( Frijoles) 2 Ibs. each
Small Hominy, Macaroni, Spaghetti 1 Ib. each
Potatoes (More if you have room) 12 Ibs.
Grape Fruit, Oranges and Lemons 1 dozen each
Dried peaches, apricots and apples 1 Ib. each
Prunes, Fard Dates, Raisins and Dried Figs.. 2 Ibs. each
English Walnuts 2 Ibs.
Eggs 4 or 5 dozen
10
THE DESEETS
one April morning set forth. Noon found us landed
with our boxes around us at the nearest station to
our canip-site. The place had been selected through
the advice of a friend who knew the region, for in
venturing into the wilderness it is essential that
you should be assured in advance of a good situa-
tion, either through personal investigation or the
advice of one who knows the spot.
We had engaged beforehand the services of a
man to transport us from the station, where he met
us with a Studebaker wagon and a stout team of
horses. Of course it would have been more like a
book if his outfit had been a string of burros, but we
set down the fact as it happened. He proved to be
a fatherly old soul from Pike County, Missouri, for
which his unweaned heart was pining; and as he
drove, he began to gossip of brother Pete who
would be seventy-six come next Fourth, and son
Abner who was farming the place now, and Aunt
'Mandy, bless you what a woman she was to spin
home-spun! — she's dead now, these twenty year;
until he became quite unconscious that just now we
Butter (packed in tumblers) 7 Ibs.
Sugar .' 6 Ibs.
Salt 1 package
Pepper, Magic Yeast and Baking Powder.... 1 box each
Soap 2 cakes
Candles
Conserves, Canned Fruits. Cereals, Evaporated Cream and
Milk, and Sweets, according to liking.
In passing it may be remarked that provisions are not checked
as baggage on the railways, and must be shipped by express.
11
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
were all traveling a troublous road in California.
The wagon — blessed be its honest maker — banged
and bounded airily over rocks and clumps of sage-
brush, now two wheels in the air while the other
two were down to the hub in a wash-out; now
dropping us bodily into a cross-gulch with a stun-
ning thump that made our anatomies cry out and
brought loose bits of baggage flying about our ears.
Finally we crossed a stony arroyo at a hand gallop,
and after tugging up a ridge of sand beyond, our
wheels buried in it halfway to the hub and raising
a suffocating dust, we came out into the open desert
dotted with sage-brush and tree yuccas. Our Jehu
pointed with his whip to a thin line of green trees
a mile away.
"That's the Moharvy River," he remarked, "and
when the boys was fencin' in the range last year
they camped down there under them sycamores.
It's shady there, and water's handy. I reckon
you '11 like it."
We reckoned so, too; for the leisurely old trees
and the strip of green vegetation by the still waters
of the shallow, broad flowing river, made an oasis
spot that for "homeyness" and comfort exceeded
our most sanguine hopes.
There our driver dumped us out, piled our boxes
and blankets in a heap beside us, remarked that he
reckoned he would turn up again that day three
weeks and tote us back, if we did not get tired be-
fore, and if we did maybe we could let him know
12
THE DESERTS
by Jim Johnson who looked after the cattle on that
range, and so long, good luck to us.
It was four o'clock in the afternoon, and camp
was to be made, goods unpacked and supper cooked
before nightfall ; but we devoted a few preliminary
moments to looking over the place we had come so
far to see.
First in point of practical utility, there was the
river of pure mountain water within a stone's
throw, with driftwood for our fire scattered along
the shore. A short distance behind us, the ground
rose abruptly in the form of a tableland promising
protection from the worst of the winds which our
Missouri friend had told us came "a bilin' now and
agin" out of Horsethief Canon and Rattlesnake
Draw. Back of this mesa rose the snow-capped
range of the San Bernardino, while in front of us,
under a cloudless sky, the desert lay, silent, mys-
terious, vast — the afternoon heat hovering low upon
it in quivering waves, through which far across
sagey plains we saw as in a dream a distant range
of amethystine granite hills. Somewhere doves
were cooing, a flock of restless sparrows twittered
in the wild plum bushes by the river, and a valley
quail whistled from the tip of a cactus near by. A
breath of cool wind out of the mountains came
mingled with the drowsy hum of buccaneering bees
ravaging a clump of flowers.
The night closed in still and brilliantly starlit,
and we decided that it would be flying in the face
13
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
of Providence to sleep in a tent when we might He
under the stars. All the preceding winter we had
slept outdoor under the gentle skies of Santa Cata-
lina Island; and, following our practice there, we
now laid our blankets lightly upon the cots v in that
quiet twilight hour, and tucked them in, as one
would prepare a bed at home.
Memory will never fail us regarding that first
night in the desert. By nine o'clock Horsethief
Canon and Rattlesnake Draw had wind of us, and
bore down upon us with a shrewd blast right off
the ice. It was as eager and as nipping an air as
ever blew on the ramparts at Elsinore, and it
traveled fast. Our clothing took on the similitude
of thin expanses of ice. The blankets which we
thought heavy when we packed them at eighty in
the shade in Pasadena, flapped in the gale like gos-
samer. An old down-quilt laid across the foot of
our cots, arose and skimmed away to a clump of
sage-brush out on the illimitable sands. The tent
strained furiously at its pegs and threatened to fol-
low the quilt at any moment. A pack of coyotes set
tip a shivering chorus in the distance. Even the
motherly old sycamore above our heads lost the pro-
tecting air which we had felt in it earlier in the day,
and creaked and groaned ominously in the blast,
brandishing its great branches threateningly over
us. Fortunately neither of us was nervous or easily
alarmed, and though very sleepy and very cold, the
abiding sense of humor which had borne us through
14
THE DESERTS
other emergencies, remained with us still. Holding
down the covers with both hands, we patiently
awaited the morning, which, when it came, with one
of those magical changes inseparable from desert
life, aroused us from a belated snatch of sleep with
a windless radiance of sunshine, and a musical
chorus from the boughs above. All the birds in the
desert seemed assembled there to give us a welcome.
We arose and, greeting our little brothers of the
air, set our house in order.
Warned by the first night's experience, we sewed
the blankets up into sleeping bags and reinforced
the two heavy Navajo rugs, on which we lay, with
layers of newspapers. By moving the cots at night
so that the foot of each was within the tent-door
and the head out, we secured the coveted freshness
of night air for our lungs without risking having
our covering blown off. Then the wind, after
the perverse fashion of inanimate things, finding
itself foiled, never afterwards blew upon us so
fiercely.
Life in the desert is an adaptation to conditions.
To take up arms against the obstacles is less wise
than to submit to the inevitable. The old-time poet
who wrote, "To bear is to conquer our fate," had
the making of a good desert dweller. If the cook-
stove will not burn because of the wind, the wise
man digs a hole in the ground, and sets his Dutch-
oven going. When the thermometer runs up to a
breezeless hundred in the shade, he takes a hint
15
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
from the breeze and stops work, too. Our main ad-
vice, for a desert trip of this nature, provided al-
ways that you are not of the tough kind that can
stand anything, would be this: Be sure to take
enough material for emergencies. During this stay
on the Mojave, for instance, we had one furious but
short-lived rain storm, some spits of hail, a little
snow, one night so cold that our camp was white
with frost, some days of heat so intense that the
thinnest clothing at midday was necessary for com-
fort, and others when all these material considera-
tions were of no importance in the absolute comfort
and tranquillity of the atmosphere.
In planning for a desert camp, the question of
how to get about after you are settled, is one that
requires serious attention. It happened that our
work was such that we could ordinarily pursue it
close to camp, but when we needed to move about we
found a neighboring ditch-tender's burros to be the
ideal motive power. While slow, the burro is pref-
erable to a horse in being more easily cared for,
and in standing the shortcomings of desert life with
patience and even with good humor. He requires a
minimum of water, and lives contentedly enough on
a browse of shrubs and wild flowers, though if you
can include in your camp stores enough crushed bar-
ley to afford the little animal a quart of it once a
day, he will do better work for you. The whims of
burro appetite we found rather entertaining.
Paper, for instance, is quite a tidbit, be it tissue or
16
THE DESERTS
manila ; even cardboard, if it is thin, such as is used
in making confectioner's ice-cream boxes, has its
devotees in burrodom; while to all a bit of news-
paper is choice. We made a note of what one of
our desert burros had for lunch upon a picnicking
occasion. He had been standing indifferently up to
his knees in grass, without so much as nibbling at it,
and we thought he could not be hungry, but here are
the items in the order of consumption:
Tissue paper and eggshells ; plain white wrapping
paper; brown paper and some crusts of zwieback;
bread and butter; one boiled egg in the shell, and
two prune seeds wrapped in tissue paper — (he spat
out one prune seed and the yolk of the egg, but later
ate the shell) ; steeped tea leaves and tissue paper;
a few bran crackers ; a slice of cake ; a bit of cheese ;
and two orange skins, keenly relished.
Having exhausted the scraps from our luncheon,
he topped off with a demi-tasse of dry cottonwood
leaves, picked up from the ground.
One day our neighbor, the ditch-tender, stopped
at our camp to pass the time of day, and the talk
fell on burros.
"Some folks say a burro never dies," he gossiped,
4 'and to prove it they'll ask you if you ever seen a
dead one. But, gosh, that ain't so. To be sure, a
burro mighty seldom gets sick, but if he does git
sick, you bet he kicks the bucket quick. How old
will a burro git to be? Lord, I don't know. Now
that black burro of mine, he was twenty years old
17
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
when I got him and I've had him fifteen year. How
much does add up? Thirty-five year old? Well,
he's all of that, you bet, and he's as good as ever.
Why, gosh a 'mighty, he'll run like a deer, if he finds
he's .loose.
"Yes, sirree," he continued, "there's nothin' like
'em for the desert. Some folks say they don't care
much for water, but I know they like a good drink
of fresh water all right, same as any animal; but if
it ain't to be had, they're reasonable — they don't go
to pieces for want of it like a horse does. I've
known a burro to go three days without water, but
I don't want no burro of mine to have to go dry
longer than that. I guess that's pretty near the
limit.
"Eating? Yes, you're right about that — they're
purty permisc'ous eaters — purty much ev'ything
from shoe-strings to sagebrush goes with them.
When I clear up after a meal, the burros come in
right handy ; they clean up all the scraps, the potato
parings, and beans that's left over and so on, and
old Black Jack there thinks he's cheated bad if I
don 't give him the frying pan to lick clean. You got
to watch how you leave things layin' loose around
camp, though ; I had a burro wunst eat a good straw
hat for me — brand new, cost me six bits in San Ber'-
doo — eat it all up so's you couldn't tell whether
what was left was a necktie or a hat band, and I
don't know why he left that."
From Sancho Panza's day — and doubtless from
18 '
THE DESERTS
an earlier — men have fellowshiped affectionately
with donkeys, and the average Californian, in com-
mon with all who know the burro intimately, has a
weak spot in his heart for him. The little beast
would be only a joke, if he were not so useful — if he
had not so often stood between the life of his mas-
ter and death. His cat-like quality of clinging to
the skirts of existence till the last strand parts, and
the habit of bearing with superhuman patience the
buffets and privations of a frontier career, more
than offset the burro's exasperating pigheadedness
and blundering, stupid ways, that contrast so
sharply with the nervous, clean-cut, intelligent ac-
tion of a good horse. Moreover, your burro train
is a sort of traveling vaudeville show in the wilder-
ness, and furnishes an element of unpremeditated
humor in a weary land. When Jack and Jenny rub
noses after a day's separation, or lift up their ri-
diculous, labored voices in raucous salutation to
each other, or raise their great ears in interested
attention when something happens on ahead, or
flap them out like horizontal bars in dejection when
there's nothing doing, you laugh in spite of your-
self and think, "What, after all, is life without a
burro ! ' '
III. THE COLORADO DESERT OF CALIFORNIA
As different from the Mojave as one race of men
from another, is the Colorado Desert of Southern
19
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
California. To the lover of the artistic it appeals
as far more picturesque than the more northern
desert, and its floral life is very different. While
the Mojave may not be visited until early May to
be seen in the glory of its spring, the Colorado
Desert offers its best in March, though if it is pos-
sible to remain longer, the glorious display of mul-
titudinous cactus blooms, of the tree-dalea in its
floral robe of royal purple, and the palo verde be-
spangled in gold, will reward the heat-proof lin-
gerer until April and May or even June.
The Colorado Desert being in a low sink, its air
possesses at seasons a quality of enervation that is
not noticeable on the Mojave's elevated plateaus,
and the time when it may be visited with pleasure
by the unacclimated is therefore shorter. For com-
fortable conditions of living and ease of access to a
typical part of this region's beauties and wonders,
there is no more satisfactory headquarters than
Palm Springs, a small settlement at the eastern base
of San Jacinto Mountain, adjacent to some warm
sulphur springs frequented from time immemorial
by the Indians. It is situated upon a shelving edge
of the desert, which, here between the San Jacinto
and the San Bernardino ranges, thrusts in a long
sandy tongue to which the early Spaniards gave the
name of the Conchilla Desert — that is, the Desert
of the Little Shells — because of the myriads of tiny
shells that strew it in places.
Palm Springs village is reached by private con-
20
I
C';
bfi
as
C/J
THE DESERTS
veyance from the station of the same name six miles
distant on the Southern Pacific Railroad, and from
November till the first of May is resorted to by suf-
ferers from respiratory troubles, for whom sani-
tariums are maintained embowered in palm, fig, and
orange trees. The casual visitor may board at one
of them if he will, or with one of the few resident
families, or — and this is the more cheerful way —
he may keep house in a rented room, tent or cot-
tage, eking out the scanty supplies of the local store
by sending to Banning, twenty-five miles away, or
to Los Angeles, one hundred miles distant, for
needed comforts and luxuries. He should by all
means arrange to sleep in the open — his cot set di-
rectly under the stars, or at least upon an open
porch. In no other way can one enjoy the tran-
scendent freshness and sweetness of the desert air,
which especially during the dewless night and early
morning hours is the very breath of heaven. Stim-
ulating as a tonic, without dampness or harshness,
simply to inhale it gives a new joy to living.
The feature at Palm Springs that offers a special
attraction to sojourners, is the great San Jacinto
Mountain, which towers immediately back of the lit-
tle settlement. Its rugged sides are cleft with many
canons extending for miles in their sinuous courses
far back into the mountain's recesses, opening up
new vistas of noble scenery and affording endless
opportunities to the lover of mountain climbing.
Here he finds the freshness of a new experience in.
21
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
scaling the desert's sunburnt heights. The pre-
cipitous range of barren rocks, glistening in the sun
like burnished metal, and appearing like a flat wall
rising sheer halfway to the zenith, seems at first
glance an impossibility to climb, but to one pos-
sessed of average strength and wind, the task once
entered upon resolves itself quickly into a delight-
ful pastime.
The rocks, smooth-shining in the sunlight, are
rough enough as a rule to afford a good foothold,
and you step from one to another, zigzagging this
way and that but always mounting higher, as
though ascending a giant's staircase. Lovely
blooms of the cactus look hospitably out at you
from snug corners of the rocks, and golden suns of
the desert encelia beckon to you to come yet higher.
The seemingly flat wall that confronted you from
the desert floor, now that you are scaling it, proves
to be neither flat nor a wall, but a succession of re-
ceding rock ridges, each higher than the one in
front of it. As you climb and see above you the
jagged crest of the ridge far up the sky, you are
convinced that that is the mountain's summit, but
it never is — another is just beyond. Between each
ridge there are sequestered hollows — arid flats and
coves and little greenish vales, waterless always
save for a day or two after some winter storm, when
shallow basins in the rocks hold pools of gathered
rain.
Into these resting places undreamt of by the trav-
22
THE DESERTS
elers on the desert that gleams far out and below,
the foot of man never comes, unless it be in quest
of gold or game for his gun; though in other days
the Indians had trails up these steeps, as weather-
worn shards of a broken pot now and then attest.
The desert birds however find here somewhat to
their liking and the air is musical with their twit-
ter ; while in the dust of the shelving pavements and
sloping walls of these dry parks, many varieties of
flowers blossom and smell sweet — beloperones, en-
celias, trixis, hosackias, eriogonums, kramerias like
purple butterflies caught in thorns — here and there
a blue brodiaea, and the canes of a strange, leafless
milkweed rising like slender reeds six or eight feet,
their creamy umbels of bloom dangling naked from
the tip. If it be afternoon, white four-o 'decks are
opening their snowy corollas to the cooling air.
Here in the hollows of the rocks the wild bee es-
tablishes its kingdom of sweetness and light, the
quail comes to feed upon the harvest of wile1 seeds,
and bob-cats and coyotes make their silent way.
From these hidden vantage grounds there are glo-
rious outlooks upon the mysterious, fascinating
desert. In the foreground are the gleaming sands,
shadow-flecked and dotted with millions of bushes
looking from this height like pinpoints ; and farther
off is another mountain barrier draped in ethereal
color, extending from the snow-capped peaks of the
San Bernardino Sierra at the north, south to
misty pass that leads into the Coachella Valley.
23
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
Each of the San Jacinto canons adjacent to Palm
Springs is deserving of as much time for its ex-
ploration as one can spare to it. The main ones
nearest the village number six, named respectively,
Chino, Tauquitz, Andreas, Murray, Palm and Ca-
thedral. Each of these may be visited within the
limits of a day, if one have no longer time to spend
upon them. Palm Canon, however, can only be
glanced at in so short a time, as its mouth is seven
miles distant by an arduour: road, and the visitor
should arrange to spend at least one night there if
he desires to get any idea of what it holds. To this
end, all needful, except water, must be carried, as
no one lives within its confines.
The first of the canons to engage attention, be-
cause the nearest, is usually Tauquitz. This
opens out upon the desert just south of Palm
Springs settlement, and pours for eight months of
the year into an artificial waterway a crystal flood
of delicious mountain water that supplies the needs
of the white villagers and the handful of Agua
Caliente Indians whose reservation is close by. A
half day will suffice for a surface exploration of
Tauquitz, though if you put a bite of lunch in your
pocket and devote an entire day to the jaunt, it will
well pay you.
Of all the canons, Tauquitz is the only one com-
fortably accessible on foot. Leaving the waterless
sands of the desert floor, and ascending the gravelly
rock-strewn incline that spreads like a huge fan out
24
THE DESEETS
of the canon 's mouth, we pass into one of Nature's
cactus gardens. Here are bright purple-flowered
cereuses whose clustered upright stems bristle from
the crevices of rock; here are opuntias of various
kinds — one gray, spineless sort covered with a mass
of glorious pink blossoms lovely as roses, cheek by
jowl with a burly, silvery-spined variety whose dis-
carded joints strew the ground like chestnut burs
and draw blood with their barbed spines if you
touch them ever so lightly. Here, too, are the ro-
tund cylinders, rosy-spined, of the curious bisnaga
or barrel cactus — natural water casks, filled from
root to flower-encircled tip with a drinkable fluid
that has- saved many a human life.
By and by we cross a low ridge of rock and sud-
denly the sound of rushing water strikes gratefully
upon the ear— it is the escaping stream, whose
source is ten thousand feet above in the melting
snows of San Jacinto's summit. Then following
the trail across a sandy wash, we scramble through
a narrow gateway of fragrant wild plum bushes in
bloom, where bees hum and butterflies flutter, and
we are fairly within the canon. The great barren
walls of granite rock incline upward and away so
that the canon is filled with sunlight, yet cool with a
gentle breeze that is drawn down and through the
gorge from the snowy heights of the mountain. Up
through thickets of clambering white ellisia and blue
phacelia • and scarlet-flowered beloperone where
humming-birds suck, the trail winds, bordered with
25
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
fragrant wild mints, and skirting now and then
great bowlders in whose shadow small ferns spread
their lusty green fronds, and selaginellas creep,
until at last we reach a lofty barrier of rocky wall
set athwart the canon. Here the mountain says to
the desert, "Thus far thou comest, but no fur-
ther." Through a narrow cleft at this wall's top
the stream from above emerges and plunges down-
ward in a ribbon-like fall. This is the head of Tau-
quitz Canon, so far as the average visitor is con-
cerned though if one have the abilities of the wild
goat in climbing, it is possible to scale this wall and
enter the gorge again above the fall.
The Indians of Palm Springs, though they are
"civilized" now out of practically all semblance to
Indians, have an hereditary dread of Tauquitz
Canon; its recesses are regarded by them as the
especial haunt of an ancient god, whose name it
bears, and they fear his anger, should they trespass
on his preserves. When a thunder storm rumbles
and flashes on the upper heights, a great wind roars
down this inner canon and belches out into the
desert ; and the red man who doubts that God Tau-
quitz is raging within must either be both deaf and
blind or a fool.
It was the postmaster who first told us of Chino
Canon.
"You ought to go there, sure," he remarked, "it's
the best of the bunch, 7 think. A little far to walk,
but you can hire my buggy and the gray mare.
26
THE DESERTS
Stay all day, if you like, and come back in the cool
of the evening. You can't lose the old horse on the
road home, even if there ain't no moon — not on
your life. Cost you two dollars, but you'll never
regret the money."
We spent the two dollars and found the postmas-
ter's enthusiasm well grounded.
Chino Canon is a titanic cleft in the mountain
the approach to which, a couple of miles north of
Palm Springs village, is a superb upward sweep of
sand, rocks and bowlders, rising gradually and ma-
jestically from the desert into the shadows of the
mountain's fastnesses. The gateway to the canon,
formed by two projecting, verdureless promontories
of the mountain, is two miles in width ; and skirting
the base of one of these a fairly good road enables
the visitor to drive or ride a few miles into the
canon. Amid the chaos of scattered rocks through
which the road winds, thousands of cactuses flour-
ish, and the air is filled at times with the honeyed
fragrance of a myriad diverse wild blossoms that
dot the gravelly spaces among the bowlders.
As we pass within the great entrance — broad as
the gates of another Inferno but flooded with the
blessed sunlight — we see the precipitous sides fur-
rowed with smaller side canons, and across the west
end, like a rocky screen, the sierra lifts its jagged
crest, dotted with what looks, these eight or nine
thousand feet below, like a stubble of scrub growth
but which in fact are mighty forest trees. White
27
UNDEE THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
lines that seam those alpine sides are gorges filled
with snow which, in the deepest, will linger well into
the summer. We may think Chino ends at the foot
of this great barrier where the sides close in, but as
we follow up the ribbon of verdure that lines the
stream issuing from the canon, we come shortly to
a little green oasis cradled at the mountain's base
like a sheltered Swiss vale. Here is an excellent
camp-site, unique in being supplied with water cold
and warm — the latter from a huge sulphur spring
gushing up near a small grove of palms. Beyond
this all trails end, and the canon, turning sharply to
the left, is lost to us here below in a maze of
heaven-aspiring granite walls.
Into this, sequestered spot, now and then, comes a
man to pitch his camp and rest from the labors of
the outer world. One such — a prospector — had been
there just before us, when we visited the place one
March day, and had left neatly tacked upon the
branch of a tree a board bearing the following leg-
end:
HERMAN LUHRMAN
CAMP SIMPLE LIFE
JAN. 16 TO MARCH 16, 1908.
A considerate man was this lover of the simple
life, leaving for the next comer his stock of well-
28
a
in
rt
PL.
u
rt
<u
c
a
rt
o
ts
CJ
THE DESERTS
thumbed magazines in a box protected from the
weather, and beside the fireplace of rocks a pile of
kindling and dry wood in readiness for the firing.
His kindly spirit quickened us to try to leave the
camp in equally good condition for the next adven-
turer.
Murray, Andreas and Cathedral Canons have each
special features that make them worth a visit, if
one have the time to spare to it; but let us now
leave the canons for a time, and wander out into
the open desert toward the sunbaked wash of the
Whitewater which lies three miles or so eastward
from San Jacinto's base. In this brief distance we
pass through several distinct zones of plant life.
The cactuses — at least most of them — cease to be
as we leave the foot of the mountain, and are re-
placed by. a belt of creosote bushes set with much
precision, like shrubs in a park. The yellow forsy-
thias of spring gardens in the East are hardly more
yellow than these bushes when in full bloom — their
flowers like golden stars set in the foliage of glis-
tening green. In the liberal interspaces among the
bushes, there are gay conventions of pink wild ver-
bena, white chaenactis red of stem, and the yellow
suns of malocothrix, each with a crimson spot at its
glowing center.
Passing from these, as the sands grow heavier,
low desert sun-flowers and delicate ox-eyes begin
to appear, and by and by, we find ourselves in the
home of the fragrant evening primroses. Here we
29
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
are in the sand dunes of the mid-desert, and curi-
ously enough something in the look and feel of
things brings up thoughts of the sea. A cool fresh
breeze blows from farther out and it is hard to be-
lieve that just across yonder heaving ridge of sand
where the short-trunked shrubs are blown far to one
side by constant winds, we shall not see the ocean
surging upon the shingle. Perhaps the spirit of
that ancient sea which once covered this part of the
desert and left to it its legacy of little shells, still
walks its old-time haunt.
How the humanity of us is perpetually seeking the
companionship of the mortal! Here in this vast
solitude of sand and sun and wind, where the in-
tense silence, the far-off dome of the boundless sky,
the long, long views that nothing intercepts until
they melt into colors of another world, all speak
of infinity, exhausted thought drops sooner or later
to earth and finds relief in engaging itself with the
tracks upon the sand which mark where finite life
has passed. This is the desert's daily public print
— its newspaper. Last night, we read, a coyote
passed this way — it must have been last night, the
tracks are so fresh. We trace them to a badger's
hole which he has dug out to the size of his body
in quest of the badger. We think he did not find
the gray beast at home, as there is no evidence of
a struggle, and our feelings are mixed — there is
gladness for the badger, but what about that empty
coyote-stomach which hungered to be filled? Birds
30
THE DESEETS
by the hundred have left their tracks everywhere,
as they fed on fallen seeds and improved their di-
gestion with grains of sand or sheltered themselves
from the noonday heat in the shade of various
plants. This smooth band that wavers heavily out-
ward from a clump of greasewood is where a snake
has moved his sluggish length; here where the trail
is broader and confused, he has coiled in rest.
These delicate lines are where darting lizards have
dragged their tails. Around the base of that hum-
mock some dainty-footed prowler has dimpled the
sand with its trotting feet, its captured prey hang-
ing from its mouth, as we know by a lengthening
mark paralleling the animal's trail. Under the
shadow of this shrub, a dish-like depression marks
the resting place of a jack rabbit, and here are the
impressions of his flying feet when something
frightened him from his retreat.
IV. IN PALM CANON
One afternoon of early March, Dutch Jake, the
prospector, blew into Palm Springs from the Little
Morongos. He undid the packs of his three burros,
turned the animals loose in somebody's abandoned
field back of the school-house, and set up his cone-
shaped miner's tent among the mesquits near the
post-office. Then he borrowed a Dutch-oven from
a man who was camping near the same center of
life and news, and prepared to enjoy the sweets of
31
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
civilization for a season. He was a stout, little fig-
ure of a man, and his English was a cross between
that of Weber and Fields and Hans Breitmann.
"I haf located some purty goot prospects in dem
Leetle Moronkos," he remarked comfortably, as he
crossed his short legs and loaded his pipe, "unt I
might haf vent oop to Los Angeles unt sold out at
a purty fair figger; ofer I always make von damn
fool of myself in dot town unt lose money; so I
fought I'd yust come here unt gif de burros a
chance to browse a bit, unt soak myself in dem In-
jun Springs yonder for my rheumatism. It only
costs two bits efery time you go in, unt you can
shtay as long as you please, unt, mein Gott, I can
afford dot."
So it happened when we decided to visit Palm
Canon and camp there for a day or two, we were
referred to Dutch Jake as the man likeliest to trans-
port our outfit.
"Pollum Canon, eh? Yes, I haf been oop Pollum
Canon already a goot many years ago. It vasn't no
goot den unt it ain't no goot now — dot is for min-
eral, unt de vater gets bad in summer time, ven de
snow has all run off de mountain ; ofer now you can
drink it veil enough. You vants to make some pic-
tures, eh? Veil, some peoples does dot. All right,
I take you. It'll be fifty cents a day apiece for de
burros, unt my time is wort' somet'ing to tend camp
for you, ain't it? We make it two dollars unt a
balluf a day for de whole outfit; I pack your stuff
32
THE DESERTS
on Jinny and Chappo, unt de lady can ride old Jack.
Me unt you vill valk, mister. Vot you fink?"
The price did not seem out of the way for what
we were to get, so the bargain was closed; and by
seven the next morning the kyacks of the two pack
donkeys were filled with three days' provisions; the
blankets and Sylvia's little mattress were roped se-
curely on top; the shovel, the axe, the rifle and the
canteen were hung ready to the hand if needed ; and
we were off.
"I feelas though the bottom of thirty centuries
had dropped out and we were back in the time of the
patriarchs," laughed Sylvia when, perched upon old
Jack, she saw the desert open before her ; I, staff in
hand, trudging along in the sand at her side as she
rode.
What a morning it was ! The dewless coolness of
the spring night was still in the air and the sun
felt good upon our backs ; birds were singing in the
boughs of the mesquits upon which the first tender
green leaves of the year were just appearing; the
subtle fragrance of the pink abronias which covered
the ground in places with sheets of vivid color, filled
our nostrils with delight. Sylvia and I sang to-
gether the duets of our teens, and Chappo in whom
eight years of desert life had not quenched the
frolicsomeness of youth, cantered playfully down
every declivity of the trail and kicked up his in-
fantile heels at the bottom. Even Jake, stumping
along in the rear of the cavalcade, smoked the pipe
33
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
of contentment, and found nothing to grumble
about.
Except for those occasional ebullitions of friski-
ness on Chappo's part, the donkeys were deliberate
travelers, and Jake being rheumatic and sixty was
not the man to hurry them ; so the sun was well up
the sky when we finally left the open desert behind
us and passed into a sandy gulf that swept in be-
tween gradually narrowing walls of burnished gran-
itic rock toward Palm Canon's mouth. The trail
steepened, the sands grew heavier and heavier to
the foot, and the intense midday heat, unrelieved by
any breeze, not only blazed down with torrid fierce-
ness upon our heads but was reflected upward from
the scorching sand into our blistering faces. The
burros drooped their patient heads; even Chappo
forgot that he was young, and devoted himself
strictly to the business of "getting there." Jake,
perspiring at every pore, mopped his red face with
his redder bandanna and swore softly.
"Gott in Himmel, dis is disagreeable," he ob-
served.
Then we climbed a final ridge of rock and sand,
and descending a broad sunny way, all glorious with
purple lupines and crimson monkey-flowers, with
golden eriophyllums, white desert daisies and mot-
tled mohaveas, we came to the mouth of the canon
of the palms, where a cool breeze fresh from the
snowy summit of the great mountain came out to
greet us, and the sound of water flowing amid reeds
34
THE DESERTS
fell like music on our ears. In another moment, the
dripping canteen was passing from lip to lip, and
the burros, lined up at the edge of the stream, had
plunged three white noses deep in the flood.
It is an impressive sight that confronts us, when,
our thirst relieved, we begin to look about us — a
sight more suggestive of the Orient than of the
United States. Palms, palms, everywhere, varying
in size from the seedling growths of a single leaf or
two clutched like fans in the fist of earth, to stately
veterans of centuries, whose slender, tapering trunks
rise straight as arrows into the air to a height of
ninety or a hundred feet, each summit crowned with
a great tuft of green fan-shaped leaves rippling and
glistening in the sunshine which habitually pervades
this open canon. The older trees are bare of trunk
to within a few feet of the verdant crown, where a
fringe of dead foliage hanging head downward
forms a picturesque brown thatch beneath the green.
The young palms are thus thatched to the ground,
looking as though clad in brown petticoats. Here,
as beneath a mother's protecting skirt, the small
animal life of the canon — "shnakes unt varmints,"
in Jake's classification — is prone to hide itself.
For a distance of nearly two miles these tropic
groves fill the bed of the gorge, which is so tor-
tuous, however, that to get an idea of them in any-
thing like their entirety, one needs to clamber up
the canon's bare side — no very difficult matter.
There from some vantage point, one may look down
36
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
and watch the winding procession of the palms as
they crowd out from the mountain's inner solitudes
and follow the course of the hurrying torrent till
trees and water alike are swallowed up by the all-
consuming desert. Few other trees besides these
grow in the alkaline soil of the stream's marge, and
none at all on the barren, rocky sides of the canon
which rise steeply towards the pines and snowfields
of the mountain's summit, ten thousand feet above.
With the scorching memory of the desert still
fresh within us, we find it a heavenly place in the
cool shadow of the palms and beside these crystal
waters, which drop now in musical cascades and now
are gathered in still pools reflecting their sedgy
fringes; now flow in open sunlight, and again are
lost in quivering beds of cat-tails and rushes and
thickets of groundsel. Wild flowers of briMlant hue
brighten the tiny, sandy beaches that form here and
there in the shelter of the great rocks — flowers of
compelling charm, yet in this out-of-the-way part of
the world so unknown to men that most of them are
nameless save in the harsh lexicon of science. A
faint fragrance like tuberose fills the air — the per-
fume from millions of tiny blossoms of a leafless
mistletoe that makes witches' brooms in the mes-
quite. In such an environment we made our camp.
Botanists have given to the palm which is so char-
acteristic a feature of this canon, the name of
WTashingtonia, in honor of our country's first Presi-
dent, and it has been extensively introduced as an
56
THE DESEBTS
ornamental tree throughout Southern California
where it is a familiar object along public highways
and in private grounds. To the Indians, in the old
days, it served a number of purposes ; the leafstalks
furnished material for bows, the leaves themselves
made a staple thatch for wickiups, and were utilized
to some extent also in basket weaving ; but the great
service of the palm to the redmen was as a yielder
of food. The fruit is a small berry-like body con-
sisting of an exceedingly thin layer of sweetish pulp
enveloping a stone that is almost the whole thing.
It is borne in slender clusters depending from long,
pendulous stalks thrust out from amid the leaves, re-
minding one of gigantic bunches of chicken grapes.
A forest ranger, who dropped into our camp one
evening, a graduate of some Eastern university and
exceedingly pleased to have someone to talk to, had
a good deal to say about the palm and the Indian.
"You see," he remarked, sipping with extreme
relish a cup of tea which Sylvia had brewed for him,
adding, to his astonishment, a slice of lemon, " be-
fore the Government got to cooping them up in res-
ervations and making up their resultant deficiency
of food with charity rations of bad flour and what-
not, the Indians on the root-hog-or-die principle,
had developed the food value of the desert flora to
a wonderful degree. The Coahuilla Indians, for in-
stance, who occupied this part of the desert, dis-
covered a way to get nutrition out of these palm
berries which a white man wouldn't think fit for his
37
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFOKNIA
pigs. As I understand it, each family owned a cer-
tain bunch of trees, and every year when the fruit
was ripe, the whole lot of them from the grand-
father to the latest papoose would go on a picnic to
the canon and camp under their trees just as the
Piutes do in the central Sierra Nevada when pine-
nuts are ripe. Then with long poles made by splic-
ing shorter ones together, they battered down the
hanging clusters by the bushel, and gathered them
into baskets. Some of the fruit was consumed fresh
on the spot, but there is not much to eat outside the
stone, and most of the harvest was carried home,
dried in the sun, and then pounded in a stone mor-
tar until the kernels of the pits were ground to
meal.
"Now there was a queer thing about this Indian
business," he continued, lighting his pipe, while
Jake threw some fresh wood on the fire, and we all
watched the cheerful glow rise and fall against the
blackness of the night. "You may have noticed that
every big palm you have seen in the canon has the
trunk more or less blackened and charred, indicat-
ing that at some period in its life, it has been on
fire. That was Indian work. For some reason or
other, the Coahuillas had a fashion of periodically
firing the trees, which could be easily accomplished
by putting a spark to the hanging dead leaves, and
that is why the older trees are all bare of trunk,
while the young ones are thatched with the dead
leaves as Nature intends them to be. Now the ques-
38
THE DESEETS
tion is what were those trees fired for? Some say,
it was simply with a view of increasing the fruitful-
ness of the trees, just as my old grandfather down
in Maine used regularly to burn over his blueberry
patch to improve the crop. Maybe it was. There's
nobody to tell us now."
The ranger paused while he puffed hard at his
pipe which had almost gone out.
" There are some old Indians in the reservation at
Palm Springs," remarked one of us; "why doesn't
somebody ask them?"
"Maybe somebody has, and maybe they told him
what I've just told you. But after a man has
knocked about the Southwest for a few years, he
finds that an Indian doesn't tell every Tom, Dick
and Harry of a white man all he knows. This is
particularly the case with anything touching his re-
ligious views and rites, and fire is very closely as-
sociated with these, in the life of the desert Indian.
Now there is another explanation of these burnt
trunks, which connects them with a religious rite,
and which, foolish as it may seem, is to my mind
entirely in keeping with the Indian's attitude to-
ward the world of spirit. When a man dies, the
Indian thinks his spirit has a long journey to take
in order to reach his final home — his happy hunting^
grounds. This, in a desert Indian's view, is natu-
rally a hard journey, sandy, sunny and hot, in the
progress of which the soul will cry out mightily for
shade. So, on the occasion of a man's death, what
39
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
more natural than to set fire to one of his trees in
order that its spirit, thus released, may accompany
the spirit of the man and refresh him with its cool-
ing shade as the burning sands are crossed? I have
always been friendly, myself, to this explanation of
the burnt trees; for Indians, when it comes to the
question of spirits, go the whole figure, and believe
that even the inanimate objects of Nature have per-
sonal souls within them."
"And why shouldn't they be as near right as
we?" said Sylvia sympathetically.
A strange, tremulous sigh shivered down the
canon, and the wind which had suddenly risen,
swept in a gust like an impalpable football kicked
by some invisible jinnee of the mountain, past our
camp. It stirred the fire into a momentary fever
of brightness, and rolling on down the gorge, died
away in the distance.
Instinctively I put out my hand toward the gun.
The fire flame, unduly stimulated, sank down and
out ; and again that tremulous sigh was uttered from
the upper darkness.
"Doesn't that convert you to the Coahuilla re-
ligion?" asked the ranger, rising to go — had the
light been better we could have seen a twinkle in
his eye. "It is the voice of Tauquitz, demon of
the night wind, demanding a victim. Now you
know why no Indian can be persuaded to be out on
San Jacinto after dark."
"Dot's all imaxination," remarked Dutch Jake,
40
THE DESERTS
shaking out his blankets, and hanging his hat on a
bush — he was ready for bed — " don't you peoples
know an owl ven you hears him?"
V. SPKING FLOWEKS OF THE DESEKT
When the first alder catkins by Eastern brooks
are shaking themselves free from the bonds of win-
ter, and hepaticas push furry buds up through the
brown leaves in sunny pockets of their native woods,
when field and forest are rejoicing in the impulse
of a re-awakening life, God smiles upon His desert,
too. Then for a few brief weeks, the pallid sands
blush with a varied floral life of rare loveliness.
At least it is usually thus early — that is, in the first
days of March — that the Colorado Desert breaks
into bloom.
The flowers of the desert are both perennial and
annual. The former include shrubs, the yuccas, the
multitudinous cactuses and the few stunted trees —
the period of their blooming extending further into
the burning year than that of the annuals. It is
these latter which are responsible for much of the
evanescent glory of the springtime wastes. They
bloom, mature their seeds, sow them and perish in
the oven of the sun's heat, all within a period of
three or four weeks. Then for months their scat-
tered seeds lie dormant upon the desert, buried now
and now uncovered, and again caught and borne
hither and yon upon the wings of wind storms, un-
41
UNDEK THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
til the rains of the latter year quicken them into
life. Though there are myriads of these annuals in
bloom every spring, so that in places the sands are
radiant with their colors, this gray background set-
ting off their brightness rarely, each plant usually
stands isolated from its neighbor with much barren
space about it. The soil is so deficient in moisture
that two might die in dividing what one could live
on. Sometimes, to be sure, a few plants in a wide
circle of sand form a communal clump of inter-
mingled stems about the base of some shrub, and
sharing one another's shadows, make common cause
against the remorseless sun. Thus, perhaps though
each one's share of moisture is reduced, the evapo-
ration from the leaves is less rapid. Then, too, the
leaf-droppings from these little societies tend to
form a humus, by which the life rooted in it is the
better nourished. So though the desert in spring
is a garden of bloom, the blossoms are but infre-
quently to be expected thick over the ground like
violets or buttercups in an Eastern meadow, but
more usually they are dotted about, like separate
jewels each in a generous width of setting, enhancing
its individual beauty.
One can hardly regard these exquisite creations,
conceived and brought forth under a pitiless sun,
without feelings of awe, as for purified unearthly
presences born of elemental fire. Some of them are
of such delicacy of hue and texture that they seem
created less for the gardens of earth than for the
42
THE DESEBTS
adornment of that "far, spiritual city," where only
the Galahads of our race may touch them. Of all
none, perhaps, is more ethereal than an evening
primrose a few inches high, which lives in pure sand
and of afternoons spreads to the light its great,
creamy white flowers, glowing with yellow at their
hearts. Seen from afar, they are like flecks of foam
resting upon the long ridges and billows into which
the wind whips the desert sands, and their delicious
fragrance is one of the few sweet smells of the arid
regions. Hardly less delicate are the silky banners
of the mohavea, which might be taken by the un-
initiated for an orchid's flowers — two-lipped and
yellowish-white, splashed with purple and with a
purple palate. The blossoms of the desert aster,
clothed in lavender and gold, belong to the same
rare fellowship, in which are to be included, too,
certain gilias in tender blue, and one of so shy a
shade of pink that your very look seems to make
the lowly blossoms shrink into the sand on which
they rest. And here in a lilac garb is a larkspur,
of all flowers the least looked for in these desolate
wastes, associated as it is in our minds with the
cool gardens of "God's country, " with memories of
home and of mother's love.
The abronias or wild verbenas, among the most
abundant of the desert annuals, are of a less fine
clay. Their trailing hemispheres of bloom are
sometimes the daintiest of pinks, but quite often an
earthy strain is present, which develops into a dull,
43
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
spiritless magenta. Quite a different touch is
given to this kaleidoscope of refined color by the
waxy fruit of the desert mistletoe — berries which
are like exquisite rosy pearls, paling to a delicate
cream-color.
But in many of the desert flowers it is not so
much the delicacy of the tints, as their brilliancy
that attracts the eye. On the Mojave in May comes
an orange-scarlet tulip, so vivid that no ordinary
paint of man's concocting can reproduce its fieri-
ness. Its glowing cups of flame sit close to the
ground, each usually with its one grass-like leaf
dead beside it, shriveled up by the persistent sun-
shine in which the flower luxuriates. The tenacity
of life in these flowers is remarkable. Eight days
after we had plucked and packed a number of them
in a press to dry, we found one perfectly fresh. It
had been a bud when packed up, and, in spite of the
suffocating darkness of its captivity, had gone on
with its work and opened. Only a little less fiery
are the blossoms of the beloperone clumps. Early
in the year the tangle of their white, sinuous
branches bursts into hundreds of narrow tongues of
mock flame, all the more realistic, because the stems
are then leafless, and in appearance a mass of in-
flammable brush.
Composites on the desert are as characteristic of
spring as in the East they are of autumn, and are
of almost every hue. The yellow of some of these,
such as the desert ox-eye, rising out of clusters of
44
THE DESERTS
ashen-gray leaves, is as a burst of sunshine out of
a cloud. Most wonderful of all, perhaps, though
not at all showy, is a small composite like a dwarf
aster with white rays and a golden disk. It has no
common name but botanists have burdened it with
the title of monoptilon bellidiforme. Each flower
head is composed of perhaps fifteen or twenty
florets, each of which produces a single dry seed;
and every spring tens of thousands of these little
plants come into being, making myriads of seeds
thus produced. Now the marvel of it is that on the
upper edge of each of those countless seeds is borne
one tiny bristle which drops with the seed. No man
knows what that bristle is for, though your man of
science will learnedly explain it as a degenerate
pappus, of which the down of a thistle represents
the perfect development; but is it not wonderful
that Nature, with all she has to do in this workaday
world — crops to raise and all the machinery of the
universe to keep in order — never forgets to set that
solitary bristle on each of those little florets out
there on the Mojave Desert!
Many of the desert flowers are odd as well as
beautiful, showing forth in this pure wilderness of
the desert unlooked-for resemblances to many things
of man's complex civilization. There is the sala-
zaria, for instance, with velvety blue-and-white-
hooded corolla emerging from a loose, papery calyx
and looking in outline astonishingly like a bonneted
Quaker lady of the olden time. And there is calyp-
45
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
tridium monandrum (we would write its English
name if it had one) a Wild West cousin of the fa-
miliar "pusley." It does not drop its petals, but
when the seed vessel is set, lo and behold! the
withered corolla appears like a limp liberty cap
swinging at the tip of the slender red pod. There
is, too, a remarkable milkweed with blossoms of im-
perial purple so smothered in white wool that the
individual flowers suggest rubies lying in a bed of
jeweler's cotton. And there is nama demissum,
which grows in a circle flat upon the sand and re-
sembles a floral wheel with green spokes and a
Tyrian purple tire. The list might be continued in-
definitely.
The struggle for moisture in the desert leads the
roots of many plants straight downward. Those of
the spiny dalea, a shrub or little tree whose in-
tricacy of slender branchlets becomes clothed in
spring with a royal garment of a myriad purple
blossoms, are said sometimes to descend twenty feet
or more in quest of water. An old desert dweller
once told us that, desiring one of these trees as an
ornament near his house, he set an Indian to dig
it up, cautioning him on no account to break the tap
root. As he rode to and fro on various errands
he noticed the Indian patiently digging deeper and
deeper, his body gradually getting lower and lower
in the big hole, until a couple of days afterward the
black head of the child of the desert was just visible
at the level of the ground. Thinking the tree had
46
THE DESERTS
earned a right to its station, he told the red man to
let it stand.
The cactuses,, on the other hand, those best known
of desert plants, have but a scanty root system, and
one can without much difficulty topple some sorts
over with his foot. Their aqueous reservoirs being
within their succulent joints and stems above
ground, they do not need long roots to fetch and
carry for them. There is a great variety of the
cactus blooms, and some that are not particularly
beautiful in themselves possess a charm in their ar-
rangement. Of these latter the greenish-yellow
flowers of the strange, cylindrical bisnagas or bar-
rel cactus, are examples. They form a circle upon
the spiny top of the keg-like plant — a chaplet set
upon those repellent brows by the hand of a Love
that must indeed be divine. The spines of the cac-
tuses are a fascinating study. There is much va-
riety in them, and often great beauty. Their
placing upon the surface of the plants is no hap-
hazard arrangement, as might appear to the unob-
serving, but is in accord with an orderly plan.
Those of the bisnaga consist of regularly disposed
bundles, the central spines of each of which are very
prominent, four in number and transversely ridged,
one of the four being usually curved in the shape of
a great fishhook. These spines are remarkably
charming, with colors that hold something of the
desert's own fascination — pinks and amethysts and
creamy yellows. Strike them with your finger as
47
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
you would a jew's-harp, and they return melody,
different tones issuing from different sorts of
spines.
Miles upon miles of the desert plains are staked
with that strange Ishmael of plants, the tree-yucca,
whose shaggy arms, clutching a thousand bunched
daggers of leaves, are raised against the world. As
one rides across the Mojave, where these trees
grow, they outline themselves against the sky in a
score of fantastic shapes — pitchforks, tridents,
mailed fists and colossal battledores whose meshes
are branches. Sometimes they resemble writhing,
misshapen crosses, as though marking the uneasy
graves of men whom the sands have swallowed up.
A sullen tree, this, which moves stiffly and grace-
lessly when the wind shakes it, like a stubborn man
in the hands of adverse fortune — yielding indeed,
but only because forced to yield. Nevertheless, to
the tops of this forbidding tree, the gentle doves of
the desert trustfully fly and lodge and find comfort
there, uttering thence, to the desert's mystery, the
mystery of their own melancholy notes. From the
midst of the cruel leaves, too, there rise, in season,
panicles of bloom, creamy white bells adroop, pure
as the spirits of triumphant mortals who, out of
the valley of affliction, have come up into the sun-
light of heavenly peace.
48
THE MOUNTAINS
I. UNDER THE STARS AT CROCKER'S
THE differences between camping in Eastern
woods and Western are great and must be
borne in mind by all who attempt an outdoor life in
California. In the East even in summer the camper
must be prepared for stormy days, sudden showers,
hot waves and cool snaps, gnats and mosquitoes,
damp ground and malaria. In California woods,
while the long rainless summer and the equable
climate make it needless to consider these particular
matters, there are other things to be provided
against: thought must be had for the water supply,
good springs being much less frequent than in the
East; unremitting care must be exercised against
firing the forest, which by midsummer has become
a veritable tinderbox of dryness ; and in some locali-
ties where the inexperienced Easterner would look
for pleasant coolness on account of elevation or
other feature of situation, there is an excessive dry
heat which is a bar to camping with any comfort.
All things considered, however, the California
forest is a paradise for camping, and it is not neces-
sary that one have any great store of money or
strength to make a success of it ; but some judgment
49
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
and good advice are needful in the selection of a
site. No more charming spot for a summer camp
can be found than the neighborhood of Crocker's
Station on the Big Oak Flat Stage route, Tuolumne
County, among the sugar pines of the Sierra mid-
region. From this point as a base — it lies at an
altitude of forty-five hundred feet above sea level
—numerous trips may be taken: to the small grove
of Tuolumne Big Trees, six miles ; to the Yosemite,
twenty-three miles; to the Hetch Hetchy, a less
known but almost equally beautiful Yosemite upon
a smaller scale, about seventeen miles ; or along the
old Tioga Road fifty-six miles to the Tioga mine,
or further by trail and pack animals across the High
Sierra, snow-clad even in midsummer, and down
the eastern slope to the Mono country — an alluring
land of desert, extinct volcanoes, lost mines and
Piute Indians.
This is the land of the pedestrian and the moun-
tain climber; and all summer long parties big and
little and of both sexes, their blankets and camp kits
slung upon their backs, come gaily up from the cities
of the coast and the plain, from the schools and
counting houses and shops, living Arcadian days
and weeks in shady canons by never-failing waters,
and sleeping beneath the sky. The prose poet who
has written this region into enduring literature is
John Muir, and to go mountaineering through the
Sierra country with his "Mountains of California"
50
THE MOUNTAINS
or "Our National Parks" in one's satchel is a
liberal education.
Stopping at such a place as Crocker's for a few
weeks, one has an opportunity to make the acquaint-
ance of men of national reputation — writers, scien-
tists, college professors, artists — as they call and
linger here in outing garb on their way in and out
of the higher mountains; to say nothing of others
of lesser note, men and women of culture and knowl-
edge of the great world. This makes the homelike
hostelry a peculiarly pleasant abiding place for
those who like their scenery mixed with well-bred
human companionship and intelligent talk.
There is a railroad that starts in at Oakdale on
the Southern Pacific, and climbs the lower slopes
of the Sierra, passing close to Columbia where Bret
Harte taught school, and Tuttletown where Mark
Twain "tended store." It has stations at Angel's
and Jimtown, and puffs along within hailing dis-
tance of Murphy's, all of which classic spots are
still as much alive as when "The Luck of Roaring
Camp" was written, though their modern life flows
with a more subdued current than in the fitful days
of the Gold Fever. Those who want to get the most
out of the mountains, may start in at Chinese Camp
on this same railroad, and follow the old stage road
as it winds through a corner of Bret Harte 's coun-
try from the bare and gullied foothills honeycombed
with the exhausted pockets left by oldtime gold
51
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
miners, upward through belts of pale-leaved Dig-
ger pines and mossy-boled black oaks, corky-barked
and hung with mistletoe, into the majestic sugar
pines amid which is Crocker's, forty miles from
Chinese. There are numerous stopping places scat-
tered along these forty miles, so one may do as he
chooses about carrying a camp outfit, unless he in-
tends to essay the High Sierra. Then, as it is pure
wilderness beyond Crocker's, he will need to fit out
either there or at Chinese with everything requisite,
including a burro or two to carry the packs.
So much for the class of restless campers, who
are ever on the move; but to him who wishes rest
and quiet, who has papers to write or drawings to
make, or who would spend the summer in study ab-
solutely uninterrupted and untrammeled, the Sier-
ras offer an ideal situation, too. Establish your
camp, as we did, sufficiently near a spring, high
enough upon a hillside to have some outlook and
daily view of the sunset glow and the blush of dawn
if you can get it, deep enough in the woods to be
shaded from the ardors of the midday sun; and not
too far from some place where provisions may be
bought. Crocker's afforded us all these desiderata.
Home people wrote to us inquiring with anxiety
as to bugs and snakes. They referred tremulously
to the bears and wildcats which in their mind's eye,
were ever ready to spring upon us. Devoted rela-
tives shuddered to think of the consequences to us
of a thunderstorm striking those giant trees. In-
52
THE MOUNTAINS
deed the mere fact of our lonely camp in that dark
and gloomy forest (as it seemed to their conven-
tional fancies, three thousand miles away) caused
distress enough to these tender hearts. The truth
about the sugar-pine belt however, is this:
Except for about half an hour near sunset, there
are no mosquitoes, and then for only part of the
summer, and "there are no flies at all. Snakes of
any kind are practically never seen, bears and wild-
cats are too timid to venture so near human habita-
tions, and though one may occasionally catch a
glimpse of a coyote or a little gray fox, such are
more afraid of the camper than he of them. Thun-
der storms there are none at this altitude, but one
may spend many a happy summer hour watching
the massing of the cumulus clouds over the distant
High Sierras, where indeed at ten to thirteen thou-
sand feet above the sea, electric storms are frequent,
the muttering of their thunder being heard as far
down as Crocker's. Instead of darkness and gloom
under the mighty trees, sunlight floods the forest,
whose floor is gemmed with myriads of wild flowers
and relatively free of under-brush. The trees are
set well apart, their trunks rising fifty, seventy-five
or a hundred feet before a branch puts out, the blue
of heaven showing among their tops. The ever-
present sunlight sending cheerfulness into every
nook of the great woodlands, makes an effect of
brightness quite unthinkable to one who knows only
the half-light of the very different forest of the
53
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
damper East. And the nights! nights of the gods,
indeed. Our camp was on a dewless knoll, and as
we lay in our blankets under the open sky, we looked
up at stars like jewels set in the crowns of the
gigantic pines and cedars over us, or tipping the
branches like candle flames upon titantic Christmas
trees. Occasionally a gentle breeze passed through
the forest stirring the leaves to music ; but oftener
the nights were absolutely still, save occasionally
for the faraway yap-yap-yap of coyotes, or the
crashing downward of an enormous dry cone from
a sugar pine.
As we are not of the physical make-up that makes
a camp equipment pared down to a cotton com-
fortable and a frying pan endurable, the practical
details of our forest menage may be of value to
those nature lovers, who like ourselves delight in
life in the open and in meals taken under green
boughs, but require somewhat of the comforts of
home therewith.
Our tent is of the sort pointed at the top and
round at the bottom like an Indian tepee, and known
as a miner's tent. There being but two of us, we
find the size, which is twelve feet in diameter at
bottom, answers our purposes. In the rainless
summer of California, we use it chiefly for storage
and as a dressing-room, sleeping being pleasanter
in the open air. A small wall-tent of the same con-
tent would in some ways be better. To sleep on,
we use two army canvas cots which are so strong
54
THE MOUNTAINS
that one can thoroughly relax upon them without
fear of collapse. When not in use or when they are
to be transported, they are capable of being folded
into a compass not much greater than a closed cot-
ton umbrella. With a bed of pine needles spread
upon the cots — newspapers over and under the
needles to keep out the cold — Navajo blankets laid
over all, and the bed covers on top of these, there
is nearly the comfort of a ' 4 real city bed. ' ' We use
light-weight all-wool blankets and an old down-
quilt. We take also with us a few muslin sheets,
for on mild summer nights no words can tell the
comfort to a sensitive skin of not being sandwiched
directly between the woolly blankets that are so de-
lightful in really cold weather. If the camp is to
be for many weeks, it pays to carry a few brown
linen pillow cases to save washing, as the dust of
the woods shows very promptly on white ones.
"And what about chairs?" asked the Professor,
when we were packing our things in Pasadena for
our first trip of this kind, — the Professor too is a
believer in comfort in camping.
We thought we could knock up a rustic thing or
two in the woods, I modestly observed. I rather
pride myself on my skill in rustic carpentry.
"Bustic fiddlesticks, " the Professor replied, and
then instructed us to buy a couple of easy chairs
with high, generous, canvas backs like steamer
chairs, and canvas seats, the whole folding snugly
up into an insignificant compass when packed for
55
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
transporting. Any campers' supply store keeps
them. We obeyed the Professor and have blessed
him because of them, as often as the day. For
week in and week out of a protracted camp, the only
repose you get when not stretched out on your cot,
is in a chair, and to have one in which you can re-
lax even while cleaning fish or taking stitches, is in-
valuable.
The main place, however, where comfort in camp-
ing comes in is in the kitchen department. The
camp stove to begin with, must be good. Maybe
you are thinking of the poetic camp-fire as good
enough for you; but it is not, in any camp of over
a week's duration. For the permanent camp, it is
absolutely necessary to comfort to have a sheet-
iron cook stove. The right sort to meet the case can
be bought of any camp outfitter and is light, cheap
and compact, so as to be readily transported either
in a trunk or on burro back. We use one with two
holes and an oven, and it answers all practical pur-
poses, if you understand cooking. And it may be
said here, never attempt to camp at all, unless some
one of your number understands how to cook and
thoroughly enjoys the art.
The stove-pipe should be in two sections so that
the smoke may escape at a point high enough not to
blow in your eyes when at work. If the stove is
low, have it placed on a box sufficiently high, so
that you will not have to stoop. Maintain in addi-
tion to the stove a camp-fire where water may be
56
THE MOUNTAINS
heated, and where green corn, apples and eggs, if
you are in reach of such luxuries, may be roasted
in the ashes. A stone fireplace such as is de-
scribed in another chapter,* will be found more sat-
isfactory than an open camp-fire, unless you are in
a region where large logs are obtainable.
In a settled camp, too, an immense amount of
time and trouble may be saved by making what is
known as a hay-box — a small box tightly packed
with hay, straw or even newspaper if you can get
nothing else, a hole being left in the center of the
packing for a small, tightly covered kettle. The
principle is that of the fireless cooker, the article to
be cooked being brought thoroughly to a boil on the
stove, then placed in the hay box with the lid of the
kettle tightly fastened to ensure no escape of steam.
A hay pillow is laid on top, and the box closed with
a tightly fitting lid. This will save time and fuel
in preparing dishes which are improved by long
steaming.
It is well to take as many cooking utensils as you
can pack into the space allotted to such matters.
Working with too few, one spends an endless
amount of time washing and rewashing these few,
and the results after all are poor. For a two-
months' camp we have found useful the following
list:
Dish pan, soup kettle, muffin-pans, teapot, coffee
* "The Practical Side of It," in the section, "Spring Days in a
Carriage." ,
57
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
pot, tea-kettle, pitcher, six small tin plates, six
large tin plates, ten or twelve tin lids of different
sizes, cake griddle, cake turner, dish mop, two milk
pans, kitchen spoons and forks, whisk broom for
brushing around stove, six jelly tumblers with tops
for packing butter, a water bucket, and some cheese-
cloth bags for enclosing meat.
Of course this list could be greatly condensed if
needful; one can bake cakes in the frying-pan and
dispense with the griddle, live without muffins and
keep milk in the soup-kettle if need be, but since
we are dealing with comfort in camping, such econo-
mies of space do not enter into our present con-
siderations.
All utensils ought to be of granite or aluminum
and of the best quality ; you have to work with them
yourself, and must save time and strength. The tin
lids are constantly needed for the covering of all
cooked articles, as the outdoor air cools hot things
very quickly; and the tin plates are invaluable, as
hot pans from the stove can be placed on them and
carried to the tables with no danger of soil from the
smoky bottoms, and an immense amount of labor
saved by serving direct from the pan.
For table-dishes we use the German white enamel
ware edged with blue, which may now be found at
any house furnishing store. It is charming in its
cleanly, dainty appearance, yet as unbreakable as
the conventional camp tin plate, and it can be put
upon the stove or in the hottest oven to reheat with-
58
THE MOUNTAINS
out harm — no small consideration on a cold day
when the wind chills your soup quickly. Take sev-
eral extra plates, cups and saucers, besides the num-
ber allotted each person.
We always take our own silver spoons and forks,
and a few table napkins ; they are restful to use, and
thoroughly pay for the little extra trouble. Besides
they furnish such excellent texts for the Bohemian
camp visitor to lecture from, that we should miss a
great deal of instruction and entertainment were
these left behind.
" Silvtr in camping!" says the visitor. "Why, my
dear wo7_nan, you don't know how to camp at all!
Let me give you some of the main points, so that you
will not burden yourself with all these foolish traps
another time. Of course being from the East you
don't know, but here you want to be really com-
fortable in camp; just an old tin pan or kettle or
iron spoon or any old thing to cook with and eat
with, and throw it away afterward — no trouble at
all!"
Vainly do we explain that this entire outfit is the
result of months of camp experience ; that weeks on
the pitiless desert were rendered to a frail physique
possible and even delightful by these very comforts ;
that we see no reason for leaving silver with our
servants and eating with tin ourselves for three
painful months. Our visitor continues firmly to en^
lighten us, and, failing to convince, moves on to the
next camp, whence come fragments of sentences
59
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
descriptive of a curious form of tenderfoot snob.
Unless you are willing to wash out your table nap-
kins occasionally for the sake of the comfort they
afford — and in most summer camps there will be
enough unescapable washing without this — an ample
supply of Japanese paper ones may be laid in.
Table cloths are not to be recommended in any case ;
white ones soil too quickly, and the conventional red
cloth becomes painfully unattractive after some days
of use. A pretty green and white oilcloth, which
can be kept spotlessly clean, has been a great com-
fort in our camp life. Take rather more than you
will use on the table, as extra covers and mats are
sometimes useful.
After the kitchen comforts, those most needed are
camp furniture. This means rude tables, rough
chairs, shelves nailed to trees, boxes on legs for hold-
ing provisions which must be kept from the damp-
ness of the ground, and any articles that the men
of the camp will knock together. These can be made
of packing boxes, tree branches or old boards; and
should be put together as quickly as possible after
you go into camp, bringing thereby unlimited com-
fort without delay into the commissary department.
For the making of such things, it will be needful
to take with you a small saw, a hatchet, spade, small
axe, nails, wire and pincers. Take also a number
of old gunny-sacks or pieces of burlap for spreading
upon the ground, or using as a floor covering if you
have no wooden floor for the tent. If the ground is
60
THE MOUNTAINS
dusty or at all damp you will be very glad to have
these.
In a warm country, boxes sunk in the ground for
keeping meat, butter, eggs and milk (if you can
get these luxuries), are most valuable.
Concerning comfortable clothing for camping,
while we wear outfits perfectly satisfactory to our-
selves, it has never seemed necessary to secure this
comfort by looking like " freaks. " Hobnailed boots,
skirts to one's knees, bloomers and a general soiled
air of wildness may mean comfort to some women
campers, but they certainly do not to all. In the
wildest and most remote haunts of Nature, a woman,
unless a professional mountain climber, rarely has
need for any heavier shoes than the average stout
walking boot, nor for a skirt above the ankles; but
this should be full and light, well fastened to the
shoulders, and every garment should be loose and
comfortably adjusted. Soft colors that will not
frighten the birds and small animals about camp,
will add to their comfort and your own pleasure;
and plainly made linen-colored waists with pretty
collars, will be found welcome. A man can well
make camp-life the occasion to use up his old
clothes; and will find leather or canvas leggins, a
soft hat, an outing shirt and a handkerchief about
the neck instead of a collar, the only changes
necessary from his ordinary dress.
It may be said, in passing, that the wearing of
clothes reasonably clean and neat and devoid of
61
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
freakishness, combined with a generous supply of
baggage, will cause you invariably to be set down as
a tenderfoot. This, however, you will find to have
distinct advantages ; people will be constantly giving
you points and entertaining you with facts and
fancies which otherwise you would not hear of; for
the average California.!! is somewhat reticent about
volunteering information to one who, he thinks, may
know as much as he himself knows. Then there is
this further advantage in keeping the outward ap-
pearance of a lady or a gentleman — it frequently
secures you the entree to desirable places irrevoca-
bly closed to those whose gentle breeding is not
apparent.
As a final word in the interests of comfort in
camp, establish the habit of doing as little complain-
ing as possible even to your dearest and most com-
prehending friend. For some inscrutable reason, a
sensitive nature is apt to feel itself to blame for
most of the hardships and untoward developments
of a trip ; and to have these dwelt upon by the person
whom one most desires to relieve of discomfort,
makes the situation doubly hard. It is not neces-
sary to ignore with drawing-room politeness ills that
are perfectly patent; but neither is it needful to take
too seriously what cannot be helped. Nowhere is
the common, everyday virtue of cheerfulness more
appreciated than in camp life. Being out for a good
time, have it !
62
THE MOUNTAINS
II. CAMPING IN THE YOSEMITE
The most independent and least expensive way to
see the Yosemite Valley is to camp there, and every
year thousands spend their vacations thus in this
enchanting wonderland, seeing its magnificences as
the dweller within hotel walls can never hope to see
them. Along the sunny meadow lands skirting the
Merced Eiver as well as in the shady pine woods,
both below and above the little village of Yosemite,
are hundreds of camp sites absolutely free to visitors
who may wish to pitch their tents upon them, sub-
ject only to certain simple regulations imposed by
the United States Government. Water is dipped
out of the near-by river, clear and cool from the
snow-ranges of the High Sierra, firewood may be
gathered in the woods of the valley, and provisions
may be had from the village store, if the camper
has not brought his own. Entire camping outfits
from tent to frying-pan (though exclusive of linen)
may be hired in the valley at a reasonable charge-
fifteen dollars per month would amply cover the rent
of such an outfit for two persons ; but most campers
bring their own, for your Californian dearly loves
a vacation by camp-wagon, and if he lives anywhere
within a radius of a couple of hundred miles of "the
Valley, " he is apt to make this trip several times
in his life.
There is a butcher in the village, and a general
store ; good milk, butter, bread and eggs may be pro-
63
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
cured, and from the Indians one may occasionally
buy chickens, fresh fish or wild strawberries. Prices
in the Yosemite are about one-fourth higher than in
the large towns, owing to the expense of transporta-
tion. Deliveries of goods are made to all campers
by the store wagon. Our expenses for the best ob-
tainable food supplies during the two weeks of our
stay were $14 for two — a weekly average of $3.50
each person, or less than one day's expenses would
have been at the hotel.
The time of our visit to the Valley was the middle
of June, at which season we found the nights cool,
but the days were warm enough for thin summer
clothes. On the horse-trails women are expected to
ride astride, and if one has not a riding habit, a
skirt sufficiently full to admit of this requirement
should be taken. There is practically no rain from
June to October; but in case of a possible shower
and chiefly as a protection against dust, women will
find a light rain-coat desirable. No firearms are
permitted in the Valley, and no trapping or hunting
is allowed ; but trout fishing in season is permitted,
and at times is fairly good.
All the Yosemite trails are free to pedestrians,
and are kept in good order for climbing. Our own
experience leads us to conclude, however, that owing
to the fatigue consequent upon making the ascent
of the precipitous walls of the Valley, it is a wise
economy for all but the very vigorous to pay for
animals to carry them. The trips to Glacier Point,
64
THE MOUNTAINS
to the head of Yosemite Falls, and to Vernal and
Nevada Falls, are the three regulation ascents of
the Valley walls which most visitors make, and they
should all be taken by the camper. Each requires
a day for its accomplishment, and no guide is needed
for any one of them, as the trails are perfectly plain
and safe. Mirror Lake at the east end of the Valley
and the lovely Bridal Veil Falls near the western
end, are also unforgettable sights not to be missed.
Each may be visited in half a day. As there is no
climbing, the walks to these two points through the
woodlands and flowery meads of the Valley floor,
will prove delightful jaunts.
These five excursions need not here be dwelt upon
in detail, as they are in the province of the conven-
tional sightseer — to whose class this book does not
profess to cater. But there are some longer trips
to be taken, with which one's Yosemite camp life
may well be varied. For these more extended out-
ings it will be needful to engage a guide, who will
be furnished by the stableman from whom the ani-
mals for the trail are procured. And in passing, let
it be said that your happiness on these rougher
trips depends largely upon your limiting the party
to yourselves and your guide. The chances are
ninety-nine in a hundred that any stranger included
from charitable or mayhap economical motives, will
develop qualities that will cause you to wish him in
Jericho before you have been out half a day.
Among these trips there is for instance, that to
65
UNDEE THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
Cloud's Rest, eleven miles distant, which is possible
of accomplishment by the energetic within a day, if
a very early start be taken ; though a better plan for
the lover of easy stages is to arrange to camp over
night and return the next day. Cloud's Rest peak
is close to ten thousand feet above sea level (six
thousand above the Valley floor) and affords a su-
perb bird's-eye view of the Valley, as well as a
glorious outlook along the High Sierra. On the re-
turn, a short side trip of a few hours may easily be
made by means of a trail diverging near the head
of the Nevada Fall, into the sequestered vale known
as the Little Yosemite.
Twenty-five miles by trail northeastward from
the Yosemite are the beautiful Tuolumne Meadows
at the head of the Grand Canon of the Tuolumne
River and in full view of the High Sierra which rises
to the height of a mile above them. For a compre-
hensive variety of Sierra mountaineering experi-
ence in comparatively small compass, this trip is one
of the finest out of the Yosemite. The trail takes in
the lovely glacial Lake Tenaya; while a few miles
beyond the Meadows, Mount Dana, one of the
loftiest peaks of the Sierra Nevada, offers a com-
paratively easy back to clamber upon and look down
on the wonderful mountain scenery of this part of
California. A week is none too much to allow to
this trip, which — to quote the words of John Muir,
whose classic book "The Mountains of California"
should be part of your baggage, whatever else you
66
A camp in the Yosemite, with a view of the famous Falls
THE MOUNTAINS
leave out — will lead you "through regions that lie
far above the ordinary haunts of the devil and of
the pestilence that walks in darkness." If, how-
ever, you are too limited in time to allow yourself
to steep leisurely in the subalpine glories, it is quite
possible to make the round from the Valley and back
without undue fatigue, in four days.
We had been camping in the Yosemite for over a
week before we became acquainted with its Indian
life. This is so unobtrusive a feature of the Valley
that the conventional tourist " doing" the Valley in
three or four days will hardly know of its existence
at all; for one may almost count upon one's fingers
these present-day descendants of the once numerous
and proud race that formerly dwelt here.
The quest of wild strawberries one June day led
us well over toward the base of the northern wall of
the Valley, and there close by some black oaks we
caught our first sight of a Yosemite chuck-dk. This
is an outdoor receptacle for storing acorns — in
shape like a huge hamper, and made of branches
and twigs closely interwoven. It is mounted on
four posts that lift it several feet above the ground,
and hold it thus out of the reach of ground-dwelling
rodents, while a covering of thatch or bits of board
and old cloths protects the contents from the
weather. Three of these odd looking objects stood
in a row, and penetrating the thicket beyond them,
we came upon the present homestead of old Fran-
cisco and his wife and Wilson's Lucy — an unpie-
67
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
turesque frame shack near a great oak tree and
within sound of the rushing waters of Indian Creek
as they bound down out of Indian Canon to join the
Merced River. Wilson 's Lucy made baskets, it ap-
peared, for we got a glimpse of a partially finished
one over which she had hastily thrown her apron
when we unexpectedly broke in upon her seclusion.
Old Francisco was frankly basking in the sun; his
working days were over, and rheumatism had him
by the legs. He was a little, wizened old man, with
a cheerful outlook upon life for all, as we afterwards
found, quite content to let others run the race though
he could not.
He responded smilingly to our salutation, and en-
tered briskly into conversation, marshalling his little
stock of English into all sorts of queer combinations.
From him we learned the name and uses of the
chuck-ah, until then an enigma to us, and he ex-
patiated upon the merits of acorn meal, the way of
preparing which from the bitter acorn he endeav-
ored to explain, but the method of manufacture as
set forth in his pigeon English was more than we
could follow. He did, however, make plain the be-
ginning of the process by convoying us a short dis-
tance through the chaparral to a great, sunny, flat-
topped granite rock, pitted with a score or more
of small depressions or mortar holes, which it seems
the Indian women of past generations had worn,
beating acorns there into meal with granite pestles.
In this way the fruit of the oak was reduced to flour,
68
THE MOUNTAINS
but bitter and unpalatable as the original nut. The
endeavor to tell how by some system of leaching,
this bitterness was subsequently extracted, was the
rock upon which old Francisco's limited stock of
English met disaster. After several ineffectual at-
tempts to clarify the subject, he finally laughed
pleasantly, and remarked:
"You no savvy?"
Then changing the subject, he inquired affably:
"You got some match f"
I proffered him a box of them — always an espe-
cially acceptable gift to the old-time Indian, who re-
members the days when fires were arduously kindled
by rubbing sticks of wood — and old Francisco put
it in his pocket with a look of satisfaction. Then
sitting down in the sunshine, he looked up and
watched the cumulus clouds float up from behind the
Valley wall out into the blue heavens. Thus resting
from his labors, we left him.
The able-bodied men and younger women of the
Yosemites, find employment at day's labor at the
hotel, the livery stable, and with resident white
families ; while the older women attend to the house-
hold duties of their rancherias, and at odd times
make baskets for sale to the tourists. Like all the
California Indians, this remnant of the Yosemites
entirely lack the picturesqueness which is so notice-
able a feature of the red men in their native estate
to the east of the Sierra Nevada. Nevertheless the
reason for their being in the Valley at all at this
69
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
day, lends a certain romantic interest to their pres-
ence. Their story is briefly this :
Shortly after the discovery of gold in California,
the Sierra foothills were overrun with a more or
less lawless horde of white gold-hunters, who treated
the resident Indian in the usual cavalier manner of
the frontier. His hereditary rights ruthlessly tres-
passed upon, and himself cheated right and left in
trade, the red man finally retaliated, stole horses
and set fire to miners' cabins. Bloodshed followed
and the Government was appealed to, to rid the
earth of "the marauding savages." Then ensued
an Indian war resulting, of course, in the defeat of
the Indians, and the transference of all the sur-
vivors of the foot-hill tribes from their native
homes to a Government Reservation near Fresno
in the San Joaquin Valley.
The Yosemites, dwelling in the mountains, were
not so easily handled, and it was in pursuing them
to their Sierra fastnesses that in 1851 a company of
white soldiers discovered the marvelous valley which
the world still calls Yosemite. These Indians, too,
however, were eventually captured and carried to
Fresno; but life in a lowland reservation proved so
much of a hardship to the mountain-bred tribes, that
at the expiration of a few years of misery, disease,
and induction into frontier white vices, the remnant
of them begged to be allowed to go back and live in
their old home, promising to be self-supporting and
in no way to molest the white population. Their pe-
70
THE MOUNTAINS
tition was mercifully granted, and during the half
century that has elapsed since their return to the
land which was the cradle of their race, they have
faithfully kept their promise. They have accumu-
lated no property, they have dwindled in numbers,
but they have been free— they have kept the faith
of their fathers. Under the slouchy clothing of
metropolitan sweat-shops, in which their bodies are
clothed, something of the old proud spirit still burns.
"Why don't you work for me?" a man who had
little respect for Indians, but wanted laborers, asked
Yosemite Tom one day. "You work for George
Smith. Isn't my money as good as his?"
"Yes, me work for George," the old red man re-
plied; "when George have pie, me have pie; when
George have cake, me have cake. You say, 'Any-
thing good enough for damned Indian.' "
III. SUMMER IN THE CANONS
As I sit by my open window this morning of mid-
July, the soft pitty-pat of a burro's unshod hoofs
greets my ears, and the murmur of pleasant voices.
Looking up I see passing along the street in front
of our house, our neighbors, the Professor and his
wife, starting on their three weeks' summer vaca-
tion in the mountains, and chatting with all the
buoyancy of spirits that goes with the early hours
of a day's outing.
They have three burros. One is ridden by Madam
71
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
Professor ; the other two are packed with the camp
equipment and provisions. The Professor in high-
laced shoes and a khaki suit is walking and with
the skillful application of his chamise stick keeps the
burros in the middle of the street. Their destina-
tion is one of the canons of the Sierra Madre, whose
cool, green, rugged sides lift themselves five or six
thousand feet against the blue heaven to the north
of our little city. Five miles of gradual ascent will
bring the small cavalcade to the foot of the moun-
tains and the mouth of the canon — it may be Mil-
lard's or the Canon of the Arroyo Seco or another.
There they will halt at noon for a siesta, and a cup
of tea made with water obtained at one of the ranch
houses that dot the upper edge of the mesa under
the foot-hills. From that vantage ground there will
be a superb view of the great valley of the San Gab-
riel with its busy towns and great ranch-lands, and
far off across a low bank of fog to the southward the
blue Pacific with the twin peaks of Santa Catalina
Island rising above the haze. Beyond them, per-
haps San Clemente's hulking back will be visible.
And there will be a pleasant breeze blowing in from
the sea, still cool and refreshing after its thirty-odd
miles of travel across the land.
Then, after an hour or two of this delicious far
niente, the donkeys will be wakened to fresh en-
deavor; the cinches will be tightened; the smolder-
ing remains of the bit of camp-fire will be quenched
with earth — for in this dry summer weather a neg-
72
THE MOUNTAINS
lected ember might set fire to a whole mountain —
and the climb into the canon will begin. The burros
spread their ears to a picturesque horizontal, drop
their noses to the ground, and arrange themselves
en queue upon the white dusty trail, Madam on
burro number one and the Professor bringing up
the rear. The air is filled with a dozen pungent
aromas, as the packs brush against the shrubbery
that crowds upon the trail — fascinating, unforgetta-
ble odors of artemisia and California bay, white sage
and black sage, monardella and what-not. Ground
squirrels frisk about at a safe distance, and gray
lizards look inquiringly out from the top of sunny
rocks as the procession passes. Noble California
sycamores, great-leaved maples and alders cast a
grateful shade in the canon's lower reaches, but the
tinkle of water in the rocky stream-bed of the arroyo
is missing. That will come higher up. Water is
too precious in Southern California to be suffered
to run at large in summer, and the iron pipe-line
that follows this caiion trail tells the story of the
water caught at its source in the Sierra's upper
springs and conveyed to the valley to be meted out
there to consumers at so much per inch.
Nightfall will find the little party beneath the
Douglas spruces and live-oaks -of the mountain's
higher slopes. The tent, if tent there be, will have
been pitched, supper eaten, the blankets spread on
a fragrant bed of springy boughs, the burros staked
out, and the Professor and his wife — lovers still
73
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
after two and twenty years of companionship in a
rough world — sit with their hands in each other's,
silently watching the night mists gathering in the
purple coves and canons below them. The rosy
tints of the sunset once almost gone from the sky,
flash up again for a moment, then die finally away.
Hesper glows like another sun, above one black
western peak and slowly sinks behind it. An owl
goes chittering by in the dusk, and a cool breeze
awakening somewhere and taking wing through the
night, makes the thought of the blankets a very
pleasant thought. The Professor and his wife are
glad they have come.
Perhaps this is their permanent camping ground
for the three weeks, or it may be that they will
better themselves by proceeding further on the mor-
row. When, however, they are settled, they will
want to be under immemorial trees and near enough
a trout stream for the Professor to keep his hand in
as an active member of the Ancient and Honorable
Fraternity of Temperate Anglers; and they will
want to have an outlook across tree tops to the south
and west, for thence come the cooling influences of
the blessed trade-winds of the Pacific, which con-
tribute so essentially to the summer comfort of
Southern California.
All summer long from June until September, the
canons of the California mountains are resorted to
by camping-parties small and large, and to meet the
demand for this healthful recreation many public
74
THE MOUNTAINS
camps, plain but comfortable, are established, where
for ten or twelve dollars per week those who want
such an outing but, unlike the Professor and his
wife, do not care for the labors incident to main-
taining a private camp, may go, indulge their souls
and be happy. Within seventy-five or a hundred
miles of San Francisco, for instance, both north and
south, there are among the redwood forests scores
of such public camps, where the visitor sleeps in a
tent and eats his meals at a public table under the
trees. This appears to be Arcady enough for a cer-
tain portion of our population, though the lover of
unadulterated nature is apt to find such an out-
ing with its permanent floors and deal tables, to-
gether with more or less boisterous companionship
of people, too conventional for him. In the gen-
erous length and breadth of the California moun-
tains, however, there is room enough for all.
Many camping resorts are advertised in the
folders issued by the railroads, but just as there are
as good fish in the sea as ever were caught, so there
are countless choice nooks in this empire of a State,
never dreamt of in the philosophy of the railroad
man. Any old-time Californian, as he smokes his
pipe under the vines of his porch of a summer night,
will delight to give you points about his especial
happy hunting grounds, and the best way to get
there.
To mention a few in many of the more publicly
known, there is the Shasta country in the extreme
75
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
northern part of the State, to which a number of
stations on the Southern Pacific Railroad serve as
gateways. This region offers almost everything in
the way of camping out, from marquees under the
wing of a fashionable hotel to the wildest kind of
wilderness, attainable only by the use of guides and
pack animals. Ukiah in the Russian River region
somewhat further south is a starting point for many
camps, and the visitor having an interest in the
basketry of the California Indians or in these In-
dians themselves, will find himself there within com-
paratively easy access of a great deal of Indian life.
And there are the redwoods of the Santa Cruz Moun-
tains.
In the southern half of the State, every city and
town from San Diego to Monterey has its summer
camps in the canons at its back, so that it seems in-
vidious to mention one and not another. One, how-
ever, cannot go amiss in Strawberry Valley on the
western slopes of San Jacinto Mountain, or in Bear
Valley in the San Bernardino Mountains, or in the
great San Gabriel Canon of the Sierra Madre ac-
cessible from Azusa. Then if one have a month or
two to give to it — less time seems an insult to such
grandeur — there is the glorious wild region of that
comparatively little visited rival of Yosemite, the
King's River Canon in the lower Sierra Nevada, to
which one attains by wagon and horseback and foot
from Visalia in the San Joaquin Valley. Here one
may camp beneath giant sequoias which were old
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THE MOUNTAINS
while the Roman Empire was still undreamt of;
may gather wild flowers by glacial lakes, or climb
out above the timber line upon some of the noblest
peaks of the High Sierra, and experience the doubt-
ful enjoyment of weathering out a thunder storm in
the clouds in the very factory of the lightning.
The advertisements of many of the "camper's
paradise " regions contain the announcement "Out-
fits must be taken. " In such cases, if you are not
over-strong and not only desire but need to be com-
fortable— and this, it is to be remembered, is the
class to which these hints are especially addressed—
do not hearken to the voice of the athletic tempter
who is continually urging folk to "travel light. "
Let him if he like, go as John Muir does, with a sack
of bread, a packet of tea and a tin cup; but as for
you, hire an extra burro if need be, but by all means
carry everything your reasonable comfort requires,
except firewood and water. You may find yourself
with some unnecessary things when you get there,
but that is infinitely better than being short-sup-
plied. Many travel by wagon to the road's end,
and there leaving the vehicle, pack their camp outfit
and provisions upon the horses' backs and proceed
by trail to the sequestered spots that suit them,
transporting thus even the family sewing machine
and baby carriage, and leading the family cow.
Only time and experience can show each camper
the exact measure of his or her own needs.
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UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
IV. AMONG THE ACORN EATERS OF SAN DIEGO COUNTY
We had been to the Mission and had photographed
the ancient date palms at Old Town ; we had bought
curios at Ramona's renovated marriage place, and
had motored to Lakeside for a chicken dinner. We
had promenaded in and out of the Coronado's mag-
nificence as nonchalantly as though we were regis-
tered there, and had looked on at archery meets and
polo. Point Loma and the purple domes of the
theosophical Tingley, we had done with the prole-
tariat in a "rubber-neck" automobile, and we had
tripped it to Tia Juana for a taste of Old Mexico.
Yet there remained the feeling of an unfulfilled
want. There was a disappointing sense of arti-
ficiality about it all; we were only tourists in a
tourist town, and we somehow felt that, as soon
as we and the rest of our ilk departed, all San Diego
would return to the dust and adobe whence it had
arisen.
"What you need," said the Old Calif ornian, "is
to take a pasear into the back-country and have a
look at California as it was before tourists became
a staple crop. There's some of it left — the real
thing — thirty and forty thousand acre cattle ranches
with vaqueros and all that — Indians, too. I know a
rancher fifty miles northeast of here, who takes
boarders. It's three quarters of a mile up in the
air in the mountains, just this side of the desert,
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THE MOUNTAINS
and, if you fix it so as to be there November second,
you'll see the Indian candle lighting ceremonies on
All Souls' Night at Mesa Grande."
That struck our fancy, for we have a weakness
for Indians when they are out of school; and so,
one brilliant autumn morning, we shipped aboard
a rickety little train that wheezed and snorted by
devious ways a matter of twenty-five miles up into
the foothills, through a chaparral-clad, bowlder-
strewn country, barren looking in the main but with
occasional pleasant valleys in the dimples of the
hills where lemon raising and other agricultural
pursuits are possible, and by and by we came to the
village of Foster. Here the railroad ended and an
automobile stage carried us fifteen miles farther to
Ramona, there to be handed over to a two-horse
stage of the conventional back-country type with
"U. S. Mail" lettered on the side.
Now followed another fifteen miles through an
ever-rising mountain region of cattle-ranges and
bee-ranches, with here and there orchards of apples,
pears and cherries, and views of distant peaks to
which Spanish names lent the charm of mystery and
romance — Corral, Volcan, the Cuyamacas, Palomar
and San Jacinto 's pallid bulk, anchored in mist. At
ranch gates, Dick the driver dropped the morning
paper in the mail box and grinned a llQue hay,
hombre" to the occasional Mexican who loped by us
on horseback. Once an athletic lady in khaki and
sombrero, driving a buckboard, halted us to ask with
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UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
wiimingness of manner not to be denied by any
gentleman, if Dick would mind waiting while she
wrote a postal to her husband, as she might not
have another chance soon to catch the mail ! Of
course, we waited, Dick meanwhile rolling a ciga-
rette, and, as he smoked, watched the clouds streak-
ing the sky over Volcan.
"I believe we'll have rain before spring," he
observed with a wink, as he thrust the finished post-
card into his mail sack, and saying, "So long,
missus," to the lady, resumed the journey.
At a certain cross-road, three young horsemen
bright-faced and brown, with a led saddle-pony,
awaited our coming. They had expected a friend
from Los Angeles on the stage; but got only a pos-
tal card, which they read, and then cantered on
ahead of us until they struck a trail that led off
through the chamise to some mountain ranch. They
were a picturesque trio in their straight brimmed
Stetson hats and leather chaps, the ends of their
blue neck handkerchiefs fluttering behind them in the
breeze — types of a young America that often comes
for a year or two into these wholesome, open spaces
to get into their systems the spirit of the great
Western out-of-doors and a taste of clean, demo-
cratic living, as one gets it nowhere except upon a
ranch.
"It does them young town fellows good to rough
it awhile," said Dick, "if there's anything to 'em
at all. I worked in the Arizona cow country before
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THE MOUNTAINS
I come up here, and there was a good many of
them used to blow in there from back East
to learn somethin' honest after they was through
college. They learned all right, or if they didn't,
they was throwed off the range. You wouldn't
believe what poor cusses some of these fel-
lows is that's had fortunes spent on education.
Why, last summer there was a widow lady and her
son come up to one of these here boarding-houses
to spend a month near Palomar, where I was work-
ing with the stock. She was a haughty sort, just
because she'd all sorts of money in bank; but, gosh!
do you know how she come by it? I know. Why,
her husband was a sheepman and once when he was
in Los Angeles about twenty years ago, and drunk,
as he always was when he was not out in the country
about his business, he bought a bunch of good-for-
nothin' land in what is now the heart of Los Angeles.
And when he sobered up and seen what he'd done,
he was game and stayed with the goods; but he
turned right around and rented it out on a twenty
years' lease to some fellows who wanted to make
bricks — so he couldn't gamble it away, you see, when
he got drunk again sometime. And that's how he
kep' the land in the family, and, all the time, Los
kep' growing around it. So, when he passed in his
checks and his estate was settled up three or four
years ago, there was a considerable bunch of money
and somethin' doin' for the widow and boy, you bet
you. Well, as I was goin' to say about the boy.
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UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
He was twenty year old and he was just plum no
good. He'd set around on the piazza and smoke
cigareets and read novels when the Sunday papers
wore out, and was always on the bum, and all the
time he was more ignorant than an Injun. Of
course, he'd been to college; but that don't cut no
ice in real life, you know. Why, will you believe
me," and Dick took the quid of tobacco from his
mouth and threw it bitterly into the dust of the
road, "that damn fool didn't savvy nothing —
couldn't even cook a meal or saddle a horse, and the
way he talked to women was a disgrace. He
couldn't open his mouth to a girl without being
fresh to her, and he was plum impudent to his
mother — hardly ever give her a decent answer. He
used to come down loafing around the barn some-
times when I was working over the stock, and one
day I give the boy a piece of my mind about the
way he talked to the women folks.
" <Why,' says I, 'if you was over in Arizona and
talked to the women the way you do here, the boys
would poke you in the face about four times a day.
You'd just Ifiave to learn to behave.' Well, do you
know, it surprised him? He'd just had no bringing
up and nobody had ever spoke right out to him be-
fore. He studied over it quite a bit and it done
him good. He stayed on here a couple of months
after his mother went home, and him and me went
hunting together, and, by gosh, at the end of the
time, he could skin a rabbit and flip a flapjack pretty
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THE MOUNTAINS
good, and once he shot a ky-ote. Yes, sir," con-
tinued Dick, with the unction of the unco guid, "I
figure that mebbe in the Day of Judgment, the Lord
will give me credit for startin' that boy on the
straight and narrow path of duty."
And so, with pleasant discourse, we came in the
afterglow to Mesa Grande, hemmed in with moun-
tains whose peaks, facing two ways, looked out upon
two great elemental mysteries, a sea of waters to
the west, and to the east an ocean of desert sands.
Past some vineyards and through a cherry orchard
we drove, and drew up before the hospitable veranda
of a white adobe ranch-house, beside which roses
and two colossal live-oaks grew.
Our host, who held out a welcoming hand to us,
though we were strangers to him, was the reverse
in looks of the typical husky ranchman of drama
and romance; for he was of delicate frame, though
wiry, with a poet's sensitive face and eyes. A quar-
ter of a century ago he had come in impaired health
to California from a New York studio and selected
this spot, as he told us, not as a practical man would
choose, but as an idealist, for its beauty and its in-
spiration. Had he hit upon any one of a dozen
other places along the coast, the rise in land values
by this time would have made him a hard-worked
coupon clipper. To-day he has to show for his in-
vestment—with the cooperation of his wife who has
shared the adventure with him from the first — no
great bank account, perhaps, but rugged health, three
83
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
strapping sons well educated and at home anywhere
under the sky, and a soul still sensitive to the appeal
of life's poetry and beauty. Yet his life has not
been a mere dreamer's, but, in the best sense, prac-
tical, as his well-kept ranch buildings and produc-
tive orchards betoken; while the captaincy which he
holds in the Indian tribe whose reservation adjoins
his ranch, testifies to his sympathetic, intelligent
friendship with the vanishing race whom most white
men notice only to plunder or to pauperize.
After supper — a delicious memory yet with its
tender cottage-cheese and pitchers of sweet cider,
its heaped-up dishes of fresh figs and luscious
bunches of Black Hamburg grapes straight from the
vineyard on the hill — everybody gathered about the
open fire-place with its glowing backlog in the liv-
ing room. There was in the company the make-up
of another series of " Tales of a Wayside Inn" — so
varied and racy of the soil was it. There were our
host's cultured family; his kindly ranch-partner
who had once been a desert prospector; a stoutish
apple-packer from San Diego, two weeks unshaven ;
three young chaps of the Government Survey, who,
on the morrow were to begin some work at the In-
dian Reservation; a wealthy mine-owner's vale-
tudinarian wife from Mexico; and a cheerful lady
from Long Island who had come on a visit a couple
of years before and had never gone back. "I know
a good thing when I see it," she had written East,
"I've had snow enough — give me roses for the rest
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THE MOUNTAINS
of time!" Above the piano and over the hook-
shelves, hung a few fine pictures of Indian life and
many specimens of local Indian basketry, and
across the whitewashed face of the adobe fire-place
was draped the brown tangle of a reda, or net of
native fiber, in which Indian women used to carry
their burdens. So the talk fell naturally on In-
dians.
" There are several reservations of Mission In-
dians within a radius of twenty-five miles from
here," said our host, " — no, thanks, I don't smoke
—but the California red men are not picturesque
subjects nowadays and probably never were, com-
pared with their history-making brethren of the
plains and eastern forests; and to look at them,
fat and lethargic in their white-man's clothing and
clipped hair, you wouldn't think there was much
Indian left in them. A century and a half of pa-
ternalism, under the Padres first and then Uncle
Sam, has certainly made them commonplace enough ;
so that the tourist, here to-day and gone to-morrow,
can't even get a snap-shot of anything about them
worth a film. But just the same, under the blue-
jeans jumper and the calico dress, the old Indian
nature exists, and if you had wintered and sum-
mered them for twenty-odd years, as I have, you
would find a lot, even in a Mission Indian, to respect
and to love. For the Indian nature is there, with
all its childlike appeal and fundamental virtue, if
you once get its confidence. But, of course, the old
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UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
ways are rapidly disappearing. Pottery making
is a lost art, and the basket weavers are almost en-
tirely old women, who will be gone in a few years,
carrying out of the world the secrets of a wonder-
ful and beautiful handicraft. There are still oc-
casional mescal roasts on the desert; and the acorn
harvesting still goes on, though in a prosy way,
with barley sacks and horses instead of the pic-
turesque burden baskets and the reda of the old
days ; and their few remaining native ceremonies
are three-fourths Catholic. "
"But they still play peon," put in one of the
Government boys, whose views of Indians were
purely materialistic.
1 1 Oh, yes, they '11 gamble the shirts off their backs ;
but it's among themselves and the luck may turn,
and they'll get them back again. Now, I tell you
what we'll do," turning to Sylvia and me, "you are
interested in the primitive things. It is four days
till the candle-lighting; and, if you say the word,
we'll hitch the colts to the buckboard to-morrow,
pack along grub and blankets, and put off mananita
— in the little morning, as the Spanish people say —
for some rancherias I know of, twenty or thirty
miles over by the desert. We'll have to camp out;
for there isn't a white soul living over there, but
that's part of the sport and the weather's fine. It's
in such out-of-the-way spots that you see the last
stand of the California Indian. What do you say ? ' '
We said yes, with emphasis, and early the next
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THE MOUNTAINS
morning we were off for San Ygnacio. There had
been a hard northeast wind for two days previously
but it had stilled, leaving the atmosphere dry and
clear as crystal and cold as Christmas. The colts
tossed their heads in sheer joy of life, and with our
light rig, up-hill and down-hill were all one to them.
Past Mesa Grande store, where before the still un-
opened door a couple of chilly Indians sunned them-
selves; past Ysidro Nejo's little house — he is a
character in "Ramona"; past Government School
and Indian blacksmith shop, and finally the ranch-
eria itself, where smoke from morning fires was
rising straight into the still air — we showed a clean
quartette of heels. Then the road, rounding the
toe of a hill, slipped into the mountains where small
sign of man was and the wilderness closed in about
us.
Our host pointed with his whip to a distant ridge
covered with the yellowing foliage of deciduous
oaks.
" There," said he, "are the ancestral granaries
of the Mesa Grande Indians, oak forests where for
unnumbered generations they and their fathers'
fathers have gathered the acorns that are a staple
of their diet. There are a dozen sorts of oaks in
the country and the Indians have discovered that of
them all, the acorns that are least bitter and so most
easily made palatable are those of a particular
species of black oak. And though the Indians have
only unwritten laws, the rights of the different
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UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
tribes throughout Southern California in their re-
spective black oak lands are sharply defined and
thoroughly understood, so that no Mesa Grande
Indian, for instance, would think of gathering acorns
in a forest which the San Ygnacio people had pre-
empted.
"This whole region, " he continued, as our road
wound among majestic trees, "has the touch of the
Indian everywhere upon it; but you have to stay
with the country year in and year out really to
learn much. That's why the chance traveler, par-
ticularly if he has no active sympathy with the red
brother — and he rarely has — is so ignorant of the
Indian life and its impress on the land. Why,
every prominent object in the landscape around us,
every hill and rincon and canon, every oak-wood
and spring and arroyo, almost every tree that dif-
fers markedly from another, has its Indian name
descriptive of its physical character or commemo-
rating some event of Indian history that has hap-
pened there. Indians know these names and can
direct one another by them quite as accurately as
one man can direct another about city streets.
"And here is the Indian's impress in another
way;" he pulled up the horses and, leaping out,
picked up a flat, oblong stone from the roadside.
Though weather-beaten, it showed artificial fashion-
ing. "This is not just a stone; it is an implement
of human use. Indian hands shaped this and em-
ployed it — hands that are now doubtless returned
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THE MOUNTAINS
to primordial dust. You can see it is ancient. It is
a rubbing stone, useful in a dozen ways to the man
of the Stone Age, which the Indian, in his native
estate, even to-day, really is — such as for smooth-
ing roughness from wood or dried skins, for rubbing
meal to fineness, for cracking acorn hulls and so
on."
We were now trotting down a grade that wound
in and out of the folds of the mountain side, and
opened up vistas of a wide, peaceful valley, where
cattle, tiny specks in the distance, were grazing. It
was a portion of the famous Warner Ranch, which
came rather prominently into the public eye nine
or ten years ago, when its white claimants caused
the eviction of the resident Indians from this their
ancient domain. The Government forcibly removed
them across the mountains to alien Pala, where the
ancients of the tribe are still unreconciled and
mourn for Cupa, the old home of their people, and
for the healing waters of its hot springs.
" There's many a hidden nook around this coun-
try," our host went on, with a longing look up a
canon, " where a fellow with sharp eyes is liable
to stumble on relics of the old days. I have often
found earthenware jars of Indian make set away
in caves or in the niches of rocky cliffs, where mes-
quite beans or acorns were once 'cached' for safety
in troublous times when the raiding of home stores
by enemies was feared. They were usually empty,
because the squirrels had cleaned up the contents,
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UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
but others I have found containing hechicero things,
that is, articles of one kind or another that the
liechiceros, or medicine men, made use of in their
ceremonies. Such relics, as well as the jars them-
selves, which are of ancient make, are, of course,
very interesting to scientific collectors, but they
are rare nowadays, and about the known ones that
are still left in place the present-day Indians are
very reluctant to tell anything. They are afraid
that if they help the white people to remove them,
the spirits of the dead-and-gone hechiceros may get
angry and make trouble for the informant. Old
Joe, a Mesa Grande man who will do anything for
me, came to me quietly one day and said that a
Santa Ysabel man had bragged to him about know-
ing where a fine hechicero jar was, and Joe had been
'muy coyote' with him, and, by skilful questioning,
had found out where it was. So Joe and I set out
for the place; but when we got there the jar was
gone. The other Indian on second thought had
evidently grown suspicious that foxy Joe meant
mischief about the jar and so had removed it. 'Joe,
him muy coyote, but Santa Ysabel man him more
coyote,' is the way Joe sized up the incident."
After a frosty night beneath the stars, our
blankets spread on springy beds of pine needles,
with hot rocks rolled in barley sacks at our feet,
we came in the sparkling morning to San Ygnacio,
a rancheria of Luiseno Indians in an upland valley
of the desert's rocky rim. Here Maria Juana Se-
90
THE MOUNTAINS
gunda, plump of body and good-humored of spirit,
dwells with her mama, maker of baskets and of
acorn-meal, and in a meadow close by their house
we were permitted to make our camp. Beyond
stretched a wet cienaga fenced in, where Indian
cattle fed and where a little stream, assembling its
waters beneath an outcropping of tumbled rocks,
issued doughtily forth and flowed valiantly away
through a thicket of rustling carrizo reeds, to
quench the desert's thirst — as quixotic an adventure
as ever a bit of mountain-stream set out upon.
Now, the fashion of San Ygnacio is not unpic-
turesque, hidden from the world beyond the moun-
tains, as in a bowl. Here and there perched upon
the valley's tilted side are set the Indians' cabins,
each one-storied of a room or two, the material in
the better sort being adobe with American-made
doors and windows, and roof of shingles, or of cedar
shakes split in the near-by mountains. Others have
shaggy walls of brush and stout sunflower-stalks,
their roofs a thatch of tule rush and carrizo reed;
and against almost every house is built the ramada
or roofed shelter of brush, a sort of open-air living-
room where, on warm days, the household work is
carried on and meals are eaten. Like huge bee-
hives, dome-shaped baskets for the storage of
acorns sit upon platforms lifted safely a man's
height or more above the ground, for the discom-
fiture of pilfering rodents; and dominant over all
is the little Catholic chapel with its squat steeple
91
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
beneath the cross. Close by, enclosed in a tight
paling fence, is the campo santo, where, side by side
and even on top of one another, departed San
Ygnacians are packed to the very fence corners,
each grave marked with a wooden cross. As
ground is cheap in San Ygnacio, we are for extend-
ing the fence so as to do away with such unseemly
crowding of the helpless dead, but Juan Capistrano
Siva, who is showing us about, enlightens our
American darkness about that.
"Big campo santo, mala suerte," says he, "very
bad luck; much people have to die to fill it up.
Little campo santo, all filled up, no die."
Not far away, among some huge bowlders, a
woman is pounding acorns with a stone, a shallow
cavity in the rock serving as a mortar. Acorn-meal
is both bitter and astringent as it comes from the
mortar; but the Indian, who has as little taste as
you or I for the bitter in life, has found a way to
eliminate these qualities. Old Angelita's cabin is
just around the rocks and she is at the process now
— old Angelita, whose name means "little angel,"
lingering echo of her far-away babyhood. Now she
is bent and rheumatic, and her withered brow is
swathed in a blue bandanna handkerchief. By a
rill of water under some bushes she has a large,
shallow Indian basket, cradled in a pile of sticks.
Across the basket is stretched a cloth of loose
weave, and upon it is spread some fresh acorn-
meal. Dipping water from the stream, she pours
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THE MOUNTAINS
it over the meal and as the liquid seeps through
the straining cloth, more is added. So at intervals
will the wetting and seeping go on for, perhaps,
a day, until the bitter nature be all strained away.
The result of this treatment is a dough, to be either
boiled as a mush, or baked into bread.
Don't commiserate old Angelita, and say, "Poor
thing I" for having to live on acorn-meal; for it is
famously nutritious, rich in fat and carbo-hydrates,
and makes fat Indians. To civilized palates it is
at first rather insipid; but many white folk acquire
a fondness for it and find acorn-mush as tasty as a
manufactured breakfast food. It helps towards re-
spect for the acorn to remember that botanically
the chestnut is its first cousin.
At Martina's house, over the way from Ange-
lita 's, we find a basket for sale, and from bartering
we drift easily into chatting, the more easily be-
cause fat Bartolome, her husband, is at home and
has a tongue that runs. Their place is a good ex-
ample of what the Mission Indian can make with
his own hands from the native products of the coun-
try roundabout. The house, with its brush walls
packed tight to keep out the wind, its thatched tule
roof, and its stool seat, carved from a single block
of wood, by the doorway, is as picturesque as an
Irish peasant's cottage. It and the barn, with its
storage basket on the roof, the thatched hog-pen
and the temescal, or sweathouse for baths, are all
the work of Bartolome 's own hand. Bartolome is
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UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
a handy man; possibly his father may have been a
neophyte at San Luis Rey in the Mission days, and
passed on to his son somewhat of his Padre-taught
skill. Bartolome's feet are shod in leather sandals
of his own cutting-out, and he speaks only Spanish
and Luiseno. He was born in the desert — most of
these mountain Indian families spend their winters
in the lowlands — and was a boy when Los Angeles
was still a little pueblo; so he has seen much his-
tory made. He had worked as vaquero for Spanish
rancher os when any ranch was a day's journey
across, and when any traveler was welcome without
a peso in his pocket, and a cup of wine was always
to be had for the asking; not that Bartolome was
anything of a tippler — madre de Dios, no — but at
a fiesta, or of a Sunday now and then, a sip of wine
feels good in the throat, and makes no man crazy
like this cursed whiskey. And, of course, he had
seen the coming of the Americans, first one or two,
then swarms of them like flies; and then the rail-
road and the hard times, and now every man has
his hand in your pocket and all the world is for the
dollar. These Americans, they are smart traders,
no? You have to sell; oh, yes, they buy, but very
low price ; you have to buy, oh, yes, they sell to you,
but muy caro, very dear. And, as for land, there is
no more any land in all California an Indian can
call his own. Why, when the Americans want San
Ygnacio, will they not come and take it? Did not
Bartolome know? Had he not seen them drive the
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THE MOUNTAINS
Indians out of Temecula when he was a young man,
and from the hot springs of Cupa when he was old!
We present Bartolome with a sack of tobacco and
Martina with a pocketful of grapes, and, parting
good friends, we sally forth to further adventure.
Our eyes turn wistfully to the chaparral-covered
slopes of the mountains to the east and scan them
to the bowlder-strewn crest that looks, we know,
down upon the desert; and Juan Capistrano Siva,
who loves the desert and came from it but yester-
day, says if we would like to see it from that dizzy
ridge, he knows a good trail. So we mount horses,
and following Juan's lead we are soon hidden head
and heels in the brush, now plunging down into dry
arroyos, now gingerly picking our way along nar-
row shelves of rock above some canon's yawning
jaws, now scrambling up sandy steeps down which
our pomes' sliding heels push loose stones, cracking
and bounding into depths behind. Our legs are
pricked with cactus spines and yucca daggers, and
our faces whipped by the thorny branches of grease-
wood and buck-brush that stretch across the trail
that would be no trail to any but an Indian's keen
sight; and so we come by and by to the last pitch
of all, where a chaos of gray rock, belched up in
some fiery geologic day, is not negotiable by horses.
Here dismounting and tying the animals, we clam-
ber, hand and foot, tooth and nail, up the rest of
the way until we stand upon the ridge that divides
desert and coast country. Before us the mountains
95
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
fall sharply away, and there below us spread out
as a map, in the stillness of the waning afternoon,
lies that co-equal with mountain and sea and sky in
elemental majesty, the desert — "the country of lost
borders/' "the land of little rain," "God's garden "
— what you will.
Purple shadows flung down by our mountain's
height were laying cool hands upon the shimmering
sands, and through a palpitating mist that hung
upon it, gleamed the waters of the Salton Sea. Far
beyond dimly rose the bastioned walls that are the
southern boundary of the Mojave Desert; to the
east and southeast, above the haze, swam peaks we
could not name, glowing in the late light like
islands of a dream — peaks of Arizona, doubtless, and
some of Old Mexico. Juan's eyes glistened as he
looked, and his Indian reserve gave way to real
enthusiasm as he told of his sixty-mile ride the day
before on horseback from Indio, alone across the
sands to Rattlesnake Canon, where it cuts into the
shoulder of San Jacinto; then by this trail and that
— Juan pointed them out as he talked, and was very
patient with our white stupidity when we could not
see twenty miles away what was as plain to him as
the nose on your face — then down into Coyote Pass
and around by Lost Valley into San Ygnacio ; and
how he had seen a deer at Pinon Flat and moun-
tain-lion tracks near Horsethief Creek; and he de-
scribed minutely where all the water holes were.
From the white man's point of view, really nothing
96
The ruined San Diego Mission still marks the early activities
of the padres
The Night of the Candles in the little, campo santo at
Mesa Grande
THE MOUNTAINS
noteworthy had occurred on Juan's long ride; but to
the Indian all nature is of intensest interest. He
marks the flight of a bird and is not satisfied till he
has identified the kind; he hears a twig crack —
his old nature is alert to solve the problem of what
broke it; a fresh track across the trail he travels is
as vital to him as to us a telegram — is it a coyote,
or a deer or a rabbit? Other business of life stops
till he has found out. So the sixty miles between
Indio and San Ygnacio had given Juan matter
enough to discourse about for a month or two.
"And do you know any place, Juan," asked our
host as we descended the mountain towards San
Ygnacio, "hereabout or in the desert, where old ollas
are hidden away?"
And Juan returned the usual answer of the young
school-taught Indian to questions about the old days
and their ways:
"No, senor, the old people they knew about old
thing like that; the young people they do not know
about it."
The night was chilly even by our camp-fire, when
supper was over, and we repaired to Maria Juana's
cabin for a bit of chat before retiring. A fire was
burning in her ample fire-place, and Maria Juana's
mama was a-squat on the hearth, working up her
basket material by the flickering flame. Maria Ju-
ana herself, as became one who had dwelt among
white folk, sat properly in a chair by a table on
which was a kerosene lamp. She gossiped pleas-
97
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
antly in English, in a soft, motherly voice, trans-
lating, from time to time, into' Luiseno such tidbits
of what we told as she thought her mama would
enJoy. Mesa Grande is Diegueno country and like
a foreign land to Luiseno San Ygnacio, and Maria
Juana and her mama would laugh heartily when our
host would give them the Diegueno word for one
of theirs — it was so strange that words of such di-
verse sound should mean the same; and, when he
sang them a Diegueno song, dramatically illustrated
with the motions of the dance and as though he held
a rattle, the two women's eyes sparkled and their
faces were aglow in their interest.
"That is funny words," said Maria Juana, "but
it is nice, too, I think," and her mama's eyes had
a reminiscent look as of a bygone day when she,
too, sang the songs of her people. We coaxed her
to sing one to us now, but she would not — she had
forgotten, she said; but perhaps she was only shy.
So the talk turned on other things — on poor
Teofilo who was died long time ago and Natividad,
who was marry — did we not know? And of how
Bautista killed the mountain sheep one time, and of
who was got sick and who was got well. So many
sick peoples now in Coahuilla country; they got the
consumption, the doctor calls it. Maria Juana
could not understand what makes them so sick.
"That consumption now," she says in quaint won-
derment, "I don't know what makes it — it did not
use to be." And did we know that old Jose was
98
THE MOUNTAINS
died in Los Angeles, and before he died, he told the
peoples he could not be happy for afterwards, un-
less he was bury in the campo santo of the old
rancheria at San Felipe where he was born ; and so
his people brought his body and now it was bury
just as he wanted, there in the old campo santo by
the desert in the sun; so he would be happy, old
Jose.
Day comes to San Ygnacio 's tiny valley in an ex-
quisiteness that city dwellers know not of — first,
a flush of red in the east, then all about is a feeling
of virgin light as mysterious and pure as though a
Holy Grail drew near, and, in the twinkling of an
eye, the wan peaks of the chalky mountain barrier
to the west leap into vivid life, reflecting upon San
Ygnacio the warmth of glory of the risen sun come
through the shining gateways of the desert. And
soon we are rolling up our blankets and tossing
flapjacks over the campfire and eating them, and
bidding good-bye to Maria Juana and her mama;
and then the colts, bursting their very jackets with
the thoughts of home, are hitting the high places
with us along the Indian road through the chapar-
ral, and San Ygnacio is a tale that is told.
The sun was just nearing the western rim of
mountains when we tame in sight of Mesa Grande,
in its bowl-like valley, and people were wending
their way singly and in families to the little campo
santo, fenced about with white palings beside the
church at the edge of the rancheria. All day, work-
99
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
ers with hoes and brooms, had been busily clearing
it of weeds and litter, in preparation for this La
NocJie de las Velas — the Night of the Candles. We
tied our team to a fence, and joined the gathering
throng, which included, besides the Indians, many
white visitors from the surrounding country, to
whom any Indian "doings" are a recreation, like
the circus, not to be missed. Just as the sun dis-
appeared below the mountains, and shadow filled
the valley, men, women and children passed through
the gate into the cemetery and began setting candles
upright in the earth about the graves, and lighting
them; each being cared for by the surviving rela-
tives of the departed. Everywhere in the rapidly
falling dusk, stooping figures passed slowly about
amid the graves and wooden crosses, making sure
of the resting places they were in search of, and
then bending to shield the candles' incipient flicker
from the wind, waited till the flame was set.
Here a mother teaches her little child to stand
the lights about its father's grave; and next to them
is the bent figure of an aged woman with many
mounds to dress — like the widow of Scripture, cast-
ing in of her penury perhaps all the living that she
had, for candles run into money when you have
to buy them by the dozen; and over here is old Joe,
bareheaded and clad in a second-hand overcoat, fix-
ing, with unsteady hand, four tallow tapers upon his
dead wife's resting-place. The faces of all are
grave; but we notice no assumption of sadness.
100
THE MOUNTAINS
The Indian may hide his feelings ; but he is not
hypocrite enough to put on the semblance of grief
to suit an occasion. Yet this is serious business
and it is conducted seriously. About the center of
the campo santo where a great cross stands, a con-
siderable knot of people are gathered placing lights
so thickly that the spot glows like a campfire. They
are for those remembered dead who have been
buried away from the old home.
It is quite dark when all the graves are alight,
and now grouped before the candles of the absent
dead, kneeling figures chant a litany of the Church,
strikingly solemn in the open air in the midst of
the enveloping blackness of night; and this finished,
the air is suddenly filled with that most heartbreak-
ing of human sounds, the quavering, sobbing death-
wail of the elder Indian women, mourning for the
lives that have entered within the veil. It lasts
but a short time, and then slowly and quietly the
crowd files out of the cemetery, leaving its dead in
a world of lighted candles, to be as lamps to the
feet of them who tread the dark trails of purgatory
—for this is the significance of the ceremony.
As we drove out of the valley, we drew rein on
the ridge and looked back. In the houses of the
rancheria fresh fires were gleaming, and suppers
were being eaten; the living were again taking up
the joys of living, and, by and by, would be playing
peon till morning. On the dark hillside, the while,
the little campo santo bore its glowing testimony of
101
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
light like a seed of faith in a benighted world; and
just outside its circle of brightness in a black hol-
low, in ground unconsecrate, shone two tiny sparks
— the flames of candles set, we were told, upon the
unsanctified grave of one who had murdered a
United States constable and himself been murdered
in return. The Church could not receive such, dy-
ing unshriven and in crime, so he was laid without
the pale ; but, as each recurring year brings around
La Noche de las Velas, two candles are lit for him,
also. He needs the light, if any does, and his people
do not forget.
102
SPRING DAYS IN A CARRIAGE
I. PRELIMINARIES
IT is safe to say that ninety-nine out of every hun-
dred visitors in California miss one of its pleas-
antest possibilities, — the little driving trip. When
you ask one of the ninety-nine just returned from
the Coast, "Did you take many carriage trips?"
You get for an answer, "Why, no; you see the rail-
roads and the electric cars take you into all the
sights ;" or "Of course not, we had our automobile
shipped out and went everywhere in that." Yet
to our mind, the trip par excellence is the carriage
trip. Its leisureliness comports particularly with
the spirit of this land of the afternoon, and it pos-
sesses the practical advantage over motoring of per-
mitting many an interesting short cut and detour
from the best-roads districts, not feasible with com-
fort in an automobile.
In California, and particularly in Southern Cali-
fornia, the traveler by unbeaten ways meets with a
minimum of difficulties. The roads as a rule are
good; the weather, after the rainy season is past,
say in April or May, settles down to a succession
of heavenly days as fresh and balmy and sparkling
as those first-created days of time's dawn must have
103
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
been; accommodations for man and beast may
readily be had at the end of each day's journey;
and the country through which one travels is not
only radiantly beautiful in its fresh green and
wealth of wild blooms, but filled with much of his-
toric interest.
The prospect of such a trip extending over a
period of about two weeks, appealed to us vigor-
ously one April day, after reading "Ramona," and
we decided unanimously to lay our itinerary through
some of the country made famous by that romance.
It was our first year in California and we knew
little of its geography, but with the aid of the ac-
curate maps of the United States Geological Survey
we planned a route in advance that should find us
every night in some settlement where there should
be a roof to shelter us. Then, too, we set on foot dili-
gent inquiries among our friends as to the available
comforts and general characteristics of each place.
The data thus secured we set down in orderly
fashion in the note-book for reference as we trav-
eled. The next step was to engage a strong, gentle
horse tested in many drives during the previous
winter and known to be fearless of electric cars and
automobiles — never start with a strange horse on a
protracted trip — and a stout top-buggy roomy
enough to hold the needful baggage and supplies
which will be referred to in detail in a subsequent
chapter.
We made our preparations to cook the noonday
104
SPRING DAYS IN A CARRIAGE
meal under the sky by the roadside, stowing in the
back part of the buggy-box the provisions for sev-
eral meals, and the cooking utensils, packed sepa-
rately in two chip baskets, so as to be conveniently
lifted in and out. This plan was partly to insure
one substantial meal each day amid the culinary
uncertainties of a country which, it may as well be
frankly said, has much to learn in the cook's art;
and partly for the benefit of a good rest and noon-
tide grazing for the horse. While such a procedure
in the East would be apt to stamp the participants
as gypsies, it is taken quite as a matter of course
in California, where people whom one passes on
highway or trail dressed in dusty khaki and driving
their pack animals before them, are, as likely as
not, personages whose next appearance may be in
faultless evening dress at some social function.
II. CAMULOS
To be in harmony with the "Ramona" motif, it
seemed fitting to start from Santa Barbara, from
the serene shades of whose beautiful Mission Father
Salvierderra was wont to set out on foot upon his
periodical visits to the Sefiora Moreno's ranch.
The highroad follows the sea to Carpinteria, thence
through the lovely Casitas Passes to Ventura, an-
other Mission town; then turning inland takes one,
an easy day's travel, by the Camulos Rancho, well
known as the place of which Mrs. Jackson made a
105
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
special study for the local color of the Moreno es-
tate in her novel. The courteous Spanish family
who owned and lived on the ranch when the novel-
ist made her two-hour visit there, are still occu-
pants and if approached with the consideration to
which their station entitles them, are glad to show
and explain points of interest about the place.
Time was when in true Spanish fashion, hospitality
was extended in a princely manner, and all visitors,
whatever the number, were treated as guests; but
the inability on the part of average American tour-
ists to receive such attention in the spirit in which
it was given, and their outrageous disregard of the
family 's rights and feelings, have led to a discon-
tinuance of the freedom of the house to the unin-
vited.
The nearest public accommodation to Camulos is
a plain but comfortable hostelry at Piru, two miles
distant, which we made the terminus of our day's
drive from Ventura. Next morning as we drove
along the road that winds up the little valley of the
Rio Santa Clara, whose waters flow through Cam-
ulos, all the earth seemed one great jewel sparkling
in the bright sunshine. The fragrance of a myriad
flowers sweetened the dewy air, and the meadow
larks and red-throated linnets raised their cheery
carols from fence post and telegraph pole. Now
and again we drove through thickets of wild mus-
tard, higher than a man, as in Ramona's time, and
covered with golden bloom. The great, swelling
106
SPRING DAYS IN A CARRIAGE
Mils, so characteristic of the coast region of South-
ern California, treeless but verdure clad, lifted their
rounded heads on both sides of our valley road ; and
on the summit of one, outlined against the blue sky
ahead of us, stood a slender wooden cross. We re-
membered the Senora Moreno 's reminders for heret-
ical Americans and knew that Camulos must be
near.
Shortly the white walls of the rambling ranch
house shone through a screen of trees, and hitching
our horse without the gate, we walked across a
bridge spanning a little stream where white ducks
were swimming, and in another moment we were
looking into the courtyard of Ramona's home. The
sunlight lay warm and bright in the peaceful en-
closure; there was a fragrance of roses in the still
air, and far away somewhere beyond the house the
harsh, insistent cry of a pea-fowl. Across the patio
a door banged and a Japanese boy walked briskly
along the far corridor and disappeared within the
house. At the kitchen window near us a Mexican
man-cook glanced indifferently at us. Evidently
Old Marda was dead.
The front of the house, as readers of "Ramona"
will remember, is turned away from the highroad.
It faces a shady garden and the cultivated lands
of the rancho with its orange and almond groves, its
vineyards and pomegranate hedges ; and as we
stood before the wide veranda speculating as to
Ramona's window and the Father Salvierderra's,
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UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
there stepped from the house a bright-faced young
girl, whose black hair, olive skin and vivacious eyes
proclaimed her Spanish blood. Evidently it was she
to whom we should speak.
" Maybe you would like to see the chapel," she
suggested. "Yes? Then the little girl will show
it you. O Frasquita, ven aqui!"
A little Mexican maid came running from within,
bringing a jingling bunch of keys, and piloted us into
the garden.
"When you are through," called the sefiorita,
"maybe you would like to eat your lunch under the
big walnut tree. It is cool there."
So we were let into the little rustic chapel within
the garden's shade, and saw an altar cloth as white
and fresh as though just from Ramona's hands.
And Frasquita told us all the news about the
chapel, how they had to keep it locked now, for
the American visitors they would have carried
everything away for — what you call? — keepsake,
yes; and once they did — Mother of God, the here-
tics!— steal a holy crucifix that had been the fam-
ily's for a hundred — two hundred — yes, two hun-
dred years maybe; and how they still hold services
in the chapel once a month, and Father John comes
up from Ventura, and there is mass, and everybody
attends from the rancho, and sometimes some of the
neighbors, too. 0 yes, a gift for the chapel? Many,
many thanks ; and adios, Senora ; adios, Senor.
As we sat under the shade of the huge walnut tree
108
SPRING DAYS IN A CARRIAGE
which is a special pride of Camulos, at the end of the
ranch house, the Seiiorita came by and smiled.
"We work at the orange packing," she remarked,
with an apologetic glance at her workaday attire,
"maybe you would like to see? Over there in that
building we are, where the teams are unloading the
boxes. They have just come in from the trees, and
I must hurry;" and off she ran.
We followed at leisure, and entering the long
barnlike building, had our first sight of an orange-
packing. The golden balls were tumbled from the
wagons into a great hopper, out of which they ran
by gravity in a long single file down a narrow trough
the bottom of which was perforated by holes of vari-
ous sizes, permitting the oranges of the correspond-
ing sizes to fall through into compartments beneath.
Each compartment thus was fed with fruit all of
the same size. A half dozen laughing girls, of
whom the senorita was one, sat deftly wrapping the
assorted oranges in thin paper and packing them in
their boxes for shipment. The wrapping and pack-
ing went forward as rapidly as the fruit dropped,
and as each box was filled, it was lifted away by a
man and nailed up, ready for transportation to the
car that lay upon the siding a hundred rods away.
The Senorita smiled brightly upon us and enjoyed
our enjoyment in the novel sight.
"Yes, I like the packing, too; it is pretty seeing
the oranges roll along and drop each down into the
box with the others of just their size. It is like life,
109
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
no? the great folks gathering together by them-
selves and the humble little people by themselves,
too." And she laughed merrily at her fancy.
"But there isn't much money in the business for
the poor orange raiser. There is the scale to fight
always, and the pruning to do, and the help to pay
for the picking, and the packing, and the freight to
the railroads — oh, the robbers that they are — and
after it all, if we have twenty-five cents a box left
for ourselves we are lucky. That's just enough to
keep us from getting far from home, and I should
so like to travel. Oh, to see the world — New Or-
leans and New York and old Mexico — would it not
be beautiful! But we may as well be as happy as
we can — and it is a beautiful world right here, eh,
Pedro, you rascal!" — stroking a big black cat that
rubbed up against her — "for oh, we shall be a long
time dead!"
III. CAPISTRANO
From Camulos, the Santa Susana Mountains
crossed, it is a pleasant road through the olive or-
chards, the barley-fields and the berry ranches of
the San Fernando Valley, past the ruined Mission
of San Fernando, homely of aspect in its present
low estate but interesting to the Mission enthusi-
ast; through Pasadena, and San Gabriel, through
the walnut groves of Whittier to Santa Ana and
thence to Capistrano, where we arrived on the even-
ing of our fourth day out.
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SPRING DAYS IN A CARRIAGE
Fair in the evening light, the crumbling walls of
the most poetic of all the Missions, "the Melrose of
the West," outlined themselves against a back-
ground of hills clothed in living green. The shad-
ows lay long in the old deserted garden with its
white oleanders and scarlet geraniums, where once
the Padres walked in the cool of the day and medi-
tated; and instead of the spiritual songs that as-
cended a century ago from worshiping congrega-
tions in the great church, the air was filled with
the whir and twitter of hundreds of swallows flying
in and out of their mud nests built far up on the
walls of the roofless ruin. Time has laid a kindly
hand on the broken pillars and buttresses, mellow-
ing the color of the plaster to soft pinks and yellows,
and brightening the gaps with tiny gardens of wild
bloom, sown by the winds and the birds. In one of
the rooms opening off the cloistered quadrangle we
found a Mexican wood carver at work, patiently
piecing together parts of broken, wooden saints for
the chapel; brightening up their time-dimmed fea-
tures, and gilding their halos anew. He was a so-
ciable child of the sun, none too well pleased with
the dim light of his thick-walled cell, and glad of
some one to talk to.
"Yes, senor caballero," he observed, rolling the
inevitable cigarette, "it's pleasant work enough,
and it's good for the soul to be doing something for
the Church; but it's dull business seeing nobody for
days together." Then he shrugged his shoulders,
111
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
before adding, "Of course, some days too many
come — these American tourists — pardon me, senor,
but you are not their kind — and then, santa Maria
purisima! you must watch or they will carry off the
last stone. Pieces of the wall, branches of ivy torn
from the pillars, tiles from the roof, brick from the
cloister pavement — everything would go, if we let it.
Why, senor, will you believe me, once they stole the
gold crown from the Blessed Virgin's head at the
altar; but the heretics were caught and had to give
it back. H ombre! Some people when they go
sightseeing, have neither manners nor religion/'
On every hand were subjects appealing to the ar-
tistic sense, but the descending night made any
sketching or photographing out of the question un-
til morning. We would spend the whole of the next
day, however, in the enchanting spot, and so, agog
with enthusiasm, we sought our room and went
early to bed. Sometime in the night, a sound
awakened me, the patter of rain upon the roof. By
morning there was a steady downpour without a
rift in the leaden sky. We made some remarks to
the chambermaid about having understood that it
never rained in Southern California after the
middle of April. She said she didn't know much
about this climate, having been here only a few
months — she was from back East herself — but she
had heard the boss say he thought we were in for a
three days' storm.
We sighed. Accommodations were exceedingly
112
SPRING DAYS IN A CAEEIAGE
poor. Our room was cold, of course; no dyed-in-
the-wool Southern Calif ornian would think of sup-
plying fire in your room — it would be an insult to
the climate. There were leaks in the ceiling. The
public sitting-room, normally cheerless and dark,
was made more so that morning by the concentrated
gloom of an assemblance of three or four other
storm-stayed travelers who had nothing to do but
read back-number literature and grumble about the
weather. Even the prospect of a good dinner was
denied us, for never elsewhere, East or West, had
we encountered the like of the bill-of-fare offered by
that rustic hostelry — with its fried onions, boiled cab-
bage, rank butter, and bloody bones of bull steak —
served on cold, greasy plates upon a grimy table
cloth. Alas for the sunshine of Camulos, the radi-
ance of the San Fernando Valley, the happy gypsy
meals by the flowery roadsides ; alas for our carriage
trip — was it to end like this?
The day dragged wearily on. Sylvia, wrapped in
a shawl and coat, attempted to work at a dejected
sketch in our chamber; while I sat drearily writing
up my notes in a corner of the public sitting-room
where there was a shred of fire smoldering in a
rusty grate. Matters were not helped any by the
cheerful assurance of our hostess that a rain like
this would cause all the rivers between there and
San Diego, several of which were on our map to be
crossed, to rise so as to be unfordable for at least
a week.
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UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
"But it won't wash away the bridges," said I
anxiously.
"Caramba!" she replied, startled into Spanish by
such crass ignorance, "there are no bridges!"
She would advise our staying where we were till
the waters went down; or — for, bless you, she did
not want us to think she was seeking to profit by our
misfortune — we might ship the team home by freight
and go back ourselves on the train. Only she felt it
her duty to warn us about those rivers.
It was a dreadful dilemma, either horn of which
it was out of the question for us to consider; and
after a glance at an equally impossible supper, we
again sought our room. The Government map was
spread out on the table, and gone minutely over
with a view to discovering some road that went in-
land whereby we might go around the dreadful riv-
ers, but the mountain range that hedges in the coast
country set a veto upon any such program. There
was but the one road and we were on it. Under
such circumstances the man of the party naturally
felt the responsibility of procedure, and as I tossed
the map into the satchel, I observed savagely:
"It was folly anyhow to undertake a trip of this
kind through a half-settled country. These outdoor
trips are lotteries even in a civilized land, but here
there's nothing to fall back on if you come to grief.
The idea of there being no bridges ! In my opinion,
there's not much to California anyhow except its
climate and even that is not what it is cracked up
114
SPRING DAYS IN A CARRIAGE
to be. If those idiots in Santa Barbara who sent us
on this carriage trip, had only warned us of what
we might expect, we'd have known better than to
come/'
I saw a look of sympathetic comprehension come
into Sylvia's face. To the eternal feminine the
spring of the trouble was evident.
' ' Here are the rubbers, put them on," she ob-
served; "take the umbrella, and go down to the
buggy. There are some things to eat in the right-
hand basket ; please bring them all up here, and the
tea-pot, too."
In half an hour there was a spread upon the table
worthy of a college impromptu. The alcohol lamp
which goes with us on every trip, burned merrily;
the tea-pot purred; the frizzled beef sent out an
aroma of comfort; the bread was like mother's, for
it was home-baked, supplied us by a discerning
friend in Pasadena who had "roughed it" and knew;
and the butter was sweet — it had been laid in fresh
at Santa Ana, the day before. There was a crown-
ing touch from somewhere of canned peaches. Our
starving stomachs returned practical thanks in a
quiet tide of serenity that took possession of our
frames. What matter that the rains descended, and
that overcoats and capes had to be donned in a fire-
less room? A happy inspiration brought the hot-
water bags to mind, and these were fished up from
the baggage, filled, and one laid in each lap. So
with this heat without, and the joyous radiance of
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UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
our normal life restored within, whence it shone
out into the little room lighted by one smoky lamp,
we looked forward to the developments of the mor-
row with the proverbial serenity of one who has
dined to-day.
Recall if you can the cool, crisp mornings of your
childhood's Octobers when the air sparkled like an
elixir, and you know the sort of morning that
greeted us when we opened 'our eyes to the sun next
day. The tender blue of the California sky, the
dazzling green hills, flower-bedecked here and there,
the look of everything as if Nature had washed her
face and hands and come out to play — all these
things called to us to be up and make an early start.
"But hombre, the rivers?" said our anxious host-
ess.
Nothing, even risen rivers, we felt, could be very
dreadful on such a day, but in order to be on the
safe side, we engaged Cipriano Morales for two
dollars to ride ahead of us on horseback and pilot
us across the San Mateo ford, seventeen miles
away, which would be the worst of all. If we could
cross that, we could surely cross the others. So
with Cipriano as an outrider, spurs jingling, som-
brero flapping, and saddle strings streaming on the
breeze, and Gypsy Johnson, our sorrel mare, tossing
her blond mane in high spirits, we drove out of
Capistrano in some style.
The road, after following the line of surf for a
while, turned inland and upward upon a great mesa
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SPRING DAYS IN A CARRIAGE
with a glorious view of emerald hills and sparkling
sea; and at noon after the dangerous fords had
been safely crossed and we made our midday camp
amid wild flowers and nodding mustard in yellow
bloom, and the bacon sizzled cheerfully in the pan,
the delight of -life overcame me and I launched forth
enthusiastically :
' ' This is one of the loveliest places on earth. I
defy Italy to show anything equal to this superb
view of green, rounding hills and blue ocean and
bluer sky. Then the soft touch of this breeze, and
the stimulus of this heavenly sunshine. This is
something like! I wouldn't have missed it for the
world. "
To each statement individually and to all collec-
tively Sylvia gave joyous assent, checking them off
with the fork that turned the bacon. Then with a
merry twinkle in her eyes, she observed very softly :
"If only those idiots in Santa Barbara who sent
us on this carriage trip — "
IV. RANCHO SAN FULANO
"I don't see why in the name of common sense,"
I can remember saying testily, "no Calif ornian can
give you directions that can be followed. That fel-
low at Capistrano said it was a straight road and
we couldn't possibly get off it, and now look at
this!"
All the sunny afternoon we had driven cheerfully
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UNDEE THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
along a grassy highway that wound due south mile
after mile across a great cattle-ranch, and was guar-
anteed by the last white man we had seen, some
fifteen miles back, to lead without fork or deviation
to Oceanside, where we had designed to pass the
night. It was now six in the evening, and on a
lonely mesa bounded on one side by the distant sea
and on the other by a line of bare, monotonous hills
without sign of human habitation in any direction,
we found ourselves at a dividing of the road, where
a weather-worn guide-post stated dimly on one finger
that San Diego was fifty-six miles distant, while the
legend upon the other finger was illegible entirely.
We anxiously scanned the country in every direc-
tion for sight of some one who might direct us, but
in vain. It was exactly the situation where the old-
time writer of romance would have set "a solitary
horseman" jogging along, but though we waited for
a bad quarter of an hour for one to turn up, none
appeared. The sun was rapidly descending to the
horizon, and a decision could no longer be post-
poned. The speculative possibilities of the un-
known seemed preferable to the certainty of fifty-six
miles to San Diego, and we turned our tired horse
into the unmarked fork which led into the foothills.
Our hope was that it might take us to some hamlet
where we could secure a lodging for the night and
where in the morning we might be started right for
Oceanside.
The road, after ascending gradually through the
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SPRING DAYS IN A CARRIAGE
chaparral for a mile or so, turned sharply around
the base of a knoll where suddenly there opened be-
fore our eyes a view which made us pinch each other
to assure ourselves that we were not in a dream.
At our feet stretched a long green valley glorified
with the last warm rays of the setting sun, and down
its length of emerald meadow-lands a little silver
river flowed, with red cattle feeding on the banks
or standing knee-deep in the quiet waters. And far
away at the upper end of this secluded vale there
gleamed in the sun a cluster of red roofs and white
walls, like some castle of old romance, rising from
the midst of tree-tops. A wonderful stillness was
over all, and of humanity there was no sign. The
scene seemed more a pictured page from an ancient
tale than a bit of our noisy, practical America, and
we half expected to see at any minute some "gentle
knight pricking across the plain, " or a band of
squire-attended damosels on dappled palfreys issu-
ing from the castle gates.
But at any rate, if the romance of our souls was
not to be indulged, here was surely an opportunity
to have our physical requirements for the night sup-
plied; and so, shaking out the reins, we started
Gypsy Johnson down the road that led into this val-
ley of peace. That the red roofs were of some ham-
let of the hills, we did not doubt ; yet it was a most
foreign-looking village for the United States — even
for Southern California.
As we descended to the floor of the valley, the red
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UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
roofs and white walls became lost to sight; but a
road led in their direction, and we took it. By and
by we came to a gate closed across the road.
"A most inhospitable village, " observed Sylvia.
Opening the gate, we passed through, and shortly
caught the gleam of white again through an envelop-
ing olive orchard. The bright walls were now seen
to be of one building, low and rambling, its roof of
old-fashioned red tiles. There were vine-covered
verandas and deep cool windows about which roses
climbed, and a white-walled garden with pomegran-
ates and olive trees and grape vines visible within.
The fragrance of honeysuckle was in the air, and a
mocking-bird hidden somewhere was singing its ves-
per song.
A short distance from the great house was a long
adobe barn, also glistening white, and beyond it a
row of laborers' cottages each with its bit of garden
in front and rear. A Mexican stableman leading a
horse gave us the first chance we had in twenty
miles to ask questions, and we learned that our sup-
posititious village was no village at all, but the
Rancho San Fulano, over part of whose two hun-
dred and fifty thousand acres we had been driving
since noon.
So the problem of the night's lodging was still un-
solved, and our hearts sank.
"How far is it to Oceanside?" we inquired.
The Mexican scratched his head.
"Quien sabe? Long way."
120
I
SPEING DAYS IN A CARRIAGE
We looked at Gypsy Johnson, whose tired head
hung low. Perhaps we could get a room at the
ranch overnight, we suggested — we had provisions
enough to tide us over, if the horse could be cared
for, too.
The Mexican shrugged his shoulders.
"Quien sabe," he observed, "you have to see
Meester MacCleenchy up at the big house/' and he
nodded his head towards the red-tiled mansion.
"Who is Mr. MacClinchy?M we asked.
"Meester MacCleenchy, he own these ranch — he
own all what you see," — with a comprehensive wave
of his hand over Southern California — "Meester
MacCleenchy — he ver-r-ry reech gentleman."
We then dimly remembered having once been told
by somebody that the largest existing Spanish ranch
in Southern California was now owned by an Ameri-
can, who had bought it from the heirs of the original
Spanish owner — a crony of the last of the Mexican
governors of California. Under ordinary circum-
stances we should have jumped at the chance of see-
ing so interesting a survival of the old days of Span-
ish dominion in California, for it had been scrupu-
lously kept up and the aristocratic Old-World look
which it had from its Spanish architect, had been
preserved in all essential particulars. To be forced,
however, to knock at its gates as suppliants for a
night's lodging was not exactly the ideal condition
of visiting it, and we were a somewhat nervous
couple as we drew up at the garden-wicket.
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I made fast the horse to a post, and, leaving Syl-
via arranging her hair and removing as well as she
might the more evident stains of travel from her
dress, I walked along the great front veranda, past
the conventional big five-gallon Mexican olla of
drinking water swathed in its damp burlap, and
entered an open door. A long passageway led
through the house to an inner quadrangle where
trees cast their shade and flowers bloomed — the
regulation patio of Spanish architecture — and there
an olive-skinned lady with dark hair and a rose
caught in it, directed me to a doorway across the
courtyard where, she said, Mr. MacClinchy would
be found.
There he was found standing before the agreeable
warmth of a wood-fire that crackled on a cavernous
hearth the width. of the room's end — a stocky gentle-
man with a bald head, bushy brows, a bristling gray
mustache, and a ruddy countenance terminating in
a square jaw that betokened small liking for opposi-
tion. He frowned fiercely as the situation was ex-
plained, and as soon as he learned there was a
woman in the case he cut the unfinished narrative
short and roared :
1 ' Bring your lady in, sir!"
Then striding ahead he led the way back to the
carriage.
" Madam," he said with a bow, and a tone as
gentle as Bottom's when that versatile character
would simulate the sucking dove, "let me assist you
122
SPRING DAYS IN A CARRIAGE
to alight. My house is yours. Let your husband
drive the team to the barn, the men will care for it.
Come to the fire, you are cold, I am sure. And now
tell me, how did you happen to lose your road?"
And so we came to taste the proverbial hospitality
of an old-time Spanish ranch, for though this latter-
day host of San Fulano made no claim to Castilian
blood, the tradition of Spanish-Californian large-
handedness was thoroughly maintained in him.
Strangers as we were, his son's room was vacated
for us, and we were given seats at the great table
in the dining-hall, where he presided like a mediaeval
baron over a dozen or more guests — for a house-
party of young people was in progress at the time,
the olive-skinned lady of the dark hair and the rose
evidently being the chaperon.
The eatables were provided on a scale that con-
firmed the mediaeval atmosphere, being hearty rather
than dainty, and bountiful to a fault. A huge plat-
ter of ribs of beef newly from the grassy ranges
which we had that afternoon traversed, a couple of
side platters of stewed rabbit shot the day before
by some Nimrod of the party, enormous dishes of
white potatoes hot from the kitchen and smoking to
the raftered ceiling, chicken-tamales and enchiladas
out of compliment perhaps to the guests of Spanish
blood, mounds of red frijoles, of course — and to
crown all, endless relays of steaming batter cakes.
A sad-eyed Chinese "boy" in chintz blouse and pig-
tail transported the dishes at lightning speed on the
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UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
palms of his upturned hands from the kitchen across
the patio, and when not otherwise employed circled
about the table with monumental pots of tea and
coffee, serving meanwhile as an ever-ready target
for vociferous denunciation from the master of the
house, when the latter thought he detected any re-
missness of service. Indeed to see that the bottom
of his guest's plate never showed was this hospitable
host's great delight, and especially toward the ladies
were his attentions unrelaxing. A pretty Spanish
girl who sat at his left, pausing in her meal, was dis-
covered to be waiting for the molasses jug, from
which one of the young men opposite to her, was
helping himself. So unknightly an action as to keep
a lady waiting was intolerable, and in an instant a
roar sounded down the table.
"Pass the lady the syrup! Are you all a pack of
ruffians V9
"And now, my dear," he remarked with fatherly
tenderness, as he laid back the lid of the jug for her,
"is there anything else I can help you to?"
We would have left in the morning before break-
fast, but it would not be permitted, and so the sun
was well up in the heavens when our little mare,
jaunty and fresh after her night's rest and good
fare, was brought to the garden wicket by a stable-
man.
Our host was walking up and down the veranda
puffing fiercely at a cigar, as we approached to bid
him good-bye. It was an awkward moment, for we
124
SPRING DAYS IN A CARRIAGE
greatly desired to pay for the accommodation, and
we stammered out something to that effect.
' ' Pay ! ' ' he shouted ; ' * pay ? Not one cent, sir, not
one cent;" and in the vigor of his feeling he tossed
his half-smoked cigar quite across the garden.
"But you will at least let us thank you — " began
Sylvia, when he gently interrupted her.
"Madam," said he, "I pray you do not mention
so small a matter. I wish you a pleasant journey."
As we passed out the gates, we paused for a last
look at the kindly old place. It was but one story,
the conventional height of the Spanish-California
ranch-house, and the adobe walls were of prison-like
thickness pierced at rather distant intervals with
small iron-grated windows, recalling the wild days of
old when every ranch had to be a fortress as well as
a home. The shadows of the trees trembled in cool
patches across the white expanse of wall and a couple
of pigeons were cooing on the ridge of the red-tiled
roof. Through an open door we could see the olean-
ders within the sunny patio, and outlined in the
doorway stood our host of San Fulano, his face
grimly smiling while one of the pretty Spanish girls
fastened a red blossom in his buttonhole.*
V. SAN Luis REY, GUAJOME AND PALA
From San Fulano, it was but a short drive into
the pretty valley of the San Luis Rey river, where
* The true names of this ranch and its host are not given by the
recipients of the courtesies so graciously extended.
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on a little sunny knoll in the midst of a fertile farm-
ing country, stands another Mission associated with
"Ramona," the Mission San Luis Rey. This, in its
heyday, was perhaps the largest and richest — tem-
porally speaking — of all the Southern California
religious establishments of the Franciscans, and it
was here that Alessandro's father, as will be remem-
bered, was master of the flocks and herds and leader
of the choir. While much of the Mission building-
has fallen into decay, the main church-edifice, with
an impressive fagade toned by time to mellow colors,
still stands a worthy monument to the Christian
zeal and architectural good taste of the founders.
Religious services are regularly held here, and
across the road is a Franciscan college for the
education of priests. As we drove up, a christening-
party of Mexicans was shyly entering the church-
door which was held ajar by the smiling, brown-
robed padre. Through the open portal the sun sent
its cheerful beam into the black interior — an obvious
symbol of the inward brightness which, it was to be
hoped, would lighten life's shadows for the little
Christian.
The Mission is rich in picturesqueness which will
amply repay the artist, the photograph-taker or the
dreamer, for many days' stay. The accommoda-
tion for the visitor, however, is exceedingly meager,
as there is no public house within four miles, and
there remains only the possibility of securing a
room at the storekeeper's or with some obliging
126
In its heyday San Luis Rey was one of the most important
of the Missions
SPRING DAYS IN A CARRIAGE
Mexican. We tried the latter plan for one night,
but we would recommend anyone not immune to
fleas and to whom frijoles and chili-sauce have lost
their charm, to lodge at Oceanside, four miles dis-
tant though it be.
A few miles from San Luis Rey, just back from
the Pala road which we took after leaving the Mis-
sion, is the old Spanish rancho of Guajome — they
pronounce it wah-ho-may and it means "The Place
of the Frogs " — standing cool within the shadow of
great cypresses. Here the creator of Ramona is said
to have spent some weeks when she was beginning her
novel, absorbing the atmosphere of Spanish-Calif or-
nian home life which is so livingly reproduced in the
work. Guajome is indeed the original home of
Ramona and the geography of the novel in several
particulars is intelligible only when we know this.
Owing to some feeling which eventually rose between
the novelist and the mistress of Guajome, portions
of the story were recast to conform to the physical
features of the Camulos estate. Like Camulos, Gua-
jome being private property is "no thoroughfare ' '
to unintroduced visitors, though to any traveler
genuinely interested in the beauty of the historic
place, the kindly host will doubtless extend — as he
did to us — the proverbial hospitality of the Spanish-
American landed proprietor.
Built four-square about a central patio where flow-
ers bloom and cluster around a quiet fountain, the
adobe walls of the house three feet thick and the
127
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
roof red-tiled, Guajome is a typical Southern Cali-
fornia country house of the ancient regime. Set be-
side unfailing waters in the midst of fertile acres, it
is a kingdom in itself ; and in the old days, after the
fashion of a land without cities, it possessed re-
sources for the entire support of the resident family
and the numerous following of servants and depend-
ents. Herds of cattle, horses and sheep pastured
on the ranch's thousand hills; vineyards, olive-
orchards, and wheat-lands rolled their tides of fruit-
fulness up to the ranch-house walls. Among the
retainers of the estate were artisans of many sorts
— carpenters, and blacksmiths, harness-makers and
weavers; there were those under the Guajome roof
who were skilled in the medicinal value of herbs;
and for the cure of souls, a chapel stood by the en-
trance to the main house, where the offices of the
church were administered from time to time when
some visitant father came. A thoroughly feudal
community in the old days was Guajome, where the
master required that every night the gates of the
main court upon which the sleeping apartments of
the family opened, be locked securely and the keys
delivered to him by the majordomo. Any luckless
servant found within the enclosure after that, was
summarily flogged.
All this and more our Spanish host told, as he
strolled with us over the place, plucking for us here
a sprig of rue and here a sweet lemon for souvenirs
of the visit. Then true to the spirit of hospitality
128
SPRING DAYS IN A CARRIAGE
which in the period of Spanish dominion in Califor-
nia saw that no stranger departed not properly
horsed and without small silver in his purse, he ac-
companied us to our carriage, looked quietly over
the harness to be sure that no flaw was in it, and as
he handed in the lines, asked:
"And now do you surely know your way?"
On a hillside commanding a distant view of the
ranch, where sumacs and elders make a shady
bower, we pulled up by the road for luncheon, taking
Gypsy Johnson from the shafts and turning her out
to graze in a knee-high patch of juicy grass. Our
canteen, the vade mecum of every California trav-
eler, supplied us water, dry sticks that lay about
were sufficient for a bit of camp-fire, and in half an
hour we were in full enjoyment of chops and stewed
tomatoes and a steaming pot of tea. An ill-man-
nered blue jay took up his station on a neighboring
rock, having an eye to some of our leavings, and now
and then scolded us roundly for being so slow to
move on. We tossed him a mutton-chop bone,
which after watching suspiciously for a moment or
two he cautiously approached, then backed off, drew
near again, and finally dashed with boldness upon it
and made off with it, no doubt thinking, like another
Jack Horner, "What a brave boy am I!"
"Breakfast in sight of San Luis Rey ; dinner over-
looking the barley fields and olive yards of Gua-
jome ; supper, I suppose, in the shadow of the Pala
bell tower ; why go to Italy when there are sights like
129
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
this and such days as these within the borders of
our ain countree?" exclaimed Sylvia rapturously, as
she removed the teapot from the fire and set the
tomatoes on to heat.
I sat silent, gazing in placid contentment on the
green hills which stretched away mile upon mile in
soft undulations. Then I could not help saying:
" Oh, it's all right for people to go to Italy, if
they want to; the ones I find fault with are those
who come out here and never get out of sight of a
hotel from the time they register at the hotel in San
Diego till they fee the last lackey at the one in San
Francisco, and then lay claim to knowing something
about California — they haven't seen the real Cali-
fornia at all. "
So, pleasantly congratulating ourselves on being
given the opportunity to see something of which the
conventional tourist knows nothing and cares as
little, we packed up and set out for Pala, that pictur-
esque outpost of the Church, or sub-Mission, estab-
lished nearly a century ago by the priests of San
Luis Rey for the gathering in of the Indians of the
hill country.
Should one desire to linger along this part of the
road where the little river San Luis Rey bears the
traveler company the whole twenty miles from Mis
sion San Luis Rey to Pala, there are plain but com-
fortable accommodations to be had over night at a
hamlet called Bonsall. As there were but six hours
of daylight before us when we quenched our road-
130
SPRING DAYS IN A CARRIAGE
side fire near Guajome, and Sylvia had ambitious
designs to paint the little Mission in its evening
color, we pushed on without stop, and just as the
sun nearecl its setting we entered the lovely natural
amphitheater where Pala lies. And there before us,
as fair in its way as Giotto's campanile, shone the
white bell tower designed so long ago by some for-
gotten artist of the church. The old church build-
ings, the corridors and the quadrangle have fallen
badly into decay, but this bell tower with two bells
a-swing from wooden beams in the belfry is in thor-
ough preservation. From an artist's standpoint
the bell tower is the whole of Pala, and Sylvia lost
no time in getting out her paint-box and sketch-
block and setting to work, while I went off upon a
reconnaissance of the country with a view to the
night's lodgings.
When I returned after half an hour's absence, I
suppose my voice betrayed some annoyance, for I
felt it, as I told my troubles :
"I thought we could get accommodations at the
store — those know-it-alls at Santa Barbara said we
could ; but it seems they are going to transfer a new
batch of Indians to this reservation from Warner's
Ranch. There has been a lot of trouble with them
about it, and the storekeeper has had orders from
Washington to allow no strangers to remain on his
premises under penalty of having his license re-
voked. So he referred me to a Senora Somebody
who lives just outside the Government Reservation,
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UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
and I went to see her, but as well as I could make
out from her Spanish — these Mexicans talk a vil-
lainous jargon — the priest from down below is due
any evening on his parochial rounds, and if he
should arrive to-night and find that room preempted,
she thinks there would be a loss to her spiritual wel-
fare, as he always puts up at her house. She passed
me across the road to a Mexican family, and we can
have a room there for six-bits. The woman of the
house seems all right but the place is only a shack,
and of course nobody knows how many fleas board
there."
Sylvia was looking at the bell tower through a
frame of fingers. Was ever there such an inde-
scribable, unpaintable, other-worldly color as that
which glorified it in the mellow twilight?
"It doesn't matter," she murmured absently,
"nothing matters. I could sleep sitting up in the
buggy, for the sake of dwelling one hour in the midst
of such beauty as this. Besides, the color would be
heavenly at sunrise."
Northward by the "Pala grade," as the long, steep
climb is called that leads up from the Pala valley to
the mesa country around Temecula, Gypsy Johnson
pulled us, and here the "Ramona" student needs to
divide himself in many sections to see everything at
once, for this place of tragic memory is a veritable
"Ramona" center. At the village itself one may
see the store that is called HartsePs in the novel;
132
SPRING DAYS IN A CAEEIAGE
some distance to the west is plainly seen the canon
out of which Alessandro and Ramona climbed on the
eventful night of their visit together to Temecula;
and far away to the east, its snowy summit that
spring day of our visit floating like an island of
dreamland upon the unstable vapors of earth, San
Jacinto mountain showed — San Jacinto, upon
whose demon-haunted slope Alessandro met his
cruel death. There are Indians there still — Coahuil-
las, Luisenos and what not — and every year some
excited traveler comes away from that country with
a story of having seen the original Ramona, an an-
cient crone of anywhere from a hundred upward;
and to prove it, shows her photograph ; all of which
gets into the paper to the misguidance of the public.
As Ramona is the regular feminine form of Ramon,
a frequent man's name in Spanish, no doubt there
are Ramonas a-plenty among the California Indian
women, but there is in fact no reason for believing
that Mrs. Jackson's heroine had other existence than
in the fancy of the novelist.
San Jacinto, with its Indian rancherias, its sum-
mer camps, its shadowy forests, and its rugged
peaks lifting the climber two miles above the level
of the sea and affording superb outlooks to the east
over the deserts of California and Arizona and to
the westward across fertile valleys to the Pacific
Ocean — this is a trip to itself. Reluctantly we left
it far off to our right, as we drove along, now
through barley ranches, now across green pasture-
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UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
lands dotted with thousands of browsing kine ; now
over wide, treeless stretches, sandy and rock-strewn
but carpeted in places with wild grasses, filaree, and
myriads of wild flowers of such beauty and abun-
dance as had had no existence for us previously
except in dreams; and where we sometimes would
find ourselves slowly threading our way through an
enormous band of bleating sheep, their shepherd,
canteen on back and staff in hand, following in their
dusty wake, while an anxious-eyed dog with droop-
ing tail kept watch and ward over stragglers.
So by easy stages we jogged into Riverside, Red-
lands and San Bernardino, and then straight west-
ward through fifty miles of orange groves and vine-
yards to our home city of Pasadena.
The liveryman was airing himself at his door as
we drove along, and we stopped to pass the time
of day with him. His practical eye rapidly summed
up the condition of the team, and he smiled affably.
"You don't seem to have had any smashups,"
said he, "and you haven't spavined the mare, and
you're both looking right brown and peart. I
reckon you had a real good time in the country;
now, hadn't you?"
And we assured him we certainly had.
VI. THE PBACTICAL SIDE OF IT
A chapter may be added as to the practical side
of such a trip by carriage as has just been outlined.
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SPRING DAYS IN A CARRIAGE
We were gone fourteen days, and the expense
items for two persons and one horse, were as fol-
lows:
Hire of one horse and top buggy $2 per day $28.00
Keep of horse, average 75 cents per day . . 10.50
Cost of lodging and meals at hotels and
boarding places en route 31.00
Cost of provisions carried and purchased en
route 11.00
$80.50
Making an average expense of $6.00 per day.
It will be found advantageous to give the horse a
full day's rest every four or five days, though if the
daily travel is easy the Sunday rest will be all that
is really needful.
Twenty-five to thirty miles a day for a single
horse on a fairly good country road is an average
day's travel to reckon upon.
There is nothing in the nature of the trip described
that would debar two ladies from undertaking it
alone, provided that one is reasonably familiar with
horseflesh and has a good head for directions.
It is well to have in the carriage a monkey-wrench,
a hatchet, a hank of rope and a few yards of baling
wire. "California," remarked one of our rustic
friends, "would have fallen to pieces long ago, if it
had not been for baling wire. ' ' There will probably
not be need for any of these, but if one requires them
135
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
at all, it will be when out of reach of human assist-
ance, and then they will be needed badly.
It is always best, when putting up the horse at a
stable for the night, to stipulate with the livery man
that he gives the animal a grain feed, also that he
sees to the greasing of the axles.
When one is on the wing and must cook each meal
in a new place, it is of the utmost importance to have
all supplies and utensils in complete order. We
made two bags of turkey-red calico, material that is
easily washed. In one of these were stowed two
saucepans, two frying pans, the coffee pot and sev-
eral tin lids : in the other, enameled-ware plates and
cups, knives, forks and spoons in a cloth, a few tin
plates and small dishes.
All these things should be packed with layers of
newspaper between, and the two bundles tightly tied
can then go on the bottom of the wagon. In a chip
basket, store such provisions as will carry you to the
next stopping-place, salt and pepper in shakers, soap
in a small tin box, and numerous small pieces of
linen, muslin or cheese cloth for use as dish cloths
and tea-towels, one or two of which may be used up
at each stopping-place and left behind, since wet
rags are unpleasant and unprofitable to transport.
In the bottom of the wagon also stow two iron
rings fitted to tripods, which you will find invaluable
in cooking on a camp fire, particularly in desert
country where logs or large stones are not available
to rest your utensils upon over the flame. These
136
SPRING DAYS IN A CARRIAGE
rings are sold at all first class campers' supply
stores.
When you stop for a roadside dinner, the follow-
ing mode of procedure will economize time. As
soon as the carriage is stopped, unload the cooking-
utensil bags (described above) and start a fire, lay-
ing a supply of wood for your hand, needful to keep
the fire going. Do not make a big fire — a small fire
of glowing coal is what you need. Then while the
needs of the horse or horses are being looked after,
set the water on the fire to boil. Next prepare the
potatoes and open what canned things you are going
to use at the meal. Then as soon as the water is
boiling, start first upon the fire whatever will con-
sume the longest time to cook. While this is cook-
ing, set out your dishes, cut the bread and make the
coffee or tea, fry the bacon or whatever other dish is
to be cooked; and by the time the horses have been
attended to, dinner should be ready.
Serve everything hot from the pans and at once
set some water on the fire to boil while you eat, that
there may be hot water for washing up immediately
after dinner. Then when the horses are being
hitched to the carriage, wash everything and repack
the red bags ready for the next time.
When camp is of a more protracted kind, as for
several days, or even over one night, it pays to make
one or more fire-places of stones. Three substantial
stones, each with a fairly smooth top and one fairly
perpendicular side are selected. Two are set paral-
137
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
lei to each other with the perpendicular sides inward,
and just far enough apart to allow the cooking uten-
sils to rest over the space, and the third is set at
right angles across the back. The fire is built be-
tween the stones. It is important that the space
between the stones be arranged so that the coffee
pot or other utensils rest steadily over the flame, or
they are sure to tip over at some critical moment and
not only spill their contents but put out the fire. If
your stay is long enough to warrant it, and fuel is
plentiful, you might as well have the luxury of two
or three of these fire-places, so that several dishes
may be cooked at once.
Should you employ a driver on a carriage trip,
your livery people will probably say that the man
will board himself; but our experience has been that
as the driver is more or less busied with the horses
during the stops for meals, and therefore has little
time to cook on his own behalf, it generally proves
more expeditious to include him at meals with your-
selves. Besides, in the democratic West it does not
do to draw social distinctions too fine, and if your
driver is a tolerably decent sort of fellow — and you
had better have no other kind— it will contribute de-
cidedly to the pleasant feeling to let him know at
the outset that he is welcome to what is provided for
all. Of course, if he has a liking for some special
thing — coffee, for instance, when none of the rest of
the party drinks coffee — it would be in order for him
to prepare this for himself.
138
SPEING DAYS IN A CARRIAGE
Moreover, in making up your budget of supplies,
besides allowing for the driver it is well to provide
some margin to take care of any chance visitors that
may drop into your camp at meal times. In the hos-
pitable, thinly settled stretches of rural California,
where every door is open to the stranger, you will
want to be equally open-handed to white or Indian,
who may stop at your camp. No one would ever
expect you to cook anything extra for him, but a
share of whatever might be most convenient — if only
crackers and tea — would, if cordially and heartily
offered, be as cordially and heartily received.
139
THE FRANCISCAN MISSIONS
I. AFOOT ON THE PADRES' PATHWAY
IT is the fashion nowadays to call it by its old Span-
ish name, El Camino Real — the King's High-
way — and to travel it, if one travels it at all, by mo-
tor-car, making the run from San Diego to Los An-
geles between a late breakfast and an early tea ; then
to Santa Barbara in another day, and on to Paso
Robles the third; to Monterey the fourth, spending
the night at Del Monte; and on the evening of the
fifth, you slip leisurely into San Francisco to a bath
and a comfortable dinner. Or you may reverse the
procedure.
To one with a taste for the outdoors and the ro-
mance that clings to Franciscan Missions, there is a
great delight in this trip of six hundred miles over
roads rich in sights more Old-Worldly than New,
and never dull. To be sure, they are somewhat
chequered in condition — sometimes hub-deep in
sand, again sticky with mud, oftener reasonably good,
and not infrequently like park boulevards ; but each
day of the five is novel in its scenery. To-day you
are skirting a sunset sea ; to-morrow threading moun-
tain canons ; now crossing huge ranches dotted with
140
THE FRANCISCAN MISSIONS
grazing cattle or given over to the raising of beans
and sugar-beets by the thousand acres, where Hin-
dus and Japanese, in picturesque toggery, labor in
the sun. Here you skim over breezy mesa-lands un-
der a sky like Italy's, with no evidence of humanity
in sight ; and then you descend into agricultural val-
leys where the presence of the olive, the pomegran-
ate, the fig, the prune and the orange, and the adobe
abodes of swart Mexicans, deepen the illusion
that this is not the United States, but a foreign
land.
Personally I prefer walking, the way of the heroic
old Franciscans themselves, who, gowned and
girdled and with umbrella on shoulder, were accus-
tomed to foot it when they stirred abroad. But
since the shortness of life prevents most of us who
are not professional pedestrians from often under-
taking six-hundred-mile jaunts on foot, I find it ex-
pedient to do my Mission pilgriming in sections, cov-
ering by train such parts of the intermediate
stretches as suit my convenience. So is needless
fatigue saved and the sentiment kept of pilgrimage
to the hallowed places of earth in becoming humil-
ity.
In point of fact, the precise trails the Padres fol-
lowed from Mission to Mission are now largely a
matter of conjecture. The elements and the chang-
ing requirements of the times have obliterated them
so that even tradition is wanting as to many of them.
141
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
Nevertheless, the road of to-day that joins all the
missions, like beads on a string, is near enough the
original to preserve the atmosphere of the adven-
ture, even if the finical student of things as they ex-
actly were, mourns its divagations.
Of all such foot excursions I like most, I think, the
memory of the one to the ruined Mission San An-
tonio de Padua, in Monterey county. If one drops
off the train at the dreary little town of Soledad, and
crosses the Salinas River by a crazy bit of foot-bridge
that is in evidence when the water is low, one may
walk in the very foot-steps of Serra and Portola
(California's first governor) past the crumbling
mud walls of the Mission Nuestra Senora de la Sole-
dad — Our Lady of Solitude — up the Arroyo Seco
Canon through Reliz Pass into the seclusion of the
lonely Canada de los Robles where is what remains
of the San Antonio Mission. In silent dignity by its
little river it stands in a solitude almost as profound
as on that summer day of 1771 when, as the old
chronicle tells us, Padre Junipero Serra and his com-
panions arrived there from Monterey, and swinging
their church bells from the branch of an oak, Serra
satisfied the longing of his apostolic heart by ringing
them furiously and crying at the top of his voice for
all the Indian gentiles to hear who might, "Come,
come, come to Holy Church: come to receive the
faith of Jesus Christ!"
That, however, is more than one day's walk for
most legs and through a mountainous region so
142
THE FKANCISCAN MISSIONS
sparsely settled that the attempt might necessitate a
night under the stars. So, sending my grip ahead
by stage, I set out from King City by the broad high-
way Which many of the motorists follow, into the
foothills of the Sierra Santa Lucia, up the Jimlo
grade with its magnificent outlooks, and down into
the oak glades of the San Antonio river basin,
twenty pleasant miles to Jolon — they pronounce it
Ho-lone' — where is the nearest public house to the
Mission.
Thus faring, towards evening, I fell in with Frater
Vagabundus. Of course, that was not his name.
He volunteered none and I did not ask. It is not eti-
quette to inquire names in the rural West, where
men have been known to work side by side very con-
tentedly for a year or two, knowing one another only
as "Slim" or " Shorty. " Frater Vagabundus was
a stocky man of middle age and imperturbable coun-
tenance, with a stubby red beard and a pipe in his
mouth. He was decently enough dressed, as a work-
ing-man might be, and swung over his left shoulder
by a broad strap was a roll of blankets. In one hand
he carried a covered lard-kettle that tinkled with a
sound as of tin utensils within. He was a type of
pedestrian one often encounters on California high-
ways. They may be seen plodding from one end of
the State to the other, their bed-rolls upon their
backs, ostensibly in quest of work, but probably im-
pelled mostly by the rover's taste for fresh air and
a change of scene. Yet they seem a grade above the
143
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
professional hobo of comic literature and the police
court. As we were bound in the same direction, we
dropped into step and chatted a bit together. He
was not averse to speech, but his words came slowly
and rustily, as if little used.
" Lots of mechanics on the road now," he ob-
served; "people are not hiring much/'
"And you," said I, "what is your trade?"
"Oh, I'm just a common laborer," he replied with
unexpected humility, "but I pick up a job now and
then. Even if it doesn't pay any money, there's a
meal of wittles in it, and that's worth while. Some
of the boys are .always watching to beat their way
on the cars ; but, says I, what good does that do 'em?
They can't get no work that way. Once a rancher
hired me all winter to do chores for grub and lodg-
ing— he couldn't afford to pay out money — and the
boys said I was a fool. But I guess not. I had rum-
atism in my legs and couldn't walk good, and the
rest done me good. I've been up in Alameda
County, and it got bum there, and I think mebbe
times is better in the south, so me and another fel-
low we're headin' for Los Angeles. I'm looking for
him now" — glancing down the road back of him —
"he's back there a piece. We know a wacant house,
not far from here, where we can sleep."
"Oh, it don't cost much to live on the road," he
went on, "I always carry a loaf of bread and some
coffee, and I've rice enough now to last a week.
Then at the railroad warehouses they'll almost al-
144
THE FEANCISCAN MISSIONS
ways give you a handful of beans, and I'm here to
tell you beans stays by you. In the morning I have
coffee and bread, and I don't need nothin' more till
along about five o'clock and then I make up a fire
and have rice, and when it's dark I roll up in my
blankets and sleep till morning. Sometimes there's
several of us camps together, and company's cheer-
ful."
Here a little trail struck off from the road, and my
companion stepped into it.
"Well, I'm leavin' you here," he said, "solong
and be good."
I had gone but a few rods on my way, ruminating
upon the new glimpse into life my vagabond friend
had opened up to me, when I heard a scuffling noise
at my feet, and there, caught by one long ear in the
savage barbs of a wire fence, cowered a trembling
jack-rabbit. He had beaten a pathetic little pathway
on the ground in his frantic efforts to get free, and
his bleeding ear was half torn through, but enough
remained to hold him. Frater Vagabundus was still
in sight, and I called to him to come.
"Here's your supper," I said.
He caught up a billet from the ground, and with a
blow, released poor Jack from his misery.
"You bet that'll make a fine stew," he chuckled,
his eyes a-sparkle, as he held the rabbit up by its
hind-legs.
"I like to take photographs as I travel," I ven-
tured; "would you mind if I take yours!"
145
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
He gave a seared glance at the camera and quickly
averted his face.
"No, .no," he stammered, backing away, "I — I'm
not dressed good enough."
So did I learn that Frater Vagabundus had a past,
and I was sorry.
Jolon is a quaint mountain hamlet, old as things
go in our West, and of a look unusual in California's
villages — a look of finished snugness, almost Eng-
lish, beneath venerable oaks. There are a couple of
roadside taverns with roomy verandas and balconies,
a store or two, a grimy blacksmith shop beside a
spreading tree, and in winter a generous bit of
green. Of the two inns, Button's picturesquely
festooned with a huge grape-vine that dates back to
the Padres' day, would probably get the asterisk of
commendation in Baedeker, if either would, though
at "four bits for beds and four bits for meals,"
which is the Dutton tariff, one is not to be too fas-
tidious. Button's is, however, the real thing in old-
fashioned rural inns, and, after a comfortable coun-
try supper, it is pleasant to sit in an arm-chair by
the huge fireplace in the bar and toast your toes,
read the San Francisco morning paper and listen to
the talk of the local publicans and sinners. Having
attained a certain age, Jolon has lost the crudity of
the typical Wild West border village ; and if you are
looking for a Bret Harte setting, you will not find it
there, but rather something more like the atmos-
phere of "The Rainbow" in George Eliot's tale or
146
THE FRANCISCAN MISSIONS
the "Six Jolly Fellowship Porters" of Dickens.
There is, to be sure, the miner, inseparable from the
California mountains, but he of Jolon is a quiet, be-
nevolent-looking mountain of a man, tipping the
scales at 320 pounds, they say, in a shirt neither red
nor flannel, and who plays cribbage every night with
the barber, pegging the score with three-penny nails.
As for gambling, when there is any, it is nothing
more reckless than "pitch pedro" for nickels, in
which the jovial landlord, six feet two in his stock-
ings and Falstaffian of paunch, likes to take a hand,
and loses four bits or so with an equanimity that
enhances his popularity with his partners in the
game— Frank who clerks in the store and Black Bill,
the hostler, for Jolon is democratic. A sprinkling
of Spanish "fellows" from the mountain ranches, a
Socialistic blacksmith with radical views on taxation,
and a chance traveler or two, like myself, complete
the company, who, after swapping the neighborhood
news, discussing the prospects of the fishing season
and settling the affairs of the nation at large, dis-
perse soberly at nine o'clock, and fifteen minutes
later, Jolon lies slumbering.
Lamps were still burning in Jolon kitchens
when, next morning in the nipping dawn, I set forth
by the westward road that leads through the Milpi-
tas Rancho to the Mission. It is a country of wild
pasture-lands and of scattered oaks. The leafless
branches that winter morning were draped in gray,
hanging lichens and clotted with witches' brooms of
147
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
pale green mistletoe. Along the hills there was a
shrill clamor of coyotes, and with the sun's first level
rays that lighted to rose color the purple deeps of
the Santa Lucias ahead of me, came the lamenting
of wild doves and the sleepy twitter of innumerable
small birds awakened. So for five miles, when the
road emerged from the trees into a wide grassy
Canada, or level valley, where meadow-larks were
singing in the sun. A mile away, on a hill-top amid
trees, was a house of the Milpitas Rancho, but
straight ahead at the end of the road the facade of
San Antonio Mission with its one corridored wing
shone white. Of all its aforetime extensive domain,
only a few acres remain to it now, about which a
wire fence is drawn to protect the crumbling ruin
from the cattle of the surrounding ranch. Within
the enclosure two small black swine that morning
were rooting in the grass, and when the sound of my
footsteps reached them, they lifted curious snouts
and ears at me and grunted audibly— perhaps a wel-
come. Somehow, it seemed a fitting greeting, this
salutation of the humble beasties on ground dedi-
cated to the saint whose love for the lower animals
was as tender and all-embracing as was that of his
Father Francis.
A few years ago, the Landmarks Club made a
start at repairing the wreck which time and vandals
have made of this Mission's buildings; but, beyond
clearing out the fallen rubbish within the church
148
THE FRANCISCAN MISSIONS
building, strengthening the walls and putting on a
shingle roof, they had accomplished little when the
money ran out. Once a year, on June thirteenth,
Saint Anthony 's day, a priest comes to hold re-
ligious service in the church, and people gather from
miles around to attend and make it a fiesta day. At
other times, the edifice appears to be reduced to a
sanctuary for stray tramps and birds. In the empty
sockets high under the roof, where dead-and-gone
beams once rested, mud swallows build their nests,
and as I walked the deserted nave, two owls of the
species Calif ornians graphically call "monkey-
faced" flew up from the high rafters over the altar
where they had been dreaming out the day, and
flapped blindly about. The hand of irreverence has
indeed been laid hard on San Antonio. Empty
whiskey bottles were scattered that day about the
floor, amid the slovenly remains of a tramp's camp
who had lately helped himself to free lodging there ;
and the plastered walls, as high as the arm of man
could reach, were literally covered with the scratched
and scribbled names of visitors. More cheerful is
what remains of the Padres' garden into which one
steps from a side-door of the sacristy. Here, shut
out from the world, in the blessed sunshine, with a
bee or two for company, I sat on a bit of green turf
under an ancient budding pear tree and ate my
luncheon garnished with cress from the little brook
that flowed back of the Mission into the San Antonio
149
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
river. A few rose bushes, some tamarisks and a
blossoming currant or two, still maintained a strug-
gling existence there, though the hands that planted
and tended them were long since dust.
From the ranch-house on the hill a mellow-voiced
bell sounded, bidding to their midday meal some
half-breed laborers who were ploughing in the fertile
land below the old campo santo by the river — labor-
ers whose ancestors had bowed their heads on other
noons at the call of the angelus bell from the Mission
belfry. As its tones died away, I looked up and saw
a horseman beyond the broken wall. He was an
elderly man, lantern- jawed, dark of visage and spare
of frame. Dismounting stiffly, he threw the reins
over his horse's head, and leaving the animal to
graze, he approached and saluted me with the
gravity of demeanor that characterizes the well-born
Spaniard. For Spanish he proved to be, as he in-
formed me by and by, with some pride — a grandson
of one of Portola's corporals. His grandfather,
when he left the service, had been given a hundred
gentle cows, a hundred dollars and a grant of land
which had remained in the family until the coming
of the Americans, who, by processes peculiar to the
time, managed to oust the corporal's descendants
and got for themselves from Washington a title to
his King-given acres.
"Melancholy business, this," said my visitor,
slowly inhaling the smoke of his cigarette and look-
ing through half -closed eyes at the ruined buildings.
150
THE FKANCISCAN MISSIONS
" Fifty- three years ago, when I came to this region,
although that was twenty-five years after the con-
fiscation of the Missions under the Mexican Secular-
ization Act, there was still abundant life here. The
church and the buildings around this quadrangle
were then in very good repair, and families lived in
them. There was a Spanish curate in residence and
he loved the Mission and the old ways. I knew him
well — he died in 1881. He was a real father to the
people — very different from the Irish priests who
followed, and who cared nothing for the old order
and let everything go to rack in a few years. And
yet, for all the devastation of the American and
Mexican vandals, who have robbed the place of
everything movable, as rats riddle a cheese, nothing
would be easier, if I only had the money some of yon
Americans have to burn, than to restore the main
buildings here and show the world to-day how a
typical Mission really looked a century ago ; for the
foundations of the principal features are still plain
—the church, the Indians' houses, the shops, the
sleeping quarters, the irrigation works, the burying
ground, the Fathers' garden here. You are inter-
ested in such things, sir? I will show you the plan
of the original Mission."
And the old man, his eyes sparkling and his face
alight, drew eagerly with a stick upon the ground
this rough outline, and pointed out the features as
I have marked them.
151
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
Monjerio or Women's
Quarters-Here unrnar-
rieo. inciian^irls lived.
Indian 3*
Q\xa,rter£
Garden
O
3
M»«
0
£
Interior Corridors
Sacristy
i
»-«
3
O
5
(0
a
0
"""of"
P
0
1
0>
o
C
ff
Interior Corridors
C qnven
to
a- •
iv in £ T
i ^ (
oomr
3)
Front Corridor
Plan of Mission San Antonio as it originally stood. It represents
the general plan of the Franciscan structures in California.
"Ah, the old days of Church and King," he went
on, rolling a fresh cigarette; "that was a life worth
while. Now we live in a fever and all the country
is under the goad of the Anglo-Saxon whip; and
pardon me sir, everything the Anglo-Saxon touches
he vulgarizes. But then it was different. The
Church hunted souls, not dollars. The Indians were
152
THE FRANCISCAN MISSIONS
made fit for heaven and were taught to lead lives
of usefulness here; the gente de razon — the white
people — if they had little money, had abundance of
the material comforts of life, a full larder and
horses and cattle unnumbered, and they were rich,
sir, in time, good manners and reverence for
Church and authority. There were no lawyers in
the country, and a man's word was security enough.
In those days the Missions were the only inns, and
the bill was nothing. A man traveling on horseback
could reach a Mission every night. He would be
insulting the Father if he did not stop, and he was
welcome to stay as long as he liked, with a good
room to himself and a seat in the place of honor at
table. On leaving, he could have a fresh horse if he
liked and a guide to the next Mission.
"And now I want to say about the Indians. Can
you imagine what it was for two or three priests and
a handful of soldiers to stop at a spot like this in a
pure wilderness — not a civilized soul within fifty or
a hundred miles — and start a Mission such as this
was? When the books tell you that this establish
ment, for instance, dates from 1771, which was the
time of its foundation, you must not think that the
walls you now see were erected in that year. It was
many years before such buildings could be erected;
for, after setting up a wooden cross and stringing the
church bells on a framework by a temporary brush-
chapel, and invoking the blessing of God, the first step
was to make workmen out of untrained savages.
153
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
That, sir, takes time, and more time, patience and the
help of God. Brick and tiles had to be made on the
spot from the earth about them; suitable trees for
timbers had to be cut out in the mountains — and in
some cases that meant transportation on the backs of
Indians over trails where none was before ; lime had
to be made from shells gathered far away on the sea-
shore. The construction from this raw material of
these edifices, which even in their decay awaken ad-
miration for their beauty, went on at the same time
with the spiritual instruction of the Indians; and
when finished, each establishment was both a Chris-
tian temple, and a beehive of temporal industry.
Under the direction of the Fathers, the Indian neo-
phytes were taught blacksmithing and carpentry,
brick-making and stone-cutting, tailoring, shoemak-
ing and saddlery; they were shown how to prepare
the ground and raise crops ; to dress olive-yards and
vineyards; to herd sheep and cattle; to be millers
and butchers and bakers — in short, to cover at each
Mission the whole round of activities needful to sup-
port a community modeled on lines of European civi-
lization. In the case of Indians who manifested
artistic sense, care was taken to develop it and turn
it to use in the adornment of the church walls, in
the manufacture of metal vessels for the altar, in
wood and stone-carving, in lace-making, and in
leather work. You have doubtless seen in the active
Missions of to-day relics of this art-work, as inter-
esting in its way as the architecture. Music was
154
THE FEANCISCAN MISSIONS
also assiduously taught, and the making of some
kinds of musical instruments.
"The life under the Padres was, of course, com-
munistic and strictly regulated. At daybreak, I
have heard the old curate say, everyone was astir
and had to attend early mass; then came a frugal
breakfast of atole, a soup of corn or ground roast
barley, a big dipperf ul to each person ; then the men
went to work in the shops, fields or orchards, the
girls, in charge of a duenna, to their sewing, weav-
ing or grinding and the young children to school
within the Mission. At noon, the angelus sounded
and everybody came to a dinner of pozole, a kind of
porridge in which meat and beans or peas were prin-
cipal ingredients. Two hours were allowed for din-
ner and rest; and then to work again for two or
three hours. At five o'clock all were rung to church
again for an hour's religious teaching, instruction in
Spanish and hymn-singing. Then came supper of
atole and the evening was given over to recreation —
dancing, music and games in this patio or in the
kitchen. All the food was supplied from the Mis-
sion's community stock; the unmarried received
theirs already cooked, but the married ones got only
the raw material which they had to cook themselves.
When a, young man wanted to marry, he told the
head of his guild— all the laborers were classed in
guilds, according to their trade — and that man told
the Mission alcalde or judge; then the alcalde in-
formed the Padre, who would call the young couple
155
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
before him and talk the matter over, and if it seemed
a right match, he would marry them. After the
marriage, they were given an apartment and regular
rations of uncooked victuals. And that was Mission
life.
"Oh, of course, there was rebellion sometimes,"
the old man continued as he rose to go, "that's hu-
man nature; even white people will quarrel with
their bread and butter; but generally the spanking
of the ringleader laid across the Padre's knee, or the
locking up of a few of the malcontents in the stocks
till they cooled off, was all that was needed to restore
order. Ah, well, it's all one now. Of all the Indi-
ans that this San Antonio Mission brought into the
bosom of the Church — and at one time, there were
more than a thousand neophytes on its rolls — all are
gone except a solitary family who are tolerated to
live a few miles from here on the lands of this ranch.
After the secularization, the Indians were like a
sheep without a shepherd or a fold. Gringo whisky
and white men's diseases carried them off like flies.
The Americans regarded them merely as thieves and
vagrants, with no more rights than wild animals,
and shot them as they shot coyotes if they insisted
on being in the way. Spain, sir, never deprived a
Mission Indian of land to live on — it was reserved to
this great republic, founded on the common freedom
and equality of all men, to deny him ground to stand
on. And so ends the story. I hope my garrulity
has not tired you, but I have seen much, and read
156
In the Campo Santo of Santa Barbara Mission
THE FRANCISCAN MISSIONS
much, and my tongue cannot always be silent.
Adios, sir."
And yet, as one travels the Padres' pathway to-
day, one is made aware that theirs is not all an ended
story. If Indians are not, there are in the land un~
regenerate white folk a-plenty, and many a Mission
bell still calls in the service of the Cross. The Mis-
sions that are still in use are mostly in charge of the
secular clergy, but at two, at least, San Luis Rey
and Santa Barbara, the brethren of the Franciscan
Order in their brown gowns and white rope-girdles,
maintain their old community life in a restricted
way.
The Mission at Santa Barbara is, of all the chain,
perhaps the best known to the tourist, and in a way
it is of all to-day the most heartening, because of its
well-groomed appearance and the active, cheerful
life that is going on under its roof and in its fields
and gardens, where the bareheaded brothers in the
conventional garb of their order come and go con-
tinually. A college for the education of novitiates
is maintained close by, which in part accounts for
the air of active routine that prevails. Santa Bar-
bara was the last of the Missions in which Serra was
personally concerned, and a pathetic interest at-
taches to it because of the heartbreaking delays in
starting the building after he had selected the site —
delays due to the antagonism of the Territorial Gov-
ernor Neve, who was determined, if he could, to
break up the Mission. And so Serra, in disappoint-
157
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
ment, died without seeing the first stone laid. Two
years later, in 1786, building was at last begun. A
beautiful adjunct of this Mission is the Padres > gar-
den with its variety of plants, its pleasant shaded
walks, and its quiet seclusion promoting meditation.
To the woman visitor this enclosure is a tantalizing
matter, if she catches a glimpse of it through an
open door, for into it only men are admitted. "It
seems/' to quote the words of an urbane Padre,
"that since our Mother Eve through her fatal curi-
osity brought upon her daughters the curse of ex-
pulsion from Eden, the Franciscan Order does not
subject any other woman to a similar temptation. "
The ancient cemetery, however, which occupies a
quiet corner of the Mission grounds within high,
time-stained walls, is garden enough to satisfy any
reasonable taste — a lovely, peaceful campo santo
where palm and cypress cast cool shadows and flow-
ers bloom by every path.
Then there is San Gabriel, the first Mission the
tourist sees if he comes to California by the Los
Angeles gateway.
" These Mission was found in 1771 by the Fran-
ciscan Fathers. The picture at the left of these
altar is Saint Joseph, these other is Saint Gabriel
Archangel ; these picture here is the Blessed Virgin,
very old by Spanish master. These wall was built
by Indians; here is the baptis' font which eight
thousand Indians were baptise', and are buried all
around the chorch."
158
THE FRANCISCAN MISSIONS
It is the voice of gentle Father Bot, late Padre of
San Gabriel but now gathered to his everlasting
rest. Through an open window float the ecstatic
notes of the meadow-lark and the fragrance of or-
ange blossoms. Although' it is March, the air is soft
and still, and a pair of dark-faced Latins of whom
we catch a glimpse through the window, have found
the sun very hot and are refreshing themselves by
rolling a cigarette apiece in the checkered shadow
of a fig tree just bursting into leaf. No, it is not
Italy, nor Andalusia ; but one of the newest, richest
and most progressive of the United States. Clus-
tered about the Mission is perhaps the quaintest old-
time Mexican village now to be found in California,
with picturesque adobe houses shaded by old trees
and smothered often in clambering roses, with gay
little gardens gathered about them.
"Yes," observed mine hostess of "The Grape-
vine" with complacency, "it's a pretty spot. I
think if the Lord left any place on earth for Him-
self to return to, it would be San Gabriel."
Five or six years ago the electric railway com-
pany which has gridironed with its tracks all the
country around Los Angeles, put in a branch to San
Gabriel, and that remains the principal evidence of
American enterprise in the sleepy little place to-day.
Nothing can be more incongruous than the big, red,
noisy trolley cars, clanging and banging every half-
hour down the narrow little main street, and dis-
charging their loads of curious American sightseers
159
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
by the old Padres ' garden gate ; and if you are sensi-
tive about such matters, you will do well to let the
car go hang, and walk to the village — a mile or so—
by the quiet country-road lined with eucalyptus, that
leads down to San Gabriel from El Molino Station
on the Los Angeles-Monrovia line. Only so, or by
carriage, may one, entering the village, enter also
into the Old World atmosphere which is its great
charm.
There is a quaint adobe fonda there, with eye-like
windows in a squat roof and a patio hidden from
the sky by an immense, spreading grapevine. It is
not listed among the tourist hotels of the Land of
Sunshine, but the unconventional traveler with a
taste for life that smacks of the soil, will find it an
interesting experience to take a room there for a day
or two, and mix with the people. Real tamales,
frijoles and chili con came are to be had — not the
canned products of a Chicago packing-house; and,
if you are not a teetotaler, there are wines, sweet
and dry, from San Gabriel vineyards. Of an after-
noon, games of hand-ball are to be watched in open-
air courts, the score shouted in Spanish; and in the
dusky evening the strumming of guitars offsets the
unromantic clamor of the trolley gong. Then there
is the daily possibility of a Mexican christening
party or a wedding within the Mission walls; and
always thrice a day the angelus sounds from the bel-
fry its solemn call to prayer. For the Mission San
Gabriel, while a professional show-place under the
160
THE FRANCISCAN MISSIONS
care now of an order of Spanish priests, who have
an eye to income and charge you "two bits" apiece
to show the interior of the building, is an active in-
strumentality of the Church; and though shorn of
the temporal wealth which in common with all the
California Missions it possessed until three-quarters
of a century ago, it is still a center of religious life
having a spiritual care over a populous parish where
English is as a foreign language.*
II. IN THE SANTA BARBARA BACK-COUNTRY
"I've lived in California only seven years,"
said I, "and I'm still a bit tender in places;
so tell me what is a skinner?"
"Why, a skinner," replied the Calif ornian in the
red bandanna neckerchief — he had but one eye and it
was full of surprise at my ignorance — "a skinner is
a man that skins a team. Gosh, I supposed anybody
knowed that. ' '
"You mean," I ventured, "a teamster, as some
people say?"
"Sure," he nodded; "and they'll always give a
foot man a lift; so I guess you'll have no trouble
* The story of the Missions has been cast in dramatic form by
a Los Angeles literary man, Mr. John S. McGroarty, and under the
title "The Mission Play" was staged at San Gabriel in 1912 in a
little theater especially built for it beneath the eucalyptus across
the street from the Mission. It is purposed to make the play a
permanent feature of San Gabriel, and to produce it annually during
the winter tourist season.
161
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
hoofing it in the country back there. But if it was
me that was going, I'd hire me a pony and be inde-
pendent. ' '
That anybody should undertake a jaunt of a hun-
dred and fifty miles or so on foot for the pleasure of
walking was unthinkable by the conventional West-
ern mind ; but I was already familiar with the strong
points of tripping afoot, and the lure of that splen-
did chain of mountains back of Santa Barbara, with
their fame of sparkling trout-streams and deer-
haunted trails through fragrant chaparral and
primeval woodlands, their patriarchal ranchos with
Spanish names and their sequestered valleys where
living rivers run, was strong within me. To motor
there seemed out of key with such a land, though
thousands do it; and, besides, motoring is expensive.
To take a team meant responsibility and risk; for,
with the possibility of meeting a flying automobile
at any time on the narrow ledges that do service as
roads in our Western mountains, the joy of driving
in such regions is nowadays far from an unmixed
one. No, for me "the footpath way," with kodak
over my shoulder, a pocketful of dried figs, and free-
dom from care. Yet that hint about the pony stuck
pleasantly in my thought. Why not try both ways?
I would.
If you look at a map, you will notice that the north-
ern boundary of what is called Southern California is
a three-hundred-mile line of lofty mountains stretch-
ing west from the Mojave desert to the Pacific Ocean
162
THE FEANCISCAN MISSIONS
at Point Conception. This long-drawn huddle of
mountains is bisected1 some forty miles northwest of
Los Angeles by the San Francisquito Canon, and
from this point a hundred miles westward is a maze
of mountain country which forms to Santa Barbara
a hinterland of great beauty and interest. Thanks
to the State's lively interest in good roads, supple-
mented by the United States Forestry Service, which
is interlacing the forest reserves with a system of
splendid trails, the region is exceptionally accessible
to travelers, and the automobile horn is now a com-
monplace in mountain solitudes that, less than a de-
cade ago, knew no more civilized sound than the
whistle of quail or the bark of the coyote. Public
camps and good roadside hostelries provide abund-
antly for the entertainment of visitors, and while the
distance between is sometimes a matter of a day's
jaunt for the pedestrian, one can always count upon
a roof and a hot meal each night.
The prevailing style of inn is on the cottage plan ;
that is, close to a main building a number of small
cottages are clustered. In some cases there is one
room only, though oftener these cottages contain
several. Here guests are lodged, meals being served
in a general dining-room in the central building.
The automobile patronage has become so sure a fac-
tor in the business of the roadside boniface that good
service can now be maintained where formerly, in as
wild a country as this, only the simplest provision
could be risked for the chance traveler's comfort.
163
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
As a matter of fact, no better accommodation is
given, even in well-groomed England with its famous
rural inns, than I have enjoyed in this Santa Bar-
bara back-country.
It was a May afternoon when I made acquaintance
with my first among these pleasant hostelries, which
was set in a snug little spot at a canon's mouth.
The air, as I walked up the roadway to the house,
was sweet with the perfume of lemon blossoms from
an adjacent grove where mocking-birds were sing-
ing. The main building was shaded by enormous
live-oaks, and its outlying cottages were embowered
in roses, red and white and golden. A motor-car
stood under a wide-spreading oak before the steps;
two ladies in riding-habits were preparing to mount
their horses for an hour's canter before dinner; an
old gentleman in an easy chair was dozing over his
paper. Off in a garden nearby I could see a maid
gathering lettuce. Everything about the place be-
spoke "horneyness" and comfort. The room to
which I was shown was a fair counterpart of many
that I have occupied in England, with prettily cur-
tained windows, snowy sheets and pillows, and a fire
all laid for the lighting, should I need it. And a few
steps off in a room at the end of the veranda was a
porcelain-lined bathtub. The charge for lodging
and for two delicious meals, deftly served by a dark-
haired, ruddy-cheeked granddaughter of Spain, was
two dollars. Ever after as I walked, the memory of
that pleasant cottage-inn served to preserve a Chris-
164
THE FBANCISCAN MISSIONS
tian spirit within me when some bouncing, speeding
car honk-honked me into the ditch and smothered me
in dust, as not infrequently happened. "Were it
not for this motoring gentry/' I would say to my-
self, "such inns could not afford to be, and some mil-
lennial day, mayhap, our lords of the road will learn
consideration for the farer afoot — who knows 1"
The particular gem of the Santa Barbara back-
country is the Ojai Valley. The road to it is of fa-
mous beauty, following the sea to Carpinteria ; then
crossing a mountain pass of exquisite charm to the
Ventura Kiver, and beyond threading a winding
course for miles, dappled with shadows cast by over-
arching boughs, through unbroken woodlands by the
side of a musical mountain stream, which, if you are
of a leisurely turn, you may whip for trout as you
go, and catch some. The valley itself is a rare spot
of quiet loveliness of small area, encompassed with
protecting mountains whose chaparral-covered
slopes are green winter and summer. The Ojaians
tell you that the queer name of their home (you are
to pronounce it 0-high) is Indian for nest, and a nest
it looks, lapped in the great mountains. Magnifi-
cent oak trees everywhere dot the valley floor, and
the one village — Nordhoff, named in honor of Cali-
fornia's pioneer eulogist — is hidden quite by these
primeval trees, from many of which swing streamers
of gray lichen, reminding one of the moss-draped
live-oaks of the Southern Atlantic seaboard. Of
all California villages, Nordhoff is the most sylvan
165
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
and about the only one free from metropolitan aspi-
rations. Its rusticity is its fortune and it knows it.
What with its tree-embowered inns, its shady black-
smith shop, its leafy lanes and here and there a stone
fence and bowlder-strewn pasture, it has about it
something of the atmosphere of a New England ham-
let. It is a mecca for tennis players who for seven-
teen years have flocked here from all quarters to at-
tend the annual spring tournament of the Ojai Val-
ley Tennis Club on its pretty oak-fringed courts.
Here and there among the oaks on the outskirts of
the village and for a mile or two beyond, are many
little cottages half-smothered in roses.
''No, they're not farm houses," said a " skinner, "
hauling oranges, who picked me up on the road one
day, "some of 'em are just sort of camps for tour-
ists who like to spend the winter here in a bully cli-
mate ; and some of 'em is where consumptive fellows
live. The hotels won't take them; so they rent a
place to themselves. I don't know as it often cures
'em, but they live longer here. Living in the Ojai is
pretty near the same as bein' in heaven, anyhow, I
say, and when you die it's just a step across."
In May, after the winter rains are over and the be-
ginning of the six months' dry season daily lowers
the mountain streams to fordable proportions, sum-
mer camps open up at many places along the upper
waters of the Sespe or the Matilija or the Santa
Ynez, for the accommodation of anglers and other
vacationers. At such resorts, a couple of dollars a day
166
THE FRANCISCAN MISSIONS
or ten per week will pay for one's keep if he has
stomach for a plain, though in the main wholesome
table, and likes his lodging beneath a roof. Of
course, you lack here the genteel attentions of the
automobile inns ; the waitress startles you with such
blunt queries as, "Are you going to have steak or
chops ?" and "What '11 you have to drink ? " and on
Sunday evenings quite naturally turns up in the par-
lor with the guests to listen to the graphophone, take
a hand at cards, or join in the hymn singing, if
there is any.
Sauntering over these open mountains through
miles upon miles of chaparral — that sun-scorched
tangle of sumac and manzanita, adenostoma, islay
and wild lilac, rarely above a man's head in height
—I wondered that it should be considered worth in-
cluding in the Government's forest reserves, as it is.
A keen-eyed, rugged-faced man, whose bronze but-
tons adorned with the image of a pine tree pro-
claimed him a forest ranger, overtook me on the trail
one day and explained. He rode one horse and led
another bearing tight-packed cowhide alforjas and a
bundle of bedding, and did not mind if he did not get
home for a month.
"Of course, chaparral's no account for timber, "
he said, "but it grows so thick over the mountains,
it performs, in considerable measure, what timber
does for the water supply — it conserves the mois-
ture in the ground. Then again, it needs to be
watched against fires ; if they get started in it once,
167
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
they spread like the dickens and run into the good
timber in the canons and on the higher mountains.
You see, lots of this chaparral is just greasewood,
and somebody going along throws away a live ciga-
reet end, not thinking, in summer when every-
thing's as dry as preachin', and before you know
it, the fat's in the fire."
The valley of the Santa Ynez River, which lies
behind the same Saint Agnes 's mountain range
that backs Santa Barbara, is one of the sort of re-
gions becoming fewer every year, where the pictur-
esque California life of half a century ago still
lingers. The ranches there are no forty-acre af-
fairs, but mount into the thousands — fifteen, twenty,
fifty and even sixty and seventy thousand. Through
one of them, the San Marcos, the public highway
runs for twelve miles with barred gates across it
where it enters and leaves the ranch. The railway
touches only the outer skirt of this great valley
given over to hay camps, sheep walks and cattle
ranges. Here you may witness sheep-shearing as
described in "Ramona" and watch Spanish vaqueros
throwing the lariat, as their powerful, sure-footed
horses — no slabsided cayuses for this business —
carry them at a breakneck pace up and down rocky
hillsides that you might suppose goats would think
twice about. Or you may drop in at country barbe-
cues under the patriarchal oaks and be heartily wel-
come to Gargantuan steaks broiled over the coals
and unstinted draughts of coffee boiled in cauldrons.
168
THE FRANCISCAN MISSIONS
Into this Santa Ynez country there are three en-
trances from the south, good roads, as mountain
roads go, through passes of rare beauty. I elected
to go by way of the San Marcos and return by the
Gaviota, and, as the village of Santa Ynez is forty
miles from Santa Barbara and no surety could be
given me that any roadside house was open as early
in the season as the time of my journeying, I un-
wisely hired a pony with saddle-bags to transport
me and my handful of baggage. He was guaran-
teed gentle as a kitten; but he turned out to be a
cantankerous, opinionated little beast, with a minc-
ing amble of a gait, when he was not walking, and
an unquenchable desire to turn around in the road
every whipstitch and strike out for home. He was
as much trouble to me as Stevenson's Modestine
or John Muir's memorable mule, and I had better
never have taken him; for, as there proved to be a
good inn in commission half-way to Santa Ynez, the
trip could have been quite comfortably managed
afoot.
The San Marcos road, however, with its glorious
outlook seaward to where the Channel Islands lie,
and inland across green depths of canons to the
misty peaks of the Santa Ynez Sierra, and bordered,
as the way was that pleasant May day, with wild
blossoms of varied hues and fragrance — pitcher sage
and yucca and yellow mimulus, brodiaeas, styrax
bells and lupines of many colors — the San Marcos
road is of such rare beauty that even a nostalgic
169
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
pony cannot quench its charm. To the literary stu-
dent, moreover, it possesses a special interest in that
it skirts the territory so luringly described in the
opening chapter of that entertaining book "The
Mountains," by the Santa Barbara author, Stewart
Edward White. Wild and sparsely inhabited as the
country is through which the highroad winds its way
to the pass, there to plunge down into the pastoral
land by the river's solitary reaches, it is a well-
traveled thoroughfare by no means lacking in human
interest. I do not know to what extent my experi-
ence with it may have been exceptional; but the
Canterbury pilgrims could hardly have been more
picturesque in their day than the intermittent tide
of travel that passed within my ken. There was,
for instance, the dust-covered automobile puffing
under its load of hilarious week-enders, bound for
the upper river ostensibly to fish ; and there was the
big four-horse ranch team, piled high with miscel-
laneous supplies, including a couple of Chinese
kitchen "boys," tempted for a season from the fan-
tan and ch9p-suey of some city Chinatown, to cook
beans for cowmen and lay by money. There was
the itinerant prospector ensconced in an indescrib-
able canvas-covered wreck of a cart, drawn by two
scrawny burros with newspaper blinders, the sight
of which frightened my bronco into standing on his
hind legs and all but backing me into the canon;
and there was the deputy sheriff in chaps and som-
brero, escorting back to their rightful owner a
170
THE FRANCISCAN MISSIONS
string of colts sold by some horse-thief to an
"easy" rancher. There were families in camp
wagons on journeys from one end of the State to
the other, staking out their teams in fat, wild pas-
tures every night and themselves sleeping under
the shelter of hospitable oaks; there were rovers
like myself, only independent of horseflesh, their
beds rolled up in canvas a-swing at their backs;
there was the moving-picture man, traveling with
horse and buggy, looking for taking backgrounds
for picture-plays; and there was the girl from Wy-
oming, en route a-horseback to New York, with no
other company than a revolver and a wolfish look-
ing dog.
By this same pass, they will tell you, the trail of
the old Padres ran when a century ago they walked
between Santa Barbara and the Mission Santa
Ynes, which still lifts its cross in the midst of the
valley. But Padre Alejandro says no, not by San
Marcos did they travel, but by another further
west, the Refugio. El Paso de Nuestra Senora del
Refugio was the stately Spanish name — the Pass of
our Lady of Refuge.
Padre Alejandro is the present resident rector at
the Mission Santa Ynes, an elderly man of comfort-
able rotundity of figure and known the countryside
over. If he seems a bit short with you at first
greeting when* you ring the visitor's bell, do not
think he means it. He has all kinds to deal with,
and must needs defend his dear Mission from the
171
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
vandals who, afoot and more especially in automo-
biles, are forever traveling the State highway that
passes the gate, and who, if not watched, would
steal the very vessels from the altar. After a little,
when he has taken your measure and finds you not
a bad sort, you will catch a twinkle in his eye and
the flicker of a kindly smile about the corner of his
mouth, for he loves his joke and his heart is as ten-
der as a woman's. Though not a' Franciscan, Pa-
dre Alejandro keeps alive at Santa Ynes the best
traditions of the Order for hospitality to the poor,
and no hungry wayfarer is ever turned away un-
fed. In the corridor by the doorway, is a little deal
stand with a kitchen chair by it — "the poor sinner's
table" the Padre calls it — and here the hoboes who
stop for a bite to eat, have it served them with a
kind word or two for a relish. If sick, they are
taken in and cared for, and if they want work for
their board and lodging, there is no end of it about
the Mission to employ them as long as they care to
stay and behave themselves.
Ten years ago when the Padre came to Santa
Ynes, he found it a ruin except the church part,
which though sadly out of repair, he could make
shift to hold services in. A slovenly American
family occupied the few dilapidated living-rooms
that were at all under roof, sharing them with
chickens, pigs and a colony of snakes. With his
own hands and his pretty housekeeper niece's, he
set about the herculean task of restoration — clear-
172
THE FEANCISCAN MISSIONS
ing away the rubbish, making adobes, mixing lime
and mortar, sawing and hammering and painting
and all the rest. Little by little, with outside con-
tributions, now and then, that enabled him to pay
for hired laborers, he patiently went on until to-day
the church part is completely restored and is safe
beneath a tight tile roof; and one wing of the con-
vento, the part that includes the living and sleeping
rooms of the old Padres and their guests, is also
finished.
"Yes," the Padre will tell you, tapping his snuff
box, as you sit with him in the arched corridor with
its outlook over the peaceful valley, "I came here
with eight hundred dollars, and in the ten years I
have spent more than twenty thousand dollars; but
see what I have now — a palace ! But the work is
not done. Do you know what I would do if I were
rich? Over there"-— he pointed to a long, low
mound of crumbled adobe hardby, overgrown with
wild grasses — "is the foundation of the Indian
quarters of the old Padres' day. There were
eighty rooms all told, and the foundation under that
adobe is as solid as rock, being cement. I'd restore
that building and put it to use again, make it a
home for tramps and social derelicts, as well as for
the waifs that public institutions of charity will not
accept, and give 'em a chance to pull themselves
together and try again. There's some wheat in
even that sort of chaff, and human souls are worth
the endeavor."
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UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
About this Mission of Santa Ynes there is a
home-like atmosphere that cannot escape you, for
the niece is a rare housekeeper, and the feminine
touch is over all. The south corridor, which runs
the length of the convento's front, and which is
bright with sunshine the greater part of the day, is
less a cloistered walk than an outdoor living-room,
cheerful with potted plants and fragrant with per-
fumes from the strip of garden along the front
where roses and wall-flowers, stocks and poppies,
lift dear, old-fashioned faces to the sky. Through
the great arches is an unobstructed view up the
quiet, pastoral valley and across the river to the
mountains that look down on Santa Barbara where
Santa Barbara looks on the sea ; and in all Southern
California I know no more charming spot for respite
from the world's cark and care than this lovely open
corridor of Mission Santa Ynes.
174
WINTER ON
THE ISLE OF SUMMER
I. UNEXPLOKED CATALINA
SANTA CATALINA ISLAND of worldwide
fame, fifty miles due south from Los Angeles
and thirty miles out at sea — an American Capri set
in an ocean of perpetual summer, and possessing a
climate quite peculiar to itself — is practically a.n
unexplored country save to a very few. The aver-
age visitor goes there to refresh his tired spirit on
its delightful little beaches with their lovely out-
look across a radiant sea to the dreamy mainland
mountains; or to gaze into the luminous depths of
the wonderful submarine gardens; or for a quiet
game of golf on one of the most charming winter
links in the world; or more often for a bout with
those famous game fish of the Catalina waters, such
as the leaping tuna, the yellow-tail, and that levia-
than of the rod and reel, the jew-fish.
Like all the rest of the resorts within the tourist
zone of California, however, Catalina, while she
sets before the transient visitor a feast of attrac-
tions easily attainable and admirable to talk about
when he shall have returned home, holds in reserve
for her intimates her deeper and finer native
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UNDEE THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
charms. To know the real heart of Catalina one
must turn to the hills which compass Avalon about.
From their rugged sides and crests a new world
opens to the view.
For the exploration of unexplored Catalina, the
winter months are the best. Then the hills are
clothed in fresh vestments of green and call you to
come to them; the skies are the skies of Italy; and
the stimulating sunshine invites to outdoor en-
deavor.
It is a breath-taxing climb, the ascent from the
beach to the ridges, but you are helped by the paths
worn by the clambering feet of bands of sheep with
which the interior of the island is so over-run that
their trails along the ridges make a practically con-
tinuous by-way for the pedestrian throughout the
whole of the island's twenty-two miles of length.
Up, up, you go, zigzagging this way and that, puff-
ing and blowing, the summit always retreating.
By and by, you sit down to rest and draw draughts
of refreshment into your tired lungs. There, far
down, are the golf links, the club house like a toy
and the golfers like pigmies creeping along the
ground. Barely you discern the swing of a stick,
and quite a perceptible time afterward, the sharp
crack of the smitten ball reaches to your silent
height. There a little further on is the medley of
Avalon roofs, and there pouring from the wharf
where the steamer from the mainland has just tied
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WINTER ON THE ISLE OF SUMMER
up, a black wave of tourists spreads over the beach.
The horns of the crescent bay, however, hide much
of the sea's expanse, and you rise and struggle up-
ward again for a wider outlook.
You pass the head of a side canon or two, the
summit is just beyond you at last, and with one
final desperate charge you gain it — only to find that
there is another above it! Nevertheless, the brow
of the hill just ascended shuts Avalon completely
from view and you are across the confines of Cata-
lina's other world. From the hillsides about comes
the intermittent bleating of sheep, the lambs in
a frightened treble, the mothers in a reassuring,
dignified contralto. A black, glossy raven alights
on the ground a few rods off, and satisfied by your
stillness and immobility that you are harmless,
wags his head slowly from side to side and indulges
in a low, melodious ditty so different from the harsh
croak that he addresses to the rest of the world,
that you feel yourself of the elect. Wild doves are
cooing and a valley quail makes you the target of
his railing whistle. "You fool — you, you fool —
you," he says as plainly as his eastern cousin says
"Bob White. " On every side the monotonous
monosyllabic squeak of ground squirrels pipes up;
Mollie Cottontail looks in on you quite unexpect-
edly to herself, and scurries away in terror; you
may even catch a distant view of a little gray fox
slipping along the hills.
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UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
But it is a long lane that has no turning, and
finally you do reach a ridge beyond which there is
no other — only illimitable views of the real Pacific,
for at Avalon it is but a channel that one sees.
Off there to the southward the island of San Clem-
ente humps his big bulk; far to the west lies little
San Nicolas, and if the atmosphere is clear, the
Channel Islands off Santa Barbara, a hundred
miles away, show in the dim northwest. Santa
Catalina herself stretches away from your feet to
the north and the west in a succession of canons
and ranges and mountain peaks — you would call
them so "back East," though the highest is only
about twenty-five hundred feet above the sea.
In these upper regions one may begin to realize
something of the beauty of the midwinter plant life
of Catalina. While there are few native trees of
large or even medium size, there are low-growing
sorts enough to make quite a forest showing, such
as the picturesque dwarf oaks that flourish in ever-
green groves both on the inland hillsides and along
certain of the slopes that overhang the sea.
What pictures await the rambler amid these up-
land sunlit thickets of oak, where the foot of the
regulation tourist never treads! Silver ferns and
maidenhair nestle amid the green grasses about the
shaded bases of the tree trunks; and looking down
oceanward, where the gulls are querulously crying,
there may be seen through the interstices of the
gray, twisting branches of the little trees, exquisite
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WINTER ON THE ISLE OP SUMMER
vistas, as through windows framing the sapphire of
the sea. The air is faintly fragrant with the flow-
ers resembling apple blossoms which are the bloom
of the crossosoma, a small, gray-barked tree, pale
of leaf, twisted and twiggy, clinging to the rockiest,
barrenest of soil, unsociably holding itself aloof
from its fellows. Rotund clumps of bushy sumac
with glossy, oily leaves that will pop into a flame
like fire-crackers if you touch a match to them, are
thickly dotted with their small pink and white
bloom, where in surpassing content the bees sip and
hum. Along these hillsides, too, are glorious speci-
mens of the so-called California holly or toyon, the
rich green foliage alight with the red glow of its
clustered winter berries. A yellow-berried variety
is occasionally found, and the possibility of collect-
ing this rarity gives a special zest to a winter day's
outing in these unbeaten paths.
Sometimes as you top a hill there opens upon
your view a distant slope that is sheeted in white
or pale lilac, and hurrying towards the unfamiliar
vision, you find it to be a grove of ceanothus, com-
monly called wild lilac in California— little trees
about the size of the eastern dogwood, bearing in
late winter feathery clusters of tiny flowers, with
a bitterish, tonic fragrance. These treelings have
great tenacity of life, and even when half dead the
live half will still perform its winter duty of bloom-
ing. Some specimens that we found one February
day on a promontory looking westward upon the
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UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
Pacific were dead to the extreme top, where on one
last live twig a few blossoms had opened, seem-
ing like the soul of the expiring tree poising for
flight into the heavens.
In the moist, shady canons and on the grassy
slopes facing the north are many charming wild
flowers, which begin to open as early as January,
reaching their climax of bloom in April or May —
yellow-starred baeria, in patches upon the ground
like golden rugs; scarlet-mouthed beard-tongue,
clambering over bushes; nemophilas, with pearly
chalices, cousins to the baby-blue-eyes of the main-
land; orange coils of fiddlehead, and twinkling
wild pop-corn flowers in white. But of all the floral
beauty of the island, nothing is capable of giving
greater pleasure than the wild cactus gardens of
the inland hills. The sheep that have had the run
of the interior of the island for a generation, would
long ago have cropped it flowerless, had it not been
for the prickly pear cactus, which, growing luxuri-
antly on the sunny slopes has been as a nursing
mother to multitudes of wild flowers that have
gathered under its spiny skirts for protection from
the marauding browsers. The great slab-like arms
of a cactus clump stretch and sprawl about upon
the ground in a way that makes a very effective
hedge, and within their beneficent sphere of influ-
ence such a tangle of lovely wildings grows and
flourishes as is worth a long climb to see. Here are
misty clouds of galium and flaming spikes of Indian
180
WINTER ON THE ISLE OF SUMMER
paint brush, wild four-o 'clocks, magenta-hued, lav-
ender-cupped phacelias, and the white trumpets of
native morning glories; here the cheerful suns of
the plebeian yellow ox-eye blaze by the side of the
delicate Catalina mariposa tulips. Blue brodiaeas
and bluer nightshades are here, vetches in varying
shades of purple and in white, velvety-leaved ho-
sackias with clustered blooms of orange and yellow,
and the mingled fragrances of the stately white
sage, threadleaved artemisia, and everlasting.
Even a few ferns and patches of moss-like selagi-
nella snuggle beneath the shadows of the great
cactus wings where some moisture lingers after
the more exposed earth is baked hard as a
brick.
As for the cactuses themselves, the edges of their
flat stems are glorified in February and March with
crumpled pinkish buds that expand into broad flow-
ers of limpid yellow. Later they are fringed with
rows of fruit and resemble Pipes of Pan. These
fruits of the slab-jointed tuna or prickly-pear cac-
tus are very pleasant to the taste when at the proper
stage of ripeness— a condition which may be known
by the rich purple color and the loosened hold of
the fruit upon the stem, causing it to be easily de-
tached. Because of the bundles of minute prickles
which dot the fruit, it needs to be plucked with
a gloved hand. Then slice the square end off, and
squeeze the pulpy interior into your mouth.
Though seedy, it possesses a pleasant flavor, sub-
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UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
acid and cool, and is evidently nutritious to the
ravens, quails and Mexicans that make of it a staple
item of diet.
There is but one wagon road on Catalina that
penetrates into the interior of the island, so that
the exploration of the inland hills can be done thor-
oughly only on foot. The network of sheep trails,
however, making of every ridge an aerial highway
and connecting one ridge with another throughout
the length and breadth of the island, brings the re-
motest points within comparatively easy reach of
good walkers who find Catalina a pedestrian's para-
dise. Even those whose limit is quickly reached in
a walk at home find that the island air renders trips
entirely possible of a length that was undreamed
of before. We know of one lady who finds a half-
mile walk in the East quite a burdensome undertak-
ing, but who one spring day climbed to the summit
of the range east of Avalon and walked ten miles
by easy stages with entire enjoyment along the
ridges overlooking the sea, returning by way of one
of the canons, without especial fatigue.
Among the all day trips afoot from Avalon, one
that will prove of more than ordinary interest is
to Silver Canon on the western side of the island-
about ten or twelve miles, there and back — afford-
ing some superb views of the open Pacific, and
chances to get a glimpse of wild goats. This trip
may be accomplished by strong walkers in a half
day, but unless one is pressed for time, it is well
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WINTER ON THE ISLE OF SUMMER
to take a day, giving time for frequent stops to en-
joy the views.
To Black Jack (one of the two highest peaks of
the island) and back, about fifteen miles, is another
delightful jaunt, introducing the pedestrian to the
scenery of Catalina's heart, as well as affording
from the summit of the peak a magnificent all-
around ocean view. From Black Jack the walk may
be extended some four miles further to Empire
Landing where are the serpentine quarries, once
worked by the original Indian inhabitants of the
island for the manufacture of stone cooking pots.
The marks of their primitive cutting are still seen
upon the outcroppings. There selecting some
handy spot upon the bowlder— a knob or jutting cor-
ner would be preferred — the red craftsman would
fashion it into the outside of a pot. When properly
shaped thus, the pot was severed from the rock and
the interior then chiseled out. At the time of our
last visit, some of the half-finished pots were still
und^tached from the rock, just as their sculptors
had left them when, nearly a century ago, they
abandoned their old home. In event of continuing
the Black Jack trip to Empire Landing, provision
should be made in advance either to camp at the
Landing overnight, or to have a boat call and take
you back to Avalon the same day.
On another day you may have the Moonstone
Beach boat drop you in the morning at Swain's
Landing, and walk to the head of the canon out
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UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
upon the stage road and so back to Avalon. The
walk is approximately six or seven miles, but it is
a stiff climb out of the canon. A feature of this
canon is the presence in it of several small groves
of the ironwood (Lyonothamus floribundus) a rare
tree found nowhere in the world but on Catalina
and one or two of its neighbor islands. Should your
visit be as late as May or June, you would be treated
to the novelty of seeing it in bloom.
Owing to the scarcity of springs on Catalina,
water must be carried in a canteen, on any all-day
outing; and before starting on a lengthy trip, the
outlines of the island's geography should be firmly
fixed in mind, for once out of Avalon, there is prac-
tically no chance of a lost rambler's meeting any
one to put him on his road again. If one has a
reasonably good head for direction, there is little
likelihood, however, of getting badly lost in the
island unless one should be caught in a fog, which
sometimes shuts in suddenly in the winter season.
Then the only safe course is to stop and wait until
it lifts.
The fisher folk around Avalon will be found to be
a kindly people, willing as a rule to impart all in-
formation they can, and like all whose vocation
leads them into familiar contact with the life of the
sea, they have many things picturesque and won-
derful to tell about it. But of the land side — the
unexplored side— of Catalina, we found few to tell
us anything, until we made the acquaintance of
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WINTER ON THE ISLE OF SUMMER
John of the chicken ranch, whose shack and corrals
are a mile up the beautiful canon back of the golf
links. A small, gray, shaggy-bearded man is John,
with twinkling blue eyes and a heart that has a kind
thought for all the world except the red-throated
linnets that flock persistently about his garden:
"The thieving little devils/' he says, "they never
know when they have enough, and destroy every-
thing a body raises!"
After a career of wandering by sea and land this
Ulysses of the West happened upon Catalina
twenty-odd years ago and has been there ever since.
Perhaps it was because he had a surfeit of the sea,
out of which nearly every other permanent resident
of the island was seeking to make a living, or per-
haps it was because in a community of fishermen
and boatmen, poultry-raising was a calling without
competitors, that John embarked in the business.
However that may be, it proved a thriving enter-
prise, and dwelling in the lap of the hills John has
managed to pick up about all that anybody knows
of the island's land side. From him we learned
the shortest cut to Silver Canon, and where was the
nearest point to see the sun set in the Pacific; he
initiated us into the mystery of a cooling drink,
made from the sticky, red, acid berries of a bush
which he called "shumake"; instructed us in what
island plants made the best "greens," and how to
recognize under its protean forms that "abomi-
nable shrub or weed" as Robert Louis Stevenson
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UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
called the California poison-oak. And it was John,
who with a shovel one day disclosed to us the enor-
mous proportions — it would be a fat man indeed
whose body was as big — of the root of the chilicothe
vine or "big-root," that clambers riotously over all
the thickets of the island and adorns them with its
clustered white bloom, its bristling seed-pods the
size of goose eggs resembling little porcupines
swinging by their tails.
We first heard of John when we were keeping
house in a tiny three-roomed cottage at the top of
an Avalon street so steep that we suspect it must
have been built up in the interests of the butchers
and the bakers, the climbing gave us such an appe-
tite! The most robust appetite palls on monotony,
and after we had exhausted the variety of the Ava-
lon provision shops two or three times over, our
tastes demanded chicken. We looked and inquired
for chicken at all the shops, but in vain. There
were steaks guaranteed to melt in the mouth, mut-
ton chops fresh off the range, legs of lamb, and pigs'
feet and tamales if we would, but never a chicken.
Then we learned that John was the poultry mo-
nopolist of the island. So one sunny afternoon we
went in quest of him.
The road up John's beautiful canon makes one of
the pleasantest short walks out of Avalon, winding,
after it leaves the golf links, by a gentle ascent
among rolling hills, their sides dotted with clumps
of dwarf oaks and wild lilac, blossoming elders and
186
WINTER ON THE ISLE OF SUMMER
red-berried holly and thickets starred with wild
flowers and musical with the song of birds. As the
road rises, it gives us, as we stop now and then to
look back, exquisite glimpses of the blue sea and far
away the snow-capped mountains of the mainland
rising dreamily above the fog banks of the mainland
shore. By and by a turn in the road shuts all that
from view, and a nearby cock-a-doodle-doo betokens
the poultry ranch at hand.
The sight of John's chickens, his waddling ducks
and strutting turkeys resplendent of feather, and
the clouds of cooing pigeons presented an embar-
rassment of riches that rather staggered us. Here
were possibilities beyond our wildest hopes— broil-
ers, friers, roasters, squabs — surely we must invite
company to our feast. John, ambling about with a
bucket of chopped alfalfa, caught sight of us and
came forward to greet us with a slow and gentle
speech and a smile that with difficulty disengaged
itself from his tangle of whiskers. Why, yes, he
had a purty nice lot of chickens; they hadn't ought
to be anything but nice with the green stuff he giv'
'em — chopped alfalfa and such, and wheat ground
up tasty in the coffee mill. Yes, he reckoned they
was some friers among 'em, but not quite big
enough to sell, not just yet. That fat old hen for
stewing? Well, no-o he didn't think 'twould be
right to let her go, not just now; you see, she's a
purty good layer yet, and eggs is eggs, these days.
Them ducks? Well no-o, he wasn't selling ducks,
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UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
not just now; he was figurin' on getting a bunch of
them together before parting with them. Them
turkeys, there, he had rather thought of killing a
couple at Christmas, but somehow it didn't get
done, and it was a question if they'd be good eating
just now.
This was indeed discouraging. It seemed ridicu-
lous that in a land fairly flowing with chickens, we
should be thus baffled. We sat down on a log and
while John proceeded to shower his pets with
chopped alfalfa, we held a council of war. Being
human, John must have his price, but it was evi-
dently not the price of a chicken or two ; something
rarer than money must be had to reach him. We
looked at his shabby little cabin void of human com-
panionship, and it occurred to us that as John was
"batching it" and had batched it for twenty-odd
years, his stomach was probably his vulnerable
point. We were housekeeping and it was within the
possibilities of our gasoline stove to turn out a
pudding. Might it not be that a pudding— we arose
and renewed the attack.
"John," said Sylvia, "we want a nice stewing
chicken. If you can sell us one, we will pay you
your own price for it, and make you a pudding."
John's mouth gave a twitch or two. The arrow
had hit the mark. He stood uneasily first on one
leg and then on another, took a hasty look at his
clucking family, shut his eyes and surrendered.
The chicken would be ours at two o'clock to-morrow.
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WINTER ON THE ISLE OF SUMMER
We shall probably never forget that chicken. It
was a big, fat dowager of a hen, and we cooked it
and cooked it and cooked it. We began after break-
fast and let it stew till dinner time. We stayed in
during the afternoon and unceasingly let it simmer.
The process was renewed after supper and kept up
until bed-time. The veteran bird holding her own,
we ordered a fresh can of gasoline next morning,
and continued the treatment. At the expiration of
nine hours of stewing, all told, the hen was still
holding well together, but we were exhausted with
hope deferred and served her up. We ate the ten-
derest parts at that sitting, and cooked the rest
in instalments off and on for the balance of the
week.
"John," I remarked, when we called on him
again, "the ranch isn't what it was before the hen
left, is it? An old familiar sight gone out of your
life, eh? You must- miss her sadly."
John's eyes twinkled.
"Wasn't she a good tastin' bird?" he inquired.
"She tasted well enough," we admitted, "but she
seemed a little old. She'd been on the place some
time, hadn't she?"
"No-o," he replied reflectively, "no-o, not so
long. She wasn't over three year old, I guess—
mebbe four — or a little rising that."
"That was a good pudding," he added, as he
handed back the dish, with three fresh eggs in it.
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II. AVALON IN WINTER
The season on Santa Catalina Island is from
June to September. Then the hotels, the room-
ing houses, the tents on the camp grounds and the
private cottages are overflowing with pleasure-
seeking humanity, who sometimes crowd the capac-
ity of the island's one little town to such a degree
that the evening boat from San Pedro is held over-
night to give shelter to people unable to secure a
roof over their heads on shore. So we made our
first visit to Santa Catalina in winter.
To speak of winter on Santa Catalina, however,
is a concession to the nomenclature of the almanac,
for in and about Avalon, which to the transient visi-
tor is the whole island, one rarely sees the ther-
mometer below forty, and only so low as that on
sunless stormy mornings, or in the chill hours be-
tween midnight and dawn. To the hilltops of the
inland, Jack Frost comes occasionally during Janu-
ary and February, but he is shy of descending to
the beach, sheltered as it is on three sides by the
lofty hills. In fact the weather recorders have
worked it out that the mean winter temperature of
Avalon averages but eleven degrees Fahrenheit be-
low that of summer. The winter, in short, is merely
summer over again with a few cool rains and fogs,
and rarely a high wind thrown in. When New York
is icebound and the Middle West lies under five feet
of snow, here in Avalon the sweet alyssum blooms
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WINTER ON THE ISLE OF SUMMER
wild on the hillsides; down in "Uncle Johnnie's"
park and over by the golf links, the malva-rosa sets
its pretty buds and spreads its bright petals ; in cot-
tage gardens, geraniums, mignonette, yellow oxalis
and many-hued nasturtiums, regardless of the cal-
endar, flower untiringly; and old residents show
with pride tomato vines many years old, as high as
the roof, untouched by frost.
A feature of the Santa Catalina climate that al-
ways surprises the winter visitor, who naturally ex-
pects to find an atmosphere of greater moisture on
an island than upon the mainland, is the compara-
tive absence of dampness. The marked chill that
comes into the evening air of the California coast
region as soon as the sun approaches its setting,
making one hurry into one's wraps, is noticeably
lacking at Avalon. The temperature does fall, of
course, but the winter night has all the balminess
of those occasional cool, summer nights of the East
that follow upon a west wind devoid of humidity.
For outdoor sleeping, such nights are among the
pleasantest in the world.
There being no crowd in winter, except during
the few midday hours when the steamer from the
mainland is in with her load of day excursionists,
the visitor with leisure has the pick of the island's
accommodations. Even the haughty hotel proprie-
tors condescend now to notice you and are your
faithful and obliged servants to command at a sub-
stantial discount from summer rates. Mrs. Brown,
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UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
the baker's wife, has furnished cottages to rent,
"very reasonable, " as her modest sign written in
violet ink on a sheet of note paper tacked up in the
post office, informs the public. So has Abalone
Jack's widow, in whose matronly care several of
the summer cottagers have left their keys and in-
structions to let no respectable inquirer for lodg-
ings escape. Mrs. Robinson, too — her husband con-
ducts a rival bake-shop to Mr. Brown, and she her-
self is a motherly body with the warm heart and
racy speech that mark the daughters of Erin — Mrs.
Robinson, too, has usually a darlin' little furnished
flat to let in her house, with the privilege of using
her own piano and parlor of an evening, if you
should be a bit lonely.
Indeed if one wants to be quite independent and
at the same time live in the most economical way,
there is no better plan than to rent a small, furn-
ished cottage or a room or two in one of the many
houses fitted up for light housekeeping. The latter
are usually arranged in suites of two or three rooms,
each suite with its little porch and bit of view, one
of the rooms being fitted up for a combined kitchen
and dining-room, with a gasoline stove for cooking,
and running water at the door.
We spent half a day walking up one hilly street
and down another, finding "To Let" signs on all
sorts of little camps and bungalows with queer
names that must have taxed the inventive humor of
their owners to the snapping point— "Rest-a-bit,"
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WINTER ON THE ISLE OF SUMMER
"Munnysunk," "Peek Inn," "Never Inn," and the
like. Finally we decided upon a two-storied cot-
tage perched upon a hill back of Avalon so steep of
approach that we felt sure that none but the sound-
est in heart and the most determined in will would
ever visit us. We began climbing steps as soon as
we were within hailing distance of the place. The
first two flights brought us to the level of the gar-
den path; two more flights delivered us, well
winded, on the little porch at the front door. To
the southward, over the tops of the eucalyptus grove
in which many of the summer camps of Avalon
are embowered, rose the oak-dotted hills, green that
January day as ever an emerald was; to the east-
ward, at our feet, the roofs of the little town with
tree-tops and aspiring vines pushing up masses of
verdure and flowers between the buildings, and far-
ther out, the crescent bay of Avalon, sparkling in
the sun and dotted with little craft of varied sorts ;
and as our delighted gaze wandered still farther
eastward across the white-capped waters, lo, above
the fogline of the mainland shore, the heavenly,
snow-capped crest of the Sierra Madre and its out-
lying peaks from sixty to a hundred miles away—
"Old Baldy," "Grayback," San Jacinto— a view
which in many of its aspects brought to mind the
Bay of Naples.
Within the cottage was a living-room, half win-
dows, as befitted so lovely an outlook, with a snug
little fire-place in one corner, for fires of eucalyptus-
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UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
bark on snappy mornings and evenings; and there
were two bedrooms, a little kitchen with a sink, a
dining-room and a bathroom; upstairs were two
more bedrooms and a roofed porch open on three
sides to the winds of heaven, where we vowed, if
the place became ours, we should spread our mat-
tress and sleep, steeped in that softest of night airs
in which the tender warmth of the winter sun's
last beams seemed to linger until he rose again.
There was a little, neglected, precipitous garden,
plunging down to the neighboring houses whose
roofs were far below us ; a swarm of flaming gera-
niums were in riotous bloom there, and the first
modest wild flowers of the year were peeping out
from the green grass.
"It is just what we want and what we've dreamed
of," we confessed to each other sotto voce, "but of
course we can never pay the price."
The agent eyed us anxiously, as we screwed our
faces into Gradgrind hardness and indifferently
asked the rate. Then he faltered out— he was a
shrinking kind of old man, as though used to being
browbeaten —
"I'll have to charge you fifteen dollars a month
for it. The owner instructed me not to take a cent
less. You see, it has seven rooms and a bath, and
in summer it would fetch sixty, easy. Do you think
maybe you could pay fifteen?"
For an answer we paid down a month's rent in
advance, and the old man departed promising to
194
WINTER ON THE ISLE OF SUMMER
bring us some clean linen and a tea-kettle lid which
was lacking. Then sitting down, in the pleasant
winter sunshine, in the 'midst of all that glory of
green canon-side and blue sky and flashing sea and
dreamy, distant mountains, we estimated ways and
means :
Rent, one month, . ., ,. ., , $15.00
Gasoline for cooking, and kerosene for lamps
and oil heater, 10.00
Provisions for two (including Wilmington
water for drinking, the Avalon water be-
ing very, very hard), 45.00
Total expenses for two, one month, ........ $70.00
That averaged somewhat less than $1.20 per day
for each of us, with all the comforts of home and
the most beautiful outlook on an island whose cli-
mate has no superior on the Lord's lovely earth.
One cramped little room at the hotel, with board,
would have cost us even at the monthly rate more
than twice as much. To be sure, our housekeeping
plan was based on our doing our own cooking. But
then, as we pharisaically remarked to each other,
that meant better cooking; and we could always
have the things we liked the way we liked. Besides
we had room enough to give afternoon teas to all
Avalon, and keep a friend overnight.
"We'll stay three months !" we cried raptur-
ously, and we did.
195
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
The steamer arrives from the mainland but once
a day in winter, bringing the mail, the milk, the
fresh vegetables, and the daily crowd of sightseers,
and its coming is what the arrival of the daily stage
is to a backwoods village. It is due a half-hour
after noon, and as the hour draws near, a feeling of
expectation and suspense begins to settle upon Ava-
lon. The excursion launches from Moonstone
Beach and Seal Rocks come puffing in, and the fish-
ermen who went out at dawn return with their
catches and stories of the big ones that got away —
the gulls screaming and flapping along in the wake
of the boats. The nurses with the babies and chil-
dren straggle in with treasure from the beach and
rocks — starfish and luckless, stranded jelly-fish,
sometimes even a little octopus or a live abalone, and
always strings of bladdery brown kelp and seaweeds
and shells of divers sorts. The hotel runners and
the men with boats to hire put a fresh stock of cards
in their pockets, clear their throats and don natty
little caps with the names of their establishments
in gold lace lettering on the bands. The curio deal-
ers add what jauntiness they may to their conglom-
erate stock of shells and pictures, kelp canes and
bristling star-fish with a little dusting here and
there; and knots of people gather along the side-
walk and on the porches facing the bay, speculating
on the extent of the passenger list as they watch
with heightening interest the growth of the black
speck far out at sea into the dark-hulled steamer
196
From the hills you look directly down on the golf links of
Avalon
WINTEK ON THE ISLE OF SUMMER
with her white houses and glistening upper deck and
the rail crowded with humanity. Then when she
rounds Sugar Loaf and blows a hoarse salute, the big
power-boats with glass bottoms push out to her,
and men with megaphones stun the ear and dazzle
the fancy with offers of their services to visit the
submarine gardens, whose far-heralded glories
probably bring more visitors to Avalon in winter
than any other one thing, for the fishing is not then
at its best. Here and there, little rowboats are
darting close to the steamer as she reaches her pier,
and boys in swimming attire are clamoring to the
passengers to throw small coins into the sea, to be
dived for and caught before they reach the. bottom
of the transparent water. Then as the gang plank
is lowered, and the tide of passengers starts to flow
to land, the band at the big hotel begins to play, the
Japanese bell-boys stir about and button up their
jackets, and every restaurant on the island front,
from Delmonico's to the Klondike wakes to ecstasy
its gongs and triangles to attract the hungry.
From now on to three o'clock, when the steamer
is to leave, is Avalon 's busy time of day. After
that when the boat has taken on again her restless
load and departed, the little town resumes its
wonted placidity. There is just enough of human
life on the beach promenade to engage your holiday
mood comfortably — a few elderly ladies in golf caps
with cameras or a botany book, a sprinkling of chil-
dren, a portly old gentleman or two on the retired
197
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
list, an occasional nervous-eyed man of business
dropped here so recently by the steamer that his
thoughts have obviously not yet arrived from the
stock market. Then here are respectable citizens
from the rural districts of the Middle West who
have saved up for years for this the great trip of
their lives, possible to them only in winter when
things are quiet on the farm. Of course the ubi-
quitous British tourist is here, too, in tweeds and
overgaiters and wonderful waistcoats. Gum-chew-
ing California girls, bare-armed and bare-headed,
swagger about, with their "fellows" smoking along-
side ; and at five o 'clock the cholos straggle in from
their labors on the roads, very foreign-looking in
steeple-crowned straw hats pinched in at the top.
The sense of absolute removal from the storm
and stress of the world's mad race, enabling you to
get your breath and renew your strength for your
next sally into the world beyond the mountains, is
what endears an Avalon winter to you. Hither as
to that more famous Avalon whither King Arthur
was borne to be healed of his wounds, comes many
a business-buffeted pilgrim and is quite as effectu-
ally cured. Sitting on the beach as the evening
shadows lengthen, the departing steamer long since
swallowed up in the mainland mists; listening to
the scolding of the gulls, and the barking of the
seals ; watching the sun's low beams light up to gold
the sails of the ships bound up and down the coast
and bathing in mysterious amethystine tints the far-
198
WINTER ON THE ISLE OF SUMMER
off mountains, the visitor begins to feel the chains
of care loosen their grip upon him, and to realize
that some things about which he had been worrying
himself sick are no affair of his at all. The knowl-
edge that nothing can interfere with this novel
sense of isolation from the world's whirl until the
steamer comes again tomorrow afternoon, sends a
delicious thrill through his weary frame and he does
not wonder that there are people who have come to
Avalon to spend a day or two and have stayed six
years — in fact, are there yet!
199
TOUKIST TOWNS
I. SAN DIEGO AND SANTA BARBARA
WTH the first frosts comes the vanguard of
winter tourists to Southern California; and
the streets of a dozen little cities that make a -bid
for tourist trade arouse themselves as a drought-
stricken country-side brightens up after rain.
Shops deserted during the long, dry (Jays of sum-
mer now run up their shades and blossom out into
all sorts of allurements for the tourists' patronage.
There are, for instance, windows full of California
and Mexican gems — tourmalines, opals, moon-
stones, turquoises, and sardonyx; and beside them
are trays of Navajo silver bracelets, buckles and
rings, and abalone brooches, cuff-buttons, paper cut-
ters and what not, in all colors of the sunset and
more. Navajo blankets blaze in doorways and In-
dian baskets in designs both aboriginal and sophisti-
cated, catch the eye at every turn. The bidders for
the cheaper trade sort over their last season's tar-
antulas and scorpions, mounting them on clean
pasteboards, and dust off their left over trap-door
spider's nests and horned toads. In the book
stores, Mission photographs are put nearer the
200
TOURIST TOWNS
door, and " Ramona "—perennial best seller in
Southern California — is stacked up on the counter;
while every art-shop with its picture of golden pop-
pies and scarlet pepper-berries, fuzzy eucalyptus
blossoms and fiery poinsettias, becomes a sort of
Hesperian hortus slccus. Chinese and Japanese
shops spring up over night with their punky smell
of the Orient, their alluring dress-goods and potter-
ies and carvings, their devils and dragons and
bald-headed old men in bric-a-brac, and their ex-
quisite teacups and squat teapots, world without
end. The streets thicken daily with automobiles un-
til well after New Year's, and the old residenter
who knows most of the permanent population by
heart, finds rare entertainment in the new faces that
each day brings. Pretty girls in the latest Eastern
thing in hats ; elderly ladies of comfortable embon-
point, with lorgnettes and lapdogs; stout old gen-
tlemen clean-shaven and florid, with Scotch bottoms
to their shoes, bespeaking a solid footing in bank
directorates; nervous, dyspeptic-looking "Big Busi-
ness" presidents grudgingly taking a little relaxa-
tion by the doctor's orders; young bloods, without
hats and in white flannels, talking golf, polo and
motor-cars — every day you see these types and
many another, taking the air and enjoying the sun
from November till the lambs of March are skipping
again in Eastern fields, when they begin to vanish
away.
But the tourist of the motor-car type is by no
201
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
means the only one. He is, of course, the mainstay
of the big hotels whose rates start in at four dol-
lars a day and leave off goodness knows where ; but
of the scores of thousands who every winter visit
California, only a small proportion can afford that
style. Far more numerous is quite another sort
of tourist — those who after the railroad has de-
livered them on the Coast, have mighty little left
but their return tickets. Many of these are from
the farming districts of the Middle West. They
stroll about with poppies and big oranges in their
hands, and to their pleased vision the sights are the
sights of a foreign land. Now and then you see one
unexpectedly meet an old neighbor from home and
then it's a slap on the back and a pump-handle
shake, and " Hello, if it ain't Hi Smith! Where in
thunder did you drop from? I- thought you was
snowed in and froze up back in Ottumway ! ' ' This
sort may stop at a small hotel or a boarding house,
or they may rent a room or two in a private home
and do light housekeeping, or they may get their
meals out ; their sight-seeing is done on electric cars
and the "rubberneck" automobiles, and they are
steady patrons of the picture post-card stands.
Some of them thriftily carry an oil stove in their
trunk, get their breakfast on it, and dine at a cafe-
teria. Do you know what a cafeteria is? It is a
waiterless restaurant, where, following the crowd
in single file down an aisle, you pick up an empty
tray, and arrived before a great table spread with
202
TOURIST TOWNS
viands cold and hot, yon indicate your choice and
have it placed on your tray by the attendant disher-
up behind the table. Then, filing past a desk for
your check, you pass into the general room filled
with little tables. You take your seat at one and
eat your meal in peace and quiet, paying the amount
of your check to the cashier at the door as you go
out. You pay for every item you get, even the use
of the napkin, and there is nothing particularly
cheap about the plan. Its popularity, which is great
on the Pacific Coast — Los Angeles has scores of
cafeterias — is based on wholesome home cooking, the
opportunity afforded to see just what you are going
to get before ordering it, and the absolute inde-
pendence of the delays and humors of the profes-
sional waiter.
In our gossip about the tourist towns we are not
thinking especially of Los Angeles, though in a very
important sense it is the tourist city of California
par excellence, the very hub of the tourist country,
from which radiate in all directions the trips that
make up a large part of the visitors' pleasuring.
But if one is going to winter in a big Los Angeles
hotel or apartment house in the midst of an ambi-
tious, seething American metropolis of three hun-
dred and fifty thousand people, one might almost as
well be in New York or Chicago for all the taste
that is had of any life racy of the Californian soil.
The city is now so big, so full of business of one sort
and another that in a multiplicity of interests the
203
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
tourist in Los Angeles, while exceedingly esteemed,
is not just the noticeable feature that he is in
smaller places.
Each of California's tourist resorts has its
marked individuality, though there is one feature
common to all that might be eliminated in the in-
terests of seemly brotherly love, and that is a dis-
position in each to speak slightingly of the others.
The tourist who in Santa Barbara, for instance, has
a good word to speak of San Diego, is quickly aware
of a drop in the local temperature; while to dilate
in San Diego upon the fine climate, say of Pasadena,
is to defy the lightning. Climate, in fact, is San
Diego's specialty. On that and its bay, San Diego
was founded, and by virtue of both it has reached
its present eminent station in the sisterhood of Cal-
ifornia towns. If, by any chance, you are so obtuse
as not to notice the climate during the first day of
your stay, the San Diegans mention it to you — in
fact, din it in your ears; and it is a fine climate.
It is more equable than that of any of the other
tourist resorts of the mainland— warmer in winter,
cooler in summer, with less difference at all sea-
sons between day temperatures and night, and it is
claimed that San Diego averages three hundred and
fifty-six days in the year on which the sun shines.
On many of these same days, to be sure, the sun-
shine is sandwiched between substantial slabs of
fog; nevertheless it shines enough to squeeze into
the records.
204
TOURIST TOWNS
"Yes, sir," your San Diego friend will tell you,
"we have the world buffaloed on climate, and as for
that bay, do you know its equal ?"
"There's the Bay of Naples, " you venture, heed-
lessly, "have you seen that?"
"With such a bay as this before my eyes?" he
snorts. "I don't have to!"
And there is no denying that it is a beautiful har-
bor. Seen from the city hills with the dreamy
mountains of Mexico to the south, and with Point
Loma's ocean-cleaving headland and the Coronado
peninsula stretched like protecting arms about its
blue, sunlit waters, it forms a lovely foreground to
the Pacific's white-capped expanse and the mar-
velous sunset skies when day sinks to China.
In the matter of antiquity, too, San Diego makes
somewhat of a specialty. It is, in fact, the cradle
of California's nativity. Into the quiet bay came
Cabrillo's caravels of discovery, in 1542, and here
in 1769 the Spanish King planted the first of his
California colonies which were to save the territory
from the designs of Russia, while at the same time
the Franciscan friar, Junipero Serra, hungry for
heathen souls to save, founded here the first of his
chain of Indian Missions in the wilderness. The
crumbling walls of the Mission church, half hid-
den in a valley three or four miles back of the
modern city, and a few melting adobes by the ven-
erable date palms in the bayside suburb known as
Old Town, are our only remaining architectural lega-
205
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
cies from that early day when Serra first looked
upon this land of his dreams and found it ' ' a
goodly land, the wild vines loaded with grapes and
the roses like the roses of Castile." But the San
Diego that we know was born in the brain of quite
a different character — a Connecticut gringo affec-
tionately known to all American San Diegans as
"Father Horton." A century after Serra, he
came to the sleepy little Mexican pueblo, liked the
climate and the bay, and settling, started a "boom"
in both that has never been allowed to cease. His
long-headed purchase of a thousand acres at twen-
ty-six cents per acre where the present city stands,
is one of the first historical facts communicated to
the visitor and never fails to gain for Father Hor-
ton's genius the respect of the average American
tourist, who may or may not be impressed by the
Franciscan Father's spiritual investments.
Two special jewels in San Diego's crown are the
seaside resorts of La Jolla and Coronado. The
former is a dozen miles away in a little corner of
the coast, with Soledad Mountain at its back, and
the islands of Santa Catalina and San Clemente
dimly showing in the ocean mists before it. It is
perched on the edge of a bluff, strangely honey-
combed with remarkable caves, which the tides of
ocean daily fill and empty. There are submarine
gardens here, and it is the ambition of the profes-
sional boatmen to make them a drawing card for
tourists, as at Santa Catalina, but unfortunately na-
206
TOURIST TOWNS
ture has not given La Jolla the quiet waters of
Avalon, and boating over the La Jolla gardens, es-
pecially in winter, is ticklish business. The mag-
nificent ocean sunsets, the fine surf effects and the
quiet beauties of the long beach, make La Jolla a
favorite with artists as well as with the more leis-
urely sort of tourists who, winter and summer,
haunt the place to sit on the sunny rocks, go fishing,
enjoy the moonlight and do light housekeeping in
the furnished cottages and apartments which enter-
prising local capitalists have set up for them
a-plenty.
Coronado, at the tip of its peninsula just across
the bay from San Diego, is quite another sort of
place. You reach it by a quaint old-fashioned
ferry-boat in a few minutes, or you can motor to it
by way of Otay, twenty miles, around the edge of
the bay. Like so many things in the world, Coro-
nado is tripartite. There is the permanent residen-
tial section of the usual pretty cottages, bungalows
and mansions smothered in shrubbery and flowers
to which the traveler in California quickly becomes
accustomed; then, if it be summer, there is the fa-
mous city of tents laid out in regular streets, upon
the beach, the tents rented furnished or unfur-
nished to crowds of holiday sojourners for whose
benefit special restaurants are maintained; and
finally, dominating all, is the Hotel del Coronado,
known wherever California literature circulates, its
red roofs and cone-topped turrets thrust up above
207
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
enveloping trees. It is a huge caravansary built
four-square about the seclusion of an entrancing
garden-court open to the sky and planted with
palms, coprosmas, bougainvilleas, bottle-brushes
and many another exotic. Many of these plants
which, in the chilly North, are customarily coddled
in tubs and greenhouses, are, here in this genial
clime, arboreal in their growth, and their branches
are trained as screens along the railings of the sec-
ond-story gallery that looks down upon the court.
Without, the grounds are beautiful with shrubbery,
vines and trees, where winding paths lead always
to pleasant vistas of the sea. The surf runs in al-
most to the hotel, and upon the sheltered verandas
facing the ocean one may watch through a leafy
framing of trees the ships of commerce and of war
pass up and down the horizon as they go upon their
business between the ports of Spanish America
and the harbors of the North. If a man have an
elastic bank account and a taste for conventional
amusements, the Coronado is a sort of lotus land,
luring to prolonged stay. Congenial spirits from
all over the world will foregather with him here,
and the entertainment never flags — golf, polo, arch-
ery, tennis, sailing, fishing, surf-bathing, horseback-
riding, motoring, aeroplaning, music— and, of
course, always climate.
A tourist city by the sea that suggests compari-
son with San Diego is Santa Barbara. It has had
no Father Horton to forge its destinies, and its
208
TOURIST TOWNS
open roadstead is not hospitable to shipping; so, in
point of growth, it has lagged behind its southern
sister. It has preserved more, however, of what is
especially dear to the romance-loving tourist — a
certain Old Worldly flavor inherited from its Span-
ish past and kept going by a plentiful survival of
picturesque adobe buildings, but especially by the
well-preserved and restored Mission whose brown-
robed, rope- girdled and sandaled brothers, in their
active community life, are perhaps responsible for
more visits to Santa Barbara than any other one of
its attractions. And where else in these United
States will you find such an array of foreign street
names and localities? Asking your way about the
town, the morning after your arrival, you feel in
fifteen minutes that you have acquired a pretty fair
working knowledge of Spanish and a sprinkling of
Indian, and of course that pleases you and tends to
your satisfaction with Santa Barbara. There are
among streets, for instance, Canon Perdido and
Anapamu, Arellaga and Micheltorena, Pedragoso,
Salsipuedes, Parra Grande. There is the old De la
Guerra house to be hunted up and the Nonega gar-
dens, San Ysidro and rose-embowered Miramar
and El Fureidis in Montecito to be visited. The
Mission, you find, is not just Santa Barbara ; it is,
unedited, La Mision de Santa Barbara Virgen y
Martir. The mountains, too, that rise behind the
city have a foreign name. Santa Ynez, unpro-
nounceable until you hear it, and then the words
209
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
are as music in your ears for life ; and the little un-
fenced park by the beach, where the band plays,
and children frolic and old and middle-aged sun
themselves on the benches, and lovers sit on the
grass under the palms and watch the sea that is
bearing their ships home to them — this little park
is not, thank heaven, Americanized into a "Pike"
or a " Board-walk " or a "White Way," but is the
Plaza del Mar, open to the sunshine and the breeze.
Why, all this is as good as a trip abroad; and as
you stroll up State Street (for a wonder it is not La
Calle del Estado) and see Mexicans eating tamales
and chili con carne in the restaurants, and stop at
Pio's hole in the wall to have your shoes polished,
the illusion is further enhanced. Pio is a philan-
thropist, worth knowing if you have no friends in
Santa Barbara. He will translate Spanish words
for you gratis, and as a local directory he is of more
worth than a guidebook. He knows restaurants
and their prices, and the ins and outs of rooming-
places are at his finger ends. "H ombre," he says
confidentially, "I say you secret. I know a room,
where they let you sleep day-time all same as night,
tambien—and don't cos' you no more. A gentle-
man what is travel everywhere, he go always there
when he come to Santa Barbara ; and he say to me,
'Pio,' he say, 'you have friends what hongry for
sleep, that's good place for to send them.'
If you are a lover of life in the saddle, no other
of the tourist towns offers you quite the varied
210
TOURIST TOWNS
delights of Santa Barbara. You may stay weeks
there and every day canter over new territory —
along the beach with the ocean wind and the fog in
your face, or inland among the ranches of walnuts
and beans and olives, or threading the winding
roads of the mountains' seaward slopes with their
magnificent outlooks over valley and town and blue-
green ocean where sunshine and rolling mists battle
in beauty. Besides the roads there are many trails
over which your pony will carry you where wheels
cannot go — deep into canons beneath the perennial
shade of live-oaks, where nemophilas open their
wide, blue eyes and the California thrasher trills
and whistles ; or up to the very crest of the range-
La Cumbre, as the Spanish has it — where the ocean
view is supplemented by an equally compelling one
of the multitudinous mountain country to the north,
an unpeopled region of oaks and chaparral and wa-
terfalls, and of caverns upon whose walls are pic-
tured records of redmen, dead-and-gone. Make a
day of it on these jaunts; munch your cracker and
figs with the dryads under the giant fronds of the
woodwardia ferns by some spring at noon; and
come down to the lowlands only when evening falls,
bringing the divine help of the hills with you in
your uplifted heart.
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UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
II. TOUEIST TOWNS OF THE ORANGE BELT
The tourist towns of the orange belt are Red-
lands, Riverside and Pasadena. Of these, Red-
lands is the smallest, but it has a special charm
from its sylvan character. The better class of res-
idences— and most of them are of the better class,
for it is a place of much wealth — are fairly em-
bedded in shrubbery and orange groves, and the
murmur of hidden waters in the irrigating ditches
is Redlands' characteristic music. Magnificent
rows of palms, grevilleas and peppers, miles of
them, line and often overarch the streets and make
a grateful shade in summer days when the heat of
the desert just around the corner lays its hand on
Redlands, and most residents who can, make holi-
day Sittings to cooler places. The proximity of the
desert, indeed, is at the bottom of the marvel of
Redlands which, perhaps more strikingly than any
other California town, illustrates the transforming
power of water when directed by man's intelli-
gence and taste in an arid land. Of all the riotous
growth of trees and shrubs that makes the Red-
lands of to-day the paradisaical garden that it is,
not one is indigenous ; all have been planted by the
Pauls and watered by the Apolloses of the last quar-
ter century. At Smiley Heights, to whose beauties
every visitor to Redlands is hurried at the first op-
portunity, this fact is patent with especial force ; for
212
TOUEIST TOWNS
here, just across the line which marks the high tide
of cultivation, the parched, treeless slopes of the
desert borders lie as if in wait for man's care to
be withdrawn, when the desert will sweep in again
and claim its own. It is an eloquent contrast — on
one side of a plough's furrow these wastes whose
only cover is scattering sage-brush and wild buck-
wheat, and on the other this artificial wildwood of
eucalyptus, deodars, pines, palms, peppers, acacias,
olives, oranges, bamboos and a perfect wilderness
of roses. That is the story of all Southern Cali-
fornia ; but nowhere is it told so plainly to him who
runs as at Kedlands.
In all the world there are few more lovely bow-
ers of man's building than this smiling park of the
Canon's Crest, with its outlook over the roofs of
Redlands, peeping out here and there amid the tree
tops, and across the San Bernardino Valley to the
great snow-capped mountain wall that shuts in Cal-
ifornia's tourist country on the east. Set every-
where about the park are little rustic kiosks with
thatched roofs of palm-leaf, inviting to far niente
and dreams. Here, dreaming, I was brought to
earth one day by the voice of a stranger youth who
stood at my elbow.
" Bully scenery, all right, ain't it?" he remarked.
He was a sturdy young fellow in a corduroy suit
and a cow-boyish sort of hat, and his gaze was
directed toward the San Bernardino moun-
tains.
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UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
I assented, and to keep the ball rolling, asked if
he was a stranger in Redlands.
"I'm working in a restaurant for two months
now, but the old man's gone to Los Angeles to-day,
and he said shut the shebang till he gets back; so
I'm having a holiday and seeing the burg. Say,
which is the mountain they call Grayback?"
I pointed it out.
"And the desert is just beyond, and the Mo-
rongo country, ain't it?"
I thought so. Did he want to go there?
44 Well, mebbe," he answered; "a friend of mine
knows where there's some good prospects in them
Morongos, and we may hit the trail this summer.
The restaurant will be shut down then."
"Summer is a pretty dangerous time to be on the
desert," I cautioned, knowing the heedlessness of
youth.
"You bet you," he said, "or any other time. I
lived on it six years before I come inside, and I
swore I'd never go back."
I took another look at him and saw lines in his
face that showed him to be older than I had at first
taken him to be. And there were streaks of gray
in his hair, yet he could not have been thirty.
"Prospecting?" I asked.
"Huh-huh," he grunted, as he pulled at a plug of
tobacco. "There's not bad money in that; but not
on your own hook. There's most by working for a
company; me for that.
214
TOURIST TOWNS
"Why, you see," he went on, in response to my
request for further enlightenment on this branch
of the business which was new to me, "there are big
mining companies will hire men nowadays to go
out in the desert to prospect for them. They grub-
stake the fellows and pay seventy-five to two hun-
dred dollars a month wages, besides a percentage
in claims they locate that pan out. All the pros-
pector has to put up is his own burros. It's a bet-
ter proposition in the long run, I think, than run-
ning your own game; for you can't go broke; but
youVe got to be good — keep sober, play fair and
deliver some goods or nobody '11 hire you.
"Yes, sir" — he was dreamily gazing beyond the
beautiful little city of homes nestled in orange
groves at our feet, away to the grim mountains that
looked down on the lava beds, the drifting sands, the
alkali sinks and devil's half -acres of the Morongo
country that filled his mind's eye — "yes, sir, once I
swore I'd never go back to the desert again. It was
this way: Me and my pardner, Johnny Ryan — he
was a big six-foot-four Irishman and weighed two
hundred and eighty pounds — we got lost somehow
and missed a tank we knew of. So we had to let the
burros go and light out for water wherever it was.
Johnny strapped seventy-five pounds of stuff on his
back and I packed thirty on mine — I was kind of
weak and off my feed, anyhow— and we hoofed it
across the desert for four days straight, twenty-
eight or thirty miles a day, looking for water and
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UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
the way in. We each had a little in our canteens ;
but we daren't any more than just wet our lips with
it, and just as it was all about gone and me and
Johnny was all in, we struck a waterhole. That
cured me of the desert for a while, and I vowed I'd
never set foot on the place again ; but I dunno, seems
to be looking good again. Oranges is all right and
sure pretty; but, somehow, they don't look good like
sagebrush."
So does the desert hold its own.
Your Redlands friends will probably not lend
much encouragement to any plans you have for vis-
iting Riverside; for, after Redlands, Riverside
seems to them skimmed milk. Nevertheless go, if
for no other rrason than to see how the Mission
note has been incorporated in a hotel by that prince
of modern Bonifaces, the master of Riverside's
Glenwood Mission Inn. That, indeed, is Riverside
to the average tourist. Like the Coronado, it is a
little world in itself, but unique in its reincarna-
tion of the material features of the California of a
century or more agone, when the Franciscan Mis-
sions were practically the whole of its civilization
and the recognized stopping places for travelers.
The arched corridors, facing a sunny patio where
one may sip one's afternoon tea among roses and
under the pleasant shade of tropic trees; the cam-
panario, with its sweet-toned bells that chime out
old hymns at noon and eventide ; the cloistered mu-
sic-room, with its pipe organ, and atmosphere so
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chapel-like that one talks there in whispers; the
shadowy walls, where old banners hang and an-
cient armor and pictures of saints and kings; the
cloister walk with mural pictures of the Missions
and images of saints in lighted niches; the monkish
refectory with its old Spanish kitchen in one cor-
ner; the roof-garden of the bells, where quaint and
ancient samples of the founder's art the world over
are suspended; the churchly books and illuminated
manuscripts on vellum that lie to the hand upon
tables and window-seats everywhere, — is there such
another hotel in all the modern world as this Mis-
sion Inn at Riverside? Looking deeper than to the
mere creature comfort that most hotels are content
to strive for, it touches a man's spirit, if his soul be
not dead to the appeal of beauty and romance and
high purpose; and so in a very real sense, it is a
mission, as well as an inn. And then there is
Joseph, the dignified macaw with coat of many col-
ors, who has the freedom of the entire hotel and its
grounds, his wings being clipped, and is the pet of
every guest. Why, it is worth the price of a day's
lodging to sit in an easy chair by St. Catherine's
well and watch Joseph go his leisurely round. He
perches on the wrists of such as he approves of;
climbs over their shoulders and down their backs;
sidles up tree-limbs, cocking his eye the while like
Bunsby's on the coast of Greenland; stands care-
fully on his head at the top of a pole; is photo-
graphed a hundred times a day; takes a bath under
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UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
the hydrant; meditates profoundly on chair backs,
and other things conformable to claws; ogles the
pretty girls in golf and tennis outfits, as they come
and go; till finally when the day is done and the
vesper chimes have sounded and electric lights re-
place the sun, he is carried off to his perch in a
special niche in the wall reserved for him and
blanketed in from the night chill.
To stop at an inn so steeped as this in the spirit
of the Mission days is a fitting prelude to another
unique experience which, at Easter, Riverside of-
fers to the traveler — the Sunrise Pilgrimage to the
summit of Rubidoux Mountain. This round knob
of barrenness in a plain on the outskirts of River-
side has in recent years been provided with a
broad, winding roadway of easy grade, leading to
the summit where a great wooden cross has been
erected to the memory of the Franciscan Father,
Junipero Serra. Hither, on every Sunday at
dawn, afoot and by automobile, come crowds of
Riversidians together with the strangers within
their gates, and gathering about the cross, await
the sun. As it appears above the snowy crest of
the San Bernardino Sierra, the people bare their
heads and unite in a brief religious service, the or-
der of it being printed upon a sheet and copies pre-
viously distributed among the throng. As one
stands in this reverent assembly upon a mountain-
top beneath the sky, one's heart is hard indeed if it
is not made tender by the spirit of this simple of-
218
en
JD
3
03
U
~rt
O
"o-
G
03
TOURIST TOWNS
fering of praise and adoration to the risen Lord of
Life. Serra, as he lay dying, told his followers
that he would "use his influence with God" before
whom his spirit was soon to appear, to prosper the
Missions of their Father Francis. Such an unsec-
tarian gathering as this annually on Rubidoux,
owing its inspiration to Serra 's selfless work on
behalf of one little fragment of the human race,
would seem to show that in a larger way than he
thought the Franciscan's prayer is being answered.
While not every tourist finds it convenient to
visit Riverside or Redlands, few fail to see Pasa-
dena, which occupies at the western end of the or-
ange belt a superb situation on an elevated bench
of land at the foot of high mountains, a situation
very similar to that occupied by Redlands. The
magnet of wealth probably has a good deal to do
with this influx of visitors; for the fame of Pasa-
dena's millionaire residents, whose sumptuous
homes line Orange Grove Boulevard for a mile and
a half and dot hundreds of acres at Oak Knoll, is
nation-wide. Popular report credits the little city
with being the richest per capita in California; but
I do not find that this is quite the truth, though its
average in this not very important matter is, owing
to the presence of the aforesaid men of millions,
unquestionably high. In point of fact, besides a
considerable number of business men and wage-
earners going daily to their vocations in Los An-
geles, its citizenship includes a large leisure and
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UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
semi-leisure class of very moderate means, who, by
economy and thrift, manage to live well on modest
incomes in a climate of rare excellence — retired
farmerfolk from the Middle West, semi-invalided
merchants from the Eastern Coast States, pen-
sioned college professors and school teachers from
everywhere, who have come hither in the afternoon
of life to " crown a youth of labor with an age of
ease."
More potent than millionaires, however, who
nowadays are too common to be of the prominence
they once were, is Pasadena's other specialty, the
New Year's open-air fete, known as the Tourna-
ment of Roses. This really fine pageant has, for
over twenty years, been an annual feature in Pasa-
dena and draws thither on New Year's Day per-
haps a hundred thousand people from all over Cal-
ifornia and the East every year. It was never, in
any sense, a real-estate advertising scheme, though
this has been often said of it; but was the disinter-
ested suggestion of Dr. C. F. Holder, whose account
of its history is authority for the facts here given.
Its first presentation was in 1888, under the au-
spices of the Valley Hunt Club, the pioneer social
organization of Pasadena, and was given "as a po-
etic and artistic celebration of the most important
event in California at the time — the ripening of the
orange. It was a greeting of Flora to the fruits."
The date was fixed as January first, because that was
the nearest general holiday to the time when or-
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TOURIST TOWNS
anges began to be picked. At the suggestion of a
member who had seen the Battle of the Eoses in
Rome, that feature was originally introduced, giv-
ing the title to the fiesta, which title still holds,
though the feature itself has, for many years, been
given up. As at present given, the Tournament of
Roses is a whole day's affair. In the morning is a
street parade of fine saddle-horses, carriages and
automobiles, lavishly decorated with flowers and
greenery; cleverly devised floats, historical or rep-
resentative of contemporary features of California;
and marching clubs, the dominant feature in all be-
ing the display of flowers blooming in the open in
California at a time when the rest of the country
is largely snow-bound. The afternoon is given
over to sports of various kinds at a large concourse
known as Tournament Park. The principal event
among these has, for many years, been a series of
chariot-races, each chariot drawn by four horses
abreast. As these chariots, which are models of
the famous quadriga of the old Romans, tear
around the course, their drivers urging on the
madly flying steeds amid clouds of swirling dust,
the twentieth century crowd arises and cheers as
enthusiastically as did ever one in Rome's old Coli-
seum in the days of the Caesars.
One needs to live in Pasadena to realize how
closely this Tournament of Roses is bound up in the
life of the people. When autumn is well under way
and the tourists begin to drop in, the Tournament
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UNDEE THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
Committee gets down to work, arranging the de-
tails of the programme and giving out contracts.
Delinquent members of the Association are
drummed for their dues. Tournament squibs and
paragraphs, inciting to civic pride in the coming
event, pop at you every day or two from the local
newspapers. Residents are urged to be diligent to
protect their flowers from untimely frosts or the
yearly "Santa Ana" which has a way of swooping
down from the desert for a night's demoniac blow
just before the winter rains set in. In December,
the Weather Man becomes the most pampered of
citizens. He must be kept in good humor at all
hazards. First, he is coaxed to send a gentle pre-
liminary storm to freshen up the gardens; then,
about Christmas, he is daily cajoled to keep the
skies clear till the day after New Year's at least.
The last few days before the Tournament are
nerve-racking to a degree, on account of weather
possibilities; for a wet New Year's Day, of course,
means complete collapse of this fete. It is remark-
able that, in all the twenty-odd years of its holding,
not once has there had to be a postponement on ac-
count of weather. In 1910, indeed, failure did
seem imminent. A heavy rainstorm set in during
the last days of December and continued during the
thirty-first without signs of passing. Flowers had
been gathered between showers and in the rain and
were abundant enough ; but, if the rain should con-
tinue into the next day, there could be no parade,
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TOURIST TOWNS
for the delicate vestments of participants and the
gauzy draperies of many of the floats could not
stand it — to say nothing of the lack of spectators.
Moreover, the railroads had arranged for excur-
sions from various points, and must know abso-
lutely the night before if the Tournament was to be
held or not. If not, they must notify their patrons
at once.
The Weather Man had no hope to offer. The
Committee met for decision in the early evening —
the rain still falling — and their sporting blood was
up. There was but one view — the Tournament,
rain or shine ; and the news was flashed instantly in
every house in Pasadena by the dipping of the elec-
tric lights, according to a prearranged signal an-
nounced in the evening papers. The decoration
of the entries went on all night in garages, barns
and back-kitchens, to a very devil's tattoo of de-
scending torrents; and when morning broke, the
storm still hovered over the city. Before nine
o'clock, however, the rain held, and when the her-
alds sounded their trumpets for the march to begin,
the sun was shining, though fitfully. The Tourna-
ment was held, Pasadena New Year's record was
saved unbroken, and at nightfall — the storm set in
again !
III. MONTEREY
The stout lady from New York settled herself in
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UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
her seat as the train began its half-hour run from
Castroville to Monterey.
"To-day's Wednesday," she calculated aloud.
"We'll rest at Del Monte this afternoon, and do
the drive they talk about in the morning ; and then
couldn't we be in San Francisco to-morrow night?"
That's Monterey to most tourists — Del Monte
and the Seventeen Mile Drive; only not quite all
are so grudging of time as the stout lady. Give it
a week, if you can, and if you are of a contempla-
tive mind, disposed to the study of a romantic past
and a picturesque present, after you have seen Del
Monte, go on to the old town of Monterey, and there
put up at a little commercial hotel on Alvarado
Street that any traveling man can tell you of. It
has a modest little entrance, which you will surely
walk past in the dark and have to inquire your way
back of the tamale man at the corner; but once in-
side, you will find a wide hearth where a woodfire
glows and crackles, a dignified black cat answering
to the name of Nig, who, properly approached will
sit up on his haunches like a dog and shake hands,
a bed above suspicion and a delightful table (if
Charley, the Chinese "boy," still does the cook-
ing), all for two dollars and a half a day.
Or, if there are two or three of you and you have
a taste for the independence of light-housekeeping,
you may do as, perhaps, you have done in Europe,
stay the night at the hotel and the next morning,
walk the streets in quest of the familiar sign of
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TOURIST TOWNS
" Furnished Rooms to Let" in cottage windows.
Such apartments you will find most to your taste at
Pacific Grove into which Monterey insensibly
merges at the south. Here, as at Santa Barbara,
the flowers are fat and chubby from the tonic of the
sea air. Roses, pelargoniums, heliotropes, pan-
sies, nasturtiums, irises, pinks, poppies and callas
nod a welcome to you at every turn, and you will
almost miss the sign you are looking for, because
of the luxuriance of its floral framing. Yes, you
will like it at Pacific Grove, settled in your cottage
rooms, with a bit of porch to yourselves, a view of
the ever-changing beauties of sea, the perpetual
music of the surf, the perfumes of the garden, and,
like as not, a crabbed old Chinaman with baskets
swung from a yoke across his shoulders, to bring
you fresh fish as often as you want it.
To be sure, Pacific Grove lacks the historic inter-
est and down-at-the-heel picturesqueness that is old
Monterey's, but to the heart where the love of na-
ture dwells, it makes rare appeal, with the solemni-
ties of its encompassing pines and its sunny, wind-
swept, turfy downs, bright with sea-daisies, Cali-
fornia buttercups and eschscholtzias, and ending
suddenly at the sea's edge in perpendicular cliffs
and huge rock-masses drenched with spray, that re-
mind you of New England's coast. But whatever
the season, be sure to bring warm clothing; for it
is a coast of chill fogs and searching winds at times,
and the times are not predictable.
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A dingy, little, yellow electric-car runs at decent
intervals between Pacific Grove and Monterey for
the benefit of non-pedestrians; but pleasanter than
track of steel is the old foot-pathway that Steven-
son doubtless often trod, along the downs that skirt
the sea, and the sweet, grassy lanes that lead
through the settlement of Chinese fishermen with
its racks and trellises for drying nets, and queer
ideographic signs and smoldering joss-sticks to
placate the devil withal; and on past the shops of
the jolly Japanese boat-builders, to the spider-
legged pier of the oil company where tank steamers
lie tied up to bobbing buoys and suck into their
hollow holds the black petroleum piped hither a
hundred miles from Coalinga beyond the moun-
tains. So do we come to the little creek's mouth,
now all but choked up, where tradition places the
landing of Padre Serra in 1770 and, perhaps, of
Vizcaino in 1602, when this caballero of fortune dis-
covered and named the bay of Monterey, describing
it after a fashion so much in the style of the florid
California advertising literature of to-day that, for
a hundred and sixty-eight years, no subsequent
passer-by seemed to recognize the place. Here we
may climb the hill of the Presidio, where our Gov-
ernment maintains an army post, and sitting upon
an antique Spanish cannon in the old earthworks at
the top, look out across the town and the bay to the
dim arm of land thrust seaward beyond Santa
Cruz, hiding another that the old Spaniards named
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TOURIST TOWNS
Punta de Afio Nuevo — the Point of the New Year.
Below us at our hacks, upon the sunny parade
ground, the bugles will be playing if the troops are
drilling, or perhaps there is baseball on the Pre-
sidio diamond between noisy nines of the infantry
and cavalry. Soldiers, in fact, are a cherished
feature of Monterey, and we run up against them
at every turn, singly or in squads at street corners,
on the water-front watching the fisher-folk, loiter-
ing about saloon doors, or discussing enchiladas in
the Spanish casas de comida and abalone steaks in
Wo Hop's Chinese restaurant.
Monterey's streets, except where Americanism is
creeping in, have the charm of country lanes. They
fork off at unexpected angles; along their grassy
borders run footpaths, and behind old adobe walls
with tile copings are tangled gardens that smell
sweet and bear fruit and are the happy playgrounds
of little children whose prattle in the Spanish which
seems Monterey's only proper tongue, falls pleas-
antly on your ear. It is in these streets of the
older town that the quaint adobe houses stand,
whitewashed and galleried and square of roof,
which link Monterey so vividly with the period of
Spanish supremacy. They are but few now, these
out-at-elbow aristocrats of a day that is gone, but
they give to the whole place a flavor of unmistak-
able gentility. Most have been identified with the
part in history they have played, and to such are
affixed modest labels of identification. The events
227
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recorded are, as a rule, more interesting to Cali-
fornians than to others, as they have to do mainly
with the capture and first occupation of the State
by the United States — not altogether a savory
memory. The picturesqueness of the buildings,
however, and the indefinable atmosphere of ro-
mance that clings to all las cosas de Espana, are of
a universal appeal, and so Monterey has been a
home to the bearer of more than one honored name
in literature and art. The one all know is Robert
Louis Stevenson's. A dilapidated adobe mansion
in a decaying part of the town, passes for a house
in which, thirty-odd years ago, he had lodgings for
a few months and slept rolled in his blankets on the
floor. Above the door is a sign, weather-beaten as
the house, reading: "R. Stevenson House." A
carriage painter makes use of a room or two for
his simple needs and a couple of Spanish families
are quartered in other rooms. The rest is given
over to vagrant winds and bats.
One must not, however, confuse the R. Stevenson
of the sign with the R. L. S. of immortal literature ;
for Monterey, it seems, has harbored Stevensons
and Stevensons, as I learned. Seeking something
more picturesque than the barren front of this
structure with its broken plaster and gaping win-
dows, I come upon a partially shut-in quadrangle
in the rear where the sun brightens into a dozen
lovely tints the time-stained walls, and where a sag-
ging outside stairway leads alluringly to an upper
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TOURIST TOWNS
story. Here trees cast dappled shadows on the
grass and lazy murmurs drift in from the unseen
street, and here Rosalia Ybarra, in a calico gown
of startling hues and designs, appears to do wash-
ing in her intervals of labor. To-day the sun is
very pleasant along the old wall and she is enjoying
its warmth, the while watching little Marquitos play
in the mud. Seeing me open my camera she would
inject Marquitos into the picture; but he, from in-
fantile shyness, drifts into the shadow of the steps,
to Rosalia's evident disappointment. It is ar-
ranged, however, between us to get the muchachito
well in the sunny foreground, and though he ducks
his head at the cannon-like instrument pointed at
him, the shutter snaps before he escapes to the
shade again. So Rosalia claps her hands and
laughs comfortably and gives me her address that a
print may be sent her. She is very friendly, is Ro-
salia, good-humored and fat, and, though we have
never met before, ready to inform. Oh, yais, senor,
she know' Mr. Stevenson ver' wail — he ver' reech
gentleman what own' ver' much houses and get
good rent. Yais, he was die' now, but one time ago
he live' in this house — ver' fine house in them day'
—what you call hotel, and many people they use'
to board this house. Books? Oh, yais, he write
books, too — ver' reech man, Mr. Stevenson.
Adios, and the senor would not forget to send the
picture what he make?
From Monterey you may motor, trolley, drive or
229
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foot it to Del Monte — it is only a mile. If you go
by vehicle, have your driver take you the longest
way round through the glorious woodland which
envelopes the hotel on all sides — a wildwood of na-
tive pines, cypresses and oaks in gray draperies of
hanging moss, huge eucalypts and countless bloom-
ing shrubs. And, if you walk, follow the same de-
vious way. And after you have wound round and
round-about for the best part of a mile, like a
knight-errant of old in search of an enchanted cas-
tle, suddenly it gleams out at you through the trees
— the red roofs and spirelike chimneys and pinna-
cles of the hotel, islanded in a lake of emerald lawn
dotted with English daisies and ordered beds of
flowers. While architecturally the hotel is less im-
posing than the Coronado, it is this sylvan ap-
proach that makes a visit there a memorable ex-
perience in life, and you do not get it in its fullness
when you enter from the railroad station which is
already well in the midst of the grounds. One
might dream away days sitting in the shade of the
magnificent trees or lingering among the beds of
exotic bloom, or getting lost and found again in the
bewildering labyrinth of the cypress maze, or con-
templating the grotesque wonders of the cactus
garden defended by the humiliating notice, "All
persons are requested not to cut their names
or initials on the cactus leaves. " Truly a high
seat in heaven is meet for these philanthropic
souls who throw their parks open to the American
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public, knowing the vandal instincts of the race.
The automobile era has elongated Monterey's
Seventeen Mile Drive into a thirty-five mile drive
now; but the original seventeen holds the cream of
the matter. Contemplative travelers of sound
wind and limb, may advantageously walk it, taking
a day to the adventure, with camera and a bit of
lunch along, unless they prefer to spend the price
of an abalone chowder at Pebble Beach Lodge, a
rustic outpost of the hotel half-way round the cir-
cle. The essential charm of this famous drive is
the untouched natural beauty of the park-like re-
gion it traverses. Man has made a road and then,
with unwonted modesty, withdrawn in Nature's
favor. The entrance is barred by a toll-gate whose
"open sesame, " if you are a rider, is California's
hackneyed "two bits"; but the pedestrian passes
free to his heritage. For nearly two miles, the
hard gravel road, old enough now to have all its
lines softened by time, winds in sun and shadow,
opening ever new vistas through a forest of native
pines, where Stevenson loved to walk. Years after,
when he was writing "Treasure Island," Mrs. Os-
bourne tells us, he drew on his memories of this
Monterey country for descriptions of the place of
the buried gold in that immortal story. Bracken
and shade-loving blossoms brighten the interspaces
under the trees, and the peace of Arden fills all this
lovely woodland where the song of the southwest
wind, blowing from mid-Pacific isles, is caught in
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UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
the pine-tops, and the murmur of the surf upon the
hidden shore sounds faint to the ear; till, by and
by, the forest parts like a curtain and lo ! the green
turfy downs, stretching to the sands where the surf
breaks white, and, beyond, the blue waters of the
Pacific, sparkling in the sun.
And then for another two miles or so, we saunter
along these joyous downs where birds are singing
and wild flowers raise their pretty faces to ours;
or we clamber out upon the rocks and watch the
sea-lions sunning their oily hides on rocky islets
amid the surf, and the solemn pelicans drifting on
deliberate wing in quest of fish, which they stow in
their ridiculous portmanteaus of bills. And so on
to a wilderness of yellow sand-dunes beyond which
rises wind-swept Cypress Point whose grotesque
trees, their gnarled and twisted boles capped with
flattish crowds of verdure of so rich and deep a
hue that they seem like moss-islands in the air,
were a land-mark of the Spanish pioneers. Non-
botanical Montereyans tell you these trees are the
same as the cedars of Lebanon, but they are of
quite a different genus. As a matter of fact, the
species is found native nowhere in the world, ex-
cept along a narrow strip of coast about two
miles in length in the immediate neighborhood of
this Cypress Point, though the tree is now
introduced into cultivation in many places. A lit-
tle further and we look into the blue depths of
Carmel Bay, named by old Vizcaino who, over three
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centuries ago, christened the little stream that emp-
ties into it El Rio de Carmelo, out of regard to
three Carmelite friars who formed the ecclesiasti-
cal department of his expedition. To the same
sheltered shore, Don Gaspar de Portola, one No-
vember day in 1769, on his way back from the re-
discovery of San Francisco Bay, came searching
for the lost harbor of Monterey. Being unable, from
Vizcaino's fanciful description, to recognize Monte-
rey Bay just around the corner, he trudged it back
to San Diego, with his half-starved command, hav-
ing first planted upon a hill, not far off, a great
white cross. Six months later, Portola came again,
and with him Serra and his Franciscans. The
cross still stood looking to the sea; but about it
strings of shells were festooned, and before it, as
before a shrine, were offerings of feathered arrows,
and the flesh of animals and fish. The natives, it
seems, had found it rare " medicine "; for at night,
so they said, the white arms stretched out and filled
the darkness with supernatural fires, reaching even
to the stars. Doubtless it had been a mute
preacher in the wilderness, preparing the way for
Serra 's apostolic work. The cross is long since
gone, but the Mission church, which Serra built in
the lovely Canada del Carmelo, still stands par-
tially restored, and before its altar are interred
the ashes of the Father and of Brother Crespi, who
labored with him in this remote vineyard of the
Lord.
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No glimpse may be had of the old church from
the Seventeen Mile Drive which, turning inland
from the Bay, penetrates flowery woodlands by hill
and dale, back to the country road that leads again
to Monterey; but there is a footway that may be
shown you, down through a dingle and across an
arroyo and up a fragrant piney hillside, through
a turnstile — I declare, it seems like a bit of Eng-
land—to the back gates of the quaintest, most en-
trancing and most homelike of all California beach
resorts, Carmel-by-the-Sea. Moreover, it is be-
loved of the Muses, and traveler folk with a taste
for literary pilgrimage, like to include it in their
itineraries. Though not yet in its teens, Carmel-
by-the-Sea is as old-timey a looking village as you
will find in a summer's day — a friendly little col-
lection of flower-embowered cottages and tasteful
bungalows with inviting gardens, in the heart of a
pine forest, so combining the natural charms of
seaside and wildwood. Here Mary Austin has her
tiny " winter wickiup " and high in a pine tree be-
hind it an aerial work-room. Here, too, are homes
of the novelist sisters, Grace MacGowan Cooke and
Alice Mac Gowan, of George Sterling the poet, of
David Starr Jordan of educational and piscatorial
fame, and of a dozen more, as yet less known.
Artists of the brush also crop out on every hand,
as one strolls about; there is an Arts and Crafts
Club and a Forest Theater whose pillars are
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TOURIST TOWNS
primeval pines and whose roof the sky; and there
is no railroad within five miles.
And down the main street of Carmel-by-the-Sea,
a short mile, lies in pastoral loveliness the vale of
Carmel with the domed Mission in its midst, and
beyond it the shining waters of the bay and the
Sierra Santa Lucia, by whose grim passes and dizzy
steeps, treacherous to the foot, the Spaniard Por-
tola and his leather jackets, the Credo in their
mouths,* came and went in quest of Monterey's elu-
sive bay, missed it, and came again and found it.
* Con el Credo en la boca — the quaint phrase of Father Crespi,
the chronicler of the expedition.
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RESIDENCE IN THE LAND OF SUNSHINE
I. LIFE IN A BUNGALOW
ONE of the most hard-worked words in Cali-
fornia of recent years is bungalow. In its
name so many architectural whimseys have been
indulged that it has at last become impossible to de-
fine the term with exactitude. Anything from a
plain, unvarnished shack to a two-storied palace
with tiled roof and patio may be dubbed a bungalow,
and few dwellers in the Land of Sunshine are will-
ing any longer to own up to living in a house or even
a cottage ; for while in the East, the climate almost
restricts the use of a bungalow to a sort of play-
thing— a vacation-camp or a week-end shelter — in
California it is taken seriously as a permanent resi-
dence.
But though it is not possible to draw a hard-and-
fast line at which the California bungalow style
stops and something else begins, there is one thing
sure: that when you see a cozy one or one-and-a-
half-story dwelling with low-pitched roof and very
wide eaves, ample porches, lots of windows and an
outside chimney of cobble or clinker-brick half hid-
den by clinging vines — that is a bungalow, whatever
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KESIDENCE IN THE LAND OF SUNSHINE
other houses may be. In Pasadena and Los An-
geles there are literally miles of these delectable
little dwellings, hardly any two just alike. Those
two cities appear to be the special places where the
bungalow habit seriously began, though the fashion
has spread very largely through the State. In size,
the popular taste is for five or six rooms (exclusive
of the bath), but eight or nine rooms are not uncom-
mon, though this greater number usually necessi-
tates an upper story. Nowadays, since the luxury
of outdoor sleeping has come to be appreci-
ated, the sleeping-porch is an indispensable ad-
junct, and this may be part of the ground plan or set
jauntily, like a yacht 's cabin, on the roof.
The building material is generally redwood on an
Oregon pine framework, the foundation being cobble
or concrete; and there may or may not be a cellar.
In former years, building was often started right
on the ground, but California ground is damp, in
winter especially; and if you want to escape rheu-
matism, your floors should be at least a couple of
feet above the earth. An artistic effect is produced
by the use, in some cases, of cypress shakes for the
sides, and some bungalows are built entirely of con-
crete, but this material stares you out of counte-
nance until its hard surface is broken up and softened
by vines and shrubbery. The style of construction
may be what is locally known as a " California
house" — that is, unplastered, with battens and bur-
237
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
lap inside to stop the cracks ; but this means a maxi-
mum of cold in winter and of heat in summer, and
while less expensive, is not so comfortable as the
ceiled bungalow, which is the customary sort now
built. Within there is usually paneling half way
up the walls in the beautifully grained Oregon pine,
stained, not painted; there is a built-in buffet in
the dining-room, and in the living-room and den
built-in book-cases and settles, and open fireplaces.
The properly appointed bungalow inside stands
for comfort, leisureliness and cheerfulness, comport
ing with a climate which makes for the same quail
ties. Bungalow life is informal but not necessarily
bohemian, and at its best is simple, without being
sloppy. If it is winter, the open fire that greets you
as you enter directly from outdoors into the living
room — there is no hallway — is a pleasant thing for
the spirit, even if hardwood does cost fifteen dollars
a cord.* The ample windows fill the house with
light, not glaring, but subdued by the generous over-
hang of the eaves ; and there is the perfume of vio-
lets or roses, or both, in the air — they have not come
from a florist's, but from under the window outside.
If it be summer, the house is cooler than the out-
doors; and the lowered awnings outside the win-
dows and the dropped screens on the porches, tem-
per the indoor light to a restful half-light. Opened
* Some dealers may quote you eleven, but you will find that means
not the 128 cubic feet of the arithmetic book, but a 96-foot cord —
a California speciality, acquaintance with which is part of the
tenderfoot's education.
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EESIDENCE IN THE LAND OF SUNSHINE
doorways and windows admit the breeze with its
manifold fragrances from hedge and garden, while
complete screening throughout the house keeps out
insect life. Kugs and couch-covers in cheerful col-
ors, Oriental or Indian; Indian ollas of quaint de-
signs for flower holders ; Indian baskets set here and
there for receptacles or hung on walls as plaques;
pictures of characteristic California scenes, such as
snow-capped mountains, cool canon depths, the
crumbling Missions— all such things help to give the
unconventional touch which goes with bungalow
living.
While the delight of bungalow life in California
is largely attributable to the quality of climate
which, winter and summer, calls you out of doors, or
failing that, to open wide your casements and invite
outdoors in, a generous share of credit is due also
to good architects and first-class builders who have
brought into the country the best ideas of their art
and craft. There is not a facility to comfortable
living known to the world that may not be found
in the better class of California towns, and at rea-
sonable rates. Electricity for lighting, electrical de-
vices for cooking or for otherwise lightening labor,
gas-ranges and grates, and gas water-heaters, the
most approved plumbing, telephone connections
both local and long-distance — these are matters of
course in every modern bungalow in California
tourist towns.
The cost of bungalows has been reduced to a
239
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
formula. As a rule of thumb, for a one-story,
modern, frame structure, you can figure on a dollar
and a half per square foot of ground covered by it,
and you will not be far astray. This applies to what
may be called the "bungalow of commerce" built by
a contractor to sell ; but it covers good work and is
the sort that the average family of four or five buys
with from $2,000 to $3,000, exclusive of the lot which
may be anywhere from $500 up, according to the lo-
cality.
To the family of moderate means a very appeal-
ing feature of bungalow life is the ease of keeping
house which it offers, and the independence of serv-
ants. The servant problem, indeed, has been solved
in Gordian-knot fashion bTT doing away with the
servant; for, given a reasonable degree of strength
and skill on the part of the womankind of the house-
hold, a servant is not needed, and in the democratic
West no lady loses caste by the fact of doing her
own housework. As there are in most bungalows but
one floor and few rooms, the housewife's daily steps
are reduced to a minimum. The kitchen is a com-
pact little room, airy and light, and provided with
various ingenious modern helps to lessen labor.
Adjoining is the invariable screen-porch where are
laundry-tubs, ice-box, cooling closets, et cetera, the
cooling closet being a built-in cupboard with open,
screened bottom and top and perforated shelves
through which a vertical current of air ascends con-
tinually from under the house to roof, and, in this
240
RESIDENCE IN THE LAND OF SUNSHINE
land of cold nights, makes the housekeeper measur-
ably independent of ice even in summer. Gas is
the usual fuel for cooking, though some bungalows
have electric kitchens, and by it the work of prepar-
ing meals is reduced to as little as may be. If the
housewife desires to be spared the labor of clean-
ing, which is necessary much less frequently in the
relatively non-humid climate of California than on
the Atlantic slope, she may arrange to have some
one come from outside at stated times and take this
off her hands. Once in two weeks may be enough.
Besides white women, Japanese "boys" make a
business of such work at about two dollars and a half
per day, or one dollar and a half per half-day, and
latterly some white men have taken up this voca-
tion. Other things being equal, men are prefer-
able to women for the business, because of the
physical strength needed for handling and beating
heavy rugs, scrubbing floors and washing windows.
As to heating the bungalow, the mildness of the
climate reduces this to a comparatively simple mat-
ter. Even in winter, unless during an abnormal
cold-snap or on rainy days, fire cannot be regarded
as a necessity, except in the early morning and dur-
ing the evenings. One wood-fire in the living-room
fireplace is, therefore, all the average family need
count on, as bathroom and sleeping-chambers are
customarily supplied either with gas heaters, or a
certain kind of little sheet-iron stove with a furious
draught, that can be made red hot with twisted
241
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
newspapers in a few minutes. This is the native
Calif ornian's favorite heating arrangement, and his
pet economy is saving the newspapers all summer
and autumn to twist up for winter fuel. These ob-
servations, however, are based on the fact that Cali-
fornians as a class are not prone to living in rooms
of as high a temperature by several degrees, as are
Easterners; and if one's health or comfort demands
a uniformly warm house in winter — say 70 degrees
Fahrenheit or over— a heater had best be installed
in the cellar for use on occasion. Many modern
bungalows are provided with such heaters of vari-
ous sorts, but all are rather lilliputian affairs from
an Eastern or Middle West point of view, yet en-
tirely sufficient for the work required of them.
The fuel is frequently gas, but oftener a fuel-petro-
leum locally known as "distillate."
As to the cost of bungalow living in California, it
is pretty much what one chooses to make it. Our
own small family of sometimes four, and sometimes
three, found by experience that we lived in Pasa-
dena for about one-third less than in Philadelphia
and lived better; and we could have reduced the
cost still further in Pasadena had we chosen to work
our kitchen garden as we might have done instead
of only playing with it. Our Pasadena account,
however, was minus a house-servant's contribution
to the expense of living, while in Philadelphia we
had kept a maid. On the other hand, we paid in
Pasadena for the weekly cleaning — half-a-day — and
242
RESIDENCE IN THE LAND OF SUNSHINE
put out all the laundry. The difference on wage-
account to the debit of Philadelphia was about what
the maid ate, broke and wasted, which is left to the
reader to compute. In our bungalow experience we
have had more elbow-room and enjoyed some ameni-
ties, particularly as to the table, that in the East we
had perforce to leave to the millionaires— among
these the luxury of entertaining our Eastern visi-
tors in January on green peas, fresh tomatoes,
strawberries and luscious Japanese persimmons,
from our own garden or from just around the cor-
ner!
Fresh fruits, nuts and vegetables should form,
and among the wise ones do form, a relatively
larger part of the diet in a mild climate like Cali-
fornia's than in the more rigorous East, and they
offer the best chance — and a very delicious one —
for keeping down the cost of the table. Particu-
larly is the list of native grown fruits an extended
one in California. Oranges, grape-fruit, lemons,
apricots, nectarines, plums, quinces, apples, pears,
cherries, peaches, figs, loquats, pomegranates, the
huge, non-astringent Japanese persimmons, a dozen
or more varieties of grapes of the meaty Old-World
stock — the very reading of these makes one's mouth
water — to say nothing of berries and melons galore
and an aristocratic little list of tropical and semi-
tropical fruits which are still experiments in Cali-
fornia, but some of which, like the avocado and the
feijoa, will doubtless be prevailed upon to stay. If
243
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
you have a fair-sized city lot with your bungalow,
you can raise quite a number of these good things
on it; but you need at least an acre to get much
satisfaction out of growing a variety of fruit, as
the birds of California figure on getting a large
share of their living out of the tenderfoot's garden-
ing undertakings, and are as merciless as the tax-
gatherer. But even if you do not raise your own
fruits and vegetables, they are cheaply bought in
their various seasons from the green-grocers and
the Chinese hucksters, or at the ranches as you drive
about the country.
In speaking of bungalow life a word is in order
about the part the porches play. Like many other
people, we made an outdoor living-and-dining-room
of our rear veranda, a quiet, retired spot on whose
roof and sides were climbing roses and honey-
suckles that hid us from our neighbors. From this
flowery bower we looked out upon our little 60x90
foot garden, and beyond to the Sierra Madre, with
its lovely lights and shadows and exquisite colors in
the evening glow. Old-hickory chairs and settees,
with a similar table or two, indifferent to the
weather, make a suitable furnishing to such a nook.
We added, in our case, the sewing-machine, and all
through the long dry season — it lasts from May
sometimes till November— it stood ready to hand,
giving the porch a pleasant touch of domesticity
which a low work-table, piled high every week with
the family mending, served to complete. Here the
244
BESIDENCE IN THE LAND OF SUNSHINE
daily mail was brought and discussed, the news-
paper read, letters written, the vegetables prepared
for dinner, callers entertained; and here often our
meals were served not only in summer, but on sunny
days in winter. We began this practise impulsively
as a sort of frolic — we were fond of picnicking — but
it proved so delightful and satisfying that it soon
became a habit. Dished up on hot plates in the
kitchen and brought quickly to the veranda on a
tray, the eatables suffered nothing from their out-
ing, while appetite and digestion throve ; for we did
not allow the meals to degenerate into " pick-up
snacks" but kept them on the plane of serious re-
pasts. An alcohol lamp on a side-table served for
the heating of water, and the warming up of small
matters. The extension of electrical connections
to the porch simplifies proceedings still further.
The vogue of the bungalow with the winter so-
journers in tourist towns has led to the establish-
ment recently of so-called "bungalow-courts" — that
is, the assembling of a number of bungalows upon a
tract of ground equal to two or three city lots and
ranged about a central open space devoted to lawn,
flower-beds and a common walk. The buildings,
while set rather closely side by side, are still sepa-
rated by a space ample to admit an abundance of
light. The idea is really that of the Spanish house
built around a patio, only in this case entire, dis-
connected dwellings, are the unit in the make-up, in-
stead of rooms. A dozen or more may be comfort-
245
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
ably built on the land of two city lots. They are
rented, usually furnished, for the season, or for the
year if desired, on a basis which provides free water
and electric light, the fuel gas consumed being paid
for by the tenant. The grounds are cared for by
the landlord. The rental rate of such bungalows
varies greatly according to number of rooms, loca-
tion and term of lease. In Pasadena, where they
are now rather numerous, few are offered furnished
under $45 monthly for the winter, while some are
as high as $200 per month. In summer these rates
are cut in two.
II. MAKING A LIVING IN THE LAND or SUNSHINE
We were sitting on the porch after a good
luncheon, enjoying the warmth of a sunny, win-
ter midday. There was a fragrance of daphne
blossoms in the air, and the music of humming bees.
Beyond the lower end of the garden where the young
folks were playing tennis in white flannels was an
orange-grove hanging heavy with its Hesperian
fruit, and beyond that across the green mesa rose
the majestic range of the Sierra Madre, its crest
white with snow. Now and then the ecstatic note
of the meadow-lark floated down the air, and on
every side mocking-birds were whistling. Automo-
biles filled with pleasure-seekers whirred by on the
street, and occasionally a horseback party of tanned
246
KESIDENCE IN THE LAND OF SUNSHINE
young men and girls bare of arm and head cantered
toward the mountains.
"Another blizzard back East,'7 chuckled the old
Calif ornian from the midst of his newspaper ; ' ' little
old New York's street car service paralyzed, mer-
cury two below zero, and wind forty miles an hour."
Your Californian can never resist gloating over
the eccentricities of the Eastern climate, as though
the relative excellence of California were his own
manufacture.
But my thoughts were on the scene before me.
"This is certainly the place to enjoy life," I ob-
served after a while, "if you have your pockets full
of money and can stay away from business as long
as you like ; but how about the poor chap with an in-
valid wife and a bunch of children, or the man with
weak lungs and a crippled bank account, shipped
out here when the back-East doctor is tired of his
case, to live an outdoor life and build up — in other
words, the fellows who have to make a living while
they live in California — what sort of a chance have
they here!"
"That was my case," fenced the Old Californian,
* ' I had weak lungs and went to ranching on a place
that couldn't be seen for the mortgage. Look at me
now. I'm strong as a bull and live on Easy
Street."
"I know," I pursued, "but that was thirty-odd
years ago when you came and things were different
then. Any land then was high at a hundred dollars
247
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
an acre, and by dumb luck you picked out your bit
of acreage where the fates had decreed a tourist
town to come. You dried peaches and apricots,
sold greasewood and peddled honey, kept a cow or
two on the scrub of the foothills, and lived, as be-
came a pioneer, on the dried fruits of the land ; and
your wife made you hold on when you wanted to
make a fool of yourself and sell out after three dry
years ; and then when the town took to growing and
was crowding you, you let go on the basis of town-
lots at twenty dollars a front foot."
"The fellow that bought it, doubled his money in
two years," put in the Old Calif ornian fiercely.
"That isn't what I'm talking about," I went on,
"if you're going to speculate in real estate, you
might as well make it oil or grain or stocks and
operate in New York or Chicago. Things go down
as well as up, and men with limited means are often
swamped over night. But you know what I mean,
something that will make an income to keep the
family in bread and meat and shoes. Take a spe-
cific case, there's Ned Thompson's son, I hear he's
in bad shape physically and is coming to California
from Boston. He's thirty-two years old and his as-
sets are a wife and three children, a college educa-
tion, eight years' clerical experience in a wholesale
dry-goods house, and a couple of thousand dollars.
What can California do for him ? ' '
The Old Californian bit the end of a cigar irrita-
bly before he replied :
248
RESIDENCE IN THE LAND OF SUNSHINE
"Hang your specific cases, it's a whole lot easier
to talk in generalities. Well, I tell you; a lot de-
pends upon the man. Some men will pick up a good
living on the Sahara Desert, and others are just
plum no good in a land of flowing milk and honey.
I don't know what sort of stuff young Thompson's
made of, but it's a good thing he has a little money.
He'll need it to live on while he's looking around for
' congenial occupation'; for that's what he'll be
after, being town-bred. He won't find it, though.
He'd better start right in by cutting * congeniality'
out of his vocabulary and substitute willingness to
take what he can get. This is a young country and
mighty democratic. There are no social distinctions
in business; everything honest is respectable; but
it is also a very different country from the East in
its climate and in the way things are done, and the
first year of a new-comer's life here should be
largely educational, getting acquainted with these
novel conditions. The sort of people that California
wants, more than any other, is the farmer sort, the
developers of the soil. The State is stocked up with
mechanics and top-heavy with the genteel vocations
—lawyers, doctors, merchants, bookkeepers, clerks,
brokers and land speculators, and purveyors of one
sort and another to the rich tourists. Being in need
of an outdoor life, of course, young Thompson might
get a job as street-car conductor — lots of college
graduates get the air that way — or he might drive
a laundry-wagon if he wasn 't too proud, or take care
249
UNDEE THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
of people's gardens. My neighbor across the way
has a weak-chested Methodist ex-preacher to mow
his lawn and trim his vines. Or he might hire as a
chauffeur if he knows anything about motor-cars, or
nerve enough to learn at the owner's expense. But
jobs like these are not to be picked up the day after
arrival, but will probably have to be waited for for
months ; and meantime he might peddle patent mops
or soap or the latest breakfast-food from door to
door as many a fine fellow is doing to-day in this
Golden State, though I don't recommend it, except
for the exercise. Then again, as long as he has a
bit of money he might buy a carriage and a pair of
horses, or a last year's automobile, and drive tour-
ists about, though that's a gamble to make expenses,
for there's lots of competition; but one gritty
' lunger' that I knew, did do that and studied law
while waiting for patrons, and made good. You see
it's largely a question of the man after all.
"But it seems to me if I were Thompson, suppos-
ing he is so as to do ordinary light work and has
horse-sense, I'd take one thousand dollars of my
two, and buy a half -acre of land, or more if I could
get it for the money, with a little old California
house on it, on the outskirts of a live town. There
are lots of places of that sort, the house not worth
figuring in the price, but yet good enough to be
patched up at a light expense so as to last quite a
while. Get a place if possible — and it won't be
hard — that has a few established fruit trees on it,
250
RESIDENCE IN THE LAND OF SUNSHINE
peaches, apricots, figs, better still if there is an Eng-
lish-walnut tree or two and some grapes, and start
a vegetable garden. There may be a little sale from
these crops, but even if there isn't, they will count
materially in feeding the family. Then I'd go in
for raising chickens for eggs — there's no end of a
market for eggs, and the young roosters can be
eaten or sold. A clerk's experience, like Thomp-
son's, is a poor start in the chicken business, but
I'm supposing he has horse-sense, and I'm giving
Mrs. Thompson credit for being no fool, and then
there's a thousand dollars reserve fund, isn't there?
Of course, there'll be all sorts of mistakes made and
a dozen times in the year the bottom will seem to
be dropping out; but knowledge comes that way,
and then the neighbors will help some in bad emer-
gencies; and I shouldn't be surprised if at the end
of a year the bank reserve had not been much de-
pleted, though it is to be expected that it would
have shrunk some. The second year ought to be
better, in the light of what had been learned not
only about the innate depravity of chickens, but
about the requirements of the fruit and vegetables
—the spraying, the irrigation, the cultivating,
trapping gophers and one doggoned thing and an-
other. But the thing especially to guard against in
the second, and third, and fourth and every suc-
ceeding year, is the natural conceit of a man that
he knows it all, for there is never a season in Cali-
fornia since I've been here that wasn't different
251
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
in some way from the others, and that meant some-
thing new to learn each year. ' '
"But I don't see that there is much of a fortune
in a half -acre and a little old shack of a house, ' ' said
I, "unless you strike oil in the garden. "
"Well maybe you will," resumed the Old Cali-
fornian with the cordial optimism of his kind.
"You've seen derricks in peoples' forty-foot lots in
Los Angeles, haven't you? And I'm told that some
places have pretty fair placer-mining in the back
yard. However, I'm not figuring on that for
Thompson; but if you'll remember, I said he was
to buy on the outskirts of a live town. Well, I think
after he has scratched along with Mrs. Thompson's
good help for three or four years in the way I have
sketched out, that little ranch of his will find itself
nearer town than when he bought, and will conse-
quently be worth more money, maybe two or three
thousand dollars ; besides, he has learned some gen-
eral principles that will make it worth his while, if
he wants to, to sell out and buy a little larger place
where he can spread himself some and do some real
ranching if he likes it — deciduous fruits for drying,
olives, walnuts, almonds, dairying; or alfalfa or
bees — they are the lazy man's jobs; citrus fruits, if
he will, but they run into money, the land is so high,
twelve or fifteen hundred an acre with bearing trees.
But whatever he does, be sure he keeps the place
small enough to run it himself with his family's aid,
for ranch laborers will eat up any profits until he
252
RESIDENCE IN THE LAND OF SUNSHINE
learns how to manage them. He will find ten or
twelve acres ample, unless for alfalfa— he will need
two or three times as much for that to make it worth
while. Then after a few years, when the land has
appreciated, as it is bound to if he buys right, sell
out again. Or if he prefers another sort of occupa-
tion after three or four years, he will by that time
have learned enough of his environment and made
acquaintances enough probably to hear of openings
for occupation coupled with the investment of a bit
of capital to advantage. You see, the first year or
two is the most dangerous time here for a man with
a little money — all the sure-thing operators in the
country are after it, and the tenderfoot doesn't
know legal tender from bogus. After he has been
here a couple of years he is wiser to the graft and
there are often real bargains he can pick up — for we
Westerners are a restless lot and when we want to
move on we have been known to put a bonanza on
the bargain counter.'"
The Old Californian was warmed up now, and
hitching his chair closer to me, continued confiden-
tially:
44 But I tell you what Thompson and any other
friend of yours ought to be mighty careful about,
when they set out to buy any land in California—
that's the title and the water supply. What with
Spanish people and Indians and mining rights, titles
are sometimes as spotty in this country as a cayuse
pony, and a tenderfoot with a lean wad doesn't want
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UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
to take any chances. We had to, when I blew in
here thirty years ago, but fortunately things are
different now, and there are responsible title com-
panies just as in the East, who will give you a clean
certificate of title and back it up with their guaran-
tee. You tell Thompson to be sure to get that be-
fore he pays out his cash. And then as to water— "
The Old Californian paused and looked remini-
scent.
''Well, sir, I guess the books of the Recording
Angel show more liens entered up against Cali-
fornians' title to glory through lying about water
than almost any other one count, unless it's frost.
It seems as though when it comes to selling a bit of
land a fellow is just obliged to romance a little about
the purity and unfailing character of the water sup-
ply; and the sources of water being hidden away
underground from mortal ken, what's the stranger
going to do? It's a hard nut for him to crack, and
that's where a year or two's experience in the coun-
try before he buys may save him a lot of trouble.
Few places have private wells as in the East, and
if they have, their permanency is by no means a
sure thing. Water is bound to be a relatively scarce
article in a country where the rainfall is, roughly
speaking, but half what it is on the Atlantic sea-
board, and its availability so clearly sets the limits
to the development of our Coast that the philan-
thropic gentlemen who organize trusts and monopo-
lies to keep the people from wasting the country's
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RESIDENCE IN THE LAND OF SUNSHINE
resources, long ago bought up pretty much all the
springs, water-rights, water-bearing canons and
such sources of supply, and created water com-
panies. To some one of these the land buyer has
to look for his supply and take what they give him,
subject to certain laws of control which the Govern-
ment imposes on them. Some of these companies
are first-c iss, some passable, and some so weak that
their supplies pinch out after a winter of deficient
rainfall. I don't know any better way for the new-
comer to do than to inquire of the honestest looking
residents what their experience has been, particu-
larly in dry years, and see how what they tell checks
up with the looks of vegetation. If the neighbor-
hood is strong on grapes, apricots, olives and such
non-irrigated crops, it is pretty safe to conclude that
there's no extra water running loose in that part of
the earth. Then if he is satisfied with the investi-
gation, let him be sure his purchase papers cover
his right to the water. And oh, yes, then there's the
little matter of alkali. That's the very deuce and
all in some localities, and the deceiving thing about
it is that it is thick in some land and right along-
side of it the ground mayn't have a trace of it. I can
show you as pretty a bit of land as you want to see,
that five hundred dollars an acre wouldn't touch,
and right across the road is a bunch of acreage that's
not worth a tinker's cuss — just alkali. Yet both
tracts are part of one ranch and originally sold at
the same price. And of course, there 's hardpan un-
255
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
der some soil, which is bad for deep-rooted crops
or trees — that ought to be looked out for.
"But, sir, you can bet your hat that if the title is
flawless and there 's plenty of water, and the land
isn't alkali or hardpan, the boy stands to double his
money by the time the Panama Canal is floating
ships through."
And so did the Old Californian come around to
the essence of the money-maker's hope in the
California philosophy — the expected rise in land
values.
III. SOME CALIFORNIANISMS
While the settlement of our Pacific slope by
Americans is of too recent a date for any marked
peculiarity of speech to have yet fastened itself
upon the Californian in the sense that it has upon
the New Englander or the Southerner of the Atlan-
tic seaboard, the newcomer does not travel far in
California before encountering words and expres-
sions that are to him either absolutely strange or
used in a novel sense.
"New Cots Two Bits a Box," for instance, posted
in a green-grocer's window, is so thoroughly unin-
telligible to the average Easterner as to read like a
foreign language, though to the Californian it is a
perfectly plain advertisement of apricots at twenty-
five cents a box. To be able to reckon in "bits" is
a serviceable accomplishment for the traveler in
256
RESIDENCE IN THE LAND OF SUNSHINE
California byways to acquire; for while its use is
by no means universal and the coin itself went out
with the Spaniards, there is a certain local pride in
keeping the word going, and one meets it constantly.
It is employed only in multiples of two, as two bits,
twenty-five cents ; four bits, fifty cents ; six bits, sev-
enty-five cents.
i ' High fog, ' ' too, is usually an enigma. The tour-
ist comes down to breakfast and finds the sky over-
cast.
"Cloudy day," he remarks to the waiter, "is it
going to rain?"
"Oh, no, sir," replies the man of the napkin, if
he is experienced, "only a high fog."
As the stranger observes no evidence of fog, only
a gray sky, he does not see the appropriateness of
the term, nor why the trouble is not plain cloudi-
ness. But the Californian, in some strange man-
ner, knows the difference, and about ten o'clock, the
fog, so high that it seemed something else, has
floated out to sea, and the sun shines in a cloudless
blue sky.
Then there is the word "pack." Anybody any-
where in the United States, knows how to pack a box
or a trunk, but we had to come to California to learn
how to pack a piece of string; for on this western
rim of our continent, half the time the word means
"to carry." Of course you have to pack your goods
upon your burro, but then, too, the burro packs the
pack. An old mountaineer of whom we had occasion
257
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
once to borrow a penknife, looked at it affectionately
as he returned it to his pocket, and remarked, * ' You
bet it's a good knife; I've packed it around with me
for nigh on to twenty years. ' '
Another interesting localism is the verb "to
rustle." Originating on the cattle ranges, where in
the old, lawless "bad man" days it meant "to
steal," it has acquired in these piping times of peace
the innocent significance of "to gather." Thus
among the camper's first duties, is to rustle his fire-
wood. He also "prospects" for water and if in his
search his foot slips on a "slick" rock, it is what is
to be expected, for your thorough-going Californian
has small use for the adjective "smooth." In the
camp supplies will be "spuds" for potatoes, and
quite likely "frijoles" (pronounced fre-ho-les) for
beans. For saddle-bags your packer will have
"kyacks" on the donkeys or alforjas (alfor-has),
and of course you never travel a path, but always a
"trail."
The principal outer influence on California speech
has naturally been Spanish. Some of these Span-
ish terms familiar as words to the new arrival from
the East, will surprise him in their application.
"Corral" for instance, seems natural enough to
cattle enclosures each covering an acre or two, as he
saw them from the car windows when he crossed the
plains; but when his California hostess who keeps
her pet Persian cat outdoors in a wire cage a few
feet square calls that a corral, it strikes him oddly.
258
RESIDENCE IN THE LAND OF SUNSHINE
Canon, too, which he associates with fearful Rocky
Mountain gorges, loses some of its majesty when ap-
plied to any small ravine as it may be in California.
The word "ranch" has possibilities he never
dreamed of, for it may describe property anywhere
in extent from half an acre to three hundred thou-
sand ; and while it may be a grain ranch or a cattle
ranch, .it may also be a chicken ranch or a bee ranch
or a fruit ranch — but never a "farm." Farmers, in
the Golden State, are "ranchers." But then, if you
have the privilege of making the acquaintance of
some Spanish landed proprietor, do not commit the
mistake of referring to his estate as a "rancheria"
(with the accent on the i), for in Southern California
this word means an Indian village.
In traveling through the country, one encounters
in every day speech many of these Spanish words
more or less modified. Mesa for tableland is uni-
versal, and chaparral for a shrubby thicket is classic,
though personally we have more often heard an-
other word, chamise, applied to the same thing.
This last term — pronounced chameeze — is also given
to the common greasewood of the mountains and
foothills, known to botanists as adenostoma fascicu-
latum. Cienaga is a good Spanish survival mean-
ing any wet, marshy place, and potrero is occasion-
ally heard applied to wild pasture land. Rincon is
where two hills come obliquely together forming a
corner or nook. A shallow valley is Canada (pro-
nounced can-yak '-da) , but this lingers now princi-
259
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
pally as a geographical designation, and it is doubt-
ful if many white Californians know what it signi-
fies. Arroyo is a commonly used Spanish word for
the channel of a stream, and the bulrush — of which
thickets are found on the borders of marshes and
certain rivers — is quite commonly called tule (two
syllables). The earthen jar that contains drinking
water and stands often wrapped in dampened bur-
lap in some shady corner in the old country houses,
or swings from a beam, is an olla (pronounced 6-ya).
The swarthy Mexican laborers in conical straw hats
who work industriously on the railroads in Southern
California and on ranches, are popularly known
sometimes as "greasers," sometimes as cholos.
Strictly speaking the term "cholo" is applicable
only to a half-breed, lower in the social scale than the
true Mexican.
Perhaps of all Californianisms, the visitor from
the Atlantic seaboard finds "back East" the most
entertaining. This expression takes on a brand
new significance once the Sierra Nevada is crossed.
When keeping house in Pasadena one summer, we
employed a woman to do some cleaning for us. She
was talkative, after the manner of her kind, and had
many pleasant words for the abundance and lus-
ciousness of the fruit in California.
"You see," she explained, "I come from back
East, and we don't have much fruit there."
Recollections of Delaware peaches, New Jersey
berries, York State grapes and New England apples,
260
RESIDENCE IN THE LAND OF SUNSHINE
rose before us, and we demurred. What part of the
East had she come from?
" Wyoming, " she remarked ingenuously.
This, we have since learned, is really quite far
east, when Utah and Arizona are reckoned, as they
are from the California standpoint, in eastern terri-
tory. As for Texas — that is "way back."
261
CONCERNING THE CLIMATE
I. THE CLIMATE IN GENERAL
(With specific reference to Southern California.)
OF all the gifts of Nature to the Golden State,
none has been more thoroughly advertised than
its climate. Nevertheless— or, shall I say, therefore
— there is nothing about which the transient visitor
is apt to be more unreliably informed beforehand, or
to carry away with him after a few weeks' visit,
more incomplete notions. One needs to spend at
least one whole year on the Pacific Slope before he
is in position to speak of its climate in any compre-
hensive way; and even this twelve-month's experi-
ence will serve only to outline its broader features
of difference from the climate of our Atlantic sea-
board. "With increasing years of residence he will
find need to revise many of his first conclusions and
will grow more and more cautious about positive
generalizations. The old-time Californian, conse-
quently, sets many hedges about his speech when
the inquiring tourist tries to pin him down to hard
and fast declarations.
"No, they ain't no sunstrokes on this coast ever,"*
262
CONCERNING THE CLIMATE
I hear Uncle William Parkes remark, as he drives
a party of Eastern school-teachers in his public car-
riage around Pasadena, " leastways you needn't fig-
ger on 'em. To be sure, last summer I did hear tell
of a couple of cholos who died of the heat in a ditch
up in Fresno. That don't often happen, though.
Of course it don't rain in summer — that's the dry
season here, you know. Leastwise, that's the way
it gin 'ally is; but once in so often, things gits out of
joint in the weather outfit up above, and I have
known quite a bit of rain once or twice in July. No,
it never snows in Southern California you bet, ex-
cept in them high mountains — that is, it ain't
natural fur it to snow in the valleys, though I do
mind, now you speak of it, that one winter a few
years ago we did have a snowfall in Pasadena, but
it melted jest as fast as it touched the ground, and
didn't last ten minutes. Thunder storms? No-o —
well I do mind there was one about two years ago ;
but there's as good as none. When does the rainy
season begin? Well, now, I couldn't jest say. No-
vember is purty safe to figger on. But then again,
I have seen right smart of rain in September; and
other years they ain't been none till purty nigh
Christmas. You see, missus, it's a bully climate, all
right, and suits me right down to the ground and
every right-minded person, but when it comes to
drawing up a constitootion and by-laws fur it to go
by, you'll find it jumpin' its bail now and then. I
knowed a lot more about this climate the first year
263
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
I lived in it than I've ever knowed since and I've
been here goin' on twenty-seven year this spring."
One of the popular misconceptions about the Cali-
fornia climate is that it is without seasons, and
thousands who annually come to this coast for a
month or two's outing during the winter or spring
months return to their Eastern homes in the belief
that the whole round year is a monotony of ethereal
mildness with a few disagreeable rains thrown in
during four or five months of the winter and spring.
As a matter of fact there are four distinct seasons
in California just as in the East, but the extremes
of the East are absent here. Speaking for the beau-
tiful valleys that open to 'the coast, and which in-
clude the particular parts of the State most resorted
to by travelers, while there is a marked freedom
from the boisterousness which in some way mars
every season in the East, there is yet no lack of dif-
ference in the quality of the months, as the year
moves on to its consummation.
From December until late February, for instance,
there is a succession of snappy mornings, not infre-
quently with frost in the early hours, and of nights
briskly cold that give a special zest to the family
gathering about the evening lamp and the crackling
hearth-firt, with pussy asleep before it. As the ver-
nal equinox approaches, the hillsides and mesas don
their glorious raiment of wild flowers, the orange-
blossoms load the air with fragrance and the decidu-
ous fruit trees of the ranches — the almonds, the
264
CONCERNING THE CLIMATE
peaches, the apricots, the plums — bourgeon and
flower ; the rains cease, the songs of returning birds
are heard on fence-post and on tree-top, and spring
is as decidedly spring here as anywhere on earth.
With the outgoing of May, the hills and valleylands
begin to take on the summer brownness that marks
the resting time of much of the plant-world in this
land of no rain from May till November ; the nights,
still cool but not so cool as earlier in the year, are
succeeded by days that during the middle hours are
sufficiently warm to lure one to a siesta in the shade
of a vine-covered pergola, or in a patio where olean-
ders cast their cooling shadows and water tinkles in
the fountain. This is pure summer — absolutely dis-
tinct from the spring that preceded it; absolutely
distinct, also, from the fall which follows it, when
the leaves of the deciduous trees and shrubs take
on characteristic autumnal tints, when the vineyards
are all glorious with their purpling clusters, when
golden-rod is blooming, and the fluffy balls of wild
clematis seeds ripen in the roadside tangles and float
away, and when the air, as the sun draws to its early
setting, is chill with the genuine appetizing cold of
an Eastern October.
All this seasonal change is to be appreciated only
from continuance of residence, and once realized, the
very gentleness and subtleness of it endear it to lov-
ers of a quiet life. There are no cold waves, hot
waves, cyclones or blizzards, no cloudbursts or thun-
derstorms even, except in the high mountains.
265
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
Kipling in one of his essays has whimsically alluded
to the boisterous, unladylike conduct of certain of
the American seasons, banging the door in each
other's faces and in other ways misbehaving. He
could not have spoken so of the California seasons,
which are well-bred, sweet tempered and kindly, yet
each with a mind of its own that makes it stand out
distinctly from its fellows. As to wind, different lo-
calities vary. On the whole there is less of it that is
disagreeable (the desert regions excepted) than on
the Atlantic coast ; though truth requires mention of
a dry, irritating sort called a norther, or in some sec-
tions a Santa Ana, which is to be borne with at
times. The norther is as discomforting to Cali-
fornia as the mistral is to the south of France, but
is warm instead of cold. Its visitations vary in fre-
quency in different parts of the State. In many, it
does not occur oftener than once a year, sometimes
not so often as that, day following day for weeks with
nothing blowing stronger than a five mile breeze.
Then some day, come certain preliminary warm
puffs, which gradually settle into a tempest that
bends great trees like whips, whistles demoniacally
about the corner of the house, and raises an intoler-
able dust. The velocity gradually increases, attain-
ing on rare occasions a maximum of fifty or sixty
miles an hour until every particle of moisture seems
sucked out of the air and your nervous system is
strained to the snapping point. Then suddenly — it
may be after twelve hours of steady blow or twenty-
266
CONCERNING THE CLIMATE
four — there comes a lull, an expiring gasp or two,
and to your unutterable relief a heavenly stillness
pervades the universe, and you thank goodness
that's over.
"Oh, yes," says the Old Calif ornian, when you re-
proach him for it, ' ' the Lord sends us a norther once
in a long while to keep us humble, I guess, but they
don't come often. When one does come, there's
nothing I know of to be done about it but to go in
the house, shut the door and windows, and forget it
if you can. Then when it has blown over, go out
and assess the damage. It won't be as much as you
thought."
Apropos of the summer, it may be added that to
appreciate the charm of the landscape in California
all that season, one needs an especially open mind.
We are all so disposed to reckon the pea-green
beauty of the Eastern summer the one proper
standard by which to judge that our first disposition
with respect to a prospect that is barren of much
green, is to call it burned up and ugly. When we
succeed in ridding ourselves of that convention, we
find that as a matter of fact the California country-
side in summer is the analogue of an Eastern land-
scape in late autumn — replete with beauty less pat-
ent to the careless than that of a more flowery
season, but just as intense. California's long rain-
less period of almost constant sunshine is radically
different from a droughty time in the East, in this
respect : there, the normal condition is fixed for f re-
267
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
quent rains and resultant greenness, and the failure
of the expected moisture is a calamity because ab-
normal; here in California, the annual browning is
part of the year's regular plan, God's permanent
ordering for the land, and like all the routine of na-
ture, beautiful if one have eyes to see. Pas-
tures are, of course, withered, and hills are verdure-
less, but the absence of bright green is made up by
the abounding presence of rare tones of brown, olive,
and yellow, which pale and deepen and intermingle
in countless exquisite combinations, in the shifting
lights of the revolving days.
Another way of dividing the California year is
into the rainy season and the dry. This only means
that from the middle of spring until mid-autumn
there is, as a rule, no rain; while from mid-autumn
until the middle of spring again, all the rain falls
that does fall within the compass of the twelve
months, but every day is by no means a rainy day.
The rainfall, for instance, recorded at Los Angeles
for a series of thirty years, during the months of
December, January, February and March, averaged
a total of eleven and one-half inches for these rain-
iest months of the rainy season, being somewhat
less than three inches per month. This is not ap-
preciably different from the average rainfall dur-
ing the summer months in the East. From Santa
Barbara northward the volume of precipitation is
rather greater.
To the permanent dweller in California the season
268
CONCERNING THE CLIMATE
of the rains is a time of especial content, for after
six months of persistent dry weather, one is, if ever,
properly ready to welcome a rainy day with that un-
reserved heartiness with which, one may be sure,
the Lord desires His blessings received. While the
winter tourist naturally enough grumbles at the
rainy day as an interference with his personal
plans for motoring, golfing or taking a drive, the
resident Californian is feelingly aware that all the
water which makes the basis of California's being
the pleasant place it is to visitors, must come from
the clouds, if it comes at all, during this season
which the tourist chooses for his own. So he smiles
comfortably as he looks over his spectacles at his
rain gauge and sees the column of water rising.
If the visitor would but realize the fact, the win-
ter rains in California are among the especial
charms of the climate. Considering, for instance,
the territory tributary to Los Angeles, nowhere are
there gentler, tenderer, softer rains; nowhere, to
reverse the Shakespearean figure of speech, are rains
fuller of the unstrained quality of mercy; nowhere
do they give more considerate warning of their com-
ing, gathering openly in a sky that daily clouds up
a little more and more for several days, and then
beginning not in a wild whirl of wind and a burst
of waterspouts, but with a gentle sprinkle which
gradually increases in volume as the parched tongue
of earth is moistened to take it in. Once begun,
however, the rain does not readily stop. Usually
269
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
for two or three days the clouds continue dripping
as from a sponge that is squeezed now hard, now
lightly. Occasionally there is a lifting of the mists
from the mountains, revealing a snow-capped peak
here and there and letting patches of reassuring sun-
light sift through to earth, before the vapors shut
down again and fresh showers descend. And then,
after all is over, the measurement of what has fallen
during the whole course of the storm, will perhaps
be but an inch or two.
On these days of moisture you will find comfort
indoors beside an open fire, if you are blessed with
one, or lacking that, by your gas grate, or portable
oil heater which sooner or later every wise visitant
in lodgings finds it conducive to comfort to have in
his room. The rain should not, however, keep one
indoors entirely, for while at times there is a storm
that drives and dashes, more often the modest pre-
cipitation is so nearly straight downward as to
make walking with an umbrella a pleasant pastime.
There is a delicious coolness in the dampness which
renders a light overcoat or medium-weight wrap
comfortable, while the cleansing air of a rainy day
in California has a caress in it that one never forgets,
being free from the humid mugginess which not in-
frequently accompanies a winter rain on the Atlan-
tic seaboard. Then the clearing off, the clouds
breaking apart and lifting from the mountains,
leaving all the peaks wreathed and the canons smok-
ing with rising vapor, the clean, bracing dryness
270
CONCERNING THE CLIMATE
that succeeds the rain, the shining faces of the leaves
and flowers put up to the sunshine, the stimulating-
winter sunshine itself — this part of the rainy pro-
gram even the grumpiest tourist enjoys.
Of all the surprises that California, and particu-
larly Southern California, holds for the newcomer,
probably none is more thorough than the delight-
fulness of the summers. When Mr. Moneybags,
just out from New York or Chicago, steps from his
room upon the sunny veranda of his hotel on some
balmy January morning and draws his first deli-
cious breath of the California winter, he is apt to
say, throwing back the lapels of his summery coat,
in which a fresh plucked flower is blooming:
1 i Well, there's no discount on this — it's gilt-edge
paper, without doubt; but if it is this warm in win-
ter, it must be like a furnace in summer. "
And that is the regulation attitude of the Eastern-
bred towards the Southern California summer, be-
fore he has lived through one. He knows that the
July temperatures of his Pennsylvania or Massachu-
setts home range anywhere from forty to eighty de-
grees higher than in midwinter and when he comes
to California and sees the thermometer at noon on
New Year's Day standing at seventy-five in the
shade, it seems natural enough to reckon on a sum-
mer temperature of a hundred and fifteen to a hun-
dred and fifty-five !
Now as a matter of fact, the entire coastal region
of Southern California, as far inland as the influ-
271
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
ence of the Pacific trade-winds and ocean fogs is
felt — the region in which, for instance, such well-
known tourist cities as Santa Barbara, Pasadena,
Los Angeles and San Diego lie — has a particularly
charming summer climate. There is an occasional
brief spell — rarely of more than three or four days '
duration — of undeniably hot weather to be expected
during the progress of every summer, but the
nights and mornings are even then deliciously cool,
and the days so devoid of any perceptible humid
quality and so tempered by the regular wind off the
sea that the midday temperature during such times,
though it ascends sometimes into the nineties and
occasionally even to a hundred, is never prostrating.
Yet even after the Easterner has decided to settle in
the State, and has been told and told and told again
that the summers in California— the desert counties
excepted — are no warmer than anywhere else, while
anywhere within fifty miles of the coast they are
really cooler than the Atlantic seaboard ever
dreamed of for summer weather, he still finds it
hard to accept the totally different conditions of the
Pacific Slope at their face value.
Our Cousin Jane from Philadelphia is typical of
this frame of mind, and her first summer in Pasa-
dena was a typical experience. She arrived in the
early part of April. Being exceedingly fond of
flowers, she was every day filled with joy at the won-
derful sight of the gardens and of the countryside
in its vernal freshness. Like most people having a
272
CONCERNING THE CLIMATE
good time in California she lost track of the calen-
dar entirely and enjoyed herself unreservedly.
One morning at breakfast, she suddenly inquired
the day of the month.
' ' Mercy me ! " she exclaimed, when told it was the
last day of June, "you don't mean to say that next
week will be the Fourth of July?"
After breakfast, we saw her examining the ther-
mometer that hung in a shady corner of the porch.
"Why," she said, looking disturbed— she hates
hot weather — and removing a light shawl which she
had found comfortable in the cool breakfast room,
"do you know it is seventy-six and not half-past
eight yet? It's going to be a scorching hot day."
It was in vain that we told her that the mercury
had been just as high at the same hour for the last
couple of weeks, and that the absence of humidity
took the unbearableness out of high temperatures.
Seventy-six was seventy-six to Cousin Jane, and
meant at least eighty-six by lunch-time, and that of
course was too hot for any mortal use.
So like Don Quixote fighting the windmill, Cousin
Jane set her lance in rest against the weather in
orthodox Philadelphia style. Taking it for granted
that the sunlit outdoors was as hot as it looked,
which it never is in California, she decided to stay
indoors, and abjured her daily walk abroad. She
pulled down the shades to keep out the glare and
shut down the windows of her room to keep out the
heat; she fanned herself in season and out, and at
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UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
noon lay on the lounge with closed eyes. Immedi-
ately after lunch, she retired to the gloom of her
darkened chamber and lay down to thoughts of the
stifling heat. We recognized all the motions of a
hot summer day in the East.
As tea-time drew near she came forth from re-
tirement clad in her coolest, gauziest attire, and
took another look at the thermometer. It was still
well up in the seventies, so she carried a chair out
upon the shadiest part of the lawn and sat down
under a tree. The same cool trade-wind that had
been gently blowing all day and had made work in
the broad sunshine even at midday entirely bear-
able to the rest of the family (though Cousin Jane's
mind had been unable to accept such a doctrine),
was still blowing and played maliciously across her
shoulders. Had the thermometer been ten degrees
lower, she would have said the air was cool, but
with the mercury not far from eighty, how could it
be cool? It certainly would have been hot at that
in Philadelphia, and why should it be different
here? So Cousin Jane stuck it out gamely until
the tea-bell rang. She went to bed early that night,
and next morning came to breakfast with her
shawl on.
' ' I seem to have caught cold, ' ' she said peevishly.
"This is a queer climate. "
It would appear that Cousin Jane's lance had
gotten entangled in the remorseless sweep of the
windmill's sail, and she had been thrown.
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CONCERNING THE CLIMATE
II. THE INVALID AND THE CLIMATE
In the case of invalids, it is to be borne in mind
that the climate in itself does not cure, but it en-
ables the ailing one who is careful, to take the need-
ful steps in the line of his cure, without the ag-
gravating assaults upon his progress to which the
Eastern climate, do what he will, subjects him.
In such an Eastern city as Philadelphia, for in-
stance, or Boston, no man with a weak throat or a
disposition to catarrhal troubles, can possibly get
through a winter without a certain number of colds.
In Southern California, there is no need of his hav-
ing a single one, if he be careful to wear woolen un-
derclothing, to avoid sitting in the shade, and
always to carry an overcoat if he is to be out after
sundown. Thus if he has any doctoring to do or
any special course of treatment to follow, he can
benefit steadily by it without encountering the set-
backs of recurring colds which in the climate of the
East with its sudden and violent changes, are prac-
tically inescapable.
To this passive advantage the California climate
offers the positive benefit of an abundance of sun-
shine, a lower relative humidity * than the Atlantic
*A word should be added about humidity on the Pacific slope,
as the reports of the United States Weather Bureau are mislead-
ing on this subject. They state for Los Angeles, for example, a
mean humidity of about 71 degrees for the year — the same as at
Philadelphia, which, among its natural advantages, makes no claim
275
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
seaboard, and a pronounced equability. Of these
three, the greatest of value to the average invalid
is the sunshine, an invigorating energy which for
many ills is doctor and nurse rolled into one. Even
in summer it is to most Californians not enervating
but distinctly stimulating, and sunstroke is a word
practically without place in the California vocabu-
lary. The special climatic feature of danger is the
to a climate of low humidity ! In point of fact the term "humidity"
in ordinary parlance, stands for a certain enervating, oppressive
mugginess rarely ever felt in California, and for this the Weather
Bureau has no descriptive word — its humidity is simply the degree
of moisture in the air.
Two other facts need to be borne in mind in relation to the
Weather Bureau reports:
1. The Office observations are taken at 8 A. M. and 8 P. M., and
while data compiled on this basis probably represent the average
conditions for the twenty-four hours on the Atlantic seaboard, they
do not so represent those of the Pacific, since they fail to take
account of the prevailing low humidity of the Pacific Coast mid-day.
Owing to the nearness of the ocean on one side and the desert on
the other, slight wind-shifts cause marked and rapid fluctuations
in the moisture-content of the air, which are ignored in computing
the daily averages. For instance, during spring and summer at
Los Angeles, the degree of atmospheric moisture is high in the
early morning, (perhaps 90 degrees), and decreases rapidly as soon
as the usual morning cloudiness (high fog) breaks away. This
decrease continues until afternoon when the moisture-laden wind
sets in from the Pacific, bringing the evening coolness. The aver-
age mid-day humidity at Los Angeles is about 50 degrees, and at
points farther inland considerably lower.
2. On the Atlantic seaboard the excessive humidities accompany
high temperatures, while in California the direct opposite is the
rule. When the humidity is high on the Pacific slope it is because
of a cool ocean breeze, which is naturally invigorating and exhila-
rating.
The author is indebted for much of the above statement of facts
to A. B. Wollaber, in charge of the Local Weather Office at Los
Angeles.
276
CONCERNING THE CLIMATE
great difference in temperature between day and
night and between sunshine and shadow. People
from the East rarely realize this when they first
arrive, and are disappointed that they cannot be
comfortable in midwinter in alpaca coats and gauze
undershirts. We always recommend our friends to
bring all their winter outfit (except ulsters) and
they find that at one time or another, it is all needed.
The people who complain of the Pacific Coast
climate — and there are many such — will, in all prob-
ability, be found to have neglected common sense
requirements as to clothing. Customarily in a
Pasadena winter, for instance, the thermometer
stands at from forty to fifty at breakfast-time, rises
to seventy or even eighty at midday, and dropping
rapidly as the sun nears its setting, is back again
in the forties by bed-time. The human system was
never framed to meet changes of some thirty de-
grees Fahrenheit in six or eight hours without some
corresponding change in dress, yet one finds some
men shivering along on winter nights in summer
clothes and no overcoat, and women in gauzy shirt-
waists and no hats, and if they do not develop
rheumatism or chronic catarrh, it is only because
they do not stay in California long enough.
If one is seeking climate in California there is a
considerable choice in the selection of a place of
sojourn. Climates vary markedly within a short
distance. The air of Pasadena, for instance, charm-
ing as it is to most, is not beneficial to all, as the
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UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
prevalence of the ocean night-fogs which temper
the summer climate and contribute largely to the
city's delightfulness as a summer residence, im-
parts a degree of dampness to the atmosphere which
is not best for certain conditions of health. River-
side or Redlands with their drier air might prove
better for these, but the drier heat of their sum-
mers due to the distance from the sea, make summer
residence so far inland rather oppressive. Banning,
in the San Grorgonio Pass overlooking the desert,
has its advocates for diseases of the respiratory
system, and the foot-hill towns perched on the rim
of the San Gabriel Valley — places like Sierra Madre
and Monrovia, connected with Los Angeles by di-
rect electric lines — have the advantage, salutary to
many conditions, of being well above the ordinary
fogs of spring and summer and yet within the cool-
ing influence of the sea. Central California, too, is
rich in phases of climate that make it a section to
be reckoned with by the health-seeker. The Napa
Valley, just north of San Francisco is one of many
that have an enviable reputation in this regard.
This valley, as the readers of Robert Louis Steven-
son's works will remember, is the scene of his " Sil-
verado Squatters."
It is, indeed, misleading ever to speak of Cal-
ifornia's climate — rather should we speak plurally
of its climates, of which there are almost as many
varieties as post-offices ; and a matter of a few miles
will often make an essential difference to the in-
278
CONCERNING THE CLIMATE
valid. Cases have been known to be at a standstill
in Altadena, for instance, that have improved stead-
ily at Pasadena, five miles away, and vice versa.
It is therefore of the greatest importance to health
seekers not to make up their minds prior to coming
to California, as to the particular locality where
they will settle. Individual cases often involve dif-
ferent requirements, and in view of the wide choice
to select from, it is wise to look about and experi-
mentally test a number of places before deciding
on any.
279
CAMP COOKERY
FOE THE NON-PROFESSIONAL CAMPER
I. WHAT OUKS Is NOT
(With Apologies to Mr. Stewart Edward White.)
IT was before the days of some experiences set
down in this book, and Sylvia was seated at a
civilized window in a civilized room reading a large
green volume. She looked troubled. Passing
through the room I noted the anxious expression
and inquired the cause. The book was closed with
some emphasis.
"I am discouraged, " she said.
I was alarmed. When before had Sylvia been
discouraged? she who had always found the interest
of life rise with the increasing difficulty of its daily
problems, and who thanked Heaven for obstacles
because they made such admirable stepping-stones
to greater heights. What catastrophe had damp-
ened this cheerful spirit? What barrier had closed
the door of hope?
"This man/' and Sylvia made a vicious poke at
the green volume, "this man is telling how to cook
in the wilderness. I have never cooked in the wil-
280
CAMP COOKERY
derness in my life, but the performance as he de-
scribes it does not seem difficult. The difficulty to
my mind lies in his results — they would simply kill
us both. Now, we are planning trips as wild as
these. Do we have to live in this dreadful way!
Please listen to this"— and she read a stomach-turn-
ing recipe involving the compounding of flour,
raisins, baking powder, fat salt pork and sugar,
11 mixed into a mess with a quantity of larfupy
dope."
Having written a little myself, I felt privileged
to speak as one of the craft, and so I expounded my
views of the matter.
"The author is just astonishing the natives a lit-
tle, I think; nobody has to live that way anywhere,
and certainly we don't. The men in this book were
possessed of iron nerves and robust physiques, and
the very bohemianism of their fare was part of the
fun to them. We are of a different makeup. We
have nerves and stomachs and livers that must be
treated with a certain consideration, or we are out
of the running. Now I think we can prove to our-
selves and to the public whom we shall try to reach
with the account of the accomplishment, that it is
entirely possible to live in the wilderness like peo-
ple of gentle breeding and to provide, a hundred
miles from anywhere, without any extraordinary
outlay of means, a menu and a menage to which we
should feel in nowise ashamed to invite our most
particular friends — only we won't!"
281
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
The following chapters are an endeavor to show
how this was done and contain some practical direc-
tions, based on our own experience, as to how others
may achieve a similar result.
II. THE COMFORTS OF HOME WHEN CAMPING
To invade the time-honored realm of the camp
frying-pan and smoke-blackened coffee-pot with any
new suggestions for camp cookery is a fearsome ven-
ture. Flapjacks and bacon dished up on a tin plate
and Drenched down," to use a favorite expression
of a guide we once employed, with coffee, always
coffee and yet again coffee, served in a granite-
ware cup with a tin spoon — these are inseparably
linked in many minds with the idea of camp life
which accordingly has been thought not for those
less vigorous, who even in an outdoor existence
cannot digest fried fare or drink unlimited
coffee.
We know, nevertheless, from experience that two
people of the latter type can travel through the
wilds of Arizona, New Mexico or California with
entire ease, provided there be a little forethought
and some understanding of cookery; but some time
must be spent beforehand in careful packing, and
considerable extra cost of transportation must be
reckoned on. Also it is well to be able to avail one's
self of the natural products of the location where
one may be camped. And here a little pioneer lore
282
CAMP COOKEEY
and botanical knowledge will come into play. For
example, lemons cannot be had everywhere, but one
of the commonest shrubs of the California moun-
tains is a species of sumac known as the Indian-
lemonade bush from the sticky, red berries of
which, by simply steeping them in cold water for a
few minutes, a refreshing acid drink may be made.
Neither may one hope for watermelon in the desert,
but the fruit of the prickly pear and some other
cacti is almost as delicious as the watermelon, with
somewhat of its flavor. Such luxuries, too, as let-
tuce and spinach, are not to be expected in the wil-
derness, but a frequent weed in certain sections of
the State is a relative of the Spring Beauty of the
East, known as Miners' or Indian Lettuce, the
younger stems and leaves of which boiled with bacon
and served with slices of hard boiled egg (if you
have eggs with you) make a capital substitute for
other greens.
In laying in supplies for a camping trip, it is well
to take as few canned things as possible, as these
are heavy to transport and if needed can usually
be bought from the traders or supply stations on
the road. So also can bacon, coffee and tea, usually
all of quite good quality. If space is very limited,
the trader can be depended upon also for flour, but
as this is frequently poor at some places, it is pref-
erable to carry one's own. We take less flour than
do most providers, and more corn-meal. If one un-
derstands the possibilities of the latter, there is a
283
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
varied number of appetizing dishes to be made
from it. They are more nutritious than wheat-
breads, besides affording more variety. White
corn-meal is much more delicate and less apt to
grow strong in hot weather than the yellow meal,
which nearly every veteran camper will tell you to
buy. After you have listened respectfully to his
advice, take white corn-meal.
Always use the best baking powder. Traders as
a rule have only inferior grades. Better still, do
not use any, but substitute cream of tartar and soda
in the proportions respectively of two to one, or
yeast when procurable. Take several different
kinds of dried beans instead of all one kind. If you
ever crave variety it will be in the matter of beans.
The white navy bean, the pink frijole, and the dried
lima make a grateful assortment of nutrition in a
small compass.
Carry as much dried fruit as possible, and again
study variety. Prunes once or twice are bearable
but prunes always are a weariness to the flesh; so
besides these it is well to pack small quantities each
of dried peaches, apples, apricots, figs and dates;
and then fill in every crack of the baggage with
English walnuts and raisins. Then there are also
" evaporated v apples, which the traders usually
carry and which make a welcome change from the
common dried apple of commerce.
We give very little space to condensed milk, never
having found its gummy sweetness a satisfactory
284
CAMP COOKERY
addition to our menus. For those whose content-
ment in camp is dependent on something of the
sort, some brand of evaporated cream is in our
judgment to be preferred to condensed milk.
As eggs are at the bottom of so many culinary
triumphs, we take as many as it is possible to carry.
Get them absolutely fresh, wipe them carefully, and
pack the requirements of your first week in oatmeal
or any dried cereal which you may be taking. They
will in this way stand a great deal of rough travel.
The supply for the latter part of your trip, should
first be greased, then dipped in salt, each wrapped
carefully in paper and packed in boxes. If they
can be packed in salt, so much the better. They
make in this way heavy packages, but it is the best
manner we have found to tide them, in cookable
condition, over several weeks of travel or camping.
With respect to butter, secure a perfectly fresh
lot and pack it in small jelly glasses with tight lids,
allowing one glassful for two persons for one day.
Be careful not to work or smear the butter around
in the packing or it will lose its sweetness and never
be good afterwards. Keep it as cool as possible
during transportation— above all, protected from
the sun — and at once upon reaching camp bury it in
a box in the shade, preferably near water.
For drinkables, a bottle of raspberry vinegar and
one of unfermented grape-juice will not be difficult
to carry, and will prove wonderful stimulants to
cheerfulness under some adverse conditions which
285
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
will come to the best regulated camp. For a steady
hot drink we have found invaluable a certain prepa-
ration of cocoa called choco-lactine, which has not
the liver-clogging or headache-producing quality of
ordinary cocoa. Moreover, unlike so many prepa-
rations of concentrated nutriment, it is entirely
palatable. It is a coarse powder containing be-
sides the cocoa an admixture of milk and sugar;
four teaspoonfuls dropped into a cup of hot water
are instantaneously converted into a delicious,
wholesome brew. There are times, however, when
to certain temperaments nothing takes the place of
a cup of hot tea. As this is readily made, it is well
to carry a packet of the leaves along, even on trips
of a few hours.
The question of meat in mountain fastnesses or
desert is always a perplexing one. Dried beef in
the " chunk" is good, this being the most concen-
trated form available, and in this shape it keeps
better than when chipped, and the amount for each
meal is sliced off as needed. Bacon of course is
one of the main standbys, and variety may be se-
cured by taking with you a piece of pickled pork
(not dry salted pork, which is a very different thing
and will not keep well) and keeping it packed in
salt in as cool a place as your camp affords. When
there is a sportsman in your party, even if you are
not out primarily for game, your larder may be
enlivened by the addition of a rabbit now and then ;
and in a trout country there is, of course, fish in
286
CAMP COOKERY
season. For frying purposes the fat from fried
bacon is by far the best material both for diges-
tion 's sake and also, to many palates, for tastiness.
If you use many fried things, provide yourself be-
fore starting with some bacon rinds from the meat
shop, and render the fat down to take with you
packed in a tight jar. If you do not fry much, the
fat left over from the bacon cooked in camp, will be
enough for ordinary purposes.
III. SOME RECIPES TO FIT THE WILDS
If for a brief time you are situated where none
but canned meats can be obtained — a situation
which from the standpoint of gastronomic comfort
is to to be avoided as far as possible— you will find
that the following dish, known to us as "The Cow-
boy's Delight, " will prove an acceptable interlude
in the monotony:
Into a pint of boiling water slice two small on-
ions and several potatoes ; season well with salt and
pepper ; and when the potatoes are nearly done, add
one can of corned beef cut into dice. If you have
butter and flour, rub together a teaspoonful of each
and thicken with it. This amount will barely suf-
fice for two normal appetites on a cold day, and if
a reasonably hungry cowboy drops in, the quantity
will need to be at least doubled. If corned beef is
scarce, use more potatoes and onions.
A dish which in our camp experience we have
287
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
found particularly palatable to all partakers, goes
by the name of "The Arizona Special." It is com-
pounded as follows:
Put into a saucepan one and one-half cups of
corn-meal. Pour boiling water upon this till it is
of the consistency of chicken feed. Add a lump of
butter, varying from the size of a walnut to that of
an egg, according to your supply of butter. Cover
this closely that the meal may steam and the butter
melt. Beat up two eggs and add them, with one
teaspoonful of salt and two of sugar, to the corn-
meal after the butter is melted. Beat this together
and add sufficient cold water to make a rather thick
batter that will drop — not pour — from the spoon.
Add to this two rounding teaspoonfuls of baking
powder ; beat thoroughly, and turn into your frying
pan, which must be hot on the camp-fire or stove
and greased with plenty of bacon fat. Cover closely
with a tight lid and cook over a very slow fire. By
being closely covered, this mixture will be practi-
cally baked. It should be turned out upon the lid
when done and slid back again into the frying pan
with the brown side up so as to brown the side that
was on top. If this is properly made, your only dif-
ficulty will be in supplying enough of it.
"But," some one objects, "where are eggs to be
had in the wilderness?"
Of course, if you have no eggs, do not use them;
but as explained elsewhere in this book, one who
believes in comfort in camping can arrange to have
288
CAMP COOKERY
them under any ordinary conditions. They are no
more trouble to transport than anything else when
you get used to it. Naturally, however there are
times when the best laid plans for an egg-supply
gang agley, in which emergency, a pleasant dish is
the following, which even at home is one of the
best ways of using corn-meal.
Make a plain corn-meal mush, boiling it, if you
have the time, for several hours. Allow it to cool
only slightly, meantime stirring it well. It should
be well salted and quite thick in consistency. Now
into a frying pan with an abundance of hot bacon
fat, drop this hot corn-meal by spoonfuls making
so many fat little cakes, each separate from the
other. When one side of a cake has browned —
this will take some time — turn the other side to
brown also. Serve "hot off the griddle. " Simple
as the process sounds, it must be carefully done to
get the right results ; but when successful, the taste
of this is entirely different from that of the usual
fried cold corn-meal mush, and is sure to make
a sensation with those who have not eaten it be-
fore.
To one of our desert camps, three young men
employed upon a Government errand connected
with the Geodetic Survey came along with their
pack-train one morning, and we invited them to stay
to dinner. We happened to be flush of corn-meal
that day, and our guests were accordingly served
with this particular make of mush. From the ra-
289
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
pidity with which it disappeared from the plates,
we soon saw it had made a hit. Presently in the
midst of an animated conversation, one of the
party, in the act of putting a piece of mush in his
mouth, paused and suddenly said to Sylvia:
" Madam, I beg your pardon, but is this delecta-
ble thing — mush?'*
"Just what IVe been wanting to ask ever since
we began eating," said Number Two; "it's sure out
of sight."
"Mush! you clodhopper!" interjected Number
Three, "it can't be — it's ambrosia. Mush was never
like that."
When the true inwardness of the article was ex-
plained to them and the consumption of it was re-
sumed, Number One nodded his head to the others.
Solemnly he remarked, as one who had seen a great
light on his future course:
"Get on to that, boys, she fries it while it's hot."
There are times when a frying-pan with a tight
lid is not to be scorned as an oven. Besides the
"Arizona Special" already described, we have fre-
quently, in emergencies, had to make baking-pow-
der bread in a frying-pan. Two cups of flour, a
heaping teaspoonful of shortening, a teaspoonful of
baking powder, salt to taste and cold water to make
a stiff dough, are all that are needed. A piece of
brown paper spread on a stone answers for a table
in an impromptu camp, and a bottle makes a good
rolling-pin. Flour the paper and the rolling-pin
290
CAMP COOKERY
bottle, if the dough sticks ; roll it out into a cake hall
an inch in thickness, and bake it in the frying-pan
with a lid tightly on, over a very slow fire. Of
course when the bottom side browns when nearly
done, the bread can be turned over and browned on
the other side. Be sure not to have too hot a fire,
or the bread will scorch on the outside and be raw
in the middle. Since it is more digestible, we pre-
fer this sort of bread to the usual camper's biscuit
which is baked in the frying-pan and tilted up be-
fore the fire to brown the tops.
There is also no reason, when camping for any
protracted stay, why one should not have yeast-
risen bread in a California camp. This idea may
be ridiculed by those accustomed to rougher camp
life, but we have never observed that there is any
flagging on the part of these Spartans in consum-
ing their full share of any homemade bread set be-
fore them in the wilds.
Presupposing that one understands bread mak-
ing at home, one simply sets the sponge at night,
putting it in the camp oven after the fire is extin-
guished, and while the oven still retains a slight
heat. In the morning make up the bread in the
dough, set it well covered in the sun to rise, and
.bake in the oven of the camp-stove. If a stove is
not in camp, yeast bread may be baked in a Dutch
oven, but for success in this one must thoroughly
understand the management of this historic cook-
ing-pot. The yeast to be employed in all this is
291
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
that for sale everywhere in the West in the form of
dried cakes. Be sure that it is not stale.
Of the few tinned goods which we have carried
on our outings, we have always found canned to-
matoes the most useful, despite the prejudice which
exists against them in some minds on the score of
health. Being so extensively used throughout the
West, they are, we believe, generally put up with
care, and we have never experienced any deleteri-
ous results from them. The men on the cattle
ranges find the liquidity of a fresh-opened can of
tomatoes a decided improvement on the alkaline
water of many arid sections, and to them it serves
as meat and drink. Of the many ways in which
the juice and the tomato itself may be employed in
cookery, perhaps the least known is the fried canned
tomato. With a little butter hot in a frying-pan,
the larger and firmer pieces of the canned tomato
will generally be found solid enough to fry very
satisfactorily. Season well, cover them closely in
the pan, and be careful that they do not scorch.
Next in value to the tomato, canned corn is
recommended. This, besides being useful heated
and served as it comes from the can, may, if you
have an egg or two, be developed into quite a pre-
sentable corn-pudding; or if beaten up with an
equal quantity of corn-meal into a thin batter with
an egg, a little butter and baking powder, and the
whole baked in the form of cakes in the frying-pan,
a result is attained which in the wilderness has
292
CAMP COOKERY
more than once been feelingly voted "an all-right
corn fritter, you bet."
One finds some excellent brands of canned string
beans in Western stores, but in view of your neces-
sary stock of dried beans, the canned articles need
not enter into your calculations, unless you have a
surplus of room. In that event, a can of these
string beans will make a very pleasant interlude of
greenery in a long-drawn-out diet of dried foods.
In the matter of cooking fish in the wilderness,
there is some choice. One of the best ways is the
time-honored one of wrapping the fish, well washed,
salted and peppered, in damp tissue paper if you
have it, or failing that in ordinary brown manila
paper dampened, and laying it thus enveloped in
the hot ashes of the camp-fire. Some experience
will be needed to teach the novice the proper hot-
ness of the ashes and the length of time to leave the
fish in, but the knowledge gained will be worth the
sacrifice of a few trout. It is to be noted that the
ashes, while they need to be quite hot, must not con-
tain redhot coals to come in contact with the fish.
The degree of heat striven for in your ashes should
be in a general way that of a hot oven, for which
the ash-bed acts as a substitute.
To secure in the fish an entirely different but just
as delicious a flavor, find a thin, smooth slab of
stone a foot or so square, and support this at the
four corners on four small stones to serve as short
legs. Build under the slab a hot fire and keep it
293
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
going until the stone is thoroughly heated; then
grease this improvised griddle with bacon fat, and
lay your fish, well seasoned, upon it. If the fish are
small, it will not be necessary to turn them as the
steady heat of the stones will cook them evenly
through.
In making this sort of a griddle, do not be dis-
turbed if a stone or two flies explosively into sev-
eral pieces. Some stones do that. In such an
event, try another kind.
"Salmon a la San Francisco" is excellent for us-
ing up a can of salmon already opened. It received
its name from being a popular dish in the dark days
immediately succeeding the great San Francisco
fire, when everybody was cooking in the streets and
open lots. This is it: Boil potatoes so as to have
rather more potato than salmon. Mix potato and
salmon and season highly with salt and pepper and
scraped onion, chopping in also, if you have it, a
boiled egg. Add a little warm water to keep from
being too dry, and bake in a frying-pan tightly
covered over a very slow fire, as directed for the
"Arizona Special."
Apropos of rabbits, on which the camper-out in
California reckons more or less largely for variety
in his bill of fare, it is said that the flesh of the
jack-rabbit at some seasons of the year, is not good
for food; but in our own experience we have never
encountered specimens which were not perfectly
satisfactory if parboiled for a few minutes, the
294
CAMP COOKERY
water then thrown out, and the meat started again
in a fresh supply of hot, salted water. The jack-
rabbit, which at its best is a delicious game meat,
is always preferably to be boiled or baked; but of
course when it comes to "them leetle bresh rab-
bits,'' as one of our chance acquaintances in the
San Gabriel foothills lovingly called the Mollie Cot-
tontails, these may be fried as simply and easily as
spring chickens.
IV. THE DUTCH OVEN
As Sancho Panza blessed the man who invented
sleep, so do we bless the genius who first thought
of the Dutch oven. When you are in a permanent
camp where a stove is denied you, the Dutch oven
puts an unscrub-off-able, triple-plated silver lining
to the cloud. It is simply a homely iron pot, ut-
terly styleless, standing on three short legs, and
covered with a close-fitting iron lid that has a
raised rim all around its edge. Ours is ten inches
in diameter, weighs fifteen pounds, and is steeped
in such memories of stewed jack-rabbit, baked
beans of royal flavor, corn pone and white wheaten
loaves, that one look at it on the bluest of Blue
Mondays routs the devil, foot, horse and dragoons.
When ready for cooking, set the oven on a bed of
live coals, and sprinkle a layer of similar coals upon
the lid — the upturned rim will hold them in place—
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UNDEE THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
thereby ensuring an even heat all about the con-
tents and a hot cover, which will put an entrancing
brown on bread or other edibles inside.
To become a cordon bleu after the Order of the
Dutch Oven, requires long personal experience, and
the art cannot be communicated through printer's
ink. There are three essential features however,
which when observed will start anyone well on the
way:
First, be sure to choose one the lid of which has
an upturned rim. Some are lacking in this.
Secondly, do not have too much fire either be-
neath the oven or on the lid.
Third, be sure that the lid is on tight, for therein
lies the Dutch oven's peculiar virtue, and a leak
there is fatal. Looseness of the lid may be due to
either of two conditions — your own carelessness in
setting the lid on the pot, or a flaw in the manufac-
ture. To guard against the latter contingency it is
prudent to try the lid at the time of purchase, and
take none that does not fit snugly. One of the most
serious moments of our outdoor life resulted from
failure to do this.
We had come into possession of a chicken at a
particular time when, surfeited with bacon and
canned salmon, we craved fresh meat, and that
special chicken, unlike John's of famous memory,
was really a fine one. It was a fowl of distin-
guished appearance— a Plymouth Rock, we thought
— a hen, with a comfortable tendency to embon-
296
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3
B:
5'
OQ
O
CAMP COOKERY
point unusual in the general run of chickens known
to campers; and our mouths watered as we picked
and dressed it.
Our old Dutch oven, the companion of many
trips, had become damaged on a previous outing,
and the one we had brought with us on this occa-
sion was new and we had not yet happened to have
used it. It was got out and scrubbed, and the
chicken, dismembered and divided into neat lengths
and morsels, was laid in and proved a perfect fit.
Then when water and seasoning and all the accom-
paniments had been added, the pot with its cover
on was set upon the bed of glowing coals and a
shovelful of embers placed on the lid. It was a
famous sight for hungry eyes.
It was a frosty Sunday morning of October in
the San Gabriel Mountains when this took place,
and the Old Californian was with us. To distract
our impatient thoughts while the chicken cooked, we
all went for a walk; for it is one of the strong
points of the Dutch oven that it does not have to be
watched. You set it on the coals and it does the
rest.
Filled with high thoughts inspired by the au-
tumnal glories of the mountain weather, and hun-
grier than ever, we returned, after two hours, to
find the camp enveloped in a suspicious odor.
"Something is burning," cried Sylvia in dismay.
The Old Californian made a dash for the Dutch
oven and lifted the lid.
297
UNDER THE SKY IN CALIFORNIA
1 ' Worse than that," he groaned, "something has
burned/' and he tipped up the luckless pot for us
to see.
The interior was black with the charred remains
of what was once our cherished chicken, burned to
a finish. Not a shred of flesh, not a bit of gristle,
not a bone was left in recognizable form. Given
those pathetic cinders, Cuvier might have guessed
them to be Gallus domesticus, but never in the world
could he have proved it.
Human speech is notoriously inadequate to cer-
tain crises of life, and this was one.
"It was the lid," I can remember the old man
murmuring, as he mechanically picked up the can-
opener and reached for a tin of sardines. "It
doesn't fit," he maundered on. "See, it wobbles,"
jolting the pot and causing the lid to seesaw and
click.
The next "Dutch-oven we bought, we tested for
air-tightness before it left the store.
298
POSTSCRIPT
The preceding pages profess to give nothing more
than a hint of the joy and interest that attend travel
by unbeaten ways in California, or leisurely resi-
dence in the tourist belt. The State is still so young
among American Commonwealths and her wide ter-
ritories are still so little settled, that the lineaments
of that virgin landscape which so delighted the
early pioneers, are yet far from obliterated. One
may still camp on Fremont's trail in surroundings
practically unchanged from those which the great
Pathfinder himself described sixty-odd years ago;
may stumble over perhaps the selfsame stones that
Pio Pico's horses kicked on the Spanish highroads
that lead across the passes down to the desert and
Old Mexico; may tread in the very footsteps of the
Mission Fathers from San Diego to San Francisco
Bay; may look out from some peak of the Sierra's
crest upon forests as yet unscarred by the lumber-
man and upon sage-brush plains where the red In-
dian still dwells and sets up his thatched wickiup.
It is this nearness to the fresh morning of ro-
mance that gives a special zest to life under the sky
in California, while one's physical frame is ever
grateful for the ease with which one may come from
such ventures into the wild, back to the comforts of
a civilized life, there to talk it all over with one's
friends, to rest and repair and — to go again.
299
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866
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Saunders, Charles
Francis, 1859-1941
Under the sky in
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