Chapter XIII: Part II: The Lost Provinces (2)

The cemetery is more curious even than the theatre of Chinadom in San Francisco. I came upon it in the course of a long stroll one afternoon, and was almost the only spectator of some peculiar ceremonial rites in propitiation of the dead. It is not grouped in the general Golgotha at Lone Mountain, but adjoins that devoted to the city paupers, out among the melancholy sand-dunes by the ocean. It is parcelled off by white fences into a large number of enclosures for separate burial guilds, or _tongs_. These have large signs upon them—“Fook Yam Tong,” “Tung Sen Tong,” “Ye On Tong,” etc. One has almost difficulty to persuade himself that he is awake witnessing such doings as here take place in the broad sunlight of Yankee-land.

It is the practice to convey the bones of their dead to China, but there are preliminary funerals in regular form. All the “hacks” in San Francisco are often engaged. The bones are left in the ground a year or more before removal.

Toward three in the afternoon a number of express-wagons of the common sort drove up with freights of Chinamen and Chinawomen, and curiously assorted provisions. The “hoodlum” drivers conducted themselves peaceably enough, but seemed to have a certain sardonic air at the idea of having to draw their profits from patrons of such a class. The provisions were unloaded, taken up and laid on small wooden altars, of which there is one at the front of each _tong_. Most conspicuous were whole roast pigs, decorated with ribbons and colored papers. There were next roast fowls, rice, salads, sweetmeats, fruits, cigars, and rice brandy. The participants set to work to fire revolvers, bombs, and crackers, kindle packages of colored paper, make profound genuflections before the graves, and scatter libations upon them of food and liquors. Only the roast pigs were reserved and taken home again; all the rest was scattered about. The din and smoke increased apace; the strange-garbed figures pranced about like sorcerers, and the decorated pigs loomed out with a goblin air. It seemed a veritable witches’ Sabbath. Some of the fruits and cigars were hospitably offered to me as I looked on; and I will say that parsimony does not seem a vice of the Chinaman, though he lives upon so little, and is content with moderate returns.

Coming back the same way in the evening, I noted prowling figures of white men among the graves, gathering up the fragments cast down by the improvident heathen.

I am glad, on the whole, not to have the mooted Chinese question to settle in person. On the one hand, a great law of political economy—the natural right of man to seek happiness where he will; on the other, a view that the best good of a community does not necessarily consist in mere size and value of “improvements.” The reflective mind will find it rather in the greatest average distribution of comfort. I should say that there have been no evils of consequence experienced from the presence of the Chinese population as yet. Without them the railroads could not have been built, nor the agricultural nor mining interests developed. With all the complaint, too, of competition, the wages of white labor are better here than at the East, and the cost of living is certainly not more.

A proper male costume for San Francisco is humorously said to be a linen duster with a fur collar. The variability of the climate within brief spaces of time is thus indicated. It varies largely, in fact, in different parts of the same day, though the mean for the year is remarkably even. The mean for January—the coldest month—is but fifty degrees, and for September—the warmest—fifty-eight. It is a famous climate for work, but the average temperature, as is seen, is pretty low for comfort. People go away for warmth in the summer quite as much as for coolness. The rainy season—the winter—is really the pleasantest of the year. The air is clearer then, while the prospects are verdant and best worthy to be seen. At other times fogs prevail, or bleak winds arise in the afternoon, and blow dust, in a dreary way, into the eyes of all whose misfortune calls them to be then in the streets.

We return to town from our Chinese ceremony along wide Point Lobos Avenue, the drive to the Cliff House. It is skirted on one side by the public pleasure-ground, Golden Gate Park, an area of half a mile by three miles and a half, which is being redeemed from an original condition of drifting sand in a wonderful way. All the outer tract near the ocean is as desert and yellow as Sahara. A few scattered dwellings appear in the sands, each with its water-tank and wind-mill, a yucca-plant or two, and some knots of tough grass about it. The city appears on the edge of the steep, as if it were looking over in surprise.

XXIV.

_THE VILLAS OF THE BONANZA KINGS._

I.

I had marked out as a field of travel Southern California.

It is not easy to decide on the instant just what Southern California should be deemed to comprehend. Most of the State, leaving out the mining and lumbering districts, displays some of those tropical features in which the idea of Southernness to the imagination of the temperate climates consists. You see orange, fig, and pomegranate trees surrounding pleasant homes at Sonoma, well to the north of San Francisco. One of the most important districts for raisin-culture is near Sacramento and Marysville, north-west. At the springs of Calistoga, seventy-five miles north, is found a group of the finest palm-trees in California. It is safe to assume, however, that all this will be found in the greater perfection as the low latitudes are approached.

San Francisco lies not far from midway of the State, and Southern California may conveniently be taken as all that part south of the seaport and metropolis. It was upon the area just below, around the Bay, that the Rev. Starr King lavished his most polished eulogies, describing the “flowers by the acre, flowers by the square mile,” which he saw there, in the spring. To the vicinity of San José, fifty miles down, Bayard Taylor proposed (if he should live to be old, and note his faculties failing) to retire in order to renew his youth. And but seventy-five miles farther south are the summer resorts—and winter resorts as well—of Santa Cruz and Monterey.

I set out in mid-autumn, the time of the county fairs, when the products of an agricultural country should be seen to particular advantage. There was held at San José the combined fair of the counties of Santa Clara and Santa Cruz, and that I made my first objective point.

There are no means of exit from San Francisco by land except to the southward, the long, narrow peninsula on which it lies being surrounded on all other sides by water. One may cross, however, by ferry to Oakland—the Jersey City and Hoboken, as well as Brooklyn, of the place—and go around the bay on that side by a road which reaches San José also. In doing so you traverse Alameda County, which raises nearly a million bushels of wheat a year from a single township, together with tons of sugar-beets, and more hay than any other county in the State. It comes third also in rank for grape-vines, and has tropical pretensions of its own, making an exhibit of orange and lemon trees in certain favored nooks. But the more direct way is the coast division of the Southern Pacific Railway, down the peninsula.

Let us glance at topography a moment. California is fenced off into valleys by two long north and south ranges—the Sierra Nevadas, immensely high, and the lower Coast Range. These meet in acute points, north at Shasta, and south at the Tejon Pass, and become one. They enclose between them the vast central space known in its upper portion as the Sacramento Valley, and its lower as the San Joaquin Valley, from the two main rivers by which it is drained. The granite Sierra Nevadas contain the peaks of from thirteen to fifteen thousand feet elevation which have obtained an extensive fame in the world. The Coast Range, of softer materials, averages only from two to six thousand feet.

The Sierra Nevadas do not greatly divide their strength, but the Coast Range throws out frequent spurs parallel to itself. These take separate names, as Sierra Morena, Santa Clara, and Santa Cruz mountains, and form numerous long, narrow valleys and benches of table-land between themselves and the Pacific Ocean.

Down the large Santa Clara Valley, one of those formed in this way in the midst of a diversified region, our first excursion takes us.

By the time the files of freight-cars constituting the immediate environs of all American cities are passed we find ourselves running through a tract of small vegetable gardens and windmills. Clusters of buildings in white enclosures, that looked from town, on their hills, like Mexican haciendas, are “institutions” of various sorts. A long arm of San Francisco Bay accompanies us thirty miles south, and is seen gleaming to the left, with a wide stretch of marsh between. Ark-like structures on piles, at intervals along the water’s edge, are guard-houses, keeping watch over beds of the small California oyster, which has never yet been either coaxed or driven into a grandeur commensurate with the pretensions of everything else about it.

The conception that has gone out about Southern California is that it is an earthly Paradise. I will say at once that it is very charming, even in the dry season, but it is an earthly Paradise very different from the best idea of it one has been able to get by previous investigation. I found myself there, in short, in the dry season, and most writers have spoken of it only as viewed in the season of rains and verdure.

The guide-book promises, “after a few minutes’ ride, orchards, vineyards, elegant farm-houses, prospects to charm all who love the beauties of nature.” But, really—one rubs his eyes—where are they? The ground is mournfully bare and brown. Hardly a tree or a bush is seen; not a green blade of grass. At length some small trees, a variety of scrub-oaks, at a little distance resembling the olive! Farm-houses are few, and not at all “elegant.” The hills are of the color of camel’s hide, and not unlike the camel’s humps.

At Millbrae, finally, there is a glimpse of the wooden towers, in the American style, of a villa, and a large dairy barn. At Belmont the low hills are close at hand. At Menlo Park a charming flower-bed is cared for, by the track, as at foreign railway-stations. We are in the chosen site for villa residences of the San Francisco millionnaires. The surface is flat, and with its growth of oaks recalls the outskirts of Chicago, as at Hyde Park or Riverside.

The valley widens till the hills are distant and veiled in blue, with tawny grain-fields between; but still no verdure! And where are the wild flowers? One hardly expects them now “by the acre and by the square mile,” it is true, since it is autumn; but of all the primroses, the larkspur, the lupin, the poppies of tradition, not one! Not a narcissus! not a chrysanthemum! Oh, my predecessors! what shall I think of you?

In the spring the flowers bloom and carpet the earth as grass carpets it elsewhere. Speaking of the spring the eulogists do not say a word too much. But it is my originality to have seen Southern California in the autumn and winter—as it is for seven months of every year, and as it may be, in exceptional seasons, the whole year through.

Not to make a great deal of this bareness and dryness would be to neglect a most essential feature. The annual rains begin in December, January, or February, and continue till June, diminishing in May, which is sometimes itself a dry month. In the autumn the leaves fall—what comparatively few there are to fall—as elsewhere, and are not renewed.

“But you set up to be a land of perpetual summer, you know,” one argues with the Californian, in the first state of surprise.

“So we are,” he replies; “but that does not necessarily mean perpetual verdure. Look at the thermometer! look at the fertility of the land! You have but to run water on it by irrigation, and it will do whatever you please. Contrast this brown season with your own white one. The land is dry and easy to get about on, and the sky above is uniformly pleasant. Do you prefer your fields of sheeted snow, under the howling blasts? your quagmires of mud and slush, alternately freezing and thawing?”

“Very true,” I admit, accepting this different point of view.

Then, perhaps, by way of finishing touch, he adds, rising to a dignity well justified by the facts, “California sets up to be a land of relations, commercial, agricultural, mineral, and social, which have made it a power in the world. It has revolutionized values, struck the key-note of new social conditions, and begun a new commercial era. California has arrived at a point where she takes her place in the Union on the ordinary terms. We no longer depend upon a repute for astounding beauties and eccentricities—though of these, too, there is no lack, as you will find.”

II.

San José, a city of twenty thousand people, contests with Sacramento the honor of being third in importance in the State. You alight there at the small station. In the vicinity are a waiting horse-car, a blacksmith’s shop, and rail-fences painted with advertisements. These have a very American look, to begin with, for a place with a romantic Spanish name—a place to which you are recommended to come in search of the elixir of life. And so have the small picket-fences an American look, and the comfortable little clapboarded wooden houses behind them, with scroll-sawed ornaments in their piazzas. With the exception of an unusual number of French and Italian names on the sign-boards, and some large, clean tuns in front of the shops of dealers in native wines, it is as downright a little Yankee town as ever was. There is much shade in the streets, and in a public green, but the trees are yet too small and low.

It is a clean, prosperous city, the centre of a rich agricultural district. It has excellent schools and all the other conveniences of life. A good deal of money has been spent on the principal business buildings. As in most other provincial towns throughout the State, they are much covered with bay-windows, in what might be described as the San Francisco style of architecture. An iron trestle-work tower was going up at the intersection of the two main streets, to rise to a height of two hundred feet, to contain an electric light and illuminate the town. The white Court-house, in the classic style, though not large, is agreeably proportioned, and quite a model of its kind.

The week’s doings at the Fair Grounds resolved themselves chiefly into trotting-matches. I was told that the combined display of the two counties was poorer this year than either was in the habit of making alone. There was racing and ornamental riding, one day, by young women, and those who took premiums were girls of but fourteen and sixteen. Another popular feature of these county fairs was “firemen’s tournaments,” in which different companies held contests of speed, equipped with all their paraphernalia.

There was but a scattering display of live-stock, and little or no fruit. The two-hundred-pound squash, the twenty-six-pound turnip, the beet five feet in length and a foot through, the apples and pears commensurate with these, were not shown. I had seen them before, and did not much regret their absence. I have a lurking suspicion that there is a standard of the vegetable as of the human race, and that the Tom Thumbs and General Bateses of the one are not more fortunate in their departure from it than those of the other.

The capacity of the country to produce fruits, not simply of abnormal size, but fine quality—excepting the apple, which requires extremes of heat and cold, and remains insipid—has, perhaps, been too well tested to need competitive exhibitions. What better county fair than the daily display of fruits and vegetables in the San Francisco market? The regular season for any and all of them is twice as long as on the Atlantic coast at corresponding latitudes.

I traversed the much-eulogized “Alameda,” an avenue of willows and poplars, of three miles, set out, in 1799, by Spanish friars. These founded a mission among the Indians at Santa Clara, to which town the avenue extends. There remains at Santa Clara the chapel of the mission, with its adobe walls, five feet thick, and flat wooden ceiling, rudely painted. It is now a part of a flourishing collegiate institution. Across the way is a clump of ruinous old adobe cottages of the same date; but we are adjured to pay no great heed to these, since we are going presently to Monterey, which has, as it were, a grand specialty of all that kind of thing.

The Alameda poplars and willows make but a moderate showing for their age, and can hardly be rated equal to New Haven elms, for instance. Behind them, along both sides of the road, are houses of a _bourgeois_ comfort, as in the town. There are said to be residents of wealth and leisure who have been attracted here to pass the remainder of their days in peace. The Coast Mountains, they say, cut off the fogs and winds of the ocean, and a higher range on the other side bars out the heats of the country eastward. We endeavor to divine, in some superior refinement of taste and sentiment, the abodes of these particular ones. It is a pleasant conception, that of coming here to live for the pure physical delight in living, and highly interesting. Perhaps their daughters will stand by the gates with a certain repining mingled with their air of superior distinction, as if they, for their part, had not quite so willingly consented to abandon a world of larger opportunities. But we do not succeed. Some of these residents are simply rude mining men who have broken their constitutions in Nevada and Utah; and, after all, the desire to live a life of physical contentment does not imply taste in architecture and landscape gardening.

III.

One had expected a good deal of novelty and picturesqueness from these towns, of romantic “San” and “Santa,” and “Los” and “Del,” and feels rather aggrieved not to get so much of it. Its absence is explained in part by the fact that there were rarely original settlements corresponding to the present names. These are taken rather from ranches, springs, or mines in the neighborhood. On the arrival of the Americans in California there were but thirteen thousand Spanish, or Mexicans, all told, while the territory was as large as New York, Pennsylvania, and the six New England States put together.

Let us believe that the pleasing designations will act as a stimulus, and these communities will live up to their names in time, as they never could have done were they simply Smithville and Jonesville.

The impressions at San José, and in the country at large, resulting from a second visit a month later, were more agreeable. Something like the proper point of view had then been attained. The face of nature was to be parched, and the towns rather commonplace; but the continued cloudlessness of the sky, and quality of the air, were more, and the peculiar form of pleasure was settled where it belonged.

The district of villa residences of the millionnaires, when penetrated, gained much in attractiveness. There are white-oaks and chestnut-oaks, as well as scrub-oaks, in groups of a park-like appearance, and live-oaks, with long, gray Spanish moss depending from them. If there are no wild flowers, there are plenty of the cultivated sort, with lawns kept green by fountains and hose. Where there is water, the winter, or brown season, need never extend.

As a rule, long stretches of white picket-fence surround the places, and the houses themselves are white.

The bonanza kings have been invested with a greater air of magnificence than really belongs to them. Their places cost them immense sums, it is true, but a reduction should be made to Eastern standards. The outpouring of untold millions put up the prices of land, labor, and every commodity entering into the result, so that less was obtained for the money than an equal expenditure would have procured here. The Menlo Park district is inferior to Llewellyn Park, Englewood, Irvington, and others, in the neighborhood of New York.

The builders have struck out a kind of style of their own, perhaps in too great haste to wait for imported ideas. The houses are chiefly of wood. Flood, of Flood & O’Brien, and “Consolidated Virginia” when the great bonanza was struck, had just completed one of great size, on an estate of five hundred acres, at Menlo Park. There was a terrace, with a fine bronze fountain. The main steps were of polished marble with bronze sphinxes, and bronze dragons studded the ornate stables—the whole glaring, white, and over-gorgeous, like listening to the noise of a brass band.

There are some gentler, more home-like places, and recalling the tone of rural life at the East. Such a one is that of ex-Governor Leland Stanford, at Palo Alto. Here is a breeding farm for horses, one of the most complete of the kind in the world. Of seventeen hundred acres one hundred are occupied by stables, barns, and small paddocks, which, at the foot of a gentle rise of ground, make a small city by themselves. It is inhabited by a population of nearly five hundred animals, who return hither from business, as it were, in the pastures and race-tracks, and have two hundred persons employed in their domestic service. The spacious stables are uniformly floored and ceiled up with redwood, strewn with the freshest straw, and kept as neat as the most unexceptionable drawing-room.

Scions of the stock, representing the best thoroughbred and trotting strains in the country, are an important influence in improving the breed of horses throughout the Pacific slope. It was here that the curious experiments were conducted, at the expense of Governor Stanford, for arriving at a better understanding of the speed of horses by photographing them in motion. The photographer, Muybridge, of San Francisco, succeeded, by an ingenious arrangement of electrical wires, communicating with cameras, in securing twelve distinct views of a single stride. The attitudes are of the most unexpected sort, and some of them even comic.

From the time of foaling the colts are gently handled, and made as familiar with the touch of harness as with that of human hands. As a consequence they are tame, gentle, and even affectionate, and never need formal breaking. The effect of the system of training has been apparent in some notable records of speed. On the Bay District Association track, at San Francisco, in 1880, the two-year-old Fred Crocker lowered the record for a one-mile trot to 2′ 25¼″. Last year Bonita, a two-year-old filly, cut it down to 2′ 24½″. At the same trotting exhibition Wildflower, another two-year-old, made the mile in 2′ 21″; and Hinda Rose, a yearling filly, added to the fame of the farm by cutting down the yearling record to 2′ 36½″.

The interiors of these fine villas are, as a rule, better than the exteriors. The Mills house, at Millbrae, residence of a banking and railway magnate, now of New York, is a notable collection of _portières_ and Oriental rugs, and bed-chambers done in the finest woods, with a picture-gallery of works of Gérôme, Detaille, and Bouguereau, while from all the windows are vistas of fan-palms, flower-beds, greensward, and bronzes.

Ralston’s old house, at Belmont, now the property of Senator Sharon, is of those of the greatest interest, through interest in the remarkable man who built it. Starting from humble origin, he rose to be a great capitalist and the promoter of brilliant schemes of improvement, both public and private. He conducted to success a hundred projects which in other hands would have been folly, and arrived thus at such an unbounded confidence in his star that he thought he could not fail. He was entangled at last, however, in schemes beyond his control. Strong and athletic, and in the prime of life, he went down to “Harry Meigs’s” wharf, in San Francisco—almost the very point from which his great prototype sailed away to Peru—and swam out half a mile into the bay. It was for refreshment in his troubles, as some say, but, as the general opinion is, with the purpose of suicide. At any rate he was never seen alive again.

The house that was his is notched into the hill-side, in a rolling country, much pleasanter than the plain at Menlo Park. A pretty gorge behind it is dammed to furnish a water-supply. There are gas-works, a bowling-alley, and an elaborate Turkish bath among the out-buildings, and a grange-like barn of solid stone, ivy-grown, which cost $80,000. The immense house is wood, white, in the usual fashion, and, with its numerous stories and windows, is not unlike a large country hotel. A peculiar arrangement and great spaciousness give it a palatial air within. The principal rooms open into one another by glass partitions, which can be rolled away, so that in large gatherings there need be no crowding through door-ways. There is an arcade above, around a grand staircase, with tribunes projecting, in which young women in colors, at an evening party, for instance, would look particularly houri-like. What in another house would be the ordinary veranda is here a delightful promenade, glazed in, and provided with easy furniture and a parquetry floor. Behind a row of such main apartments as drawing-room and library comes a parallel row, of which one is a great ball-room, entirely faced with mirrors. Pianos, mantels, and stair-posts are of California laurel—a new industry encouraged by the owner among many others.

We drove from Belmont back through a succession of cup-like dells in the lower mountains, a number of them dammed to form pretty lakes, the sources of supply for the Spring Valley Water Company—a corporation of great prominence at San Francisco. The slopes at first were tawny with grain stubble; then scattered with the thick bush known as chaparral; then bare. We passed an occasional lonely farm known as a “milk ranch,” or “chicken ranch.” There are no farms in California; no matter how small the tract is, it is always a ranch.

In the strong, warm sunshine chance objects on the bare slopes cast intense, purplish shadows. That of a distant tree is as dark as if a pit had been dug under it. That of a bird, flying low, is followed as distinctly as the bird itself. You are reconciled at last to the brown tone. It is like Algeria. White stands out in brilliant relief against it. One would rather like it to be a different white, however, than that of the little wooden houses. The falconers of Fromentin might career or the rival Arab chiefs of Pasini hold conferences among such hills.

XXV.

_THE VINTAGE SEASON, AND MONTEREY._

I.

It was the pleasant vintage season at San José. Santa Clara County, of which San José is the capital, boasts of a number of acres of grape-vines under cultivation (over eleven thousand) second only to Sonoma County. Napa, however, to the north, and Los Angeles, to the south, greatly surpass it in gallons of wine and brandy produced.

I visited, among others, the Le Franc vineyard, which dates from 1851, and is the pioneer in making wine-growing a regular industry. Here are about a hundred and seventy-five thousand vines, set out a thousand, perhaps, to the acre. The large, cheerful farm buildings are upon a gentle rise of ground above the area of vines, which is nearly level. An Alsacian foreman showed us through the wine-cellars. A servant-maid bustling about the yard was a thorough French peasant, only lacking the wooden shoes. The long tables, set for the forty hands employed in the vintage-time, were spread with viands in the French fashion. Scarcely a word of English was spoken.

At other places the surroundings are as exclusively Italian or Portuguese. One feels very much abroad in such scenes on American soil. The foreigners from Southern Europe take naturally to wine-making and go into it, from the few hundred gallons of red wine made by the Portuguese and Italian laborers for their own families, to the manufacture of an American champagne on a large scale by the Hungarian, Arpad Haraszthy, at San Francisco. The Americans, who have not acquired the habit of looking upon wine as a necessity in the family, are not yet, as a rule, very active in its production.

A certain romantic interest attaches to this ancient industry. The great tuns in the wine-cellars and all the processes were very clean. It was re-assuring to see the pure juice of the grape poured out in such floods, and to feel that here was no need—founded on scarcity, at least—for adulteration.

Teeming loads of the purple fruit were driven up, and across a weighing scale. The contents are lifted to an upper story, put into a hopper, where the stems come off, and the grapes fall through to a crusher. They are lightly crushed at first. It is something of a discovery that the earliest product of grapes of every hue is white wine. The red wine gets its hue from the coloring matter in the skins, which are utilized in a subsequent ruder squeezing.

I shall not enter upon all the various processes—the racking off, clarifying, and the like—though, so much in the company of those who spoke with authority and were continually holding up little glasses to the light with a gusto, like figures in popular chromos, I consider myself to yield in knowledge of such abstruse matters to none. Immense upright casks, containing a warm, audibly fermenting mass, and others lying down, neatly varnished, with concave ends, are the most salient features in the dimly lighted wine-cellars.

They are not cellars, properly so called, either, since they are wholly above-ground. The casks rest on wooden sills upheld by short brick posts. In the cellars of General Naglee, a successful maker of brandy on a large scale, the cobwebs have been allowed to increase and hang like tattered banners. Through these the light penetrates dimly from above, or with a white glare from a latticed window, upon which the patterns of vine-leaves without are defined. The buildings are brown, gray, and vine-clad, with quaint, Dutch-pavilion-looking roofs, and dove-cotes attached. A lofty water-tank, with a wind-mill—a feature of every California rural homestead—here is more tower-like than usual.

Round about extend long avenues of eucalyptus, pine, tamarind, with its black, dry pods; the pepper-tree, with its scarlet berries; large clumps of the _nopal_ cactus, and an occasional maguey, or century-plant. All is glowing now with the tints of autumn. Poplar and cottonwood are yellow. The peach and almond, the Lawton blackberry, and the vineyards themselves, touched by frost, supply the scarlet and crimson. The country seems bathed in a fixed sunshine, or in hues of its own wines.

The vines, themselves short and stout, and needing no support, yield each an incredible number of purple clusters, all growing from the top. They quaintly suggest the uncouth little men of Hendrik Hudson who stagger up the mountain, in “Rip Van Winkle,” with kegs of spirits on their shoulders.

No especial attention is given to the frosts now, but those of the early spring are the object of many precautions. The most effectual is to kindle smudge-fires about the vineyard toward four o’clock in the morning, the smoke of which envelops it and keeps it in a warmer atmosphere of its own till the sun be well risen.

Three to four tons of grapes to the acre are counted upon; while farther south, where irrigation is used, they expect from eight to twelve. But it is claimed, in the standing controversy on the subject, that the irrigated grapes are watery, while those of lesser yield excel them in quality. The best results, we were told, are got from such vines as the Mataro, Carignane, and Grenache, imported cuttings from the French slope of the Pyrenees. There were at Le Franc’s not less than sixty varieties, under probation, many of which will, no doubt, give an excellent account of themselves. They are assembled from Greece, Italy, Palestine, and the Canary Islands, so that we have all the chances of the development of something suited to our peculiar conditions.

II.

I left San José to drive along the dry, shallow bed of the Guadalupe River to the Guadalupe Quicksilver Mine, a more remote and less visited companion of well-known New Almaden. The mine is in a lovely little vale, with a settlement of Mexican and Chinese boarding-houses clustered around it. Some bold ledges of rock jut out above, and a superintendent’s house surrounded by flowers hangs upon the hill-side. A weird-looking flume conveys the sulphurous acid from the calcining furnaces to a hill-top, upon which every trace of vegetation has been blasted by its poisonous exhalations.

Then I made a little tour by rail southward through the immense “Murphy” and “Miller and Lux” ranches, comprising a grain country as flat as a floor.

We turned west through the fertile little Pajaro Valley, the emporium of which for produce, and fine redwood lumber, cut in great quantities on the adjoining Santa Cruz Mountains, is the thriving town of Watsonville. We ran along a rugged coast, past wooded gorges and white sea-side cottages, at Aptos and Soquel, to the much-frequented resort of Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz has bold variations of level, the usual commonplace buildings, a noble drive along cliffs eaten into a hundred fantastic shapes by the waves, and shops for the sale of shells, and its summer boarders, who become, with change of seasons, winter boarders in turn. Thence finally to the long-anticipated Monterey.

Here at last was something to commend from the point of view of the picturesque without reservation. Monterey has a population which still, in considerable part, speaks Spanish only. It retains the impress of the Spanish domination, and little else. When you are told in your own country that somebody does not speak English, you naturally infer that it is brokenly, or only a little. But at Monterey it means absolutely not a word. There are Spanish signs on the shops, and even Spanish advertisements, as, for instance, the _Wheeler & Wilson Maquinas á Coser_, on the fences.

My Mexican experience was a liberal education for Monterey, and I made the most of it. I was taken to call upon an ancient _señorita_, in whose history there was some romance.

“_Las rosas son muy secas_”—(“The roses are very dry”) she said, apologetically, as we entered her little garden, laid out in regular parallelograms, behind an adobe wall topped with red tiles. Large yellow and red roses were blowing to pieces in the wind before her long, low adobe house.

_She_ was one of those who spoke no English. It seems as if there were some wilful perversity in it, after having been since 1846 a part of the most bustling State of the most active country in the world. It seems as if it must be some lingering hatred of the American. But the _señorita_ is far too gentle for that. There is, perhaps, no reason beyond a general mental inertness by virtue of which the Mexican survivors have suffered all their other interests as well as this to go by the board.

The _señorita_ is a little, thin old lady of fifty. Her romance was with an American officer, it is said, thirty years ago, and she has never since married, but has withered, like her roses, at Monterey.

As seen from a distance, scattered loosely and white on the forest-crested slope of the fine bay, the little city, which has now perhaps two thousand inhabitants, does not show its unlikeness to other places. But when entered it consists almost exclusively of whitewashed adobe houses, and the straggling, mud-colored walls of enclosures, for animals, known as “corrals.” Many of them are vacant. At frequent intervals is encountered too some abandoned old adobe barracks, or government house, or military prison of historic fame, with its whitewash gone, holes in its walls, and bits of broken grating and balcony hanging aimlessly on, waiting only the first opportunity to let go.

The travellers of my youth had a fashion of talking glibly of adobe, without explaining what adobe was. Let me not be guilty of the same error. Adobe is bricks made of about twice the usual size, and dried in the sun instead of being baked. Walls are made of great thickness, in order that, though outside and inside crumble off, there may be a good deal left. Like a number of other things, it stands very well while not assailed; and in this climate it is rarely assailed by violent extremes of temperature.

The typical adobe house of the best class is stuccoed and whitewashed. It is large on the ground, two stories in height, and has verandas. Again, it is of but one story, with an interior court-yard. It has green doors and shutters, and green, turned posts, in what we now call the “Queen Anne style,” and it is comfortable and home-like to look at.

One of them contains the first piano ever introduced into California, and the owners are people who made haste to sell out their all at San Francisco and invest it here, in order to reap the greater prosperity which was thought to be waiting upon Monterey. Two old iron guns stand planted as posts at the corners of the dwelling. In front of others are some walks neatly made of the vertebræ of whales, taken by the Monterey Whaling Company. The company is a band of hardy, weather-beaten men, chiefly Portuguese, of the Azores, who have a lookout station on the hill by the ruined fort, and a barracks lower down. They pursue their avocation from the shore in boats, with plenty of adventure and no small profit.

Monterey, which is now not even a county seat, was the Spanish capital of the province from the time it was thought necessary to have a capital. The missionary father, Junipero Serra, came here from Mexico in the year 1770. It was next a Mexican capital under eleven successive governors. Then it became the American capital, the first port of entry, the scene of the first Constitutional Convention of the State, and an outfitting point for the southern mines. Money in those early days was so plenty, I have heard tell, that store-keepers hardly stopped to count it, but threw it under the counter in bushelfuls.

A secret belief in the ultimate revival of Monterey seems always to survive in certain quarters, like that in the reappearance of Barbarossa from the Kylfhäuser Berg, or the restoration of the Jews. Breakwaters have been ambitiously talked of, and it is said that the bay could be made a harbor and shipping-point and the rival of San Francisco.

The only step toward such revival as yet is a fine hotel, built by the Southern Pacific railroad, which may make it, instead of Santa Cruz, across the Bay, the leading sea-side resort. Though not so grandiose a direction as some others, this is really the one in which the peculiar conditions of the old capital are most likely to tell. The summer boarder can get a tangible pleasure out of its historic remains and traditions of greatness, though they be good for nothing else. The Hotel del Monte is a beautiful edifice, not surpassed by that of any American watering-place, and unequalled in the charming groves of live-oak and pine and profusion of cultivated flowers by which it is surrounded, and the air of comfort combined with its elegant arrangements.

This is the way with our friends of the Pacific coast. If they do not always stop to follow Eastern ideas and patterns, when they really attempt something in the same line, they are as likely as not to do it a great deal better.

The climate at Monterey, according to statistical tables, is remarkably even. The mean temperature is 52° in January and 58° in July. This strikes one as rather cool for bathing, but the mode is to bathe in the tanks of a large bath-house, to which sea-water is introduced, artificially warmed, instead of in the sea itself.

In other respects the place seems nearly as desirable at one time of the year as another. The quaint town is always there; and the wild rocks, with their gossiping gulls and pelicans; and the drives through the extensive forests. There are varieties of pine and cypress—the latter like the Italian stone-pine—peculiar to Monterey. The more venerable trees, hoary with age and hanging moss, are contorted into all the fantastic shapes of Doré’s “Inferno.” They grow by preference on the most savage points of rock, and the wild breakers toss handfuls of spray up to them high in the air, in amity and greeting.

Along the beach on this far-away point of the Pacific Ocean we find a Chinese fishing settlement. Veritable Celestials, without a word of English among them, have pasted the usual crimson papers of hieroglyphics on shanty residences. They burn tapers before their gods on the quay, and fish for a living in just such junks and small boats as may be seen at Hong-Kong and Canton. They prepare avallonia meat and avallonia shells for their home market. One had rather thought of the Chinese element as confined to San Francisco alone, but it is a feature of quaint interest throughout all of Southern California.

At Monterey is found an old mission of the delightfully ruinous sort. It is in the little Carmel Valley, which is bare and brown again, after the green woods are passed, four miles from the town. The mission fathers once had here ninety thousand cattle, and other things to correspond. There are now only some vestiges, resembling earth-works, of their extensive adobe walls, and, on a rise overlooking the sea, the yellowish, low, _rococo_ church of San Carlos.

The Mexican traditions in design and proportion accompanied them here, but the workmanship as they went farther from home became curiously rude, and speaks of the disadvantages under which it was done. A dome of concrete on the bell-tower is unequally bulged; a star window in the front has very irregular points. The interior does not yield, as a picture of sentimental ruin, to Muckross Abbey or any broken temple of the Roman Campagna. The roof, open now to the sky, with grasses and wild mustard growing from its crevices, was of stone arches, supplemented with timber-work tied with raw-hides. The whole body of the church—pilasters, capitals, frieze, and all—is set on a curve springing from the floor—a peculiarity I have never seen elsewhere. There are grasses growing within, sculptured stones tumbled down, vestiges of a tile pavement, tombs, bits of fresco, and over all the autograph scribblings of a myriad of A. B. Smiths and J. B. Joneses, visitors here in their time like ourselves.

Once a year, on St. Charles’s-day, in early November, a memorial service is held, attended by all the shabby Spanish-Indian life remaining in the country round about. The place is unique. It seems even more lonely than ruins of the same kind in the mother country, through standing amid surroundings of such a different class. Nothing is more conducive to pensiveness of a pleasant kind than, lying within this ruined enclosure, to watch the waving in the wind of the long grasses on its walls and listen to the plash of the sea on the shore, but a few steps distant.

XXVI.

_A WONDROUS VALLEY, AND A DESERT THAT BLOSSOMS LIKE THE ROSE._

I.

The Yosemite, currently spoken of as the “Valley,” is comprised in the belt formed by drawing lines across the State from San Francisco and Monterey respectively. It is a wild, strange nook among the Sierras, one of the few places not only not disappointing, but worthy of far more praise than has ever been bestowed upon it. It is like one of those mysterious regions on the outskirts of the fairy-land of the story-books—a standing resource of adventure to all the characters who enter it, and it is proper enough that our earthly Paradise of Southern California should have such a region of enchantment also adjoining it.

I reached it by stage-ride of sixty miles, from the Southern Pacific Railroad, at Madera, to Clark’s Station, and thence by stage and horseback of twenty-five miles to the Valley. The autumn days were lovely there. The foliage, turned by a local climate quite as severe as that of New England, glowed with a vivid richness. The Merced River, a gentle stream, pursuing a devious way in the bottom, which is as level as a floor, reflected the color from many a mirror-like pool and sudden bend. Walls of rock rise on either hand to an elevation of three-quarters of a mile, varying from one-half to one-eighth of a mile in width. It is rather a chasm than a valley. At night the radiance of a full yellow moon invested all its wonders with an added enchantment. The cliffs are exactly what we think cliffs ought to be, but what they seldom are. They are of the hardest granite, pleasantly gray in color, and terminate in castle and dome like forms. The precipices are sheer and unbroken to the base, with almost none of those slopes of _débris_ that detract from precipices in general. It is a little valley suitable, without a hair’s-breadth alteration, to the purposes of any giant, enchanter, or yellow dwarf of them all. It is such scenery as Doré has imagined for the “Idyls of the King.” One half feels himself a Sir Lancelot or Sir Gawain, riding along this lovely and majestic mountain trail; and as if he should wear chain-armor, a winged helmet, and a sword upon which he had sworn to do deeds of redoubtable valor.

It was the coast valleys and some coast towns that we took on our first journey. This time we have come down the main line of the Southern Pacific Railway through the central plain of the State. The railway is traced along the great central valley known as the San Joaquin, on a line nearly midway between the Sierra Nevadas and the Coast Range.

The road is still comparatively new, and the settlements have attained no great dimensions. It did not as a rule touch at the older towns existing, but pursued a direct course through a country where all had to be opened up. As some of the places passed by were of considerable size no little dissatisfaction ensued, and the mutterings are still heard. Frequent mention of this grievance is heard by the traveller through Southern California. Some of the neglected places even maintain that they would have been better without any railroad at all. References are thrown out to former glories of a dazzling sort which it is sometimes difficult to credit, though a railroad naturally effects great innovations in trade. To the ordinary observer it would appear that the introduction of a splendidly equipped railway, even if it distribute its blessings a little unequally at first, and its tariff be high, must be a great and permanent advantage to everything remote as well as near. For the first time an adequate means has been afforded for the transport of immigrants and supplies through the whole length of the State.

The Southern Pacific Railway has completed connections which give it a transcontinental route from San Francisco, across Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, to New Orleans. Immigrants are to be brought in by steamer from Liverpool to New Orleans, and thence by rail at a rate not to exceed that to the central West. The fares to California heretofore have been almost prohibitive, which is one of the reasons why so rich a country contains as yet less than a million of people. The languid movement hither of the valuable class of immigration which pours into the West, though ascribed by some alarmists to the presence of the Chinese, is due to the cost of travel and the lack of cheap lands for settlement. The Chinese are certainly not rivals in the matter of land, since they acquire little or none of it.

The new opportunities opened to transportation, the depression of the mining interest, and rapid increase of the Chinese, have awakened of late an exceptional interest in white immigration. A committee of some of the most prominent persons in the State has opened an inquiry into the most effectual means of promoting it. It will no doubt set forth more clearly than has ever been done before an account of such territory as is open to settlers, whether offered by the government, the railroads, or the great ranches, its advantages and the methods of reaching it.

It seems a little singular at first that lack of suitable lands can be adduced as a reason for lack of population in so vast a region, with the climate and other natural advantages of which so much has been said. It can only be understood by taking into account the unusual atmospheric dryness, and the important part played by water, which has to be brought upon the soil by costly contrivances; The locations where there is sufficient natural moisture for the maturing of crops are of small extent. They were among the first taken up. In much of the central and southern portions of the State the annual rain-fall is almost infinitesimal in quantity. At Bakersville, the capital of Kern County—whither our journey presently leads us—it is no more than from two to four inches. Light crops of grain and pasturage for stock may occasionally be got even under these conditions, but the only certain reliance is irrigation.

The springs and small streams were early appreciated at their value, and seized upon by persons who controlled with them great tracts of surrounding country, valueless except as watered from these sources. These tributary tracts are used chiefly as cattle and sheep ranges. A person owning five thousand acres will often have for his stock the free run of twenty thousand more. Cultivation is confined to the springs and water-courses, and becomes a succession of charming oases in a desert the superficial sterility of which is phenomenal.

The tenure of land by thousands of acres under a single ownership is a tradition from the Spanish and Mexican times. It has been much decried, as a great evil, and it is said that the State would be much more prosperous in a series of small farms. This is probably true, and the system as it exists may be ascribed in part to the greed of individuals, but it arises principally out of the natural features of the country. The wealth of the large holders alone enables them to undertake works of improvement, such as canal-making, drainage, and tree-planting, on an effectual scale. Perhaps the State will have to lend its assistance, and establish a public system of irrigation and drainage, before the land can be fully prepared for the small settler.

Water! water! water! How to slake the thirst of this parched, brown country, and turn it over to honest toil and thrift, is the great problem as we go southward, and the processes of irrigation are the most distinctive marks upon the landscape wherever it is improved.

II.

It is in early November that we begin to traverse the long San Joaquin Valley from Lathrop Junction, just below Stockton, southward. The side tracks of the railroad are crowded with platform-cars laden with wheat for the sea-board. The “elevator” system is not yet in use, and the grain is contained in sacks for convenient handling.

Hereabouts are some of the most famous wheat ranches. A man will plough but a single furrow a day on his farm, but this may be twenty miles long. There is sufficient rain-fall for the cereals, but not for the more exacting crops. The land gives but few bushels to the acre under the easy system of farming, but it must be remembered that there are a great many acres. The stubble of the grain-fields is whitened with wild-fowl. At a way-station a small rustic in an immense pair of boots goes over to a pool and blazes away with a shot-gun. Presently he returns, dragging by the necks an immense pair of wild-geese, almost beyond his strength to pull. The tawny color of the fields, and the great formal stacks of straw piled up in them, recall some aspects of the central table-land of Mexico. Many or spacious buildings are not necessary in the mild, dry climate of California. The prosperous ranches have, in consequence, a somewhat thin, unfurnished appearance compared with Eastern farms.