. 1 A = — c= A = ^^_ (J-, = ■ ■ —\ — .^__ IT = XI ^^S m 5 = ^^ — , 2 = ^^ J:"' 5 = =;= CD ^^^" ^ 3 — =^=: :i> 8 — ^^ 3> 8 — 111' '■■i'! i v*; ^0 California and Back By C. A. HIGGINS Illustrations by J. T. McCUTCHEON One Hundred and Sixttj-aeventh Thousanu PASSENGER DEPARTMENT THE SANTA PE CHICAGO, AUGUST, iqoi. Copyright, 1899, by The Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway Company. ^PRIHTERS.'^ Ad. 74. 9-23-Oi. 5M. \ "515 TABLE OF CONTENTS. chapter page Advertisement 5 I. Preliminary Stages 7 II. New Mexico 12 las VEGAS HOT SPRINGS 19 SANTA FE 22 PUEBLOS 28 III. ARIZONA 35 PETRIFIED FORESTS 39 MOKIS 43 CANON DIABLO 46 FLAGSTAFF 47 SAN FRANCISCO MOUNTAIN 48 GRAND CAfJON OF ARIZONA 52 CLIFF AND CAVE DWELLINGS 55 CENTRAL AND SOUTHERN ARIZONA ... 57 IV. Southern California 62 OF CLIMATE 67 SAN DIEGO AND VICINITY 74 CAPISTRANO 82 STORY OF THE MISSIONS 84 LOS ANGELES 92 PASADENA 96 MOUNT LOWE 97 RIVERSIDE AND VICINITY 98 REDONDO AND SANTA MONICA 100 SANTA CATALINA ISLAND lOI SANTA BARBARA 105 OSTRICH FARMING 108 WINTER SPORTS , .... 109 7054V3 CHAPTER l*AG£ V. Northern California "3 SAN FRANCISCO "S CHINATOWN 119 SANTA CLARA VALLEY 128 LAKE TAHOE 133 VI. Nevada and Utah 135 OGDEN '37 SALT LAKE CITY ^3^ GREAT SALT LAKE 145 VII. COLORADO '47 GLENWOOD SPRINGS '49 LEADVILLE '55 BUENA VISTA '57 CRIPPLE CREEK . . . '59 MANITOU '63 ASCENT OF PIKE'S PEAK 168 COLORADO SPRINGS '7' DENVER '73 VIII. HOMEWARD . 174 ADVERTISEMENT. The proprietary lines of the Santa Fe extend, unbroken, through Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, southeastern Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and California to the Pacific Coast, and compose a con- siderable portion of a through return route by way of Nevada, Utah, and Middle Colorado, in the following order: Between Chicago and Albuquerque, New Mexico, The Atcliison, Topcka &" Santa Fe Raihvay (Santa Fe). Between Albuquerque and Barstow or Bakers- field, California, Santa Fe Pacific Railroad (Santa Fe). Between Barstow and Los Angeles, San Diego, and other points in california east, south, and west of los angeles, Souther 71 Calijornia Railway (Santa Fe). BETWEEN BAKERSFIELD AND SAN FRANCISCO, CALI- FORNIA, Sa7i Francisco b' San Joaquin I'alley Raihvay (Santa Fe). Between Los Angeles and San Francisco, Cali- fornia, AND Between San Francisco and Ogden, Utah, The line of the Southern Facijic Company. Between Ogden and Grand Junction, Colorado, Rio Grande Western Railway. Between Grand Junction and Pueblo, Colorado Springs, or Denver, Colorado MidLind Raihvay. Denver &f Rio Grande Railroad. Between Denver, Colorato Springs, or Pueblo, AND Chicago, The Atchison, Topeka cf Santa Fe Raihvay (Santa Fe). 5 The circuit of these lines constitutes a comprehensive tour of the West, whose merits are known to many thousands of tourists, and whose attractions are the subject of the following pages. The necessity of com- pressing a theme of large proportions into a space of reasonable bounds has embarrassments which only in part are avoided by exclusion of innumerable matters well worthy to be included. It would be a simpler task to fill twice as many pages. Adequate treatment of a tenth of the number of admitted topics would exceed the limits set to the present volume. All omissions, therefore, and any neglect of particular localities, must be charged to a plan which perforce is restricted to a bri^f setting forth of only the most contrasting of the more notable scenes. With this apology to the Great West the book is tendered. It is in no sense a guide-book, but explicitly an attempt to present the merits of a relatively few selected typical features for the consideration of those who weigh the high opportunities of travel. i. :^ 'I (=1 jiiiij J r^^ :«HE Lq^ //TT PRELIMINARY STAGES. iHE California trains of the Santa Fe Route leave Chicago either in early- evening, or at a later hour when most travelers are ready to retire to the seclusion of their berths. In either event the earliest stages of the journey offer little of interest to the tourist aside from the drain- age channel, whose white rock-debris closely parallels the way for many miles in almost mountainous volume, and affords occasional glimpses of the great artificial water-way. By day the adjacent country for a few hundred miles appears a level or mildly undulating region, rich in agricultural products, and re- lieved by bits of stream and woodland and by- small villages, with here and there a consider- able city, such as Joliet, and Streator, and Galesburg. It is greater than the whole of England and Wales, this state of Illinois, but a very few hours' ride is sufficient to bring one to its western boundary, the Mississippi River. This is crossed at Fort Madison, and the way continues across the narrow southeastern corner of Iowa into Missouri. While gliding through the state last named the traveler awakes to sight of a rolling country of distant horizons, swelling here and there to considerable hills, checkered with tilled fields and frequent farm- houses, divided by small water-courses and dense groves of deciduous trees. Not one whose scenic features you would travel far to see, but gratifying to the eye ; full of gentle contrasts and pleasing variety. At the lofty Sibley bridge crossing of the Missouri River the swift sand-laden volume of this famed stream flows far below the level of the eye, and there is wide outlook upon either hand. On the farther side the way skirts bold bluffs for a considerable distance by the side of the broad and picturesque river that is reminiscent of the days of a greater steamboat commerce. Then comes Kansas City, the great commercial gate- way of the Missouri. The Kansas border lies just beyond, the entrance to that state leading by the serpentine course of the river of the same name through a wooded landscape to the open prairie. The billowy surface of Kansas was once the bed of an inland sea that deposited enor- mous quantities of salt, gypsum and marbles, and its rock strata abound in most remarkable fossils of colossal animal life — elephants, masto- dons, camels, rhinoceroses, gigantic horses, sharks, crocodiles, and more ancient aquatic monsters of extraordinary proportions, fright- ful appearance, and appalling name, whose skeletons are preserved in the National Museum. Its eastern bound was long the shore of the most stubborn wilderness of our possession. The French fur-traders were the first to establish footing of civilization in Kan- 8 sas, the greater portion of which came to us as part of the Louisiana purchase. Sixty-nine years ago Fort Leavenworth was created to give military protection to the hazardous trade with Santa Fe, and the great overland exodus of Argonauts to California at the time of the gold discovery was by way of that border sta- tion. The first general settlement of its east- ern part was in the heat of the factional excitement that led to the Civil War. It was the scene of bloody encounters between free- soil and jDro-slavery colonists, and of historic exploits by John Brown and the guerrilla Quantrell. In the space of one generation it has been transformed as by a miracle. The vast plains whereon the Indian, antelope, and buffalo roamed supreme are now counted as the second most important agricultural area of the Union, and its uncultivated tracts sustain millions of cattle, mules, and horses. Vigor- ous young cities are seen at frequent intervals. Topeka, with broad avenues and innumerable shade-trees, is one of the prettiest capitals of the West. The neighborhood of Newton and Burrton is the home of Mennonites, a Russian sect that fled to America from the domain of the Czar to find relief from oppression. At Hutchinson one enters western Kansas, and from this point for a long distance the road follows the windings of the Arkansas River, with only occasional digressions. Dodge City, of cowboy fame, and Garden City, the scene of Government experiments in agricul- ture, are the chief centers of this district. Colorado first presents itself as a plateau, 9 Ai^'^ elevated 4,000 feet above the sea. Soon the landscape begins to give hint of the heroic. Pike's Peak is clearly distinguishable, and the two beautiful Spanish Peaks hover upon the horizon and reappear long after the first- named has faded from view. Slowly the^ Raton Range gathers significance directly ahead, until it becomes a towering wall, at whose foot lies the city of Trinidad, beyond which begins the final ascent to the first of many lofty mountain gateways, the Raton Pass. The grade is terrific, and two powerful mountain engines are required to haul the train at a pace hardly faster than a walk. The vicissitudes of the pass are such that the road winds tortuously in curves so sharp the wheels shriek at the strain. From the rear vestibule may be had an endlessly varied and long- continued series of mountain-views, for the ascent is no mere matter of a moment. There are level side caiions prettily shaded with aspen, long straight slopes covered with pine, tumbled waves of rock overgrown with chap- arral, huge bare cliffs with perpendicular gray or brown faces, and breaks through which one may look far out across the lower levels to other ranges. A short distance this side the summit stands what is left of the old toll-house, an abandoned and dismantled adobe dwelling, where for many years the veteran 10 .^:*&.«r-^ Dick Wooten collected toll from those who used the wagon-road through the pass. Both ruin and trail are of. interest as belonging to the ante-railroad period of thrilling adventure, for by that road and past the site of the dilapi- dated dwelling journeyed every overland stage, every caravan, every prairie schooner, every emigrant, and every soldier cavalcade bound to the southwestern country in early days. Beyond this is a wide-sweeping curve from whose farther side, looking backward down the pass, an inspiring picture is unfolded to view for a passing instant — a farewell glimpse of the poetic Spanish Peaks at the end of a long vista past a ragged foreground of gigantic measure. Then the hills crowd and shut off the outside world; there is a deep sandstone cut, its faces seamed with layers of coal, a boundary post marked upon one side Colorado and upon the other New Mexico, and instantly following that a plunge into a half-mile tunnel of midnight blackness, at an elevation of some- thing more than 7,600 feet. At such a Rubicon the preliminary stages may fairly be said to end. II II. NEW MEXICO. LTHOUGH your introduction is by- way of a long tunnel, followed by a winding mountain pass down whose steep incline the train rushes as if to regain the low level from which the journey was begun, you will find New Mexico a terri- tory in the sky. If its mountain ranges were leveled smoothly over its valleys and plains the entire area of more than 120,000 square miles would stand higher above the sea than the summit of any peak of the Catskills or the Adirondacks. Its broad upland plains, that stretch to a horizon where wintry peaks tower high above the bold salients of gray-mottled foothills, themselves lie at an altitude that in the Eastern States must be sought among the clouds, and at no time will you fall much below an elevation of 5,000 feet in traversing the por- tion of the territory that lies along the present route. The landscape is oriental in aspect and flushed with color. Nowhere else can you find sky of deeper blue, sunlight more dazzling, y 12 shadows more intense, clouds more luminously white, or stars that throb with redder fire. Here the pure rarefied air that is associated in the mind with arduous mountain climbing is the only air known— dry, cool and gently stim- ulating. Through it, as through a crystal, the rich red of the soil, the green of vegetation, and the varied tints of the rocks gleam always freshly on the sight. You are borne over mountains above forests of pine and fir, with transient glimpses of distant prairie; through canons where fierce rock walls yield grudging passage and massive gray slopes bend down- ward from the sky; along level stretches by the side of the Great River of the North, whose turbid stream is the Nile of the New World; past picturesque desert tracts spotted with sage, and past mesas, buttes, dead volcanoes 13 and lava beds. These last are in a region where you will see not only mountain craters, with long basaltic slopes that were the ancient flow of molten rock, but dikes as well; fissures in the level plain through which the black lava oozed and ran for many miles. These vast rivers of rock, cracked, piled, scattered in blocks, and in places overgrown with chapar- ral, are full of interest, even to the accustomed eye. They wear an appearance of newness, moreover, as if the volcanic action were of recent date; but there has been found nothing in native tradition that has any direct bearing upon them. Doubtless they are many centuries old. Geologically their age is of course deter- minable, but geology deals in rock epochs; it talks darkly of millions of years between events, and in particulars is careful to avoid use of the calendar. It is well to remember that the yesterday of creation is singularly bar- ren of mankind. We are practically contem- poraries of Adam in the history of the cosmos, and all of ancient and modern history that lies between is a mere evanescent jumble of trivi- alities. Dame Nature is a crone, fecund though she be, and hugging to her breast the precious phial of rejuvenescence. Her face is wrinkled. Her back is bent. Innumerable mutations lie heavy upon her, briskly though she may plot for to-morrow. And nowhere can you find her more haggard and gray than here. You feel that this place has always worn much the same aspect that it wears to-day. Parcel of the arid region, it sleeps only for thirst. Slake that, and it becomes a garden of paradise as 14 by a magic word. The present generation has proved it trvie in a hundred localities, where the proximity of rivers or mountain streams has made irrigation practicable. The confines of the Great American Desert are narrowing rapidly. Do but reflect that a quarter-century back the journey you now make in perfect com- fort was a matter of wild adventure, at cost of months of arduous travel and at hazard of life, not only because of human foes, but for scarcity of food and water. One never appreciates the full stride of American progress until he has traversed in a Pullman car such a territory as this, where Valley of Death and Journey of the Dead are names still borne by waterless tracts, and justified by bleached bones of cattle and lonely mounds of scattered graves. Rescued from centuries of horror and planted in the front rank of young rising states by the genius of our generation. New Mexico is a land of broad ranges, where hundreds of thousands of sleek cattle and countless flocks of sheep browse upon the nutritious grasses; where fields of grain wave in the healthful breeze; where orchard trees bend under their weight of luscious fruits, and where the rocks lay bare inexhaustible veins of precious metals. Here may be found to-day as profitable large ranches as any in the country, and innumerable small aggregations of cultivated acres, whose owners sit comfortably upon shaded verandas while their servants till the field. This is the para- dox of a region whose softer scenes will often seem to be overborne by bleak mountain and desert and lava bed; that if you own ten acres 15 _ ^f^OSf^i^J^^ , "^ - ^^ - — ' --^— *- " ^-»- — ~ jf— fir!'"!!/ oej^— :-sr:-r^ia-*wii 1^ of irrigated land here you are that much- vaunted but seldom-encountered individual, an independent farmer. You may smile in a superior way when you hear talk of the profits of bank stock. You may look without envy upon the man who is said to own a gold mine. Scattered by the way are sleepy Mexican vil- lages, ancient Indian pueblos, still inhabited, and those older abandoned ruins which give to the region its peculiar atmosphere of mystery. The history of New Mexico formerly began with a pretty legend that dated back to a time in Spain when a sovereign fighting amid his native mountains found himself hemmed in by the enemy, and would have perished with all his army had not one of his enterprising sol- diers discovered an unsuspected pass, the en- trance to which he marked with a bleached cow's skull that lay convenient to his hand, and liien returning led a retreat through the pass to safety. By order of the grateful king the family name of the soldier was thereupon made Cabeza de Vaca — cow's head — to celebrate so opportune a service. It is to be hoped he got a doubloon or two as well, but on that particu- lar head tradition is silent. However, among the soldier's descendants a talent for discovery became a notorious family trait. It amounted to a passion with them. You could not get into any difficulty but a Cabeza de Vaca could find you a way out. Naturally, then, when Narvaez set sail from Spain for the Florida coast, three and a half centuries ago, he took one of that family along for a mascot. The expedition came to grief on the Florida reefs i6 but the mascot survived, and with him three others who had wisely clung to him when the ship went to pieces. Stranded upon an un- known coast, menaced by hostile Indians, an ocean behind and a wilderness before, this Ca- beza de Vaca felt his heart strangely stiiTcd within him. He gave no thought to the dangers of his situation ; he perceived only that he had the opportunity of a lifetime to discover some- thing. So, remembering that in far Mexico his fellow countrymen were known to dwell, he pretended to pull a long face and told his com- panions that to reach the Mexican settlements was the only hope of surviving. Then brand- ishing his sword in a becoming manner he called to them to come on, and led them across the unexplored continent of North America, in the year of grace 1536, by a route that inci- dentally included what is now known as New Mexico. Thus, in substance, runs the legend, which adds that he had a queer tale to tell, on arrival, of Seven Cities of Cibola, and outland- ish people of heathen appearance and notions, but of temperate and industrious habits withal, and presumably rich in treasures of silver and gold ; which incited Coronado to send out an expedition under Marcos de Nizza in 1539, and 17 a year later himself to take charge of the first real invasion , conquering native towns by force of arms on his way. But in the light of modern historical research Cabeza de Vaca's local fame dwindles ; his head diminishes. It is denied that he ever saw New Mexico, and the title of discoverer is awarded to Marcos de Nizza. It does not really matter, for in either event the conquest was by Coronado, in whose footsteps Spanish coloni- zation was firsL enabled to advance into the ter- ritory, which, it should be remembered, was for a long time thereafter a vaguely defined area of much greater extent than to-day. The friars early began their work of founding missions, and in the course of time established forty churches, attended by some 30,000 native com- municants. These natives revolted in 1680, and drove the Spaniards out of the territory, successfully resisting their return for a period of twelve years. From the time of their ulti- mate subjection (1692) the country grew in pop- ulation and commercial importance until, early in the present century, its trade with Missouri and the East became very valuable. The route traversed by pack-mules and prairie schooners loaded with merchandise will forever be re- membered as the Santa Fe Trail, and was almost identical with that followed by Coro- nado. It is at present, for the greater part of the distance, the route of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway between the Missouri River and Santa Fe ; and through western Kansas, southeastern Colorado, over the Raton Pass, and at many points in New Mexico may easily be seen from the train. The distance was 800 miles, and a round trip tlien consvmied no days. Merchandise to an enormous value was often carried by a single caravan. In spite of the protection of a strong military escort the trail was almost continuously sodden with human blood and marked by hundreds of rude graves dug for the mutilated victims of mur- derous Apaches and other tribes. Every scene recounted by romances of Indian warfare had its counterpart along the Santa Fe trail. The ambush, the surprise, the massacre, the cap- ture, the torture, in terrifying and heart-break- ing detail, have been enacted over and over. Only with the advent of the railroad did the era of peace and security begin. To-day the Apache is decimated and harmless, and, with the Pueblo Indian and the Mexican, forms a romantic background to a thriving Anglo- Saxon civilization. It is this background that gives New Mexico its peculiar charm to the thoughtful tourist; not alone its tremendous mountain-ranges, its ex- tensive uplands, its fruitful valleys, or its unsur- passed equability of climate. Its population includes 8,000 Pueblo Indians, 25,000 Navajoes, 1,300 Apaches, and 100,000 Mexicans. LAS VEGAS HOT SPRINGS. The little Rio Gallinas issues by a tortuous path through rugged tree-fringed caiion-walls from a spur of the Rockies half a dozen miles northwest from the city of Las Vegas. Upon its banks, at a point just above where it de- bouches upon the vegas, or meadows, numer- 19 .'njj'.nliTr""'^'^' jt^^^ ! ^:-<^'^^m:Q^^Tmcm sSKT- ous springs both cold and hot rise to the surface in close juxtaposition, their waters charged with a variety of chemical ingredients. The medicinal virtues of these springs, supple- mented by the attractiveness of their location upon a shoulder of the mountains, and the mildness and purity always characteristic of New Mexican air, led to the erection of the spacious and beautiful Hotel Montezuma, and the establishment here of a health resort. It is one of the few places in the Middle West where a stranger may find contentment day after day in comparative idleness. The imme- diate scenery has not the prodigiously heroic qualities of the more famous Colorado resorts, but it is endlessly attractive to the lover of nature in her less titanic moods. If you love the pine and the fir, here you may have your fill of them. If you are fond of a bit of precipitous climbing, you may find it here on every hand. If you are for quiet shaded nooks, or lofty pulpit perches that overhang a pretty clattering stream in deep solitudes, here they abound. And from the adjacent hilltops are to be had wide-sweeping views eastward over the vegas and westward over rocky folds to where the blue masses of the mountain chain are piled against the sky. There are wagon -roads wind- ing over hill and through glen, past the verge of cations and penetrating deep into the forest, and narrower branching trails for the pedestrian and the horseman. Who fails to explore these intimately will miss the full charm of Las Vegas Hot Springs. It is a place in which to be rest- fully happy. 20 2T Every known form of bath is administered in the bath house at the Springs, a resident physi- cian is in charge, and the equable air and almost unbroken sunlight of the long peaceful day are themselves a remedy for physical ills that are incurable in the harsh climes of the North and East. It is not, as might be inferred, a place of distressful heat, but a land of soft golden light whose parallel is the most perfect day of a New England spring. And although the environment of the Montezuma represents the chmax of natural remedial conditions, joined to comfort and luxury, the whole territory is su- premely he£flthful, containing numerous special localities that differ in elevation and in conse- quent adaptation to the requirements of the complications of disease. Raton, Springer, Las Vegas proper, Santa Fe, and Albuquerque, all are health resorts of high merit along the pres- ent route through New Mexico. South of Albuquerque are several admirable resorts of lower altitude, such as Las Cruces, in the Mesilla Valley, Hudson Hot Springs, in the Mimbres Valley, and El Paso, in Texas. SANTA FE. In 1605 the Spaniards founded this city under the name La Ciiidad Real de la Santa Fe de San Francisco (the True City of the Holy Faith of St. Francis), which, like many another pon- derous Spanish title, has been reduced to lower terms in the lapse of time. The extraordinary interest of its early days is ^^ \j. kept alive by monu- t/) > z 23 ments which the kindly elements protect from the accustomed ravages of the centuries. The territorial governor to-day receives his guests in the same room that served visitors in the time of the first viceroy. Eighteen American and seventy-six Mexican and Spanish rulers have successively occupied the palace. It has sur- vived all those strange modulations by which a Spanish province has become a territory of the Union bordering on statehood. The story of the palace stretches back into real antiquity, to a time when the Inquisition had powers, when zealous friars of the Order of St. Francis ex- horted throngs of dimly comprehending hea- then, and when the mailed warriors of Coronado told marvelous uncontradicted tales of ogres that were believed to dwell in the surrounding wilderness. Beneath its roof are garnered priceless treasures of that ancient time, which the curious visitor may behold. There are faded pictures of saints painted upon puma- skins; figures laboriously wrought in wood to shadow forth the Nazarene; votive offerings of silver, in the likeness of legs, arms and hands, brought to the altar of Our Lady by those who had been healed of wounds or disease; rude stone gods of the heathen, and domestic uten- sils and implements of war. There, too, may be seen ancient maps of the New World, let- tered in Latin and in French, on which Cali- fornia appears as an island of the Pacific, and the country at large is confidently displayed with grotesque inaccuracy. Nearly a mile distant from the palace, on an eminence over- H(^ \ . 24 '•^^hlM. .M^zJL^ looking the town, stands the old Chapel Ro- sario, now neighbored by the Ramona school for Apache children. In 1692 Diego de Vargas, marching t:p from the south, stood upon that hill with his little army of 200 men and looked over into the city from which his countrymen had been driven with slaughter a dozen years before. There he knelt and vowed to build upon the spot a chapel for the glorification of Our Lady of the Rosary, pro- vided she would fight upon his side that day. The town was carried by assault after a desper- ate contest of eleven hours' duration, and the chapel was built. It savors quaintly to us of a less poetic age that those roj^al old adventurers should have thought themselves hand and glove with the celestial powers; but they certainly made acknowledgment of services supposed to have been rendered, upon occasion. There are other places of antiquarian inter- est, where are stored Spanish archives cover- ing two and a quarter centuries, and numerous paintings and carvings of great age ; the 26 Church of Our Lady of Light, the Cathedral of San Francisco, and finally the Church of San Miguel and the Old House, isolated from everything that is in touch with our century by their location in the heart of a decrepit old Mexican village. Here, at last, is the real Santa Fe of the traveler's anticipation; a strag- gling aggregation of low adobe huts, divided by narrow winding lanes, where in the sharply defined shadows leathern-faced old men and women sit in vacuous idleness and burros loaded with firewood or garden- truck pass to and fro ; and in small groups of chattering women one catches an occasional glimpse of bright interrogating eyes and a saucy hand- some face, in spite of the closely drawn tapelo. If now some sturdy figure in clanking armor should obligingly pass along, you would have an exact picture of the place as it appeared two and a half centuries ago. Nothing but that figure has departed from the scene, and substantially nothing new has entered in. It does not change. The hurrying activities and transitions of the outer world, from which it is separated by only a narrow arroyo, count for nothing here. One questions if the outline of a shadow has altered for generations. The Old House, where Coronado is said to have lodged in 1540, and the Church of San Miguel, which was sacked in 1680 and rehabilitated in 1 710, are not distinguishable from their sur- roundings by any air of superior age. All is old, a petrifaction of medieval human life done in adobe. 27 PUEBLOS. More than a score of these many-cham- bered communal homes are scattered over the territory, three of the most impor- tant of which may be mentioned as lying ^«v^ adjacent to the present route: Isleta, La- ' guna, and Acoma. Isleta and Laguna are within a stone's throw of the railroad, ten miles and sixty-six miles respectively beyond Albuquerque, and Acoma is reached from either Laguna or Cubero by a drive of a dozen miles. The aboriginal inhabitants of the pueblos, an intelligent, complex, industrious, and independent race, are anomalous among North American natives. Many are housed to-day in the self-same structures in which their forebears were discovered, and in three and a half centuries of contact with Europeans their manner of life has not materially changed. The Indian tribes that roamed over moun- tain and plain have beccme wards of the Government, debased and denuded of what- ever of dignity they once possessed, ascribe what cause you will for their present condition. But the Pueblo Indian has absolutely main- tained the integrity of his individuality, self- respecting and self-sufficient. The extent to which he has adopted the religion of his 28 m C/) > m z o > > > 29 Spanish conquerors, or the teachings of his present guardians, amounts to only a shght concession from his persistent conservatism. Laborious efforts have been made to pen- etrate the reserve with which the involved inner life of this strange child of the desert is guarded, but it lies like a vast dark continent behind a dimly visible shore, and he dwells within the shadowy rim of a night that yields no ray to tell of his origin. He is a true pagan, swathed in seemingly dense clouds of super- stition, rich in fanciful legend, and profoundly ceremonious in religion. His gods are innu- merable. Not even the ancient Greeks pos- sessed a more populous Olympus. On that austere yet familiar height gods of peace and of war, of the chase, of bountiful harvest and of famine, of sun and rain and snow, elbow a thousand others for standing-room. The trail of the serpent has crossed his history, too, and he frets his pottery with an imitation of its scales, and gives the rattlesnake a prominent ace among his deities; Unmistakably a 30 pagan, yet the purity and well-being of his communities will bear favorable comparison with those of the enlightened world. He is brave, honest, and enterprising within the fixed limits of his little sphere, his wife is vir- tuous, his children are docile. And were the whole earth swept bare of every living thing, save for a few leagues surrounding his tribal home, his life would show little disturbance. Possibly he might not at once learn of so unimportant an occurrence. He would still alternately labor and relax in festive games, still reverence his gods, and rear his children to a life of industry and content, so anoma- lous is he, so firmly established in an absolute independence. Pueblo architecture possesses nothing of the elaborate ornamentation found in so-called Aztec ruins in Mexico. The house is usually built of stone, covered with adobe cement, and is severely plain. It is commonly two or three stories in height, of terrace form, and joined to its neighbors. The prevaihng entrance is by means of a ladder to the roof of the lowest story. The most strikingly interesting of New Mexican pueblos is Acoma. It is built upon 31 e^^ the summit of a table-rock with eroded precipitous sides, 350 feet above the plain, which is 7,000 feet above the sea. Acoma pueblo is 1 ,000 feet in length and 40 feet high, and there is besides a church of enormous proportions. Formerly it was reached only by a hazardous stairway in the rock, up which. the inhabitants carried upon their backs every particle of the ma- terials of which the village is con- structed; but easier pathways now exist. The graveyard con- sumed forty years in building, by reason of the necessity of bringing earth from the plain below; and the church must have cost the labor of many generations, for its walls are 60 feet high and 10 feet thick, and it has timbers 40 feet long and 14 inches square. The Acomas welcomed the soldiers of Coro- nado with deference, ascribing to them celes- tial origin. Subsequently, upon learning the distinctly human character of the Spaniards, they professed allegiance, but afterward wan- tonly slew a dozen of Zaldivar's men. By way of reprisal Zaldivar headed three-score soldiers and iindertook to carry the sky-citadel by assault. After a three days' hand-to-hand struggle the Spaniards stood victors upon that seemingly impregnable fortress, and received the submission of the Queres, who for three- 32 quarters of a century thereafter remained tract- able. In that interval the priest came to Acoma and held footing for fifty years, until the bloody uprising of 1680 occurred, in which priest, soldier, and settler were massacred or driven from the land, and every vestige of their occupation was extirpated. After the resubjection of the natives by Diego de Vargas the present church was constructed, and the Pueblos have not since rebelled against the contiguity of the white man. Anciently, according to a native tradition, for which Mr. C. F. Lummis is authority, the original pueblo of Acoma stood upon the crest of the Enchanted Mesa, 430 feet above the val- ley, three miles away, but its only approach was one day destroyed by the falling of a cliff, and three sick women, who chanced to be the only occupants — the remainder of the popula- tion being at work in the fields below — perished there, beyond reach of aid from their people, who then built a new pueblo on the present site. In 1S97 an East- ern college professor laid siege to the Mesa Encantada with a mor- tar and several miles of assorted ropes, supplemented by pulleys, a boatswain's chair, and a team of horses. By these aids the summit was reached, but the party reported that nothing was found to indicate ^ _.,_ ,^^ , ,. ,_ that it had ever been visited be- <;>V^/^\/1if!r -'-'^■' fore by man. A few weeks later *'»''-'*''•' -"'- ' • ' Dr. F. W. Hodge, of the Bureau of p C: Ethnology, made the ascent with several com- panions, aided by a few short ladders, a guide rope, and experience in mountaineering. This party found a number of potsherds and frag- ments of implements and ornaments, all of ancient type, and vigorously championed the claim that the mesa was once inhabited. Afterward, another party, including Mr. Lummis, Dr. David Starr Jordan, and Prof. T. H. Hittell, similarly ascended and were simi- larly rewarded. The adherents of the legend assert that the gnawing tooth of centuries of summer storm and winter frost would inevi- tably denude the summit of every relic of that olden time save such as have been securely pocketed in crevices instead of washing away. The talus of the mesa abounds in ancient potsherds, and the rapid annual rise of rock 34 detritus at the foot of the cHfjf not only lends corroboration but shows how recently the mesa has ceased to be unscalable. Even so, it wnll be long before the casual tourist will aspire to its giddy crest. III. ARIZONA. jHE portion to be traversed is a land of prodigious mountain terraces, exten- sive plateaus, profound caiions, and flat, arid plains, dotted with gardens of fruits and flowers, patched with vast tracts of pine timber, and veined with precious stones and metals, alternating with desolate beds of lava, bald mountainous cones of black and red volcanic cinder, grass-carpeted parks, uncouth vegetable growths of the desert, and bleak rock spires, above all which white peaks gleam radiantly in almost perpetual sunlight. The long-time residents of this region are unable to shake of? its charm, even when no longer com- pelled by any other consideration to remain. Its frequent wide stretches of rugged horizon 35 exert a fascination no less powerful than that of arduous mountain fastnesses or the secret shadows of the dense forest. There is the same dignity of Nature, the same mystery, potent even upon those who can least define its thrall. Miners confess to it, and herdsmen. To the traveler it will appear a novel environ- ment for contemporaneous American life, this /y ^ '- 'in land of sage and mesquite, of frowning vol- canic piles, shadowed canons, lofty mesas and painted buttes. It seems fitter for some Cyclo- pean race; for the pterodactyl and the behe- moth. Its cliffs are flung in broad, sinuous lines that approach and recede from the way, their contour incessantly shifting in the simili- tude of caverns, corridors, pyramids, monu- ments, and a thousand other forms so full of structural idea they seem to be the unfinished work of some giant architect who had planned more than he could execute. 36 The altitude is practically the same as that of the route through New Mexico, undulating between 5,000 and 7,000 feet above sea-level, until on the western border the high plateaus break rapidly down to an elevation of less than 500 feet at the valley of a broad and capricious stream that flows through alternate stretches of rich alluvial meadow and barren rock-spires — obelisks rising against the sky. This stream is the Colorado River, wayward, strenuous, and possessed of creative imagination and terrific energies when the mood is on. It chiseled the Grand Caiion, far to the north and east, and now complacently saunters oceanward. Despite its quiet air, not long ago, it conceived the whim to make a Salton Sea far to the south, arid the affair was a national sensation for many months. The great cantilever bridge that spans it here was made necessary by the restless spirit of the intractable stream. Only a few years ago the crossing was by means of a huge pile bridge several miles toward the north; but the river shifted its channel so frequently it was thought desirable to build a new bridge down here among the enduring obelisks, which are known as The Needles. It is a picturesque spot, full of color, and the air has a pure trans- parency that lends depth and distance to the view, such as the bird knows in its flight. The Needles form the head of the gorgeously beau- tiful Mojave Caiion, hidden from view. The Colorado is an inveterate lover of a chaotic chan- nel. It is its genius to create works of art on a "scale to awe the spirit of cataclysm itself. It ^^m^/ 37 -= is a true Hellespont, issuing from Cimmerian gloom to loiter among sunny fields, which it periodically waters with a fertilizing flood; and while you follow its gentle sweep it breaks into sudden uproar and hews a further path of des- olation and sublimity. One who does not know the caiions of the Colorado has never experi- enced the full exaltation of those impersonal emotions to which the Arts are addressed. There only are audience-halls fit for the trage- dies of ^schyhjs, for Dante and the Sagas. The known history of Arizona begins with the same ]\Iark of Nice whom we have already accredited as the discoverer of New Mexico, of which this territory was long a part; and here, as well, he was followed by Coronado and the missionaries. This is the true home of the Apache, whose unsparing warfare repeatedly destroyed the work of early Spanish civiliza- tion and Avon the land back for a time to heathenesse. Its complete acquisition by the United States dates from 1S53, and in the early days of the Civil War it was again devastated. After its reoccupation by California troops in 1862, settlers began to penetrate its northern portion. Nearly twenty years later the first railroad spanned its boundaries, and then finally it became a tenable home for the Saxon, although the well-remembered outbreak of Geronimo occurred only ten years ago. To-day the war-thirsty Apaches are widely scattered among distant reservations, and with them has departed the last existing element of disturb- ance. But Arizona will never lose its peculiar atmosphere of extreme antiquity, for in addi- 38 tion to those overwhelming chasms that have lain unchanged since the infancy of the world, it contains within its borders the ruins of once populous cities, maintained by an enormous irrigation system which our modern science has not yet outdone; whose histoiy was not written upon any lasting scroll; vi^hose peoples are classed among the undecipherable antiquities of our continent, their deeds unsung, their heroes unchronicled and unknown. Yet, if you have a chord for the heroic, hardly shall you find another land so invigorating as this of Arizona. It stiffens the luental fiber like a whiff of the north wind. It stirs in the blood dim echoes of days when achievement lay in the might of the individual arm; when sword met targe in exhilarating struggles for supremacy. The super-refinement of cities dissipates here. There is a tonic breeze that blows toward simple relations and a lusty self- hood. PETRIFIED FORESTS. From remotest epochs earth has striven against the encroaching slime of seas in a wasting struggle to free her face to air. Those who are learned may tell you where she is left most deeply scarred by the conflict, but in this region where her triumph, if barren, is com- plete, and the last straggling columns of her routed foe are sourly retreating ocean ward, at least her wounds are bare, and with them many a strange record which she thought to lock forever in her bosom. Long ere Noah fell 39 adrift with the heterogeneous company of the ark, or Adam was, perhaps even before the ancestral ape first stood erect in the posture of men that were to be, forests were growing in Arizona, just as in some parts they grow to- day. And it befell in the course of time that they lay prostrate and over them swept the waters of an inland sea. Eons passed, and sands like snowflakes buried them so deep the . plesiosaurus never suspected their grave be- neath him as he basked his monstrous length in the tropic waters and hungrily watched the pterodactyl lolling in the palm-shade on the rim. Then the sea vanished, the uncouth den- izens of its deeps and shores became extinct, and craters belched forth volcanic spume to spread a further mantle of oblivion over the past. Yet somewhere the chain of life re- mained unbroken, and as fast as there came dust for worm to burrow in, mould for seed to sprout in, and leaf for insect to feed on, life crept back in multiplying forms, only to retreat again before the surge of elemental strife after 40 a century or after a thousand years. The pre- cise sequence of events as here sketched must not be too critically scanned. The aim is to sug- gest an approximate notion, to those who pos- sess no better, of some prodigious happenings which have a bearing on our immediate theme. If still one chance to lack a working idea, let him remember that the solid svirface of earth is ceaselessly changing contour, that it actually billows like the ocean sea. It merely moves more slowly, for if the gradual upheavals and depressions of the earth's crust throughout mil- lions of years were performed within the brief span of an hour, you would have the wildest conceivable spectacle of cold rock-strata become as fluctuant as water and leaping and falling in waves whose crests towered miles in air, and whose lengths were measurable by half a continent. This region for hundreds of square miles was once sunk so low the ocean over- flowed it ; then upheaved so high the brine could find no footing. Again a partial depres- sion made it a vast repository of rivers that drained the higher levels, which in time was expelled by a further upheaval. During the periods of subsidence the incoming waters de- posited sand and silt, which time hardened to rock. But in periods of upheaval the process was reversed and the outgoing waters gnawed the mass and labored constantly to bear it away. So, to return to our long-buried forest, some 10,000 feet of rock was deposited over it, and subsequently eroded clean away. And 41 when these ancient logs were uncovered, and, like so many Van Winkles, they awoke — but from a sleep many thousand times longer — to the sight of a world that had forgotten them, lo the sybaritic chemistry of nature had trans- formed them every one into chalcedony, topaz, onyx, carnelian, agate and amethyst. Thou- sands of acres are thickly strewn with trunks and segments of trunks, and covered with chip- like fragments. There are several separated tracts, any one of which will seem to the aston- ished beholder an inexhaustible store of gems, measurable by no smaller phrase than millions of tons ; a profusion of splinters, limbs, and logs, every fragment of which as it lies would adorn the collector's cabinet, and, polished by the lapidary, might embellish a crown. Some of these prostrate trees of stone are over loo feet in length and 7 or 8 feet in diameter, although they are most frequently broken into sections by transverse fracture. One of these huge trunks, its integrity still spared by time, spans a canon 50 feet wide — a bridge of jasper and agate overhanging a tree-fringed pool — strange embodiment of a seer's rhapsody, squandered upon a desert far from the habi- tation of men. The largest and best known of the petri- fied forests lie from twenty to thirty miles distant from Holbrook, where large parties will find the most satisfactory avail- able hotel accommodations, and abundant facilities for local transportation. Individual visitors, or small parties, will minimize time, cost and fatigue by leaving the train at Ada ■ 42 mana, a little station between Billings and Carrizo. Mr. Adam Hanna, a companionable Scotchman, lives with his family within call, and will provide wholesome ranch fare for a somewhat limited number of visitors, and convey them to the nearest of the forests, only seven miles away. This particular tract em- braces several hundred acres, includes the natural log-bridge above mentioned, and will amply reward a visit. MOKIS. The Moki pueblos are seven in number: Oraibi, Shungopavi, Shipaulovi, Mishonginovi, Wolpi, Sichomovi, and Tewa(also called Hano). They are embraced in a locality less than thirty miles across, and are the citadels of a region which the discovering Spaniards in the six- teenth century named the Province of Tusayan. They are not to be confounded with the " Seven Cities of Cibola," whose imaginary treasures attracted the plundering conquerors, and whose site IS now known to be Zuni, in New Mexico. They are reached by two days' journey to the north from Cafion Diablo, Holbrook, or Wins- low, and by longer routes from Flagstaff, or from Gallup in New Mexico. Like Acoma they are perched on the crests of lofty mesas, and at the first were well-nigh inaccessible to enemies, their only approach being by way of narrow, precipitous foot trails. In modern time less difficult paths have been constructed, such fortress homes being no longer needful for defense. But the conservative Mokis continue to live as lived their forebears and cling to their 43 // 'iuM^' MOKI HAIRDRESSER. 44 high dwelling place. The women toil up the trails with water from the spring below, and the men returning from the fields climb a small mountain's height daily. They are industrious, thrifty, orderly, and mirthful, and are probably the best entertained people in the world. Sub- sisting almost wholly by agriculture in an arid region of uncertain crops, they find abundant time between their labors for lighthearted dance and song, and for elaborate ceremonials, which are grotesque in the Kachina, or masked dances, ideally poetic in the Flute dance, and intensely dramatic in the Snake dance. Of the last two, both of which are dramatized prayers for rain at an appointed season, the former is picturesque in costume and ritual, and impres- sive in solemn beauty; the latter is grim and startling, reptiles — including a liberal propor- tion of rattlesnakes— being employed as mes- sengers to carry petitions to the gods of the underworld, who are supposed to have power over the rain cloud. To the onlooker it seems impossible that venomous snakes can be han- dled so audaciously without inflicting deadly wounds, yet it is positively known that they are in no wise deprived of their natural power to do so. There are those who claim to have seen the dancers bitten by their rattlesnake partners, but the claim lacks confirmation by careful scientific observers, who incline to the belief that the snake priests avoid injury by dexterity and a knowledge of reptile ways. It is true that the priests possess a secret anti- dote, to which they resort in cases of snake- bite, which occasionally befalls the barefoot 45 natives, but even in the land of the snake dance such casualties are uncommon and the efficacy of the antidote remains a matter for investigation. That the dancers are some- times bitten is pretty well established, but the observer may not have distinguished the harm- less from the venomous snakes, which are intermingled, and the Mokis are reticent to subsequent inquiry. Moki is a nickname. It is said to signify " dead," and to have been applied at a time of devastation by smallpox, that gift of civilized man to the savage. Among themselves they are known as Hopi, ' ' good (or peaceful) people." It is to be regretted that a name so much worthier these friendly and interesting aborigines cannot be restored to current usage. Extended mention of the Mokis and their customs, with ample illustration, will be found in a separate publication, " The Moki Snake Dance.'' CARON niABLO. This. is a profound gash in the plateau, some 225 feet deep, 550 feet wide, and many miles long. It has the appearance of a volcanic rent in the earth's crust, wedge-shaped, and terraced in bare dun rock down to the thread of a stream 46 llMui.'i;,! that trickles through the notch. It is one of those inconsequent things which Arizona is fond of displaying. For many* miles you are bowled over a perfectly level plain, and without any preparation whatever, save only to slacken ^^ , its pace, the train crosses the chasm by a -, spider-web bridge and then speeds again over the self -same placid expanse. In the darkness of night one might unsuspectingly step off into its void, it is so entirely unlooked-for. Yet, re- markable as is the Canon Diablo, in comparison with those grand gorges hereafter to be men- tioned, it is worth little better than an idle glance through the car window in passing. FLAGSTAFF. Gateway to most remarkable ancient ruins, to one of the most practicable and delightful of our great mountains, and to the Grand Canon of the Colorado River, Flagstaff' is itself pic- torial in character and rich in interest. It stands upon a clearing in an extensive pine forest that here covers the plateau and clothes the mountains nearly to their peaks; although the word park better describes this sunlit, grass- carpeted expanse of widely set towering pines, where cattle graze and the horseman may gallop at will. Couched at the foot of a noble mountain that doffs its cap of snow for only a few weeks of the year, and environed by vast resources of material wealth in addition to its aggregation of spectacular and archaeological features, its fame has already spread widely over the world, and will increase with time. Space can here be given to only its three most 47 -.a^'^^ ^^a^fif ,pw"«iO)y->'»^' celebrated possessions, but the visitor can not hope to exhaust its attractions. There are wood- land retreats where scuVptured rocks tower many- hundred feet above the still surface of pools; box canons where myriads of trout leap from the waters of the stream that flows through depths of shadow; thickets where the deer browses; plains where the antelope courses, and rocky slopes where the big horn clambers and the mountain-lion dozes in the sun. The extraordinarily pure atmosphere of this elevated region and the predominance of clear weather gave Flagstaff the Lowell Observa- tory. It is charmingly situated in the heart of the pines, upon a hill in the outskirts of the town. Visitors are made welcome. SAN FRANCISCO MOUNTAIN. Here, as in many other parts of the West, the actual height of a mountain is greater than is apparent to the eye. The ascent begins at a point considerably above where the Eastern mountain climber leaves off, for the reason that the whole region is itself a prodigious mountain, hundreds of thousands of square miles in area, of which the projecting peaks are but exalted lookouts. The four summits of San Francisco Mountain are elevated nearly 13,000 feet above the sea, and only 6,000 feet above the town of Flagstaff. It follows that more than half of the actual ascent has been made without any effort by the traveler, and the same altitude is attained as if he had 48 climbed a sheer height of 13,000 feet upon the rim of the sea. There is the same rarefaction of air, the same wide range over an empire that lies flat beneath the eye, limited only by the interposition of other mountains, the spher- ical contour of the earth, atmospheric haze, or the power of vision itself. The apex of Humphrey's Peak, the only summit of this mountain yet practicable for the tourist, is little more than ten miles from Flagstaff, and an excellent carriage road covers fully seven miles of the distance. From the end of that road a comfortable bridle-path leads to within a few feet of the topmost crag. The en- tire trip may be made on horseback if desired, and one who is accustomed to the saddle will find it a preferable experience, for then short cuts are taken through the timber, and there is so much the more of freedom and the charm of an untrammeled forest. The road crosses a short stretch of clearing and then enters the magnificent pine park, rising at an easy grade and offering frequent backward glimpses. The strained, conscious severity of the Rocky Moun- tain giants is wanting here. It is a mountain without egotism, breathing gentlest dignity, and frankly fond of its robe of verdure. Birds flit and carol in its treetops, and squirrels play. Grass and fern do not fear to make soft-cush- ioned banks to allure the visitor, flowers riot in their season, and the aspens have whole hill- sides to themselves ; soft, twinkling bowers of deli- cate green, dells where one could wish to lie and 49 dream through long summer hours. The bridle-path begins, with the conventional zig- zag of mountain-trails, at the foot of a steep grass-grown terrace that lies in full view of the spreading panorama below. Above that sunny- girdle the trail winds through a more typical mountain forest, where dead stalks of pine and fir are plentifully sprinkled among the living, and ugly swaths show where the avalanche has passed. Above this, for the remaining few hundred feet, the peaks stand bare — stern, swart crags that brook no mantle except the snows, encompassed by a quiet which onlj' the wind redeems from everlasting silence. The outlook from Humphrey's Peak is one of the noblest of mountain views. It commands a recognizable territory of not less than seventy- five thousand square miles, with vague shadowy contours beyond the circle of definite vision. Categorically, as pointed out by the guide, the main features of the landscape are as follows : Directly north, the farther wall of the Grand Canon, at the Bright Angel Amphitheater, fifty miles away ; and topping that, the Buckskin Mountains of the Kaibab Plateau, thirty or forty miles farther distant. To the right, the Navajo Mountains, near the Colorado State line, 200 miles. In the northeast, the wonder- ful Painted Desert, tinted with rainbow-hues, and the Navajo Reservation. Below that the Moqui buttes and villages. Toward the east, the broad plateau and desert as far as the divide near Navajo Springs, 130 miles east from Flagstaff by the railroad. In the south- east the White ^lountains, more than 200 50 /WP miles. In the south, successively, the MogoUon Plateau, a group of a dozen lakes — unlooked for sight in the arid lands — Baker's Butte, the Four Peaks, and the Superstition Mountains near Phoenix, the last named i6o miles distant. In the southwest, the Bradshaw Mountains, 140 miles; Granite Mountain at Prescott, 100 miles, and the Juniper Range, 150 miles. The hori- zon directly west is vague and doubtful, but is supposed to lie near the California line. In the northwest a distant range is seen, north of the Colorado River and east of the Nevada line, perhaps the Sheavwits or the Hurricane Moun- tains. Among the less remote objects are the Coconino forest and basin on the north; on the east the Little Colorado, traceable bj^ its fringe of cottonwoods, beds of lava flung like the shadow of a cloud or the trail of a conflagra- tion, and Sunset and Peachblow craters, black cones of cinder capped with red scoria; on the south and southwest Oak Creek Canon, the Je- rome smelters, and the rugged pictorial break- down of the Verde; under foot. Flagstaff; and on the west the peaks of Bill Williams, Sit- greaves and Kendricks, neighborly near. Yet, in spite of the grandeur of such a scene, San Francisco Mountain itself soon gains and monopolizes the attention. It has slopes that bend in a single sweeping curve to depths which the brain reels to contemplate, down which a loosened stone will spin until the eye can no longer distinguish its course ; and there are huge folds and precipices and abysses of which no hint was given in the ascent. Per- haps its most attractive single feature is a 51 profound bowl-shaped cavity between Hum- phrey's and Agassiz peaks, overhung by strangely sculptured cliffs that have the appear- ance of ruined castle walls perforated with rude doorways, windows and loopholes. It is called The Crater, and is almost completely boxed in by steep but uniform slopes of volcanic dust, in descending which a horse sinks to his fet- locks. On one side it breaks down into a canon leading off to the plain and set with tree, grass, fern and flower. Its axis is marked by two parallel lines of bare bowlders of great size, that might have been thrown up from the underlying rock by some prodigious ebullition of internal forces. The round trip to the peak is customarily made in a day, but arrangements may be made to remain upon the mountain over night if de- termined upon in advance, and such a plan is recommended to those who are reasonably hardy and have never seen the glories of sunset and sunrise from a mountain-height. Among the great mountains of America whose ascent is made without the aid of the railway engineer, there is hardly another that at the cost of so little hardship yields so rich a reward. THE GRAND CANON OF THE COLORADO. The series of tremendous chasms which form the channel of the Colorado River in its course through northern Arizona reach their culmina- tion in a chaotic gorge 217 miles long, from 9 to 13 miles wide, and, midway, more than 6,600 feet below the level of the plateau. Standing upon the brink of that plateau, at the point of 52 \ "Si; the canon's greatest width and depth, the be- holder is confronted by a scene whose majesty and beauty are well-nigh unbearable. Snatched in a single glance from every accustomed an- chorage of human experience, the stoutest heart here quavers, the senses cower. It is one of the few widely advertised spots which one need not fear approaching with anticipations too exalted. It is a new world, compelling the tribute of sensations whose intensity ex- ceeds the familiar signification of words. It never has been adequately described, and never will be. If you say of Niagara's gorge that it is profound, what shall you say of the Colorado's chasm that yawns beneath your feet to a depth nearly fifty times greater ? If you have looked down from the height of the Eiffel tower and called it vertiginous, what shall you say when you are brought to the verge of a gulf at points of which you may drop a plummet five times as far? And when you face, not a mere nar- row frowning gash of incredible depth, but a broad underworld that reaches to the utter- most horizon and seems as vast as the earth itself ; studded with innumerable pyramidal mountains of massive bulk hewn from gaudiest rock-strata, that barely lift the cones and turrets of their crests to the level of the eye ; divided by purple voids ; banded in vivid colors of transparent brilliancy that are harmonized by atmosphere and refraction to a marvelous delicacy; controlled by a unity of idea that redeems the whole from the menace of over- whelming chaos — then, surely, you maybe par- 54 w:^^^ doned if your pen halts in its description. Some attempt, however, has been made in " The Grand Canon of Arizona" to which the reader may conveniently refer. Major Powell and Captain Button have written magnificent volumes on this theme, and there are graceful pages devoted to the subject in Warner's ' ' Our Italy." But the best popular description in print is the account by Mr. John L. Stoddard, written since his retirement from the platform and published in the admirable volumes which present, in permanent form, the travel-pictures of the most successful lecturer of our time. It is seventy miles distant from Flagstaff by a nearly level road. Except in the winter, when the journey can be undertaken only when weather is favorable, a tri-weekly stage makes the trip in eleven hours, including stop for dinner midway. Passengers quit the stage at the rim of the canon, and so long as they may choose to remain are provided with comfortable lodgings and excellent meals. CLIFF AND CAVE DWELLINGS. This region abounds in ruins of the dwellings of a prehistoric people. The most important lie within a radius of eight miles from Flag- staff. On the southeast, Walnut Cation breaks the plateau for a distance of several miles, its walls deeply eroded in horizontal lines. In these recesses, floored and roofed by the more enduring strata, the cliff-dwellings are found in great number, walled up on the front and sides with rock fragments and ce- 55 ment, and partitioned into compartments. Some have fallen into decay, only portions of their walls remaining, and but a narrow shelf of the once broad floor of solid rock left to evi- dence their extreme antiquity. Others are almost wholly intact, having stubbornly re- sisted the weathering of time. Nothing but fragments of pottery now remain of the many quaint implements and trinkets that character- ized these dwellings at the time of their discovery and have since been exhumed by scientist and collector. At least, nothing of value is supposed to remain about those that are commonly visited. Many others, more difficult to explore, may yet yield a store of archfeological treasure. Fixed like swallows' nests upon the face of a precipice, approachable from above or below only by deliberate and cautious climbing, these dwellings have the appearance of forti- fied retreats rather than habitual abodes. That there was a time, in the remote past, when warlike peoples of mysterious origin passed southward over this plateau is generally cred- ited. And the existence of the cliff-dwellings is ascribed to the exigencies of that dark period, when the inhabitants of the plateau, unable to cope with the superior energy, in- telligence and numbers of the descending hordes, devised these unassailable retreats. All their quaintness and antiquity can not con- ceal the deep pathos of their being, for tragedy is written all over these poor hovels hung between earth and sky. Their builders hold no smallest niche in recorded history. Their 56 **■ '■'-ill aspirations, their struggles and their fate are all unwritten, save on these crumbling stones, which are their sole monument and meager epitaph. Here once they dwelt. They left no other print on time. At an equal distance to the north of Flag- staff, among the cinder-buried cones, is one whose summit commands a wide-sweeping view of the plain. Upon its apex, in the innumera- ble spout-holes that were the outlet of ancient eruptions, are the cave-dwellings, around many of which rude stone-walls still stand. The story of these habitations is likewise wholly conjec- tural. They may have been contemporary with the cliff -dwellings. That they were long inhab- ited is clearly apparent. Fragments of shat- tered pottery lie on every hand. CENTRAL AND SOUTHERN ARIZONA. From Ash Fork, west of Flagstaff, the Santa Fe, Prescott& Phoenix Railroad extends south- ward through Prescott to Phoenix. In a dis- tance of less than 200 miles the traveler is afforded glimpses of neai-ly every variety of 57 i' i^a^ scenery typical of the territory. There are bleak, barren mountains, and mountains cov- ered with forests of pine, on whose slopes are seen the dumps of world-famous mines. There are rocky desert wastes where only uncouth cacti find footing to give some poor semblance of life and hope, and vast arid stretches which in early spring are overspread with flowers, among which the poppy predominates and by virtue of its superior size and brilliancy carpets the ground with an almost unbroken sheet of tawny flame, far as the eye can reach on either hand. There are waterless canons, and canons walling turbid streams, unreclaimed vales dot- ted with cattle, and broad irrigated valley-plains level as a floor, where is cultivated in extraor- dinary profusion nearly every variety of fruit, nut and vegetable not absolutely restricted to the tropics, in addition to an enormous acreage of alfalfa and the ordinary cereals of the north temperate zone. Both north and south of Prescott some pretty engineering problems have been solved, with a 58 59 picturesque result of rock-cuts, trestles, detours, and loops where distance is artificially created in order that grade may be overcome. At many points one marvels at the audacious imag- ination of the man who conceived it possible to construct a path for the locomotive through a region so desperately hostile. Here in a gorge uptilted lofty rock-pillars and tremendous bowlders lying shoulder to shoulder contest the passage; yonder, on a slope, you may see far below a second parallel track, and below that a third forming a sweeping loop by which the safe descent of the train is accomplished and the ascent of the opposite train made possible. The developed agricultural and horticultural areas are in the neighborhood of Phoenix. The climate is especially friendly to invalids, even during the hot summer months, but as in the 60 :5v case of other southwestern health and pleas- ure resorts, winter brings the influx of visitors. The beneficent effect of this chmate upon the sick, or upon those who merely seek an enjoy- able retreat from the harsh winter of the North and East, is not easily exaggerated. The hotel accommodations have been greatly enlarged and improved in recent years, the early winter of 1896 in particular having been marked by the opening of the Adams House, a caravan- sary of which older and more populous com- munities might well be proud. It was promptly filled to overflowing, and the erection of other modern hotels will speedily follow, for Phoenix is rapidly becoming one of the greatest of win- ter resorts in the southwest. The valley, of which it is the center, is one of marvelous loveliness, which only the painter's art can convey to one who has not beheld it. Of the valleys of the West there are four pre-eminent in beauty — the San Gabriel and Santa Clara in California, the valley of Salt Lake in Utah, and this of the Salt River. Across the restful and infinitely modulated green of orchard and shade trees, of alfalfa and barley fields, the eye is led to a distant horizon of rugged moun- tains, where shifting light and shadow make an endless play of color, astonishingly vivid to a traveler new to desert landscapes and un- ceasingly attractive day after day. The greatest mineral development is in the vicinity of Prescott. Here, among other fa- mous deposits, are the United Verde copper mines and the Congress and Rich Hill gold mines, the last named situated upon an isolated 61 v^Acts^ Au-" — peak, where in the early days gold was literally whittled from the rock with knives and chisels. The tourist will do well to include in his itin- erary a visit of inspection to some one of these numerous repositories of treasure. IV. SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA. FEW miles beyond the Colorado River crossing at The Needles is the rail- road station of that name, where the remnant of the once powerful and warlike Mojave tribe, now become beg- garly hangers-on to civilization, love to congre- gate and offer inferior wares in the shape of bows and arrows and pottery trinkets to trav- elers in exchange for coin. Their hovels are scattered along the wayside, and the eager con- gregation of women peddlers, some with naked babies sitting stoically astride their hips, and all dubiously picturesque in paint and rags, is sufficiently diverting. The men attain gigantic stature, and are famed for their speed and bot- tom as runners; but their ability might be fairly taxed by the tourist of average capacity who for any cause felt himself in danger of being 62 compelled to share their abode or mingle inti- mately with them. A sound-heeled Achilles would fall behind in pursuit of the fleer from such a sorry fate. But this is California, the much-lauded land of fruit and flower and sunny clime, of moun- tain and shore and sea-girt isle ; land of j^ara- doxes, where winter is the season of bloom and fruitage and summer is nature's time of slum- ber. The traveler enters it for the first time with a vivid preconception of its splendors. By way of introduction you are borne across the most sterile portion of the most hopeless waste in America, whose monotony intercepts every approach to California except that round- about one by way of the sea. On either hand lies a drear stretch of sand and alkali, relieved only by black patches of lava and a mountainous horizon — a Nubian desert un- marked by a single human habitation outside the lonely path of the locomotive; where not even the cry of a wolf breaks the grim silence of desolation. Through this the train hastens to a more elevated country, arid still, but re- lieved by rugged rocks, the esthetic gnarled trunks and bolls of the yucca and occasional growths of deciduous trees. You enter the Cajon Pass. Did not the journey include a return through Colorado, which is distinctive in mountain scenery, Cajon Pass would bear extended men- tion. It is the loveliest imaginable scene, a gently billowing mountain flank densely set with thickets of manzanita, gleaming through whose glossy foliage and red stems the pale earth 63 f I rises here and there in graceful dunes of white unflecked by grass or shrub, overhung by parallel-terraced ridges of the San Bernardino Mountains, that pale in turn to a topmost height far in the blue Italian sky. Entirely wanting in the austerity thq,t characterizes the grander mountains of loftier altitudes, it takes you from the keeping of plateau and desert, and by seductive windings leads you down to the garden of California. Typical scenes at once appear. On either hand are seen or- chards of the peach, apricot, prune, olive, fig almond, walnut, and that always eagerly antici- pated one of the orange. You will not, however, find this whole land a jungle of orange and palm trees, parted only by thick banks of flowers. The world is wide, e'-en in California, or, one might better say, particularly in California, where over an area averaging 150 miles wide and 1,000 miles long is scattered a population no greater than that of the city of Chicago. It is true that at many places along your route you may almost pluck oranges by reaching from the car window in passing; but the celebrated products of California lie in restricted areas of cultivation, which you are expected to visit; and herein lies much of the Californian's pride, that there still remains so much of opportunity for all. There is everything in California that has been credited to it, but what proves not un- commonly a surprise is the relatively small area of improved land and the consequent fre- quency of unfructed intervals. Only a mo- ment's reflection is needed to perceive that the 64 .'. m^--"^ 65 case could not be otherwise. As for flowers, even here they are not eternal, except in the thousands of watered gardens. In the dry summer season the hills turn brown and sleep. Only when the winter rains have slaked the parched earth do the grass and flowers awake, and then for a few months there is enough of bloom and fragrance to satisfy the most exu- berant fancy. Now past pretty horticultural communities, flanked by the Sierra Madre, the way leads quickly from San Bernardino to Pasadena and Los Angeles. Southward from the last-named city you pass through a fruitful region, and within a stone's throw of the impressive mission-ruins of Capis- trano, to a shore where the long waves of the Pacific break upon gleaming white sands and the air is of the sea. Blue as the sky is the Pacific, paling in the shallows toward land, and flecked with bright or somber cloud reflections and smurring ripples of the breeze. It is not only the westerly bound of the North American Continent, it is the South Seas of old adventure, where many a hulk of once treasure-laden gal- leons lies fathoms deep among the queer deni- zens of the sea who repeat wild legends of naughty buccaneers. There is challenge to the imagination in the very tracklessnessof the sea. On the wrinkled face of earth you may read earth's story. She has laid things to heart. She broods on memories. But the sea denies the past; it is as heedless of events that were as the air is of the path where yesterday a butterfly was winging. Its incontinent expanse is allur- 66 ing to the fancy, and this sunset sea even more than the tempestuous ocean that beats upon our eastern shores, for it is so lately become our possession it seems still a foreign thing, strewn with almost as many wrecks of Spanish hopes as of galleons; and into its broad bosom the sun sinks to rise upon quaint antipodean peoples, beyond a thousand mysterious inhabited islands in the swirls of the equatorial currents. Next, swinging inland to find the pass of the last intervening hills, you make a final descent to the water's edge, and come to San Diego, that dreamy city of Mediterranean atmosphere and color, terraced along the rim of a sheltered bay of surpassing beauty. Guarding the mouth of the harbor lies the long crescent peninsular of Coronado, the pale fagades of whose mam- moth hotel flash through tropical vegetation across the blue intervening waters. OF CLIMATE. Here the sun habitually shines. Near the coast flows the broad equable Japanese ocean- current, from which a tempered breeze sweeps overland every morning, every night to return from the cool mountain-tops. Between the first of May and the last of October rain almost never falls. By the end of June the earth has evap- orated most of its surface moisture, and vegeta- tion unsustained by artificial watering begins to languish. The midday temperature now rises, but the same breeze swings like a pendu- lum between ocean and mountain, and night and early morning are no less invigorating. This is summer, a joyous and active season 67 generally misconceived by the tourist, who not unreasonably visits California in the winter- time to escape Northern cold and snow, and in- fers an unendurable torrid summer from a winter of mildness and luxuriance. With November the first showers generally begin, followed by an occasional heavy down- pour, and Northern pastures now whiten under falling snow hardly faster than do these sere hills turn beryl -green. The rainy season is so called not because it is characterized by contin- uous rainfall, but to distinguish it from that portion of the year in which rain can not be looked for. Bright days are still the rule, and showery days are marked by transcendent beauties of earth and sky, fleeting wonders of form and color. Let the morning open with a murky zenith, dark tumbled cloud-masses dropping shower. As the invisible sun mounts, he peeps unexpectedly through a rift to see that his world is safe, then vanishes. The sky has an unrelenting look. The mountains are obscured. Suddenly, far to the left, a rift breaks dazzling white, just short of where the rain is falling on the hills in a long bending column, and at one side a broad patch pales into mottled graj-; and below the rift a light mist is seen floating on the flank of a mountain that shoots into sharp relief against a vapor-wall of slate. At the mountain's foot a whole hillside shows in warm brown tint, its right edge merged in a low flat cloud of silver, born, you could aver, on the instant, from which the truncated base of a second mountain depends, blue as indigo. The 68 face of earth, washed newly, is a patchwork of somber and gaudy transparent colors — yellows, greens, sepias, grays. One's range and clearness of vision are quickly expanded, as when a tele- scope is fitted to the eye. Now begins a wonder- ful shifting of light and shadow, peeps throtigh a curtain that veils unbearable splendors of upper sky; gradual dissolutions of cloud into curls and twists and splashes, with filling of blue between. Again the sun appears, at first with a pale bur- nished light, flashing and fading irresolutely until at length it flames out with summer ardor. The clouds break into still more curious forms, into pictures and images of quaint device, and outside a wide circle of brilliant sunlight all the hills are in purple shadow, fading into steel-blue, and about their crests cling wisps of many-colored fleece. Here and there a distant peak is blackly hooded, or gleams subtly be- hind an intervening shower— a thin transparent wash of smoky hue. The veil quickly dissi- pates, and at the same instant the peak is robbed of its sunlight by billows of vapor that marshal in appalling magnificence. Then the rain-mist advances and hides the whole from view. A strip of green next flashes on the sight, a distant field lighted by the sun, but lying unaccountably beneath a cloud of black. Beyond, the broad foot of a rainbow winks and disappears. Among all the hilltops rain next begins to fall like amber smoke, so thin is the veil that shields them from the sun. Then the sun abruptly ceases to shine, the whole heavens are overcast, and between the fine fast-falling drops the ground gleams wet in cool gray light. 69 .^&-.^<5«.^NL ^^;^' By noon the sun again is shining clear, although in occasional caiions there is night and deluge, and at the close of a bright afternoon the far- thest, loftiest peak has a white cloud wreath around it, as symmetrical as a smoke-ring breathed from the lips of a seiiorita; and out of the middle of it rises the fragment of a rainbow — a cockade on a mist-laureled Matterhorn. Then the sun drops, and the day is done. That is the way it rains in California, and be- tween such days are unclouded intervals of considerable duration. They call this season winter. The temperature is so finely balanced one does not easily decide whether to walk 70 upon the sunny or the shady side of the street. It is cool, not cold, not bracing in the ordinary sense, but just the proper temperature for con- tinuous out-of-door life. June does not define it, nor September. It has no synonym. But if you cared to add one more to the many un- successful attempts to define it in a phrase, you might term it constant delicious weather; to- day, to-morrow, and indefinitely in the future, morally certain to be very much as you would have it if you were to create an air and a sky exactly to suit his or her majesty yourself. But even here man is a clothes-wearing animal. There is a coolness pervading the most brilliant sunshine. Remembering this, the most appre- hensive person will soon discover that there is no menace in the dry, pure and gently invigor- ating air of the Southern California winter. It wins the invalid to health by enticing him to remain out-of-doors. Ranging from warm sea-level to peaks of frigid inclemency, this varied state offers many climatic gradations, whose contrasts are nearly always in view. In winter you may sit upon almost any veranda in Southern California and lift your eyes from the brilliant green of orna- mental trees and shrubs, from orchards where fruits ripen in heavy clusters, and from the variegated bloom of gardens, to ragged horizon- lines buried deep in snow. There above is a frozen waste and Alpine terror. Here below is summer, shorn of summer languor. And be- tween may be found any modification that could reasonably be sought, each steadfast in its own characteristics. 71 o a. O q: u. > < CQ O UJ < 72 The smallest of these communities is great in content. Literally couched beneath his own vine and fig-tree, plucking from friendly boughs delicious fruits, finding in the multi- farious products of the soil nearly everything needful in domestic economy, and free from most of the ills that flesh was thought to be heir to, what wonder that the Californian en- vies no man, nor ever looks wistfully over the sierra's crest toward the crowded cities and precarious farming regions of the East? An uplifting environment for a home, truly, fit to breed a race worthy of the noblest empire among the States. There is work to be done, in the house and the field, but in such an air and scene it is as near a transfiguration of labor as can well be imagined. Here it is indeed a poor boy or girl who has not a pony on which to scamper about, or lacks liberty for such en- joyment. And every year there comes a period of holiday, an interval when there is no plant- ing or harvesting to be done, no picking or drying or packing of fruit, a recuperating spell of nature, when the weather is just as glorious as ever, and the mountains and ocean beckon seductively to the poet that is in the heart of every unharassed man and woman and child. Then for weeks the canons are dotted with tents, where the mountain-torrent foams and spreading sycamores are festooned with mis- tletoe; and the trout of the stream and the game of the forest have their solstice of woe. Or, on the rim of the sea, thousands of merry hearts, both young and old, congregate and hold high carnival. "When the campers return 73 to shop and field it is not by reason of any in- clemency of weather, but because their term of holiday has expired. Then come the tourists, and pale fugitives from the buffets of Boreas, to wander happily over hillside and shore in a land unvexed by the tyranny of the seasons. The most seductive of lands, and the most tenacious in its hold upon you. You have done but little, and a day has fled; have idled, walked, ridden, sailed a little, have seen two or three of the thousand things to be seen, and a week, a month, is gone. You could grieve that such golden burdenless hours should ever go into the past, did they not flow from an in- exhaustible fount. For to be out all day in the careless freedom of perfect weather; to ramble over ruins of a former occupation; to wander through gardens and orchards; to fish, to shoot, to gather flowers from the blossoming hill- slopes; to explore a hundred fascinating re- treats of mountain and shore ; to lounge on the sands by the surf until the sun drops into the sea; all this is permitted by the Southern Cali- fornia winter. SAN DIEGO AND VICINITY. Fringing a bay that for a dozen miles glows like a golden mirror below its purple rim, San Diego stands upon a slope that rises from the water to the summit of a broad mesa. In front the bold promontory of Point Loma juts into the sea, overlapping the low, slender peninsu- lar of Coronado, and between them lies the narrow entrance to this most beautiful of har- bors. One may be happy in San Diego and do 74 nothing. Its soft, /, sensuous beauty - and caressing air create in the breast a new sense of the joy of mere exist- ence. But there is, besides, abundant material for the sight-seer. Here, with many, begins the first leisurely and intimate acquaintance with those objects of un- failing interest, the growing orange and lemon. Orchards are on every hand ; not in the profu- sion that characterizes some of the more exten- sively developed localities, but still abundant, and inferior to none in fruitage. Paradise Val- ley, the Valley of the Sweetwater, where may be seen the great irrigating fount of so many farms, and Mission Valley, where the San Diego River flows and the dismantled ruin of the old- est California mission, elbowed by a modern Indian school , watches over its ancient but still vigorous trees, afford the most impressive exam- ples of these growing fruits in the immediate neighborhood. El Cajon Valley is celebrated for its vineyards. At National City, four miles away, are extensive olive orchards. Fifteen miles to the south the Mexican village of Tia Juana attracts many visitors, whose average experience consists of a pleasant railroad ride to the border and a half-hour's residence in a foreign country; but the noble coast scenery of Point of Rocks, the boundary monument, and remarkable hot sulphur springs are reached by a short and attractive drive from that little Lower California town. 75 ^'^^'^i.- /S*^. iS' The diverse allurements of mountain and valley, and northward-stretching shore of alter- nating beach and high commanding bluff, are innumerable, but the catalogue of their names does not fall within the province of these pages. One marvelous bit of coast, thirteen miles away and easily reached by railway or carriage-drive, must however have specific mention. It is La Jolla Park. Here a plateau overlooks the open sea from a bluff that tumbles precipitously to a narrow strip of sand. The face of the cliff for a distance of several miles has been sculptured by the waves into most curious forms. It projects in rec- tangular blocks, in stumps, stools, benches, and bas-reliefs that strikingly resemble natural ob- jects, their surfaces chiseled intaglio with almost intelligible devices. Loosened frag- ments have worn deep symmetrical wells, or pot-holes, to which the somewhat inadequate Spanish-Indian name of the place is due; and what seem at first glance to be enormous bowl- ders loosely piled, with spacious interstices through which the foam spurts and crashes, are the selfsame solid cliff, carved and polished, but not wholly separated by the sea. Some of the cavities are mere pockets lined with mussels and minute weeds with calcareous leaves. Others are commodious secluded apartments, quite commonly used as dressing-rooms by bathers. The real caverns can be entered dry- shod only at lowest tide. The cliff where they lie is gnawed into columns, arches and aisles, through which one cave after another may be seen, dimly lighted, dry and practicable. Sev- 76 wwt^ I o H m r o m r o o 3) o z > o o o o < z o ce O o o I O O 78 enty-five feet is probably their utmost depth. They are the culmination of this extraordinary work of an insensate sculptor. There are alcove-niches, friezes of small gray and black mosaic, horizontal bands of red, and high- vaulted roofs. If the native California Indians had possessed a poetic temperament they must certainly have performed religious rites in such a temple. The water is as pellucid as a moun- tain spring. The flush of the waves foams dazzling white and pours through the intrica- cies of countless channels, tunnels and fissures in overwhelming torrents, and in the brief intervals between ebb and rise the bottom of rock and clean sand gleams invitingly through a depth of many feet. Sea-anemones are thickly clustered upon the lower levels, their tinted petal-filaments scintillating in the shal- low element, or closed bud-like while waiting for the flood. Little crabs scamper in disorderly pro- cession through the crevices at your approach, and that univalve with the ornamental shell, known every where as the abalone, is also abun- dant. Seaweeds, trailing in and out with the movement of the tide, flame through the trans- parent water in twenty shades of green, and schools of goldfish flash in the swirling current, distorted by the varying density of the eddies into great blotches of brilliant color, unquench- able firebrands darting hither and yon in their play. They are not the true goldfish whose habitat is a globular glass half-filled with tepid water, but their hue is every whit as vivid. In the time of flowers this whole plateau is cov- ered with odorous bloom. 79 i%Lx\ Then there is Coronado. Connected by ferrj' and by railroad with the mainland, Coronado bears the same relation to San Diego that fash- ionable suburbs bear to many Eastern cities, and at the same time affords recreative pleas- ures which the inhabitants of those suburbs must go fai to seek. Here the business-man dwells in Elysian bowers by the sea, screened from every reminder of business cares, yet barely a mile distant from office or shop. Lock- ing up in his desk at evening all the prosaic details of bank or factory, of railroad rates, of the price of stocks and real estate and wares, in ten minutes he is at home on what is in effect a South Sea island, where brant and cur- lew and pelican fly, and not all the myriad dwellings and the pomp of their one architec- tural splendor can disturb the air of perfect restfulness and sweet rusticity. From the low ridge of the narrow peninsular may be seen, upon the one hand, a wide-sweeping moun- tainous arc, dipping to the pretty city that borders the bay. Upon the other, the unob- structed ocean rolls. On the ocean side, just beyond reach of the waves, stands the hotel whose magnificence has given it leading rank among the famous hostelries of the world. It is built around a quadrangular court, ox patio — a dense garden of rare shrubs and flowering plants more than an acre in extent. Upon this patio many sleeping rooms open byway of the circumjacent balcony, besides fronting upon ocean and bay, and a glass-covered veranda, extending nearly the entire length of the west- ern frontage, looks over the sea toward the 80 peaks of the distant Coronado islands. On the north lies Point Loma and the harbor entrance, on the east San Diego Bay and citj', and on the south Glorieta Bay and the mountains of Mex- ico, beyond a broad half-circle of lawn dotted with semi-tropical trees and bright beds of flowers, and bordered by hedges of cypress. Here the fisherman has choice of surf or bil- low or the still surface of sheltered waters; of sailboat, skiff or iron pier. The gunner finds no lack of sea-fowl, quail or rabbits. The bather may choose between surf and huge tanks of salt-water, roofed with glass, fringed with flowers and fitted with devices to en- hance his sport. The sight-seer is provided with a score of special local attractions, and all the resources of the mainland are at elbow. These diversions are the advantage of geo- graphical location, independent of the social recreations one naturally finds in fashionable resorts, at hotels liberally managed and fre- quented by representatives of the leisure class. The climate of the coast is necessarily dis- tinguished from that of the interior by greater humidity, and the percentage of invisible moisture in the air, however small, must infal- libly be greater at Coronado than upon the Heights of San Diego, and greater in San Diego than at points farther removed from the sea. This is the clue to the only flaw in the otherwise perfect coast climate, and it is a flaw only to supersensitive persons, invalids of a certain class. The consumptive too often delays taking advantage of the benefits of climatic change until he has reached a point 8i when nicest discrimination has become neces- sary. The purest, driest and most rarefied air compatible with the comphcations of disease is his remedy, if remedy exist for him. And the driest and most rarefied air is not to be looked for by the sea. Yet the difference is not great enough to be brusquely prohibitory. No one need fear to go to the coast, and a short stay will determine whether or no the relief that is sought can there be found; while for many derangements it is preferable 'to the interior. For him who is not in precarious condition the foregoing observations have no significance. He will find the climate of all Southern Cali- fornia a mere gradation of glory. But per- haps around San Diego, and at one or two other coast points, there will seem to be a spirit even gentler than that which rules the hills. CAPISTRANO. A tiny quaint village in a fertile valley that ^) ^ slopes from a mountain wall ^t^to the sea, un- ? kempt and mon- grel, a jumble of adobe ruins, btWj ; / white-w ashed , ^hovels and low - ^^7 semi -modern - •:.::-y/f^!f} -'I'm •-^f,^ w structure?, straggHag like a moraine from the massive ruin of i.he Mission San Juan Capis- trano. The mission dominates the valley. Go where you will, the eye turns to this colossal fragment, a forlorn but vital thing; broken, crushed, and yet undying. Swarthy faces are mingled with the pale Saxon type, the music of the Spanish tongue is heard wherever you hear human speech, and from behind the lattices of the adobes come the tinkle of guitars and the cadence of soft voices in plaintive rhythm. The sun makes black shadows by every house and tree, and sweeps in broad tinbroken light over the undulating hills to hazy mountain-tops; ground squirrels scamper across the way, wild doves start up with whistling wings, and there is song of birds and cry of barnyard fowls. The essence of the scene is passing quiet and peace. The petty noises of the village are powerless to break the silence that enwraps the noble ruin; its dignity is as imperturbable as that of mountain and sea. Never was st3de of architecture more spontaneously in touch with its environment than that followed by the mis- 83 >S. sion builders. It is rhythm and cadence and rhyme. It is perfect art. Earthquake has rent, man has despoiled, time has renounced the Mission San Juan Capistrano, yet its pure nobility survives, indestructible. The tower has fallen, the sanctuary is bare and weather- beaten, the cloisters of the quadrangle are roofless, and the bones of forgotten padres lie beneath the roots of tangled shrubbery; but the bells still hang in their rawhide lashings, and the cross rises white against the sky. A contemptuous century has rolled past, and the whole ambitious and once promising dream of monkish rule has long since ended, but this slow crumbling structure will not have it so. Like some dethroned and superannuated king, whose insistent claim to royal function cloaks him with a certain grandeur, it sits in silent state, too venerable for disrespect and too august for pity. STORY OF THE MISSIONS. In the middle of the eighteenth century the Spanish throne, desiring to encourage colo- nization of its territory of Upper California, then unpeopled save by native Indian tribes, en- tered into an arrangement with the Order of St. Francis by virtue of which that order undertook to establish missions in the new country which were to be the nuclei of future villages and cities, to which Spanish subjects were encour- aged to emigrate. By the terms of that ar- rangement the Franciscans were to possess the mission properties and their revenues for ten years, which was deemed a sufficient period in 84 ^)ii t^,:* W 85 which to fairly establish the colonies, when the entire property was to revert to the Spanish government. In point of fact the Franciscans were left in undisputed possession for more than half a century. The monk chosen to take charge of the un- dertaking was Junipero Serra, a man of saintly piety and energetic character, who in child- hood desired only that he might be a priest, and in maturity earnestly wished to be a mar- tj'r. Seven years before the Declaration of the Independence of the American Colonies, in the early summer of 1769, he entered the bay of San Diego, 227 years after Cabrillo had dis- covered it for Spain and 167 years after it had been surveyed and named by Viscaino, during all which preceding time the country had lain fallow. Within two months Serra had founded a mission near the mouth of the San Diego River, which five years after was removed some six miles up the valley to a point about three miles distant from the present city of San Diego. From that time one mission after an- other was founded, twenty -one in all, from San Diego along the coast as far north as San Francisco. The more important of these were built of stone and a hard burnt briclc that even now will turn the edge of the finest trowel. The labor of their construction was appalling. Brick had to be burnt, stone quarried and dressed, and huge timbers for rafters brought on men's shoulders from the mountain forests, some- times thirty miles distant, through rocky canons and over trackless hills. The Indians per- formed most of this labor, tinder direction of the fathers. These Indians were tractable. 86 as a rule. Once, or twice at most, they rose against their masters, but the policy of the padres was kindness and forgiveness, although it must be inferred that the condition of the Indians over whom they claimed spiritual and temporal authority was a form of slavery, with- out all the cruelties that usually pertain to en- forced servitude. They were the bondsmen of the padres, whose aim was to convert them to Christianity and civilization, and many thou- sands of them were persuaded to cluster around the missions, their daughters becoming neophytes in the convents, and the others con- tributing their labor to the erection of the enormous structures that occupied many acres of ground and to the industries of agriculture, cattle raising and a variety of manufactures. There were, after the primitive fashion of the time, woolen mills, wood working and black- smith shops, and such other manufactories as were practicable in the existing state of the arts, which could be made profitable. The mission properties soon became enormously valuable, their yearly revenues sometimes amounting to $2,000,000. The exportation of hides was one of the most important items, and merchant-vessels from our own Atlantic sea- board, from England and from Spain sailed to the California coast for cargoes of that com- modity. Dana's romantic and universally read " Two Years Before the Mast " is the record of such a voyage. He visited California more than a half a century ago, and found its quaint Spanish-Indian life full of the picturesque and romantic. 87 The padres invariably selected a site favorable for defense, command- ing views of entrancing scenery, on the slopes of the most fertile valleys and convenient to the running water which was the safeguard of agriculture in a country of sparse and uncertain rainfall. The Indians, less warlike in nature than the roving tribes east of the Rockies, were almost universally submissive. If there was ever an Arcadia it was surely there and then. Against the blue of the sky, unspotted by a single cloud through many months of the year, snow-crowned moun- tains rose in dazzling relief, while oranges, olives, figs, dates, bananas and every other variety of temperate and sub-tropical fruit which had been introduced by the Spaniards, ripened in a sun whose ardency was tempered by the dryness of the air into an equability like that of June, while the regularly alternating breeze that daily swept to and from ocean and mountain made summer and winter almost in- distinguishable seasons, then as now, save for the welcome rains that characterize the latter. At tliefootof the valley, between the mountain slopes, and never more than a few miles away, the waters of the Pacific rocked placidly in the brilliant sunlight or broke in foam upon a broad beach of sand. In such a scene Spaniard and Indian plied their peaceful vocations, the one in picturesque national garb, the other almost innocent of clothing, while over and around them lay an atmosphere of sacredness which even to this day clings to the broken arches and J?» 88 crumbling walls. Over the peaceful valleys a veritable angelus rang. The mellow bells of the mission churches summoned dusky hordes to ceremonial devotion. Want and strife were unknown. Prosperity and brotherly love ruled as never before. It is true they had their trials. Earthquakes, which have been almost unknown in California for a quarter of a century, were then not imcom- mon, and were at times disastrous. Rio dc los Temblores was the name of a stream derived from the frequency of earth rockings in the region through which it flowed; and in the sec- ond decade of our century the dreaded temblor upset the 120-foot tower of the Mission San Juan Capistrano and sent it crashing down through the roof upon a congregation, of whom nearly forty perished. Those, too, were lawless times upon the main. Pirates, cruising the South Seas in quest of booty, hovered about the California coast, and then the mission men stood to their arms, while the women and chil- dren fled to the interior canons with their port- able treasures. One buccaneer, Bouchard, re- pulsed in his attempt upon Dolores and Santa Barbara, descended successfully upon another mission and dwelt there riotously for a time, carousing, and destroying such valuables as he could not carry away, while the entire popula- tion quaked in the forest along the Rio Trabuco. This was the same luckless San Juan Capistrano, six years after the earthquake visitation. Then, too, there were bickerings of a political nature, and struggles for place, after the rule of Mexico had succeeded to that of Spain, but the com- 89 Jjg,, ■'■■■' ','^'4/, :fe;];:-:';.7v.'. '^'''*^^'''^^];U,„/-: mon people troubled themselves little with such matters. The end of the Franciscan dynasty came suddenly with the secularization of the mission property by the Mexican government to replete the exhausted treasuries of Santa Ana. Sadly the fathers forsook the scene of their long labors, and silently the Indians melted away into the wilderness and the darkness of their natural ways, save such as had intermarried with the families of Spanish soldiers and colonists. The churches are now, for the most part, only de- cayed legacies and fragmentary reminders of a time whose like the world will never know again. Save only three or four, preserved by reverent hands, where modern worshipers, denational- ized and clad in American dress, still kneel and recite their orisons, the venerable ruins are forsaken by all except the tourist and the anti- quarian, and their bells are silent forever. One can not but feel the pity of it, for in the history of zealous servants of the cross there is hardly a more noteworthy name than that of Junipero Serra, and in the annals of their heroic endeav- or there is no more signal instance of absolute 90 failure than his who founded the California mis- sions, aside from tlie perpetuation of his saintly name. They accomplished nothing so far as can now be seen. The descendants of their converts, what few have survived contact with the Anglo- Saxon, have no discoverable worth, and, to- gether with the greater part of the original Spanish population, have faded away, as if a blight had fallen upon them. But so long as one stone remains upon an- other, and a single arch of the missions still stands, an atmosphere will abide there, some- thing that does not come from mountain, or vale, or sea, or sky; the spirit of consecration, it may be; but if it is only the aroma of ancient and romantic associations, the suggestion of a peculiar phase of earnest and simple human life and quaint environment that is forever past, the mission-ruins must remain among the most interesting monuments in all our varied land, and will amply repay the inconsiderable effort and outlay required to enable the tourist to view them. San Diego, the oldest; San Luis Rey, the most poetically environed; San Juan Capis- trano, of most tragic memory; San Gabriel, the most imposing, and Santa Barbara, the most perfectly preserved, will suffice the casual sight- seer. These also lie comparatively near to- gether, and are all easily accessible; the first three being located on or adjacent to the rail- way line between Los Angeles and San Diego, the fourth standing but a few miles from the first-named cit3^ and the fifth being almost in the heart of the famous resort that bears its name. 91 Reluctantly will the visitor tear himself from the encompassing charm of their roofless arches and reminiscent shadows. They are a dream of the Old World, indifferent to the sordidness and turbulency of the New; one of the few things that have been spared by a relentless past, whose habit is to sweep the things of yesterday into oblivion. Almost can one hear the echoes of their sweet bells ringing out to heathen thousands the sunset and the dawn. LOS ANGELES. One can hardly cross this continent of ours without gaining a new idea of the immense his- torical significance of the westward yearning of the Saxon, who in two and a half centuries has marched from Plymouth Rock to the Sunset Sea, and has subordinated every other people in his path from shore to shore. The Spaniard was a world-conqueror in his day, and master of California before the stars and stripes had been devised. The story of his subjugation of the southwestern portion of the New World is the most brilliant in modern history. It is a story of unexampled deeds of arms. Sword and cross, and love of fame and gold, are inex- tricably interwoven with it. The Saxon epic is a more complex tale of obscure heroism, of emi- grant cavalcades, of pioneer homes, of business enterprise. The world may never know sublimer indifference to fatigue, suffering and death than char- acterized the Sjianish invaders of America for more than two centuries. Whatever the personal considerations that allured 92 1 them, the extension of Spanish empire and the advancement of the cross amid barba- rians was their effectual purpose. The coii- gia'sfador was a crusader, and witli all his cruelty and rapacity he is a splendid figure of incarnate force. But the westward-flowing wave of Saxon conquest has set him, too, aside. In this fair land of California, won at smallest cost, and seemingly created for him, his descendants to-day are little more than a tattered fringe upon the edges of the displacing civilization. He has left his mark upon every mountain and valley in names that will long endure, but himself has been supplanted. He has not fled. He has diminished, faded away. In 1781 he named this city Pueblo de la Reina de los Aiigeles (Town of the Queen of the Angels). The Saxon, the Man of Business now supreme, has retained only the last two words of that high-sounding appellation; and hardly a greater proportion remains of the original atmosphere of this old Spanish town. You will find a Spanish (Mexican) quarter, un- kempt and adobe, containing elements of the picturesque; and in the modern portion of the city a restaurant or two where English is spo- ken in halting fashion by very pretty dark- skinned girls, and you may satisfy, if not your appetite, perhaps a long-standing curiosity re- garding tortillas, and frijoles, and chili con came. As for tainales, they are, as with us, a matter of curbstone speculation. Seiiorcs, sehoras, and senoritas are plentifully encoun- 93 tered upon the streets, but are not in gen- eral distinguished by any peculiarity of attire. Upon the borders of the city one finds more vivid types, and there the jacal., a poor mud- hovel thatched with straw, is not quite extinct. The words Spanish and Mexican are commonly used in California to distinguish a racial differ- ence. Not a few of the Spanish soldiery and colonists originally took wives from among the native Indians. Their offspring has had its charms for later comers of still other races, and a complexity of mixture has resulted. The term Mexican is generally understood to apply to this amalgamation, those of pure Castilian descent preferring to be known as Spanish. The latter, numerically a small class, represent high types, and the persistency of the old strain is such that the poorest Mexican is to a certain manner born. He wears a contented mien, as if his Diogenes-tub and his imperceptible larder were regal possessions, and he does not easily part with dignity and self-respect. ^ ,^0ii^ 94 The existence of these descendants of the Conquerors side by side with the exponents of the new regime is one of the charms of Los Angeles. It has others in historic vein. After its first overland connection with the East, by way of the Santa Fe Trail, it rapidly took on the character of a wild border-town; the influx of adventurers and the stimulation of an unwonted commerce transforming the Spanish idyl into a motley scene of remunerative trade, abandoned carousal and desperate personal conflict. Its romantic career of progress and amelioration to its present enviable estate is marked by monuments that still endure. Fremont the Pathfinder here first raised the stars and stripes in 1846, and his after residence as governor of the state is well preserved. And Winfield Scott Hancock, as a young captain of the army, had quarters in this historic town. In modern interest it stands for a type of the material development that belongs to our day. In i860 it numbered 4,500 inhabitants; in 1880, 11,000; in 1890, 50,000; in 1897, more than 100,- 000. Surrounded by hundreds of cultivated farms, whose varied products form the basis of its phenomenal activity and prosperity, it is a really great city. It is well paved, well lighted, and abundantly served by intramural railways. It has parks of extraordinary beauty, and avenues shaded by the eucalyptus and the pepper, that most esthetic of trees. Outside the immediate thoroughfares of trade the 95 ^s.^5^jr-. streets are bordered by attractive homes, fronted by grounds set with palm and orange and cypress, and blooming with flowers throughout the year. It is backed by the mountains that are always present in a Cali- fornia landscajje, and fifteen miles away lies a vista of the sea, dotted with island-peaks. PASADENA. Just outside the limits of Los Angeles, inti- mately connected by railway and street-car lines, is Pasadena. For the origin of the name you may choose between the imputed Indian signification. Crown of the Valley, and a cor- ruption of the Spanish Paso de Eden (Thresh- old of Eden). It is in any event the crown of that Eden, the San Gabriel Valley, which nes- tles warmly in its groves and rose-bowers be- low lofty bulwarks tipped with snow. Here an Eastern multitude makes regular winter home in modest cottage or imposing mansion. Every fruit and flower and every ornamental tree and shrub known to Southern California is repre- sented in the elaborate grounds of this little realm. It is a playground of wealth, a Nob Hill of Paradise, blessed home of happy men and women and children who prefer this to vaunted foreign lands. The extensive Baldwin Ranch lies near at hand, with its great vine- yards, orchards, wineries, and horse-training grounds. 96 Then there is Mount Lowe. MOUNT LOWE. At Altadena, four miles north of Pasadena, two railways connect with an electric line which leads to Rubio Canon, two and a half miles distant. There, from an altitude of 2,200 feet, the Cable Incline conveys visitors to the summit of Echo Mountain, nearly 1,400 feet higher. From this point, where will be found a charm- ing hotel and an observatory already somewhat famous for astronomical discoveries, radiate many miles of bridle-paths, and another elec- tric railway extends to still loftier heights at the Alpine Tavern, nearly a mile above the sea, and within a thousand feet of the objective summit, which is reached by bridle-path. There is no more pleasurable mountain trip in the States than this, nor anywhere one more easy of accomplishment. Sufficiently elevated 97 above its surroundings to afford commanding views which stretch across wondrously fertile valleys to other ranges upon the one hand and to the coastwise islands of the Paciiic upon the other, the total altitude is not great enough to distress those who are disordered by the thin air of more exalted summits, as in the Rockies. Among the manifold attractive features of Cal- ifornia the ascent of Mount Lowe worthily holds a conspicuous place. Its details are fully described in local publications and may be omitted here. RIVERSIDE AND VICINITY. A locality renowned for oranges, and or- anges, and still more oranges, white and odor- ous with the bloom of them, yellow with the sheen of them, and rich with the gains of them; culminating in a busy little city overhung by the accustomed mountain - battlements and pendant to a glorious avenue many miles in I o -i m r o m > > o m z > ;^^^. 99 length, lined with tall eucalyptus, drooping pepper and sprightly magnolia trees in straight lines far as eye can see, and broken only by short lateral driveways through palm , orange and cypress to mansion homes. The almost continuous citrus groves and vineyards of Riverside are the result of twenty years of co-operative effort, supplemented by some pre- ponderating advantages of location. It is the climax of the fair region that lies between Los Angeles and Redlands, through which, for the convenience of tourists, the trains of the Southern California Railway make circuit. The diagram of this circuit is a cross- belt or rough figure 8, whose shape, associated with the idea of a comprehensive and speedy journey, is responsible for a name greatly relished in a horsy state: the Kite-shaped Track. Starting from Los Angeles, nearly thirty communities of this famous region are thus traversed, the most celebrated of which are, in order, Rivera, Santa Fe Springs, La Mirada, FuUerton, Anaheim, Orange, Santa Ana, Corona, Riverside, Colton, San Bernardino, Arrowhead, East Highlands, Mentone, Red- lands, North Ontario, North Pomona, Mon- rovia, Santa Anita, and Pasadena. REDONDO AND SANTA MONICA. These are two popular beaches near Los An- geles, to both of which frequent trains are run daily. Equipped with superb hotels and fur- nished with the many minor attractions that congregate at holiday resorts, they are the lOO Brighton and Manhattan beaches of this coast, enhanced by verdure and a softer clime, and a picturesquely varied shore. Both are locally celebrated among lovers of bathing, boating, and fishing. SANTA CATALINA ISLAND. Thirty miles off the coast it rises, like Capri, from the sea, a many-peaked mountain-cap, varying in width from half a mile to nine miles, and more than twenty long. Its bold cliff shores are broken by occasional pockets rimmed by a semi-circular beach of sand. The most famous of these is Avalon, quite the most frequented camping ground of Southern Cali- fornia. In midsummer its numerous hotels are filled to overflowing, and in the hundreds of tents clustered by the water's edge thousands of pleasure-seekers gather in the height of the season. Summer is the period of Santa Catalina's greatest animation, for then, as in other lands, comes vacation time. But there is even less variation of season than on the main- land, and the nights are soft and alluring, because the seaward-blowing mountain air is robbed of all its chill in passing over the equa- ble waters. Here after nightfall verandas and the beach are still thronged; The tiny lOI ^^^«i-,6B»*^ ^;^'f,nA^' harbor is filled with pleasure-craft of every description, from rowboats to commodious yachts, and hundreds of bathers disport in the placid element. Wonderful are the waters of Avalon, blue as a Mediterranean sky and astonishingly clear. Over the side of your skiff you may gaze down through a hundred feet of transparency to where emerald weeds wave and myriad fishes, blue and brown and flaming red, swim over pebble and shell. Or, climbing the overhanging cliffs, you gain the fish-eagle's view of the life that teems in water- depths, and looking down half a thousand feet upon the fisherman in his boat see the bright- hued fishes flashing far beneath him. He seems to hang suspended in the sky. Notable fishing is to be had. The barracuda is plentiful ; likewise the yellow-tail, or sea- salmon, also generally taken by trolling, and frequently tipping a truthful scale at fifty pounds. Sea-bass fishing is the most famous sport here, and probably the most exciting known anywhere to the hand-fisherman. This fish is commonly taken, and in weight ranges I02 > < > n o t/) > z > n > > r r > z o 103 from 200 to 400 pounds. The fisherman who hooks one is frequently dragged in his skiff for several miles, and finds himself nearly as much exhausted as the fish when it finally comes to gaff. Perhaps the greatest novelty of a trip to Santa Catalina, for most travelers, is the great number of flying fish that inhabit its waters. At only a few miles' distance from the main- land they begin to leap from beneath the bows of the steamer, singly, by twos and by half- dozens, until one wearies of counting, and skim over the waves like so many swallows. The length of flight of which this poetical fish is capable proves usually a surprise, for in spite of its abundance off the Southern California coast its precise character is none too gener- ally known. In size, form and color it may be roughly compared to the mackerel. Its "wings" are muscular fins whose spines are connected by a light but strong membrane, and are four in number. The hindermost pair are quite small, mere butterfly- wings of stout fiber; the foremost pair attain a length of seven or eight inches, and when extended are two inches or more in breadth. Breaking from the water at a high rate of speed, but at a very low . angle, the flying-fish extends these wing- like fins and holds them rigid, like the set wings of a soaring hawk. With the lower flange of its deeply forked tail, which at first drags lightly, it sculls with a convulsive wriggle of the whole body that gives it the j*;^-;^^^ casual appearance of 104 actually winging its way. The additional im- pulse thus acquired lifts it entirely from the water, over whose surface it then scales with- out further effort for a long distance, until, losing in momentum and in the sustaining pressure of the air beneath its outstretched fins, it again touches the water, either to abruptly disappear or by renewed sculling to prolong its flight. Often it remains above the waves until the eye can no longer distinguish its course in the distance. In the less frequented portions of the island the wild goat is still common. But some few years ago a party of hunters, better armed than educated, wrought havoc with the domestic sheep that are pastured there; and now if you wish to hunt the goat you must first procure a permit, and to obtain that you must adduce evidence of your ability to tell the one from the other upon sight. This precautionary measure tends to the preservation of both sheep and goat, and the real sportsman as well as the herdsman is benefited thereby. Santa Catalina is reached by steamer from San Pedro, connecting with trains from Los Angeles. The exhilarating ocean-ride and the unique pleasures of the island can not be too strongly commended. SANTA BARBARA. Saint Barbara is, in Spain, the patroness of gunpowder and coast-defenses, and the invoca- tion of her name seems to have occurred in the light of a desirable precaution to the founder of this mission, who was so fond of building by 105 m >«o^ •-0 .>v^.^ ■ io6 the sea; although, like one of our own heroes, who supplemented his trust in Providence by protecting his ammunition from the rain, he kept here, as at a number of other points, a garrison of soldiers and a few small cannon. The place was long known the world over as " The American Mentone," because in seeking a term to convey its characteristics some com- parison with celebrated resorts of Eiu'ope was thought necessary and this particular com- parison most fitting. Such definition is no longer required. Santa Barbara is a name that now everywhere evokes the soft picture of a rose-buried spot, more than a village, less than a city, rising gently from the sea-rim by way of shaded avenue and plaza to the foot of the gray Santa Ynez Mountains, above whose peaks the condor loves to soar; where, when with us the winter winds are most bitter and ice and snow ' work a wicked will, normal existence is a joy- ous activity out-of-doors, in constant summer sunshine amid riotous bloom. It presents an endless variety of winsomeness. Not idly does the bright stingless air lure one to seek a new pleasure for each succeeding day. The flat beach is broken by rocky points where the surf spouts in white columns with deafening roar, and above it lies a long mesa, dotted with live-oaks, that looks down upon the little dream- ing mission city and far oceanward; and on the other hand the mountaiii-slopes beckon to innumerable glens, and, when the rains have come, to broad hillsides of green and banks of blossom. There are long level drives by the shore, and up the prolific valley to famous 107 orchard-ranches; and Montecito, a fairyland of homes, ie close at hand. Four of the Channel Islands lie opposite Santa Barbara: Anacapa, Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, and San Miguel. The last three are only less at- tractive by nature than Santa Catalina, of which mention was made in its place, and al- though equal facilities do not exist for the tour- ist, many persons find their way there by means of fishing boats, which frequently leave Santa Barbara for the island fishing grounds. These islands, now permanently inhabited only by sheep-herders who tend flocks of many thou- sands, were once poptilatedby a primitive peo- ple whose burial mounds, as yet only partly ex- humed by casual visitors, are rich in archaeo- logical treasures. Santa Barbara lies northwest from Los An- geles, on a branch of the Southern Pacific Railroad. It is the only one of the great resorts of Southern California not located upon the Santa Fe Route. OSTRICH-FARMING. At Coronado, Los Angeles, South Pasadena, and two or three other points are exhibited troops of ostriches confined in paddocks. They are generally regarded as a mere curiosity by the visitor, but really represent an established Cali- fornia industry. The original farm lies on the border of the town of Fallbrook, a dozen miles northeast from Oceanside, beyond the poetic Mission San Luis Rey, through whose incom- parable valley the stage-road leads. Here, where he roams with scores of his fellows over a io8 ^^^^ quarter- section of hill and dale, the ostrich ceases to be exotic. He is at home, and his habits and personality become an easy and entertaining study. This Fallbrook ostrich-farm has been in operation since 1883, the locality having been found to offer conditions closely resembling that portion of South Africa in which ostrich-farming has so long been a source of wealth. Breeding has been carried on until it appears to have been established that a California-bred ostrich is in every respect the equal of the imported African. There are about one hundred ostriches on this ranch, many having been sold, and others being absent on exhibition. Every phase of this re- markable bird, which in maturity yields every eight months 200 of those costly plumes that are coveted by maids and dames, and all the novelties of its manipulation, are exhibited upon a large scale. WINTER SPORTS. Where out-of-door life is the rule, there being neither frost nor chill throughout the day, rec- reation becomes a matter of pure selection, unhampered by any climatic prohibition out- side the relatively infrequent rainstorm. A few enthusiasts make a point of taking a daily dip in the surf, but the practice does not reach the proportions of a popular pastime in mid-win- ter. Crosscountry riding finds then its perfect sea- son, the whole land being transformed into a gar- den , over enough of which the horseman is free to wander. Happy must log _ ^^4«^/^' he be who knows a purer sport than to gallop, either singly or with comrades, in fragrant morning air over a fresh sod spangled with poppy, violet, forget-me-not, larkspur and alfileria; bursting through dense thickets of lilac and mustard to cross an intervening highway; dipping to verdant meadow vales; skirting orchards heavy with fruit, and mount- ing tree-capped knolls that look off to glim- mers of sea between the slopes of the hills. Coaching has its season then, as well, and the horn of the tallyho is frequently heard. For such as like to trifle with the snows from which they have fled, the foothills are at hand, ser- ried with tall firs in scattering growths or dense shadowy jungles, topping canons where the wagon-trail crosses and recrosses a stream by pleasant fords, and the crested mountain-quail skulks over the ridge above one's head. There may be had climbing to suit every taste, touch- ing extremes of chaotic tangle of chaparral and crag. There are cliffs over which the clear mountain- water tumbles sheer to great depths; notches through which the distant cones of the highest peaks of the mother range may be seen in whitest ermine, huge pines dotting their drifts like petty clumps of weed. Underfoot, too, on the northerly slopes is snow, just over the ridge from where the sun is as warm and the air as gentle as in the valley, save only the faintest sense of added vigor and rarefaction. So near do these ex- tremes lie, and yet so effectually separated, you may thrust into the mouth of a snow-man a rose broken from the bush an hour or two no before, and pelt him with oranges plucked at the very mouth of the canon. And one who is not too susceptible may comfortably linger un- til the sun has set, and above the lower dusky peaks the loftier ones glow rose-pink in the light of its aftershine, until the moon lights the fissures of the canon with a ghostly radiance against which the black shadows of the cliffs fall like ink-blots. If barracuda, Spanish mackerel, yellow-tail or sea-bass should not be hungry, trout are plenti- ful in the mountain-streams. Mountain and valley quail, and snipe, furnish the most reli- able sport for the average gunner. Good shots do not consider it a great feat to bring a hun- dred quail to bag in a day's outing. Ducks and geese are innumerable. Whole vast meadows are sometimes whitened with snow-geese, like a field with daisies, and the air above is filled with flying thousands. Deer are easily found by those who know how to hunt them, and mountain-lions and cinnamon bear are not in- frequently shot in the hills. The grizzly was once exceedingly common. One of the great sports of the old mission days was to hunt the grizzly on horseback with the riata for sole weapon, and it is of record that in a single neighborhood thirty or forty of these formidable brutes were sometimes captured in a night by roping, precisely as a modern cow- boy ropes a steer; the secret of the sportsmen's immunity lying in the fact that the bear was almost simultaneously lassoed from different sides and in that manner rigidly pinioned. But Ursus horribilis has long since retreated to III deep solitudes, where his occasional pursuers, far from approaching him with a rawhide noose, go armed with heavy repeating-rifles, and even thus equipped are not eager to en- counter him at very close range. Cricket is naturally a favorite diversion among the many young Englishmen who have located upon ranches; and yachting, polo, and tennis do not want for devotees. The recent American enthusiasm for golf likewise extends to Southern California. Excellent links will be found in Pasadena, Coronado, Santa Monica, and elsewhere. /^tf!' t,Kl*^' 112 NORTHERN CALIFORNIA. !Y Northern California is commonly meant all that portion north of the six lowermost counties. The distinction has yet no political significance, but is generally recognized. To be geographically exact, the present stage is mainly confined to the middle of the state. Upon quitting Los Angeles a gradual relapse into aridity soon becomes apparent, until again you are fairly on a desert over whose flat dry sands the water mirage loves to hover, although it no longer mocks parched perishing caravans as in former days. Railroads have robbed these wastes of their terror, and oases here and there mark the homes of irrepressible settlers. This barren quickly gives place to the Teha- chapi Pass, a scenic maze of detours and involutions leading down into vast irrigated lands in the fertile valley of the San Joaquin. At Berenda a short branch diverges eastward to Ray- mond, from which point stages ply to the renowned valley of the 113 Sierra Nevada Range, whose majestic beauty is second only to that of the Grand Canon of the Colorado. All the world has heard of the Yosemite, of its cataract that plunges 1,500 feet sheer in one of its three downward leaps, of its thread- like cascade that bends to the wind through 900 feet of descent, of its colossal domes, spires and arches of bare granite contrasted with soft tones of green forest and silver lake ; and of the Big Trees of the Mariposa Grove, where more than three hundred specimens of the Sequoia gigantea are scattered over an area of several thousand acres. This is the regular approach to those scenes, of which the barest mention should surely suffice, their description having passed into the literature of every language. Beyond Berenda widening meadows slope to a placid inlet of the sea, whose winding shore leads to Oakland Pier. Here a ferry crosses the bay to the city of San Francisco. Numberless matters of interest in this region, more or less widely known and certain to be brought to the attention of the traveler en route, must be omitted from the present ac- count. The wise traveler, blessed with leisure, will stop bythe way and look about him. Here is a state whose seaboard is as long as that which stretches from Massa- chusetts to Georgia, whose mountains are overtopped in North America only by those of Alaska, whose mines have astonished the world, whose wealth of 114 cattle and sheep and horses is nearly half as great as that of its mines, whose vales have wrought revelation in gardening and fruit- culture, and whose natural prodigies and land- scape marvels are innumerable. But San Fran- cisco, the region of the Santa Clara Valley, and Lake Tahoe, which overlaps the border-line of Nevada, will be permitted to monopolize the remainder of the space allotted to California. SAN FRANCISCO. The bay of San Francisco is almost com- pletely encircled by land. The Golden Gate is the tideway, a narrow passage between the ex- tremities of two peninsulars, upon the point of the southernmost of which the city stands. Here, too, the Franciscan mission-builders were first upon the field, and the present name is a curtailment of Mission de los Dolores de Ntiestro Padre San Francisco de A sis, an appellation commemorative of the sorrows of the originator of the order. The Mission Dolores, founded in 1776, is still preserved with its little campo santo of the dead, a poor un- sightly strangled thing, structurally unimpos- ing and wholly wanting in the poetic atmos- phere of semi-solitude that envelopes the missions of Southern California. A modern cathedral overshadows it, and shops and dwellings jostle it. So nearly, in forty years, has all trace of the preceding three-quarters of a century been obliterated. Changed from a 115 yJ«jS'A<" Spanish to a Mexican province early in the century, then promptly stripped of the treas- ures that had been accumulated by monkish administration, and subsequently ceded to the United States, California had on the whole a dreamy, quiet life until that famous nugget was found in 1848. Then followed the era of the Argonauts, seekers of the golden fleece, who flocked by the thousand from Eastern towns and cities by way of the plains, the Isthmus, and the Cape to dig in the gravel- beds; lawless adventurers in their train. San Francisco practically dates from that period. Its story is a wild one, a working-out of order and stable commercial prosperity through chap- ters that treat of feverish gold-crazy mobs, of rapine grappled by the vigilance committee, of insurrection crushed by military force. And in this prosperity, oddly enough, the produc- tion of gold has been superseded in impor- tance by other resources; for although Califor- nia annually yields more precious metal than any other state, the yearly value of its marketed cattle, wool, cereals, roots, fruits, sugar and wines is twice as great, and forms the real commercial basis of the great city of the Pacific Coast, where the rail- roads of a continent and ^f/>^i.^^[MI'^^^ ^^^ ^^^^^ °^ ^^'^ oceans clasp hands and complete • "^Jii^^l,^^^L the circuit of the globe. 116 A STREET IN CHINATOWN. 117 As if it were fearful of being hid, it is set upon not one but a score of hills, overlooking land and sea. As you near it, by way of Oak- land Ferry, it appears to be built in terraced rows rising steeply from the water-front; but that is a bit of foreshortening. It is still rather motley in architecture. Low frame buildings were at first the rule, partly because they were sufficient to the climate and partly in deference to traditions of earthquake; but at length builders ventured taller structures, of brick and stone, and now every year many lofty elegant buildings are added. Certainly no one of them has been shaken down as yet, and possibly the architects have authority for believing that even Vulcan is superannuated and in his sec- ond childhood is appeased with a rattle. It is a city of fair aspect, undulating from the water's edge, where children play upon the broad sands and sea-lions clamber over jutting rocks, to heights of nearly a thousand feet. Overlooking the sands and the seal-rocks from a considerable bluff is the Cliff House resort, and towering above that is the magnificent sky- battlement known as Sutro Heights — a private property open to the public and embellished by landscape gardens and statuary. Other sights and scenes are the Golden Gate, the park of the same name — a thousand acres of familiar and rare trees, shrubs and ' flowers — the largest mint in the world, not a few magnificent public buildings, innumerable phases of active com- merce, and the contrasting life of races repre- senting nearly every nation of the world. Ii8 CHINATOWN. A few steps from your hotel, at the turn of a corner, you come at once upon the city of the Chinese. It is night, and under the soft glow of paper lanterns and through the gloom of un- lighted alleys weaves an oriental throng. Po- licemen doubtless stand upon a corner here and there, and small parties of tourists pick their way under lead of professional guides; the re- maining thousands are Celestials all. The scene is of the Chinaman at home, very John, restored to authenticity of type by the counte- nance of numbers; and so in the twinkling of an eye you become a foreigner in your own land, a tolerated guest in a fantastic realm whose chief apparent hold upon reality is its substratum of genuine wickedness. It is a gro- tesque jumble, a panopticon of peepshows; women shoemakers huddled in diminutive rooms; barbers with marvelous tackle shaving heads and chins, and cleaning ears and eye- balls, while their patrons sit in the constrained attitude of a victim, meekly holding the tray; clerks, armed with a long pointed stick dipped in ink, soberly making pictures of variant spi- ders in perpendicular rows; apothecaries ex- pounding the medicinal virtues of desiccated toad and snake; gold-workers making bracelets of the precious metal to be welded about the arm of him who dares not trust his hoard to an- other's keep; restaurateurs serving really pala- table conserves, with pots of delectable tea; shopkeepers vending strange foreign fruits and dubious edibles plucked from the depths of nightmare; merchants displaying infinitude of 119 7 ^ v1, ->^ curious trinkets and elaborate costly wares; worshipers and readers of the book of fate in rich temples niched with uncouth deities; con- ventional actors playing interminable histri- onics to respectful and appreciative auditors; gamblers stoically venturing desperate games of chance with cards and dominoes; opium- smokers stretched upon their bunks in a hot atmosphere heavy with sickening fumes; lepers dependent upon occasional alms flung by a hand that avoids the contamination of contact; female chattels, still fair and innocent of face despite unutterable wrongs, yet no whit above the level of their deep damnation — such is the Chinatown one brings away in lasting memory after three hours of peering, entering, ascend- ing, descending, crossing and delving. A very orderly and quiet community, withal, for the Mongolian is not commonly an obstreperous individual, and his vices are not of the kind that inflame to deeds of violence. He knows no more convivial bowl than a cup of tea. If he quits the gaming-table penniless, it is with a smile of patient melancholy. And his dens of deepest horror are silent as enchanted halls. All except its innermost domestic life may be inspected by the curious. The guides are dis- creet, and do not include the lowest spectacles except upon request, although it is equally true that very many visitors, regarding the entire experience as one of the conventional sights of travel, go fortified with especial hardihood and release their conductor from considerations of delicacy. The joss-houses, or temples, are hung with 120 I2X ponderous gilded carvings, with costly draperies and rich machinery of worship. The deities are fearful conceptions, ferocious of countenance, bristling with hair and decked with tinseled robes. A tiny vestal-flame burns dimly in a corner, and near it stands a huge gong. An attendant strikes this gong vociferously to arouse the god, and then prostrates himself be- fore the altar, making three salaams. A couple of short billets, half round, are then tossed into the air to bode good or ill luck to you according as they fall upon the one or the other side. A good augury having been secured by dint of persistent tossing, a quiverful of joss-sticks is next taken in hand and dextrously shaken until three have fallen to the floor. The sticks are numbered, and correspond to paragraphs in a fate book that is next resorted to, and you are ultimately informed that you will live for forty years to come, that you will marry within two years, and, if your sex and air seem to counten- ance such a venture, that you will shortly make enormous winnings at poker. Whatever of genuine solemnity may cloak the Heathen Chi- nee in his own relations to his bewhiskered deities, he undoubtedly tips the wink to them when the temple is invaded by itinerant sight- seers. The smooth, spectacled interpreter of destinies pays $5,000 a year for the privilege of purveying such mummeries, and hardly can the Heathen Chinee himself repress a twinkle of humor at the termination of a scene in which he so easily comes off best, having fairly outdone his Caucasian critic in cynicism, and for a price. 122 jwy^ ^^-c^unl' CHINESE RESTAURANT. 123 In the theater he will be found, perhaps con- trary to expectation, to take a serious view of art. You are conducted by a tortuous under- ground passage of successive step-ladders and narrow ways, past innumerable bunk-rooms of opium-smokers, to the stage itself, where your entrance creates no disturbance. The Chinese stage is peculiar in that while the act- ors are outnumbered ten to one by supernum- eraries, musicians and Caucasian visitors, they monopolize the intellectual recognition of the audience. The men who, hat on head, pack the pit, and the women who throng the two galleries, divided into respectable and unre- spectable by a rigid meridian, have been edu- cated to a view of the drama which is hardly to be ridiculed by nations that admit the concert and the oratorio. The Chinese simply need less ocular illusion than we in the theater, and perhaps those of us who are familiar with the grotesque devices by which our own stage- veneer is wrought perform no less an intel- lectual feat than they. Their actors are indeed richly costumed, and, women not being per- mitted upon the stage, the youths who play female roles are carefully made up for their ■ parts; and one and all they endeavor to imper- sonate. Almost no other illusion is considered necessary. The stage manager and his assist- ants now and then erect a small background suggestive of environment, and the province of the orchestra is to ac9entuate emotion — in which heaven knows they attain no small de- gree of success. It is highly conventionalized drama, in which any kind of incongruity may 124 yy/ieiUrn^f' BALCONY OF JOSS-HOUSE. 125 I elbow the players provided it does not confuse the mind by actually intervening between them and the audience. The plays are largely his- torical, or at least legendary, and vary in length from six or eight hours to a serial of many consecutive nights' duration. There are stars whose celebrity packs the house to the limit of standing-room, and there are the same strained silent attention and quick rippling re- sponse to witty passages that mark our own playhouses; but such demonstrative applause as the clapping of hands and the stamping of feet is unknown. The Chinese theater-goer would as soon think of so testifying enjoyment of a good book in the quiet of his home. But as for the orchestra, let some other write its justifi- cation. Such a banging of cymbals, and ham- mering of gongs, and monotonous squealing of stringed instruments in unrememberable minor intervals almost transcends belief. Without visible leader, and unmarked by any discover- able rhythm, it is nevertheless characterized by unanimity of attack and termination, as well as enthusiasm of execution, and historians of music are authority for the statement that it is based upon an established scale and a scientific theory. Be that as it may, it is a thing of terror first to greet the ear on approach, last to quit it in departure, and may be counted upon for visitation in dreams that follow indigestion. The secret society known as the Highbinders was created two and a half centuries ago in China by a band of devoted patriots, and had degenerated into an organization employed to further the ends of avarice and revenge long 126 before it was transplanted to this countrj'. Re- lieved of the espionage that had in some meas- ure controlled it at home, and easily able to evade a police unfamiliar with the Chinese tongue, it grew in numbers and power with great rapidity. The greater portion of the peo- ple of Chinatown has always been honestly in- dustrious and law abiding, but the society re- warded hostility by persecution, ruin, and often death. Merchants were laid under tribute, and every form of industry in the community that was not directly protected by membership in the society was compelled to yield its quota of revenue. Vice was fostered, and courts of law were so corrupted by intimidation or bribery of witnesses that it was next to impossible to con- vict a Highbinder of any criminal offense. A climax of terror was reached that at last con- vulsed the environing city, and by the pure ef- frontery of autocratic power the society itself precipitated its downfall. A peremptory word was given to the police, and a scene ensued which the astonished Celestials were forced to accept as a practical termination of their bloody drama; a small epic of civilization intent on the elevation of heathendom, no in- considerable portion of which in a short space was blown skyhigh. The Highbinders were scattered, many imprisoned or executed, innu- merable dives emptied, temples and secret council-rooms stripped bare, and the society in effect undone. Yet still, for one who has viewed the lowest depths of the Chinatcnvn of to-day, the name will long revive an uncher- ished memory of two typical faces, outlined 127 upon a background of nether flame. One is the face of a young woman who, in a cell far under- ground, leans against a high couch in a man- ner half-wanton, half-indifferent, and chants an unintelligible barbaric strain. The other is that of her owner, needing only a hangman's knot beneath the ear to complete a wholly sat- isfactory presentment of irredeemable deprav- ity. And that is Avhy one quits the endless novelties of the peepshow without regret, and draws a breatii of relief upon regaining the fa- miliar streets of civilization. SANTA CLARA VALLEY. Below the junction of San Francisco's penin- sular with the main land the Santa Clara Val- ley stretches southward between the coast and Santa Cruz ranges. Along this vallej^ lies the way to San Jose and the coast resorts of Santa Cruz and Monterey, past intermediate points of celebrity. Palo Alto is the site of the Stanford Univer- sity, where in a campus of 8,000 acres, an ar- boretum to which every clime has liberally con- tributed, stands this magnificent memorial of a cherished son. The buildings are conceived in the style of mission architecture — low struc- tures connected by an arcade surrounding an immense inner court, with plain thick walls, arches and columns, built of buff sandstone and roofed with red tiles. Richly endowed, this university is broadly and ambitiously planned, and is open to both sexes in all de- partments. Hard by, at Menlo Park, is the Stanford horse breeding and training establishment, where 128 hundreds of thoroughbreds are carefully tended in paddock and stable and daily trained. Even one who is not a lover of horses, if such a person exists, can not fail to find entertainment here, where daily every phase of equine training is exhibited from the kindergarten where toddling colts are taught the habit of the track to the open course where famous racers are speeded. Perhaps there is not, in the whole of Northern California, a town more attractively environed than San Jose. It lies in the heart of the val- ley, protected by mountain- walls from every wandering asperity of land or sea, a clean, regu- larly platted city, reaching off through avenues of pine and of eucalyptus, and through or- chards and vineyards, to pretty forest slopes where roads climb past rock, glen and rivulet to fair, commanding heights. The immediate neighborhood is the center of prune production, and every year exports great quantities of berries, fruits and wines. The largest seed- farms and the largest herd of short-horned cattle in the world are here. Twenty-six miles east from San Jose is Mount Hamilton, upon whose summit the white wall of the Lick Observatory is plainly visible at that distance. This observatory has already be- come celebrated for the discovery of Jupiter's fifth satellite, and gives promise of affording many another astronom- ical sensation in time to come. Visitors are per- mitted to look through 129 the great telescope one night in the week, and in the intervals a smaller glass sufficiently pow- erful to yield a good view of the planets in the broad sunlight of midday is devoted to their entertainment. It is reached by stage from San "Jose, the round trip being made daily. Aside from the attraction of the famous sky- glass, supplanted by the multitudinous and elaborate mechanisms of the observatory, the ride through the mountains to Mount Hamilton more than compensates the small fatigue of the journey. There are backward glimpses of the beautiful valley, and a changing panorama of the Sierra, the road making loops and turns in the shadow of live oaks on the brink of pro- found crater-like depressions. Santa Cruz is a popular resort by the sea, possessing picturesque rocks and a fine back- ground of the mountains that bear its name. Near at hand is a much-visited grove of Big Trees, the approach to which leads through oak and fir, past canons fringed with madrona and manzanita, and fern and flower. Monterey was the old capital of California in the earliest period of Spanish rule. Here the forest crowds upon the sea and mingles its odor of balm with that of the brine. The beach that divides them is broken by cliffs where the cypress finds footing to flaunt its rugged boughs above the spray of the waves, and in the gentle air of a perfect climate the wild flowers hold almost perpetual carnival. Upon such a foundation the Hotel del Monte, with its vast parks of lawn and garden and driveway, cov- ering many hundred acres, is set, all its 130 magnificence lending really less than it owes to the infinite charm of Monterey. Its fame has spread through every civilized land, and Eu- ropean as well as American visitors make up its throng. Here, as elsewhere upon the coast, foreign travelers are seen most in that seasor when the extraordinary equability of winter allures them by contrast with their native en- vironment, but the Californian knows its sum- mer aspect to be no less winsome ; and so, from the year's begmning to its end, there is one long gala day at Monterey, its parks and beaches and forests animated by wealthy and fashionable pleasure-seekers. The Del Monte is located in a scattering grove of 200 acres, a little east from the town, and for lavishness of luxtiry and splendor in construction and ac- cessory has perhaps no superior. ^Bathing, boating, camping and driving are the current out-of-door activities, and specific points of in- terest are the Carmel Mission, Pacific Grove, Moss Beach, Seal Rocks, Cypress Point and Point Pinos Lighthouse. The amount of yearly rainfall at Monterey is more than at San Diego and less than at Santa Barbara. The mean mid- summer temperature is the same, namely, 65", but in winter the thermometer averages lower, the mean temperature of January being 50° at Monterey, 56° at Santa Barbara, and 57° at San Diego. These figures compare most favorably with the records of European resorts, and the absence of humidity works a further ameliora- tion both in summer and winter, firmly estab- lishing the resorts of California as character- ized by the most equable climate known. 132 LAKE TAHOE. More than 6,000 feet above the sea, among mountains that rise from its edge to a further altitude of from 2,000 to 5,000 feet, and sur- rounded by the deep forest, this lake unites the highest poetic beauty \vith definite attrac- tions for the artist and the sportsman. It is twenty-five miles long and half as wide, and reaches a depth of 1,700 feet. Hotels and cottages sprinkle its shores, little steamers ply upon its silvery surface, and there are tents and boats of camping fishermen and hunters. Here to the aromatic odor of the forest come lovers of pure joys for comparative solitude in the heart of nature. In the adjacent wilder- ness there is game to tax the address of the bravest gunner, and mountain-streams • shout in torrent through a thousand fierce tangles of woodland dear to artists and unprofessional lovers of untrammeled beauty; and from the mountain-tops one may look far out over the barriers that strive to secrete this exquisite spot from the outer world. Fragments of its loveli- ness have been copied by many a brush and many a camera, poets have sung of it, travelers have told of it in labored prose; but Lake Tahoe eludes transla- tion. Have you ever chanced upon a spot where Nature, *®7i^ ,-5" W^ turning from gorgeous pigments and heroic can- vases in a swift softening mood, had spent the white heat of inspiration upon a picture in which was permitted neither asperity nor want of per- fect grace, a thing finely poised between gran- deur and gentleness, wood and water and mountain and sky, rhymed in every line and tone to a fine exaltation such as the Greek knew when he dreamed a statue out of the marble? Tahoe is of that category. It is reached by stage from Truckee, on the line of the SoutJicrn Pacific, our returning east- ward route from San Francisco. 134 VI. NEVADA AND UTAH. i[EVADA formerly existed as part of the territory of Utah, and, having leaped into sudden significance with the discovery of silver sulphurets in 1858, was separately organized and admitted into the Union during the Civil War. Trap- pers were its pioneers in 1825, overland emi- grants crossed it as early as 1834, and the explorations of Fremont began nine years later. It is a land of silver and sage-brush and steaming mineral springs; of salt and borax and sulphur; of parallel mountain ranges, rolling plains and flat alkaline sands, of limpid fish- thronged lakes and brackish sink holes that suck the flow of its rivers. Its composition is endlessly diverse, and there is abundance of noble scenery, but this does not generally lie adjacent to the railway route. In its transit the tourist will not unlikely be aware of a few hours of monotony — the first and the last to be 135 encountered in the entire course of the journey. Reno, Winnemucca and Elko are the chief cities that will be seen, and Humboldt River is followed closely fpr the greater part of the distance across the state. Nevada, as everybody knows, means snowy. The name was derived from the range upon its western border, and was not suggested by axij charac- teristic of the climate, which is dry and health- ful, and, save in extreme altitudes, notably temperate. Crossing the Utah line, and keei^ing well above the edge of the desolate barren noted on the maps as the Great Salt Lake Desert, you come quickly into view of the Great Salt Lake itself, whose shore is approximately followed for half its circumference tipon the north and east. Between the eastern shore and the Wasatch 136 Range the southward-trending valley stretches for many miles. Ogden, Salt Lake City, Provo, Springville and numerous pretty ^lormon vil- lages are scattered along the line, and there is a large body of fresh water known as Utah Lake, linked to the great salt inland sea by the Jordan River. America boasts no fairer or more fruitful valley than this. Beyond, the circular eastward sweep of the route passes Red Nar- rows, Soldier Summit, Castle Gate, Green River and the Book Cliffs, and leads through the noble valley of the Grand River to the Col- orado boundary at Utaline. Desert, broken by innumerable lovely oases; salt sea and fresh-water lake; monuments of an institution of world-wide notoriety, and its com- munities alternating or mingled with "Gentile" population; mountain passes, cailons, noble gateways, and memorable rock-formations and river-valleys — these are the distinguishing features of Utah. OGDEN. Focal point of converging railroads from the east and west, and nourished by many thousand acres of irrigated land immediately surround- ing, Ogden is the second city of Utah in im- portance. The Wasatch Mountains pi-otect it upon the east and north, and form a background '137 of exceeding beauty here as elsewhere. The attractions of its environs include lakes, springs, rivers and parks, and Ogden Canon, a nine- mile stretch of rugged rock-fissures and roaring waters. SALT LAKE CITY. Here in 1847 came Brigham Young and his band of Latter Day Saints, driven from the States by the unpoprdarity of their tenets and practice. The story of the Mormons is a tragic one, difficult reading for a dispassionate reader, like that of the Puritanic persecution of Quakers and reputed practitioners of witchcraft two cen- turies ago. It is true the Mormon offered an affront to the public sense of morality, but a later generation, that counts so many avowed adher- ents to the notion that even monogamous mar- riage is a failure, should have only commisera- tion for a sect committed to utter bankruptcy in that particular. In any event, abhorrence of polygamy can not serve as excuse for the cruel- ties visited upon the early Mormons by the mobs that despoiled, maltreated and murdered them. In this lies our disgrace, part sectional, part national, that their one offensive characteristic was counted a forfeiture of their every human right, and their defiance of a single law made pretext for the violation of twenty in their per- secution. They are familiar to the public mind almost solely in their character as polygamists 138 -*^-. i claiming sanction of divine authority; yet, al- though polygamy no longer exists in Utah, the Church of Latter Day Saints having for- mally renounced it, the name of Mormon still has power to awaken prejudice among those who know the sect only by repute. The aban- donment of this prejudice is demanded not by charity, but by common-sense. The patriarchal households of the pious old Jewish kings are not more utterly a thing of the past than are those of the Mormons, and stripped of them Mormonism contains nothing to offend in a country that pretends to tolerance in matters of religion. The putative author of the Book of Mormon was a prophet of that name. It purports to be an abridgment of the book of the prophet Ether, which narrated that the Jaredites came to America in the great dispersion that fol- lowed the confusion of tongues at Babel, and were destroyed for their degeneracy in the year 600 B. C. In the same year Lehi led a second exodus, from Jerusalem, which landed at Chili, from which point the populating of North America was again begun. Ether's book was discovered by this colony, which in course of time was divided into two factions, the Nephites and the Lamanites. The former were eventually exterminated by the latter, who relapsed into barbarism and became the ancestral stock of our native Indians. Mor- mon was a prophet of the Nephites, and to the abridgment of Ether's story added an account of the history of the second colony, and hid his own tablets where they were found by Jo- 139 ^.■^J^&^ — =rr^i*Ac^tm>.atiLiiif *ii»t3g-niniHn.«iu'i'" ir'""""""r*-''i^. ' ^ "^i^ -^mm^ if :.^' 140 seph Smith and by him miraculously trans- lated. The basis of the religious teaching is Biblical ; the exposition constitutes Latter Day sanctity. The followers of Young found the Salt Lake Valley a desert of unproductiveness, despite the beauty of its contour. They made it an unprece- dented oasis, a broad garden of lovely fertility. A band of pauper zealots, they camped upon a barren and compelled it to sustain them. They found inspiration in the striking topo- graphical resemblance between their Desert and Palestine, and gave the name Jordan to the little river that joined their two contrasting waters, as old Jordan joins the Sea of Tiberias with the Dead Sea. They chose a site for Zion, and in its center, in 1853, they laid the foundations of the Temple, which the predeter- mined forty years of building exactly brought to completion. And as the government was of the Church, so the Temple was regarded as the pivot of Zion. The ordinal numbers, com- bined with the four cardinal points, still serve to distinguish the different streets of the city, as clearly indicating the exact relation of each to the location of the great edifice. Second West Street, East Fifth South Street, and the like, are finger-posts that guide the stranger infallibly to the Mormon mecca. It was a curious reversion to the old patri- archal idea of life, foreign to the spirit of our time and so foredoomed to failure; but the dreamers had hard muscles and determined souls. They grubbed bushes, they dug ditches, they irrigated, they fought the grasshopper, 141 they subsisted on the substance of things hoped for, enduring extremes of hunger and privation in the first years of their grapple with the desert. And by the time the reluctance of earth had been overcome and material prosperity had been won the westward flow of emigration had brought about the human conflict once more. The records of that conflict have been written by the accustomed partisan hands, but the plain truth is that whether we are Mormon, or Cath- olic, or Protestant, or Mohammedan, or Gentile pure and unalloyed, we are intolerant all; and when we lay hold upon an issue it is more than a meeting of Greeks, it is savage to savage, old Adam himself warring against himself in the persons of his common children. Mormonism was a dream of religious enthusiasm mixed with earthly dross, overthrown by dross of earth that invoked the name of religion. Yet the over- throw was plainly plotted by the higher powers, and the conquerors were in their employ. The distinguishing features of the sect, as now restricted, are not apparent to the casual traveler, to whom Zion is only a romantic and imposing relic of a day that has been outlived. But the organization still en- dures, and there is no reason to doubt that its distinction is vital enough in the sight of Mormons themselves, as it is to any clan or denomination. In- dividually they are esteemed and respected among the " Gen- tiles " that have invaded Salt Lake City, ■^yf^&irij and Brigham Young himself, in the fullness of his almost autocratic power, manifested many of the qualities that make great names in history. That he made scandalous misuse of that power is generally believed, and, however great he may have deemed the danger of his people, it is certain he rebelled against the Government of these United States; but he was essentially a great leader and a man of many broad and beneficent conceptions. As con- tractor he built hundreds of miles of the first transcontinental railroad, and built a connect- ing road nearly forty miles in length to place Salt Lake City in commercial intimacy with the outside world. The first telegraph line to span the Rockies was principally constructed by him as contractor. And it is remembered of him that he furnished a Mormon battalion to the Mexican War, and protected from Indian dep- redations the transportation of the CUnited States mails through Utah at a time when Gov- ernment troops could not be spared for the serv- ice. The establishment of the Territory of Utah was the death knell of the State of Des- eret which he had founded, yet the President had enough confidence in his loyalty to appoint him its first governor. That he should in the unavoidable ultimate issue take positive ground on the side of his people was to have been ex- pected of the Mormon leader. Young is the personification of the sect to the world at large, and his memory overhangs Salt Lake City, perpetuated in the broad private grounds with their high walls and imposing gateway, where so long he dwelt and wherein 144 death he lies buried. And near at hand are the erstwhile palaces of his favorite wives, and miscellaneous structures that had religious and governmental uses in the singular day of his prime . GREAT SALT LAKE. Great Salt Lake has lost nineteeu-twentieths of its ancient original dimensions, which still are traceable. Its area was once equal to one-half that of the present Territory. It now covers an extent of about 2,000 square miles, in which are included a dozen or more mountain-islands. Its waters are temperately warm and five times as salt as the ocean. The human body floats upon their surface with cork -like buoyancy, without the slightest sustaining effort. You may double your knees under you and recline upon it, like a cherub on a cloud, with head and shoulders protruding. With sun-umbrella and book you may idly float and read at pleas- ure, or safely take a nap upon the bosom of Salt Lake if you can contrive to maintain a suitable balance meanwhile; for you will find a marked disposition on the part of this brine to turn you face down, which position is anything but a pleasant pickle when unexpectedly assumed, for the membrane of eyes and nose and mouth is not on friendly terms with such saline bitterness. 145 The shore of the lake is a few miles distant from the city, and Garfield Beach, some eighteen miles away, is the most popular bathing-resort. Here a pavilion and whole streets and avenues of dressing rooms have been provided for the hundreds of bathers who every day in season flock to the lake. Everybody bathes, and the scene, novel and amusing by reason of the remarkable specific gravity of the water, differs from that of any other watering-place. The nat- ural aspect is full of soft beauty, not unlike that of the Southern California shore looking off to the coast islands of the Pacific, save that the semi-tropical vegetation is wanting. Salt Lake is a Dead Sea, bare of fish or fowl except for a minute and not numerous species of the former. There is said to be a Mormon tradition that in the time of their grasshopper plague an enormous flight of gulls issued from its horizon and cleared the fields of their pest. The spectacle of those sea-scavengers waddling through the brown stubble in pursuit of the grasshopper must have been diverting, at least, and the occurrence was doubtless miraculous if true. 146 VII. COLORADO. JHIS State is the apex of North Amer- ica, crown of the slopes that rise fr.om Pacific and Atlantic shores. It is the heart of the Rocky Mountain chain, numbering hundreds of individual summits that rise to a height of more than 13,000 feet, and many whose altitude exceeds 14,000. Be- tween the ranges lie numerous parks, broad basins of great fertility and surpassing loveli- ness, diversified by forest, lake and stream, and themselves exalted to an altitude of from 8,000 to 10,000 feet. The precipitous water- sheds of this titanic land give birth to many important rivers, such as the Platte, Arkansas, Rio Grande del Norte and Grand, whose chan- nels, save Avhere they occasionally loiter through the alluvial parks, are marked by fierce cataracts and gloomy gorges. The canons of the Grand River have not infrequently been confounded with the Grand Caiion of the Colo- rado River, in Arizona, by tourists who have not visited the latter, in consequence of an unfortunate coincidence of names, and further confusion has re- sulted from the use of the title "Grand Caiion" in connection with the gorges of the Gunnison and the Arkansas, and the Canon of the Yellowstone. The Grand Canon of Arizona is entitled by divine right to a monopoly of the name. 147 wife.- This Alpine land of prodigious scenery and inspiriting air, and of phenomenal mineral and agricultural wealth, we now enter upon the west. Every successive scene is an event, every turn of the way a revelation, advancing in ascending climaxes. From Grand Junction, at the confluence of the Grand and Gunnison rivers, to Colorado Springs the traveler may choose between the route of the Colorado Midland direct and that of the Denver &=> Rio Grande via Pueblo. Three intermediate points are common to both, namely, Glenwood Springs, Leadville and Buena Vista, not to mention Manitou, which is closely connected with Colorado Springs by a trolley line as well. Each route crosses the Continental Divide at a great altitude, and pre- sents a rapid succession of extraordinary scenes, in which valley, peak, gorge, cliff, meadow, forest, lake and torrent are com- bined and contrasted. 148 ^^^.^^ --^ -f^ The Midlatid spec- ially offers Hagerman Pass, Seven Castles, Red Rock Canon, Granite Canon, and the consecutive chain of Ute Pass resorts. The pre-eminent individual features of the Rio Grande are Tennessee and Marshall passes, the Canon of the Grand River and the Royal Gorge of the Arkansas, all which, and many more, are fully described in local publications easily obtainable. GLENWOOD SPRINGS. Where the Grand River issues from somber canon-walls into a mountain -hemmed valley, just above the confluence of the foaming tor- rent of Roaring Fork, numerous thermal springs of saline and chalybeate waters boil from its bed and from its grass-covered banks, and natural caves are filled with their vapor. Here is Glenwood Springs, lately the resort of Utes, and the home of deer, elk and bear; which latter have retreated only to the border- ing forest. Youngest of the great watering places of Colorado, its distinction lies in the extraordinary character and voluminous flow of the springs, the unique manner in which they have been brought into service, and the superb hotel, bath-house and park with which the natural attractiveness of the spot has been perfected. In the middle of the park the larg- est spring feeds an enormous pool, covering more than an acre, from three to five feet 149 deep, paved with smooth brick and walled with sandstone. A fountain of cold mountain-water in the center tempers the pool to gradations that radiate to its rims. Here bathing is in season throughout the year. In winter or summer the temperature of the water and of the immediate atmosphere has the same deli- cious warmth, and all the snow and ice that Colorado can boast in January at an altitude of over five thousand feet does not interfere with out-of-door bathing at Glenwood Springs. Catarrh, rheumatism, diseases of the blood, and many ailments that do not yield to medicine are either wholly cured or relieved by these waters. In the bath-house are private bath-rooms, with attendants and all manner of appliances, for those who prefer them, or to whom the public pool is unsuited. Radical treatment is given in the vapor-caves, which have been divided into compartments and fitted for the purpose. 150 y^-V. The park-grounds rise in successive terraces to the Hotel Colorado, which was conceived in the same spirit of originality which created the improvements mentioned. This hotel is con- structed iipon three sides of a large court con- taining a miniature lake, fed by cold mountain springs and stocked with trout intended for the table. In summer the glass partitions which in cold weather separate the main dining-room from the broad veranda are taken down, and tables are set in the open air ; and the guest who may fancy a broiled trout for breakfast is privileged to capture it himself, in this particu- lar following the practice of the patron of restaurants in Mexico, who selects the materials of his meal before they have been sent to the kitchen. The state of Colorado is the best hunting- ground left to the American sportsman. Not far distant from Glenwood Springs deer and ,A.v js r 152 154 elk still abound, and bears and mountain-lions may easily be found by those who understand the manner of their pursuit. The Roaring Fork, a succession of noisy rapids and cataracts coursing down the timber-clad mountain-side, affords excellent trout-fishing, and Trappers Lake is known to thousands of gunners and fishermen, either by experience or by repute. LEADVILLE. Just beyond the foot of the Hagerman and Tennessee passes, upon the swell of a mountain flank, stands the great mining city, at an ele- vation of 10,000 feet. In April, i860, the first gold claims were staked out in California Gulch, and within three months thereafter 10,000 min- ers had located there. Two claims are said to have yielded $75,000 in the space of sixty days, and single individuals are known to have been rewarded by $100,000 for the work of one sum- mer. In a little more than a year the field was exhausted, nearly $10,000,000 of the yellow metal having been carried away. In the dig- ging of ditches to facilitate the washing of the auriferous gravel, masses of a heavy black rock were so commonly encountered as to prove a considerable annoyance, but they were thrown aside and forgotten. These were the famous silver carbonates, whose value was later re- vealed by a merely curious assay; and the first body of carbonate ore to be worked formed the entire mass of a cliff in California Gulch which had been execrated by innumerable gold-dig- gers. The richest ores were not among the first to be developed, and prospecting and 155 small workings were increasingly carried on for a series of years until, in 1878, two pros- pectors who were " grub-staked " by Mr. Tabor (since Senator), chanced to be crossing Fryer Hill and sat down to imbibe casual refreshment from a jug of whisky. By the time they had become satisfactorily refreshed all kinds of ground looked alike to them, and in pure imbe- cility, without the slightest justification, they began to dig where they had been sitting. They uncovered the ore body of the famous Little Pittsburg Mine, which, so exuberantly whimsical is occasional chance, has since proved to be the only point on the entire hill where the ledge approaches so near the sur- face. Then ensued a second scramble of the multitude for place in this marvelous treasure- region, and the wildest excitement reigned. In the eight years that have passed the carbonate ores have not been exhausted; on the contrary, new finds are still of frequent occurrence, and the city of Leadville is now known to be un- derlaid with bodies of that ore. But the car- bonate era has probably passed its climax and is giving place to the sulphide era, millions of tons of sulphide ores having already been blocked out in Iron, Breece and Carbonate hills. The geological position of the new ores promises even greater extent and value than the carbonates have realized, although they are less cheaply worked. And should the sul- 156 phides at length be exhausted no one can safely prophesy that this extraordinarily versatile locality will not present the world with some new compoiind which on analysis shall prove unexpectedly rich in precious metals. The carbonate discovery revived the almost- depopulated camp, and for the space of a few years thereafter Leadville was nearly as no- torious for lawlessness and personal insecurity as for the richness and number of its mines. That phase has been outlived; order, quiet and the refinements that belong to a wealthy city in our day having long been permanently established. The tourist wnll, however, find it distinctly individual and full of present interest, and the wonderful romance of its past, which reads like a tale of unbridled imagination, invests it with an imperishable glamour. BUENA VISTA. Stretching southward for thirty miles be- tween the Park and Saguache ranges, at an 157 equal distance east from Leadville, lies an idyllic valley of the Arkansas River. At the head of this valley stands Buena Vista, like a Swiss village. Harvard, Yale and Princeton mountains, each loftier than Pike's Peak, rise close behind it upon the west, and upon the south the white summits of the Sangre de Cristo range are discernible. The view is downward upon the white town and over the far stretch of sunlit meadow, whose penetrating beauty and perfect peace is enhanced by the grandeur of the College Peaks, which from the grass- grown and timbered slopes of their feet rise to heights and forms of awful sublimity. Buena Vista means in the Spanish a comprehensive outlook rather than a beautiful scene. It is a euphonious name, and serves well enough in Colorado, where among so much that is super- lative one learns to be temperate in the use of adjectives; but anywhere else in the world this should have been Vzsia Gloriosa. It is a peep of paradise, a dream of a happy vale where the blessed might dwell in joy forever. 158 CRIPPLE CREEK. Four years ago the famous gold camp was reached only by stage coach at the heels of half a dozen spirited horses driven by a veteran who reeked of border reminiscence. Two railroads now transport its passengers and freight, the Midland Te7'minal on the north, and the Florence &^ Cripple Creek on the south. Its history is pretty well known. Twice it has been a more than national sensation, and twice the wave of general excitement has subsided and the greater part of the gathered throng of fevered gold-seekers, disappointed in its hope of acquiring immediate and unmerited riches, has melted away with anathema u^jon its lips. When the first wave receded perhaps five out of twelve or fifteen thousand remained clustered aroimd a few mines of enormous determined value and a goodly number of promising claims, among half a dozen small and fragile settle- ments which wore the motley aspect peculiar to young mining towns. During the second in- flux, when the population numbered twenty-five or thirty thousand, the camps were transformed 159 ,r < Vi I U < o u < 5i UJ UJ tr O cc o i6o into modernized cities, with water-works, elec- tric lights and good hotels. Yet even when houses in great number were building daily, men with hundreds of dollars in their pockets rented chairs for a night, instead of beds and rooms, and when chairs were no longer to be had they walked the streets or slept in alleys because money couldnot buy any better accom- modation. At the pitch of excitement'the town of Cripple Creek, center of operations, was vis- ited by a devastating conflagration. Before the smoke had cleared new and better buildings were under way, but the disaster undoubtedly hastened the inevitable hour when so dispro- portionate a population must adjust itself to its single wealth-creating industry of mining and shipping ore. For in that vast multitude com- paratively few had an indubitable prize, many owners of encouraging prospects had developed them to the limit of their own resources, and the time came when the outside speculating world' wearied of contributing money for shares i6i in prospective mines which failed to give satis- factory account of themselves, if, in truth, they were not in some instances purely mythical. In any event the grist which had fed this sensa- tional mill ceased to arrive, and thousands who had directly or indirectly subsisted upon it were compelled to withdraw. So for the second time Cripple Creek relapsed into the comparative quiet of operating its mines and developing its best prospects. It was almost unavoidable that it should lose something of good repute in cer- tain quarters. Where many wagers are lost, however foolish, good will is apt to be lacking; and the satirist of human follies may well turn a cynical eye upon the most prodigious gambling spot of America in our generation. But after the disappointed or deluded have had their say, and the moralist has eased him of his epigram, let us in justice add that Cripple Creek covers one of the richest gold deposits known to the world. At the end of the year 1898 it had milled a total of $53,000,000 in gold, not to speak of the dumps which contain uncounted 162 tons of low-grade ore awaiting the introduction of methods which shall reduce them cheaply and upon a large scale. The actual output for the first six months of 1898 was $7,204,750. MANITOU. In the immediate neighborhood of Pike's Peak is found an extraordinary group of resorts which every year, between June and Septem- ber, attracts unnumbered thousands of visitors. Each differs in individual allurements, but all alike are characterized by transparent, exhilara- ting air, vivid tones of verdure and myriad flowers, streams, waterfalls, small lakes, foun- tains, forests, red rock-sculptures, gorges and mountains, always mountains, leading the eye progressively to their kingly peak; by white tents in the shade of pines and aspens, neat hamlets and esthetic caravansaries hugging Cyclopean walls; by fashionable equipages, equestrians and an animated holiday throng on foot; and by a buoyant breadth which all the multitude can not crowd or oppress. The cul- minating point is Manitou, a spot of such supernal beauty that even the Utes rose to the height of poetic appreciation and named it after the Great Spirit. Placed at the very foot of the terrible Peak, in the opening of the mountain- notch upon the broad plains, every essence of interior landscape loveliness is showered upon it. It is without a flaw, a superlative thing unpicturable to those who know only the plains or the shores of the sea; a Titania's bower of melting sweetness amid Nature's savagest throes. Marvels are thickly clustered. 163 There are grottoes hung with stalactites and banked with moss-like beds of gleaming crys- tal-filaments, springs tinctured with iron, springs effervescent with soda, plains serried with huge isolated rock-sculptures, narrow gorges where at the bottom of hundreds of feet of shadow is scant passage-way, long perpen- dicular lines of white foaming torrent, and soft blending flames of color from rosy rock and herbage and flower. The waters of the Soda Springs are walled in the middle of a dainty park in the heart of the village, at night an incandescent lamp gleam- ing upward through their bubbling depths. Millions of gallons are exported, but something of the living sparkle on the tongue is lost in separation from the surcharged fount. Here it is more exuberantly crisp and refreshing than that of the artificial compound which, in East- ern cities, presides over the counter dearest to the feminine heart. The flow is unstinted, and is free to all. The Iron Springs are upon the hillside, within easy strolling distance. Both are distinctly beneficial to health, and are fre- quented by a merry multitude throughout the day and early night. Grand Caverns and the Cave of the Winds are near neighbors, divided by a single ridge and doubtless intercommunicating by undis- covered passages. Both are elevated far above the town; the approach to the one climbing past the Rainbow Falls along a steep slope that looks off across the entrancing landscape of the valley to the mountain back- ground, the other opening in the side of 164 i65 Williams Caiion, through the notch of whose magnificent upreaching walls there is at one point a sharp turn where an unskillful driver could hardly hope to pass without grazing a wheel. It must have been a critical place in the old days when stages were " held up,'" for the miscalculation of an inch would have meant catastrophe in the wake of plunging horses. The two caves are very similar — nar- row underground corridors opening into a series of high-vaulted chambers hung with stalactites and glittering in magnesium light like the jewel-caves of the Arabian Nights. The floors are dry, but through the limestone walls fine moisture oozes, depositing the sta- lagmite in strange and often esthetic forms, in addition to the pendent icicles of rock. There are striking suggestions of intelligible statuary, and innumerable imitations of natural objects, animal and vegetable. There is the Grand Organ, really a natural xylophone, a cluster of stalactites of varying proportions, upon which entire tunes are played with approximate accuracy, with occasional tones that are as mournfully impressive as a midnight-bell. Jewel Casket, Concert Hall, Bridal Chamber and the like are names bestowed upon different compartments, and numberless particular for- mations have individual titles. Grand Caverns and the Cave of the Winds each requires at least an hour for the most casual exploration. Thousands of visiting-cards have been left upon the walls. i66 ^.^ A park of 500 acres covered with protruding rock-figures of striking form and beauty consti- tutes the Garden of the Gods. The names ap- plied to these suggestive forms of sandstone and gypsum describe their eccentric appear- ance. Toadstools, Mushroom Park, Hedgehog, Ant Eater, Lizard, Turtle, Elephant, Lion, Camels, American Eagle, Seal and Bear, Sphinx, Siamese Twins, Flying Dutchman, Irish Washerwoman, Punch, Judy and Baby, Lady of the Garden, Three Graces, Stage Coach and Graveyard are a few. There are others which rise to the dignity of pure gran- deur. Pictures of the Gateway, a magnificent portal 330 feet high, and of Cathedral Spires and Balanced Rock have been admired all over the world. Here, as elsewhere in the West, beyond the eastern bounds of Colorado and New Mexico, color is an element of charm in landscape even greater than contour. These rocks are white and yellow and red, and in the crystalline air, that scorns a particle of haze, the scene is indescribably clear and sharp to the eye, and as vivid as an enthusiastic water- color. Drawings in black-and-white inade- quately communicate them to a reader. Contiguous to the Garden of the Gods lies Glen Eyrie, the private estate of General Palmer, covering 1,300 acres. This is oj^en to the public except on Sunday. Queen Caiion, fourteen miles long, the Major Domo, cliffs of blazing color, and tree-embowered drives and green-houses are attractive features of Glen Eyrie. 167 V' ,^•^;N *iJx-;' -.^'iJ'i ASCEMT OF pike's PEAK. The majesty of the Rocky Mountains can not be beckoned wholly into intimacy. There is a quality that holds unbendingly aloof from fel- lowship, if not from perfect comprehension. The sea is sympathetic in moods. Soul-quaking in tumult, it softens to moments of superficial loveliness that would have you forget the mur- derous hunger that lies the length of your stat- ure under wave. Not so the mountain-peaks. They are the sublimest personalities known to earth; the hugeous, towering imperturbable. They joy not, lament not, rage not. The chill seolian of upper air and the roar of distant avalanche do not stir the profundity of their rapt contemplation. Pale, austere, passionless, and ineffable in grandeur, they rise like an apotheosis of intellect over the spheres of emo- tion; or, if you like better, they stand for lofty spiritual reach. It augurs well of man that he can endure their proximity. A nation of mountaineers should be unequaled in the 168 qualities of virtue, intrepidity, and clarity of brain. The legend of William Tell is a true expression of the spirit of the people of Swit- zerland, that brooks no fetter of tyranny. And you will fear, not love, the mountains if you have not heights within to match them. So every genuine lover of a topmost pinnacle should have something sterling in him. From the knot of excursionists you will see him steal away to be alone in the solemn exaltation of the hour. There are many summits in Colorado more elevated than Pike's Peak, but they are difficult, and the difference in height is not appreciable. Here you are lifted above the clouds so far that the world lies remote beneath the eye, the neighboring towns and cities shrunk to insignifi- cance. Vast is the panorama outspread to view. The plain is grown indefinite and unsubstantial, like a subdued picture floating in the sky; but beyond the ranges are piled tier on tier, peak after peak, white-draped or dun in a haze of blue. The storm sweeps below, its forked lightnings under foot, its rumble of thunder echoing faintly up through the thin cold air; and while boisterous deluge rolls over valley and plain you stand bathed in radiance, like Phcebus i'n his chariot of morn. And there is an hour of incommunicable splendor, when the sun rises, gleaming like a burnished yellow moon through dark cloud-wrapi^ings on the rim of 169 f^v^- ^■^''^ fading night, and again when it sinks behind the fierce tumbled mountain-chain, gilding the peaks with ruddy fire, the while dusk spreads beneath like a silent submerging sea. The ascent, for very many years, was oftener talked of than attempted. Zebulon Pike him- self failed, in iSo6, and half a century passed after that before the first trail was cut, from old Summit Park, a dozen miles west of Mani- tou. That trail was little used, because of its difficulties and dangers. In the seventies three additional trails were constructed, and in 1889 the carriage-road from Cascade was com- pleted. In 1S91 the Cog-Wheel Railway began operation, running directly from Manitou to the summit, and accomplishing that feat in a distance of nine miles. The steepest grade on the road is one foot in four. It starts near the Iron Springs, at the mouth of Engelmann's Canon, and makes the round trip in four and a half hours, allowing a stop of forty minutes on the peak. Several trains are run daily, in the open season, and, moreover, accommodations for the night can be had in the old Signal Station, which has been made over into a tavern. To those who desire to obtain this crowning experience in the easiest manner and in the shortest possible time, the ascent by rail is recommended. Many, however, prefer the greater personal freedom and the fuller enjoy- 170 ment of scenes by the way offered by the carriage road from Ct.«cade. Although that is sixteen miles long, it has ample rewards for all its fatigues. The altitude of Pike's Peak is 14.147 feet above sea-level, and its height above the start- ing-point of the Cog -Wheel Railway in Mani- tou is 7,518 feet. The altitude of Mount Wash- ington, in New Hampshire, is 6,293 feet, that of the Rigi, in Switzerland, 5,832 feet, and of the Jungfrau, 13,667 feet, above the sea. COLORADO SPRINGS. Closely backed by the Rockies, whose east- ern contour is a protecting semicircle that opens to the Great Plains, this pretty city stands upon a level floor, divided by broad tree-shaded avenues into squares as regular as those of a chess-board, which it strongly resembles when viewed from the slopes and pinnacle of Pike's Peak. There are attractive drives in every direction, out upon the plains, through the canons and up the mountain-sides. Only six miles distant from Manitou, with which it is connected by an electric street-railway, in addition to the steam railroads, and joined to Cheyenne Gallons upon the other hand, Colo- rado Springs is perhaps the most fashionable and most populous of the special resorts of Colorado. It is a city of homes of the wealthy, with some 12,000 inhabitants. The street-line ends at the foot of the canon, Whose approach lies between a swelling grass- covered rise upon the one hand and a shrubby hillside upon the other. Here begins a com- 171 fortable carriage -road, and conveyances and burros are procurable. The road gradually ascends through groves of evergreen and de- ciduous trees, crossing and recrossing a clear mountain-stream by rustic bridges, on through the gateway of the Pillars of Hercules into a defile where rock-walls rise many hundred feet overhead, and needles, spires, cones and irregular crags lift head above and behind one another, some bleakly bare, some fringed with shrubs and trees, prodigious rocks serry- ing the mountain-side to heights where details of form are lost to the eye and only broad effects of color and ebb and swell are intel- ligible. The carriage-road leads directly to the foot of Seven Falls, to whose head the visitor may climb by a long stairway. A short dis- tance below the falls a circuitous narrow trail diverges toward the left from the carriage-road, up which burros are ridden to the upper level, where one can look down upon this entire series of brilliant cascades. Arrived here many diverging paths invite the visitor. The log cabin where Helen Hunt Jackson loved to spend much of her time in summer is at hand, and the former site of her grave, marked by a huge heap of stones, may be reached by a steep path to the left. Glens and rocky eminences, bushy retreats by the side of the streams, and fern and flower-decked banks entice to farther exploration. Day after day many return to the fresh beauties of the spot, each time discover- ing some new delight among the thousand charms of the mountain-wilds. 172 DENVER. Denver lies 75 miles north from Colorado Springs, and 115 from Pueblo. It is a queen among fair cities, standing upon a broad ele- vated plain, with mountain horizons of great beauty. Its enormous smelters, with towering, smoke-vomiting stacks, do not seriously deface it, and themselves are an interesting and instruc- tive sight, for many millions of gold and silver are there extracted from Rocky Mountain ores every year. The Queen City of the Plains has periods of winter cold and snow, but commonly the air is delightfully temperate when Eastern cities are ice-bound and shivering. Almost every part of Denver can be quickly visited by electric or cable street cars. 173 VIII. HOMEWARD. ^{fORTY miles below Colorado Springs, in the Arkansas Valley, thirty miles ^i/^^ east from the mountains, stands Pu- eblo, another city of smelters, and of immense steel, iron and copper works. Here is the Colorado Mineral Palace, a large and costly auditorium of modernized Egyptian arch- itecture, whose domes are supported by gilded columns, around whose bases are aiTanged plate-glass cases filled with choice specimens of Colorado minerals, which constitute the most valuable collection of minerals in the world. The region traversed by the Arkansas River, in its course through eastern Colorado and western Kansas, exemplifies the benefits of water artificially applied to growing crops; and many thrifty settlements greet the eye at frequent intervals. Sixty miles east of Pueblo one comes again to La Junta, the junction point in southeastern Colorado which was passed on the outward journey. From this point to Chicago the scenes would be familiar except for the fact that many localities which on the outward trip were passed in the night are now seen by day. 174 The marvels of the West, however, have now been left behind, and the tourist may be ex- pected to be absorbed in pleasurable anticipa- tion of his home-coming. He returns not as he departed, for such a journey as that Avhich now draws near its close possesses an emphatic edu- cating value. He knows definitely now about those features of our Western empire which before were to him a vague imagining, inade- quately and perhaps wrongly conceived. And. not the least valuable of human acqui sitions, henceforward he will have a story. THE END. 175 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY Los Angeles This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. MAR 31 1975 Form L9-10»i-6,'52(A1855)444 "i