California

VII

THE TWIN VALLEYS

It is geographical courtesy merely, to treat of intramontane California as a valley; it is in reality a vast, rolling plain. Several little kingdoms of Europe could be tucked away in it. North and south it has no natural line of demarcation other than the rivers meeting for their single assault upon the sea, but its diversity deserves the double name. They make, the Sacramento rushing from the wooded north and the sluggish San Joaquin, one of the most interesting waterways of the world. I should say they made, for of the San Joaquin one must be able to speak in the past also, to understand it. One must have seen it before man had tamed it and taught it, supine as a lioness in the sun.

To arrive at a proper feeling for the continuity of the great central plain, it must be approached from the south, by way of the old Tejon Pass, up from San Fernando, or down the Tehachapi grade where the railroad loops and winds through the confluence of the Coast Range with the Sierra Nevada. Here the hills curve graciously about the vast oval of the lower San Joaquin. The downthrow of the mountain, stippled with sage-brush, gives way to tawny sand glistening here and there with white patches of alkali, mottled with dark blocks of irrigated land. Its immensity is obscured by the haze of heat.

One is reduced to the figures of the real estate "booster" for terms of proportion. That modest checkering of green, hours away to the left, is a forty-mile field of alfalfa; beyond it lie the vineyards that in less than a quarter of a century relegated Spain to a second place in the raisin industry of the world. This is the San Joaquin of to-day and to-morrow. The white-tilted vans of the Argonauts saw it as one vast, overlapping field of radiant corollas, blue of lupins, phacelias, nemophilias, gold of a hundred packed species of composite. Wet years it is still possible for the settler in the unirrigated districts to wake some morning to blossomy lakes of sky-blueness in the hollows; from San Emigdio in the Temblors, I have seen, across the whole width of the valley, the smouldering poppy fires along the bluffs of Kern River. On the mesa below Tejon the moon-white gilia that the children call "evening snow" unfurls its musky-scented drifts mile after mile. But the prevailing note of the San Joaquin is tawny russet; gold it will be in the season, resplendent as those idols which the Incas overlaid yearly with fresh-beaten leaf, and in September the barrancas above Bakersfield and Visalia as yellow as brass, but all up and down the hill-rimmed hollow is every lion-coloured tint contending still with the thin belts of planted orchard.

Twenty-five years of cultivation have served to shift the lines of greenness but not greatly to modify the desert key. Once it was all massed in the tulares which fringed the series of lakes and connecting sloughs, continuing northward from the lowest point of the San Joaquin. Kern, Kings, Kaweah, Tule, Merced, and Tuolumne, mighty rivers, and a hundred lesser singing streams fed it. Elk by thousands ramped in its reedy borders. It was a haven of nesting water-birds. Whole islands were populated by pelicans, repairing there annually for the strange, sidling wing-dances that attend their mating. Blue herons nested in the tulares; they could be seen trailing their long dangly legs for hours above the shallows. Indians paddled in their frail balsas, built of papery, dry reeds, down intricate water-lanes in which white men venturing, lost themselves and were mazed to madness. Malaria of a surpassing virulence rode up and down that country on the "tule fogs." Even yet it is the dread of the cities of the plain to find themselves beleaguered by the thick, ghost-white mists that at long intervals roll along the ground, retaking the ancient marshes.

Into this potential opulence the cattleman precipitated himself. He bought – it is more exact to say he acquired – vast acreage of Spanish grants; along the rim of the Coast Ranges, territory equal to principalities was given over to long-horned, lean herds. All about the old beach-line of the San Joaquin may still be seen the remnant of the cattle ranches, low formless houses with purlieus of pomegranate and pampas grass and black figs, and the high, stockaded, acrid-smelling corrals, to mark the receding waves of the cattle industry. On the Sierra side the guttered mesas, the hoof-worn foothills advertise the devastation of the wandering flocks. Early in the 'sixties these appeared, little, long-armed French and Basques, with hungry hordes of sheep at their heels, pasturing on the public lands. They ate into the roots of the lush grass and left the quick rains to cut the soil. The wool in the hand was always worth the next season's feed to the sheep-herder.

Never was a land so planned for the uses of man, its shielding mountains, its deep alluvial terraces sloping gently to the sun. Men read it in the hieroglyphic the glistening waters spelled between the dark patches of the tulares, but it took some experimenting to read the message aright.

After the cattle and the flocks came the wheat. Up from the meeting waters the land billowed with grain. Owners buckled the ploughs together and drove them with engines by tens and twenties across the thousand-acre fields. But men and engines, they were alike driven by the drouth. In wet years the wheat rancher rode to view his shoulder-high harvest, but when the rains, going high and wide over the valley to break along the saw-teeth of the Sierras, left the wheat unwatered, the same thing happened to the crops that had happened to the cattle and the sheep. And at last, amid the rotting carcases and the shrivelled acres, the message came clear – not the land, but the water. So they shut up the rivers in the cañons and the day of the orchardist began.

Geographically it begins at Bakersfield, below the gap where the Kern comes down from the giant sequoias and is constrained to the wide, willow-planted canals, governed by head-gates and weirs. Such waters as find again their ancient levels, do so by way of the loose sandy soil through which they are filtered in vineyard and orchard. The tulares have been turned under; the elk are strictly preserved in the hope that enough of them will breed to serve the purposes of curiosity. The antelope bands that once flashed their white rumps from bench to bench of the tawny mesas were reduced, the last time I saw them, to a scant half-score roving the Tejon under the watchful eye of the superintendent. But with all this change, nowhere as at this diminished end, does one gather such an impression of the variety, the imperial extent of the San Joaquin. For at Bakersfield is one of the world's largest petroleum fields. The gaunt derricks rear along the unwatered hills like half-formed prehistoric creatures come up out of the ground to see what men are about. Reservoirs, fed with the stinking juices of a time decayed, squat along the barrancas, considering with a slow leech-like intelligence the tank cars in the form of a Gargantuan joint-worm of the same period that produced the derricks, as they clank between the oil-fields and the town. One of the largest oil-fields in the world – and yet the turn of the road drops it out of sight in the valley's immensity!

Bakersfield is a heaven of roses. Doubtless there are other things by which the inhabitants would be glad to have it remembered, but this is the item that the traveller in the season carries away with him. Roses do not die there, they fall apart of their own sweetness, wafts of which envelop the town for miles out on the highway. After nightfall, when each particular attar distils upon the quiescent air, the townspeople walk abroad in the streets and the moon comes up full-orbed across the Temblors at about the level of the clock-tower. Overhead and beyond it the sky retains a deep velvety blueness until long past midnight. Traces of colour can be seen sometimes in the zenith when the glimmer along the knife-edge of the Sierras announces the dawn.

North of Bakersfield, as the valley widens, the Coast Range fades to a mere shadow mountain, the peaks of Kaweah stand out above the banded haze, angel-white like the ranked Host. As the road swings in to the Sierra outposts, broad-headed oaks begin to appear; it skirts the foot of the great Sierra fault close enough for the landscape to borrow something from the dark, impending pines. But for the most part what the observer has to consider is soil and water and the miraculous product of these two. One must learn to think of the land in terms of human achievement.

North from the delta of Kern River lies a hundred miles of country scarcely disputed with the flocks, far-called and few, which still at the set time of the year forgather in green swales behind the town for the annual shearing, for the herders to play hand-ball at Noriegas', to grow riotously claret drunk and render an evanescent foreign touch to the brisk modern community. And every foot of that hundred miles is rife with the seeds of life, awaiting the touch of the impregnating water. One holds to that conviction as to a friendly assuring hand. In the presence of that vast plain, palpitating with the heat, the sluggish, untamed water lolling in the midst of it, the white-fanged Sierra combing the cloudless blue, beauty becomes a poor word: appreciation is shipwrecked and cast away. With relief one hails the beginning of a stripe, dark green like a scarf, scalloping the foothills – the citrus belt. From Portersville, Lindsay, Exeter it runs north past the meeting of the waters into the valley of the Sacramento, and for quality and early fruiting sets the figure of the world market. As if its waters had some special virtue, wherever a river is poured out upon the plain some particular crop is favoured. About Fresno it is raisins, at Madera port wine, sherry, and mild muscatel. The Merced, which takes its rise in the valley of Yosemite, is partial to melons and figs. But everywhere are prunes, peaches, apricots, almonds, sugar-beets, alfalfa, unmeasurable acreage of barley, beans, and asparagus. Anything is impressive if the scale be large enough, even a field of onions. Here the league-long rows are as terrible as an army.

Up and down this empire belt proceed two great companies, the hordes of "fruit-hands" and the army of the bees, following its successive waves of fruit and bloom. Gangs of pruners, pickers, and packers are shifted and shunted as the crop demands. Interesting economic experiments transact themselves under the worried producer's eye; alien race contending with alien race. The jarring interests of men have by no means worked out the absolute solution, but the bees have long ago settled their business. They kill the drones and gather the honey for the gods who kindly provide them with hives – the more fortunate perhaps in knowing what their particular gods require.

Wherever along the belt the rivers fail, the pumps take up the work; strenuous little Davids contending against the Goliaths of drouth. They can be heard chugging away like the active pulse of the vineyards, completing the ribbon of greenness that spans from ridge to ridge of the down-plunging hills.

And then one must take account of the cities of the plain! Twenty-five years ago they fringed the Sierra base, mere feeders to the mines, the cattle ranches, the sheep country. They had the manners of the frontier and the decaying, tawdry vices that filtered down from San Francisco, sluiced out by intermittent spasms of reform. They were "wide open." Hairy little herders with jabbering tongues knifed one another in the shearing season, vaqueros "shot up the town" occasionally; it is still within memory that prominent citizen "packed a gun" for prominent citizen. Twenty years ago the last, most southerly, of the chain of settlements was a very cesspool of the iniquities driven to a last stand by the influx of home-seekers. I who went through the years of change with it could tell tales if I would – but, thank Heaven, nobody would believe them! Now in those old places of unsavoury renown rise handsome "business blocks," the true mark of cities. Homes heaped with roses spread on either side of miles of palm-fringed boulevard. Over it all flows the clear, inspiring current of Sierra-cooled air, sliding down from the ranked peaks that, whitened from flank to flank by perpetual snows, hover like phalanxes of protecting wings.

Into the very thick of the cities drop down from the high Sierras trails to all its places of delight, the sequoia groves, King's River cañon, and all the lordly peaks about Mt. Whitney and Yosemite; and setting hillward from San Francisco the old Stockton-Sonora road along which surged the undisciplined rout of the gold-seekers of 'forty-nine. It leads, this earliest of valley highways, across the basin of the Stanislaus, past places made famous by the red-shirted, lusty miners, the sleek-coated gamblers of Bret Harte. It passes the twenty-eight Mile House where Jack Hamlin ran a poker game, and many a scene rendered memorable by the gay ladies of Poker Flat. It reaches, by way of a deep-rutted, ancient track, choked with the characteristic red dust of the country, Table Mountain, the home of Truthful James. Table Mountain, having consideration for the near-by Sierras, is a hill merely, with a flat deposit of malpais, the "black rock" of regions far north and east. Beyond Sonora lie the old placer "diggings," every foot of which has been combed and sifted for gold. The bones of the earth are laid bare; all the masking clay, tossed and tumbled, clogged with rusty pipes and decaying sluices, lies in heaps and depressions where the gold-seekers cast it. The sense of violation is heightened by the hue of the soil, redder than the hills of Devon, redder than a red heifer – but the river furnishes the more descriptive figure, the martyr hue of the Sacrament. In the flood season it carries the tint of its ensanguined clays far down into the bay's blueness.

The remnant of that riotous life, – the abandoned cabins, the towns falling into dissolution, – like the remaining specimens of the fir and redwood forests cut off to timber the Mother Lode, is left standing by unfitness. The best of it is a little nugget of remembrance of Francis Bret Harte and Mark Twain.

It was at Angels in the foothills of Calaveras that Twain, to his everlasting fame, was so impressed with the performance of the Jumping Frog. But life at Angels and all up and down that placer country is as heavy with desuetude as the frog was after the bar-keeper had fed him with buckshot. As well try to get a draught of that old time as a drink at any of the dismantled bars, high, ornate, black walnut affairs across which, in dust and nuggets, passed and repassed probably as much gold as would serve to buy the orange belt of the San Joaquin – and for a figure of magnificence you would find nothing more acceptable to its inhabitants.

Much of the history of that country is written in the names. Here the soft Spanish locutions give place to harsher, but not less descriptive, Americanisms – Jimtown, Jackass Hill, Squaw Creek; the cañons become "gulches," the mesas "flats." Later both of these were overlaid by – villes and – tons, the plain rural names of Anglo-Saxon derivation, Coulterville, Farmington, Turlock. They smell of orchards. Prosperity is coming back on the surface of the fruitful waters, but the redwood forests have not come back. Centuries, nothing less, are required for the building of one of these towers of greenness, and it is barely forty years since all that district was one roaring blast of mining life, rioting, jostling, snatching each from each. In the language of the country, the Italian truck gardeners will "beat them to it." They have smoothed over the old "slickens" and comforted the land with crops.

As one travels north, the bulk of the Sierra lessens, the pines climb higher, the oaks march well down into the middle valley to catch the wet coast winds, the character of the plantations change, there are more grain fields, more neat little farms. Finally the old Overland emigrant trail climbs down from Donner Lake and Emigrant Gap, and you find yourself deep in the Valley of the Sacramento.

By an air-line from the meeting of the waters, its geographical frontier is passed in the neighbourhood of Sonora; perhaps the bridge over the Mokelumne is a better indicator, since that river joins the San Joaquin at the estuary, but it is not until the Overland road is crossed that the character of the country definitely betrays the upper valley.

Ascending the river, the works of man are less and less, the forest and the mountains more. The rapid rise of the wooded slopes keeps the Sacramento troublous. Tributaries, not large but swift and of tremendous volume, pour into it. Occasionally from dark cañons is heard the steady pound of the quartz mill, working some ancient lead, or a smelter blocks out a whole forested slope with its poisonous exhalations; but for the most part the northern valley is given over to brooding quiet, to unending green, and streams as swift as adders.

In Mendocino county, on the coast side, the Range begins to lift toward the snow-line; on the Sierra side the alpine crest shears away. From time to time the "logging" industry cuts a wide track down the redwood forest. One hears above the singing rivers, the clucking of the donkey-engine or the rip of a mill still going in the midst of its self-created, sawdust desert. The glutting of the lumber region has been accomplished as wastefully, as violently, as the search for gold. All up the valley tall prophets of the rain have been butchered to make a lumberman's fat purse. But, link by link, the forestry bureau is closing in the line of the reserves against the lumber "kings," the Ahabs of a grasping time.

The hills fall into a certain order, serried rank on rank. Deciduous growth of the lower slopes gives way to redwoods and Shasta fir. Miles upon miles of them stand so thick that when one dies it does not fall but remains erect in the arms of its brothers. Great columnar boles rise out of the river-basins, soaring high over what, except for their dwarfing proportions, would be a considerable grove of graceful oak and bay and glistening, magnolia-leafed, crimson-shafted madroño. Over these the redwoods rise, as over the heads of worshippers the clustered columns of Milan seek the dome. High up the tops are caught in a froth of pale-green foliage through which the sunlight filters blue. This characteristic refraction from their yellowish, inch-long needles dwells about the redwood as an aura, and far on the horizon distinguishes their ranks from the hill-slopes masked with pines. So, blue ridge on ridge, they advance on the imperious height of Shasta.

Shasta is a brother of Fuji and Tacoma, one of those solitary crater peaks whose whiteness is the honourable age of fiery youth, a good mountain dead and gone to heaven. Do not go up on it; you will see a great deal more of what you have seen, wooded hills on hills and perhaps the sapphire belt of the sea, the glitter of lovely, sail-less lakes, but you will not understand it any better, for Shasta has no more to do with the abutting ranges than a great genius with the stock which produced him. This is a prophet among mountains, a vent from the burning heart of creation. One is not surprised to learn that the Indians hereabout count their descent from the Spirit of Shasta and the Grizzly Bear. That dark belt of forest circling the mountain's base looks to be the proper haunt for him, the lumbering, little-eyed embodiment of brute creation. It is well to think of those two things together, the rip of those mighty claws with a ton or two of brute bulk behind them, and the awful witness towering to the blue, and suffer the soul-satisfying fear that lies in wait for man in the great places of the earth. All our modern fears are mean, fears of the common opinion and the bill collector. Shasta will have done its best for you if it enables you to quake in the very marrow of consciousness.