Across The Plains

R >> Robert Louis Stevenson >> Across The Plains

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14

From Toano we travelled all day through deserts of alkali and sand,
horrible to man, and bare sage-brush country that seemed little
kindlier, and came by supper-time to Elko. As we were standing,
after our manner, outside the station, I saw two men whip suddenly
from underneath the cars, and take to their heels across country.
They were tramps, it appeared, who had been riding on the beams
since eleven of the night before; and several of my fellow-
passengers had already seen and conversed with them while we broke
our fast at Toano. These land stowaways play a great part over
here in America, and I should have liked dearly to become
acquainted with them.

At Elko an odd circumstance befell me. I was coming out from
supper, when I was stopped by a small, stout, ruddy man, followed
by two others taller and ruddier than himself.

"Excuse me, sir," he said, "but do you happen to be going on?"

I said I was, whereupon he said he hoped to persuade me to desist
from that intention. He had a situation to offer me, and if we
could come to terms, why, good and well. "You see," he continued,
"I'm running a theatre here, and we're a little short in the
orchestra. You're a musician, I guess?"

I assured him that, beyond a rudimentary acquaintance with "Auld
Lang Syne" and "The Wearing of the Green," I had no pretension
whatever to that style. He seemed much put out of countenance; and
one of his taller companions asked him, on the nail, for five
dollars.

"You see, sir," added the latter to me, "he bet you were a
musician; I bet you weren't. No offence, I hope?"

"None whatever," I said, and the two withdrew to the bar, where I
presume the debt was liquidated.

This little adventure woke bright hopes in my fellow-travellers,
who thought they had now come to a country where situations went a-
begging. But I am not so sure that the offer was in good faith.
Indeed, I am more than half persuaded it was but a feeler to decide
the bet.

Of all the next day I will tell you nothing, for the best of all
reasons, that I remember no more than that we continued through
desolate and desert scenes, fiery hot and deadly weary. But some
time after I had fallen asleep that night, I was awakened by one of
my companions. It was in vain that I resisted. A fire of
enthusiasm and whisky burned in his eyes; and he declared we were
in a new country, and I must come forth upon the platform and see
with my own eyes. The train was then, in its patient way, standing
halted in a by-track. It was a clear, moonlit night; but the
valley was too narrow to admit the moonshine direct, and only a
diffused glimmer whitened the tall rocks and relieved the blackness
of the pines. A hoarse clamour filled the air; it was the
continuous plunge of a cascade somewhere near at hand among the
mountains. The air struck chill, but tasted good and vigorous in
the nostrils - a fine, dry, old mountain atmosphere. I was dead
sleepy, but I returned to roost with a grateful mountain feeling at
my heart.

When I awoke next morning, I was puzzled for a while to know if it
were day or night, for the illumination was unusual. I sat up at
last, and found we were grading slowly downward through a long
snowshed; and suddenly we shot into an open; and before we were
swallowed into the next length of wooden tunnel, I had one glimpse
of a huge pine-forested ravine upon my left, a foaming river, and a
sky already coloured with the fires of dawn. I am usually very
calm over the displays of nature; but you will scarce believe how
my heart leaped at this. It was like meeting one's wife. I had
come home again - home from unsightly deserts to the green and
habitable corners of the earth. Every spire of pine along the
hill-top, every trouty pool along that mountain river, was more
dear to me than a blood relation. Few people have praised God more
happily than I did. And thenceforward, down by Blue Canon, Alta,
Dutch Flat, and all the old mining camps, through a sea of mountain
forests, dropping thousands of feet toward the far sea-level as we
went, not I only, but all the passengers on board, threw off their
sense of dirt and heat and weariness, and bawled like schoolboys,
and thronged with shining eyes upon the platform and became new
creatures within and without. The sun no longer oppressed us with
heat, it only shone laughingly along the mountain-side, until we
were fain to laugh ourselves for glee. At every turn we could see
farther into the land and our own happy futures. At every town the
cocks were tossing their clear notes into the golden air, and
crowing for the new day and the new country. For this was indeed
our destination; this was "the good country" we had been going to
so long.

By afternoon we were at Sacramento, the city of gardens in a plain
of corn; and the next day before the dawn we were lying to upon the
Oakland side of San Francisco Bay. The day was breaking as we
crossed the ferry; the fog was rising over the citied hills of San
Francisco; the bay was perfect - not a ripple, scarce a stain, upon
its blue expanse; everything was waiting, breathless, for the sun.
A spot of cloudy gold lit first upon the head of Tamalpais, and
then widened downward on its shapely shoulder; the air seemed to
awaken, and began to sparkle; and suddenly

"The tall hills Titan discovered,"

and the city of San Francisco, and the bay of gold and corn, were
lit from end to end with summer daylight.

[1879.]

CHAPTER II - THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL

THE WOODS AND THE PACIFIC

THE Bay of Monterey has been compared by no less a person than
General Sherman to a bent fishing-hook; and the comparison, if less
important than the march through Georgia, still shows the eye of a
soldier for topography. Santa Cruz sits exposed at the shank; the
mouth of the Salinas river is at the middle of the bend; and
Monterey itself is cosily ensconced beside the barb. Thus the
ancient capital of California faces across the bay, while the
Pacific Ocean, though hidden by low hills and forest, bombards her
left flank and rear with never-dying surf. In front of the town,
the long line of sea-beach trends north and north-west, and then
westward to enclose the bay. The waves which lap so quietly about
the jetties of Monterey grow louder and larger in the distance; you
can see the breakers leaping high and white by day; at night, the
outline of the shore is traced in transparent silver by the
moonlight and the flying foam; and from all round, even in quiet
weather, the distant, thrilling roar of the Pacific hangs over the
coast and the adjacent country like smoke above a battle.

These long beaches are enticing to the idle man. It would be hard
to find a walk more solitary and at the same time more exciting to
the mind. Crowds of ducks and sea-gulls hover over the sea.
Sandpipers trot in and out by troops after the retiring waves,
trilling together in a chorus of infinitesimal song. Strange sea-
tangles, new to the European eye, the bones of whales, or sometimes
a whole whale's carcase, white with carrion-gulls and poisoning the
wind, lie scattered here and there along the sands. The waves come
in slowly, vast and green, curve their translucent necks, and burst
with a surprising uproar, that runs, waxing and waning, up and down
the long key-board of the beach. The foam of these great ruins
mounts in an instant to the ridge of the sand glacis, swiftly
fleets back again, and is met and buried by the next breaker. The
interest is perpetually fresh. On no other coast that I know shall
you enjoy, in calm, sunny weather, such a spectacle of Ocean's
greatness, such beauty of changing colour, or such degrees of
thunder in the sound. The very air is more than usually salt by
this Homeric deep.

Inshore, a tract of sand-hills borders on the beach. Here and
there a lagoon, more or less brackish, attracts the birds and
hunters. A rough, undergrowth partially conceals the sand. The
crouching, hardy live-oaks flourish singly or in thickets - the
kind of wood for murderers to crawl among - and here and there the
skirts of the forest extend downward from the hills with a floor of
turf and long aisles of pine-trees hung with Spaniard's Beard.
Through this quaint desert the railway cars drew near to Monterey
from the junction at Salinas City - though that and so many other
things are now for ever altered - and it was from here that you had
the first view of the old township lying in the sands, its white
windmills bickering in the chill, perpetual wind, and the first
fogs of the evening drawing drearily around it from the sea.

The one common note of all this country is the haunting presence of
the ocean. A great faint sound of breakers follows you high up
into the inland canons; the roar of water dwells in the clean,
empty rooms of Monterey as in a shell upon the chimney; go where
you will, you have but to pause and listen to hear the voice of the
Pacific. You pass out of the town to the south-west, and mount the
hill among pine-woods. Glade, thicket, and grove surround you.
You follow winding sandy tracks that lead nowhither. You see a
deer; a multitude of quail arises. But the sound of the sea still
follows you as you advance, like that of wind among the trees, only
harsher and stranger to the ear; and when at length you gain the
summit, out breaks on every hand and with freshened vigour that
same unending, distant, whispering rumble of the ocean; for now you
are on the top of Monterey peninsula, and the noise no longer only
mounts to you from behind along the beach towards Santa Cruz, but
from your right also, round by Chinatown and Pinos lighthouse, and
from down before you to the mouth of the Carmello river. The whole
woodland is begirt with thundering surges. The silence that
immediately surrounds you where you stand is not so much broken as
it is haunted by this distant, circling rumour. It sets your
senses upon edge; you strain your attention; you are clearly and
unusually conscious of small sounds near at hand; you walk
listening like an Indian hunter; and that voice of the Pacific is a
sort of disquieting company to you in your walk.

When once I was in these woods I found it difficult to turn
homeward. All woods lure a rambler onward; but in those of
Monterey it was the surf that particularly invited me to prolong my
walks. I would push straight for the shore where I thought it to
be nearest. Indeed, there was scarce a direction that would not,
sooner or later, have brought me forth on the Pacific. The
emptiness of the woods gave me a sense of freedom and discovery in
these excursions. I never in all my visits met but one man. He
was a Mexican, very dark of hue, but smiling and fat, and he
carried an axe, though his true business at that moment was to seek
for straying cattle. I asked him what o'clock it was, but he
seemed neither to know nor care; and when he in his turn asked me
for news of his cattle, I showed myself equally indifferent. We
stood and smiled upon each other for a few seconds, and then turned
without a word and took our several ways across the forest.

One day - I shall never forget it - I had taken a trail that was
new to me. After a while the woods began to open, the sea to sound
nearer hand. I came upon a road, and, to my surprise, a stile. A
step or two farther, and, without leaving the woods, I found myself
among trim houses. I walked through street after street, parallel
and at right angles, paved with sward and dotted with trees, but
still undeniable streets, and each with its name posted at the
corner, as in a real town. Facing down the main thoroughfare -
"Central Avenue," as it was ticketed - I saw an open-air temple,
with benches and sounding-board, as though for an orchestra. The
houses were all tightly shuttered; there was no smoke, no sound but
of the waves, no moving thing. I have never been in any place that
seemed so dreamlike. Pompeii is all in a bustle with visitors, and
its antiquity and strangeness deceive the imagination; but this
town had plainly not been built above a year or two, and perhaps
had been deserted overnight. Indeed, it was not so much like a
deserted town as like a scene upon the stage by daylight, and with
no one on the boards. The barking of a dog led me at last to the
only house still occupied, where a Scotch pastor and his wife pass
the winter alone in this empty theatre. The place was "The Pacific
Camp Grounds, the Christian Seaside Resort." Thither, in the warm
season, crowds come to enjoy a life of teetotalism, religion, and
flirtation, which I am willing to think blameless and agreeable.
The neighbourhood at least is well selected. The Pacific booms in
front. Westward is Point Pinos, with the lighthouse in a
wilderness of sand, where you will find the lightkeeper playing the
piano, making models and bows and arrows, studying dawn and sunrise
in amateur oil-painting, and with a dozen other elegant pursuits
and interests to surprise his brave, old-country rivals. To the
east, and still nearer, you will come upon a space of open down, a
hamlet, a haven among rocks, a world of surge and screaming sea-
gulls. Such scenes are very similar in different climates; they
appear homely to the eyes of all; to me this was like a dozen spots
in Scotland. And yet the boats that ride in the haven are of
strange outlandish design; and, if you walk into the hamlet, you
will behold costumes and faces and hear a tongue that are
unfamiliar to the memory. The joss-stick burns, the opium pipe is
smoked, the floors are strewn with slips of coloured paper -
prayers, you would say, that had somehow missed their destination -
and a man guiding his upright pencil from right to left across the
sheet, writes home the news of Monterey to the Celestial Empire.

The woods and the Pacific rule between them the climate of this
seaboard region. On the streets of Monterey, when the air does not
smell salt from the one, it will be blowing perfumed from the
resinous tree-tops of the other. For days together a hot, dry air
will overhang the town, close as from an oven, yet healthful and
aromatic in the nostrils. The cause is not far to seek, for the
woods are afire, and the hot wind is blowing from the hills. These
fires are one of the great dangers of California. I have seen from
Monterey as many as three at the same time, by day a cloud of
smoke, by night a red coal of conflagration in the distance. A
little thing will start them, and, if the wind be favourable, they
gallop over miles of country faster than a horse. The inhabitants
must turn out and work like demons, for it is not only the pleasant
groves that are destroyed; the climate and the soil are equally at
stake, and these fires prevent the rains of the next winter and dry
up perennial fountains. California has been a land of promise in
its time, like Palestine; but if the woods continue so swiftly to
perish, it may become, like Palestine, a land of desolation.

To visit the woods while they are languidly burning is a strange
piece of experience. The fire passes through the underbrush at a
run. Every here and there a tree flares up instantaneously from
root to summit, scattering tufts of flame, and is quenched, it
seems, as quickly. But this last is only in semblance. For after
this first squib-like conflagration of the dry moss and twigs,
there remains behind a deep-rooted and consuming fire in the very
entrails of the tree. The resin of the pitch-pine is principally
condensed at the base of the bole and in the spreading roots.
Thus, after the light, showy, skirmishing flames, which are only as
the match to the explosion, have already scampered down the wind
into the distance, the true harm is but beginning for this giant of
the woods. You may approach the tree from one side, and see it
scorched indeed from top to bottom, but apparently survivor of the
peril. Make the circuit, and there, on the other side of the
column, is a clear mass of living coal, spreading like an ulcer;
while underground, to their most extended fibre, the roots are
being eaten out by fire, and the smoke is rising through the
fissures to the surface. A little while, and, without a nod of
warning, the huge pine-tree snaps off short across the ground and
falls prostrate with a crash. Meanwhile the fire continues its
silent business; the roots are reduced to a fine ash; and long
afterwards, if you pass by, you will find the earth pierced with
radiating galleries, and preserving the design of all these
subterranean spurs, as though it were the mould for a new tree
instead of the print of an old one. These pitch-pines of Monterey
are, with the single exception of the Monterey cypress, the most
fantastic of forest trees. No words can give an idea of the
contortion of their growth; they might figure without change in a
circle of the nether hell as Dante pictured it; and at the rate at
which trees grow, and at which forest fires spring up and gallop
through the hills of California, we may look forward to a time when
there will not be one of them left standing in that land of their
nativity. At least they have not so much to fear from the axe, but
perish by what may be called a natural although a violent death;
while it is man in his short-sighted greed that robs the country of
the nobler redwood. Yet a little while and perhaps all the hills
of seaboard California may be as bald as Tamalpais.

I have an interest of my own in these forest fires, for I came so
near to lynching on one occasion, that a braver man might have
retained a thrill from the experience. I wished to be certain
whether it was the moss, that quaint funereal ornament of
Californian forests, which blazed up so rapidly when the flame
first touched the tree. I suppose I must have been under the
influence of Satan, for instead of plucking off a piece for my
experiment what should I do but walk up to a great pine-tree in a
portion of the wood which had escaped so much as scorching, strike
a match, and apply the flame gingerly to one of the tassels. The
tree went off simply like a rocket; in three seconds it was a
roaring pillar of fire. Close by I could hear the shouts of those
who were at work combating the original conflagration. I could see
the waggon that had brought them tied to a live oak in a piece of
open; I could even catch the flash of an axe as it swung up through
the underwood into the sunlight. Had any one observed the result
of my experiment my neck was literally not worth a pinch of snuff;
after a few minutes of passionate expostulation I should have been
run up to convenient bough.

To die for faction is a common evil;
But to be hanged for nonsense is the devil.

I have run repeatedly, but never as I ran that day. At night I
went out of town, and there was my own particular fire, quite
distinct from the other, and burning as I thought with even greater
vigour.

But it is the Pacific that exercises the most direct and obvious
power upon the climate. At sunset, for months together, vast, wet,
melancholy fogs arise and come shoreward from the ocean. From the
hill-top above Monterey the scene is often noble, although it is
always sad. The upper air is still bright with sunlight; a glow
still rests upon the Gabelano Peak; but the fogs are in possession
of the lower levels; they crawl in scarves among the sandhills;
they float, a little higher, in clouds of a gigantic size and often
of a wild configuration; to the south, where they have struck the
seaward shoulder of the mountains of Santa Lucia, they double back
and spire up skyward like smoke. Where their shadow touches,
colour dies out of the world. The air grows chill and deadly as
they advance. The trade-wind freshens, the trees begin to sigh,
and all the windmills in Monterey are whirling and creaking and
filling their cisterns with the brackish water of the sands. It
takes but a little while till the invasion is complete. The sea,
in its lighter order, has submerged the earth. Monterey is
curtained in for the night in thick, wet, salt, and frigid clouds,
so to remain till day returns; and before the sun's rays they
slowly disperse and retreat in broken squadrons to the bosom of the
sea. And yet often when the fog is thickest and most chill, a few
steps out of the town and up the slope, the night will be dry and
warm and full of inland perfume.

MEXICANS, AMERICANS, AND INDIANS

The history of Monterey has yet to be written. Founded by Catholic
missionaries, a place of wise beneficence to Indians, a place of
arms, a Mexican capital continually wrested by one faction from
another, an American capital when the first House of
Representatives held its deliberations, and then falling lower and
lower from the capital of the State to the capital of a county, and
from that again, by the loss of its charter and town lands, to a
mere bankrupt village, its rise and decline is typical of that of
all Mexican institutions and even Mexican families in California.

Nothing is stranger in that strange State than the rapidity with
which the soil has changed-hands. The Mexicans, you may say, are
all poor and landless, like their former capital; and yet both it
and they hold themselves apart and preserve their ancient customs
and something of their ancient air.

The town, when I was there, was a place of two or three streets,
economically paved with sea-sand, and two or three lanes, which
were watercourses in the rainy season, and were, at all times, rent
up by fissures four or five feet deep. There were no street
lights. Short sections of wooden sidewalk only added to the
dangers of the night, for they were often high above the level of
the roadway, and no one could tell where they would be likely to
begin or end. The houses were, for the most part, built of unbaked
adobe brick, many of them old for so new a country, some of very
elegant proportions, with low, spacious, shapely rooms, and walls
so thick that the heat of summer never dried them to the heart. At
the approach of the rainy season a deathly chill and a graveyard
smell began to hang about the lower floors; and diseases of the
chest are common and fatal among house-keeping people of either
sex.

There was no activity but in and around the saloons, where people
sat almost all day long playing cards. The smallest excursion was
made on horseback. You would scarcely ever see the main street
without a horse or two tied to posts, and making a fine figure with
their Mexican housings. It struck me oddly to come across some of
the CORNHILL illustrations to Mr. Blackmore's EREMA, and see all
the characters astride on English saddles. As a matter of fact, an
English saddle is a rarity even in San Francisco, and, you may say,
a thing unknown in all the rest of California. In a place so
exclusively Mexican as Monterey, you saw not only Mexican saddles
but true Vaquero riding - men always at the hand-gallop up hill and
down dale, and round the sharpest corner, urging their horses with
cries and gesticulations and cruel rotatory spurs, checking them
dead with a touch, or wheeling them right-about-face in a square
yard. The type of face and character of bearing are surprisingly
un-American. The first ranged from something like the pure
Spanish, to something, in its sad fixity, not unlike the pure
Indian, although I do not suppose there was one pure blood of
either race in all the country. As for the second, it was a matter
of perpetual surprise to find, in that world of absolutely
mannerless Americans, a people full of deportment, solemnly
courteous, and doing all things with grace and decorum. In dress
they ran to colour and bright sashes. Not even the most
Americanised could always resist the temptation to stick a red rose
into his hat-band. Not even the most Americanised would descend to
wear the vile dress hat of civilisation. Spanish was the language
of the streets. It was difficult to get along without a word or
two of that language for an occasion. The only communications in
which the population joined were with a view to amusement. A
weekly public ball took place with great etiquette, in addition to
the numerous fandangoes in private houses. There was a really fair
amateur brass band. Night after night serenaders would be going
about the street, sometimes in a company and with several
instruments and voice together, sometimes severally, each guitar
before a different window. It was a strange thing to lie awake in
nineteenth-century America, and hear the guitar accompany, and one
of these old, heart-breaking Spanish love-songs mount into the
night air, perhaps in a deep baritone, perhaps in that high-
pitched, pathetic, womanish alto which is so common among Mexican
men, and which strikes on the unaccustomed ear as something not
entirely human but altogether sad.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14