"Sage-brush country" is one of those local terms that stand for a type of landscape as distinctive as the moors of England and the campagna of Italy. It means first of all, open country, great space of sky, what the inhabitants of it call "eye-reach," treeless except for a few cotton-woods and willows along the sink of intermittent streams, and stippled with low shrubs of artemesia. This is the true "sage-brush," though it is no sage, the sacred bush of Diana, Artemisia tridentata. It may grow in favoured districts man-high, but ordinarily not more than two or three feet in the arid regions which it haunts. Other social shrubs will be found pre-empting miles of the territory to which the artemesia gives its name, coleogeny, pursia, dalia, "creosote," but none other gives it the distinctive feature, the web of pale, silky sage-green against the sun-burned sand.
Other items of the sage-brush landscape are so constant that they are immediately suggested by it: mountains hanging on the horizon in opalescent haze, low flowing lines of hills overlaid by old lava-flows, the "black rock" simulating cloud shadows on the distant ranges, dry red cones of ancient volcanic ash, and great flat table-topped "buttes" of the painted desert.
White-crested ranges on the one hand and buttes on the other mark the limits of the sage; for where snow-caps are, there are trees, and where the buttes begin the cactus and the palo verde reign.
A sage-brush country is a cattle country primarily; perhaps there may be mines; where there is water to be stored for irrigation there will be towns, but the virtue of the sage is that it grows in lands that man, at least, has found no other use for.
It can thrive on an allowance of water that will support no larger thing than a chipmunk or a lizard, and, growing, feeds the cattle on a thousand hills. Therefore it is indispensable to any picture of the sage-brush country that there should be herds at large in it and vaqueros riding, or far down the bleached valley the dust of a rodeo rising. It is impossible to think of such a land and not think of these things, free life, and air as clear and vibrant with vitality as a bell. I can never think of it myself without seeing, in addition, the vultures making a merry-go-round over Panamint, and up from Coso the creaking line of a twenty-mule team.
The sage-brush country of California begins properly at the foot of the Sierras where the state-line sheers east by south from Lake Tahoe. It covers the high valleys that divide the true Sierra from the older, lesser ranges that keep it company as far south as Olancha. Below Mono Lake, that part of the gold region made immortal by Mark Twain, it gives to the chrome- and ochre-tinted soil its distinguishing characteristic. From the long arm of Death Valley it begins to be encroached upon by the mesquite, and at Indian Wells it is driven close under the lee of the last Sierra. The range of which San Bernardino and San Jacinto are outposts carries the artemisia farther desertward, almost to the Colorado River in fact, and south again about the Salton Sea it holds its own with sahuro and palo verde. Its eastern border, like that of the wild tribes along the Mojave line, is lost in pure desertness. Formerly much of that country from San Bernardino to the sea was native to the sage, and all the southern end of the San Joaquin. But now all this is replaced with orchards, for the artemisia proves nothing so much of the soil on which it grows as that, given a due allowance of water, it is as desirable for other things.
All this country which I have described to you has so recently been sea that the mark of its old beach-line is plainly to be traced along the east Sierra wall. Still the evaporating water leaves vast deposits of salt and alkali, blinking white in the sink of Death Valley. There are lakes there still where the salt crusts over hard and clear like ice, and deep thick puddles of bitter minerals, the lees of that ancient inland ocean. From the top of any of the denuded desert ranges it is possible to trace the winding bays and estuaries, and, with an eye for location, to choose the points at which one may fairly expect to find potsherds, amulets, fire-blackened hearthstones, and the middens of a nameless people who built their primitive towns along its beaches. It must have had much to recommend it in those days before the sage-brush took it, for this inland sea, rather than the more mountainous Pacific shore, was the route taken by the ancient migratory peoples who left their undecipherable signs scored into the rocks from the Aztec country to the Arctic. On isolated igneous rocks near their old encampments, and high on the walls of the box canons, such as might have been tide-rifts, high above any mechanical contrivance of the present-day Indians, the records resist equally the shifts of sea and sand and the efforts of modern science to read them.
Whether the ghosts of the departed peoples ever revisit the ancient beaches, the ghosts of waters haunt there daily. Morning and mid-afternoon the rivers of mirage arise; they well out of the past and are poured trembling on the plain; phantom fogs blow across them, wraiths of trees grow up and are reflected in false streams. Often in very early light there are strange suggestions of——dunes and boulders perhaps? Only no boulders in that country are flat-topped like the houses built in lands of the sun, and no dunes are wall-sided. Mirage, we are told, is but a picture of distant things, mirrored on atmospheric planes, but then maybe a ghost is only a mirage deflected on our atmosphere from worlds outside our ken, and it is always easy in the desert to see things that you cannot possibly believe. Whatever they are, mirages are real to the eye. I mean that they are not to be winked away nor dissipated by contact. I have watched a vaquero ride into one of them and drown to all appearances, or seem to be swimming his horse across its billows, all of him below its surface as completely hidden as by rivers of water. Moreover, mirages tend always to occur under given conditions and in the same places. I recall one of the stations on the old Mojave stage road, which, approached from the north about an hour after sunrise, would instantly duplicate: two houses, two lines of poplars, two high corrals.
Occasionally along the edge of the sage-brush country one may see that surpassing wonder, the moon mirage, poured like quicksilver along the narrow valleys, as if the thirsty land had dreamed of water.
It is odd how this suggestion of sea and river clings to a country where there is nothing harder to come by than good water to drink. For any other purpose it is not to be thought of. After one of those terrible wind storms, the only really incommoding desert weather, it is possible to find great spaces all rippled and lined in water-markings like a sea that has suddenly undergone a magic transformation into sand. The contours of the desert ranges are billowy; they rise out of the plain like the grey-backed breakers of open sea. The valleys between are narrow and trough-like; the shores of them are lined with crawling dunes that, under the steady pressure of wind currents, are for ever sliding up their own peaks and down the other side, changing place without ever once losing the long slope to windward and the abrupt landward fall of waves.
Another item which adds to the suggestion of the illimitable spread of sage-brush country, like the sea, is the way the sparse forests of the mountain-tops appear to be islanded by it. For the sage-brush extends on across the Great Basin, it stretches into Montana and south to Arizona and New Mexico, it works about the lower end of the Rocky Mountains and well into the great central plain. The ranges lie thick in it as ocean swells, as I have said, and stepping from crest to crest has come the fox-tail pine, Pinus flexilis, all the way from Humboldt Mountain to San Jacinto. A sinewy, thinly-branched species, as straight-backed as an Indian, it has little affinity for its noble congeners of the Sierra forests, but keeps to the dry and open ridges, nourished by clouds and by infrequent shallow snows. With it, but at lower levels to which the flexilis will never come, is found frequently the one-leaved piñon pine, the food-crop of the wild tribes. But the piñon is a pushing sort, it establishes itself upon the slightest invitation.
There is a story told in the desert of how this grey, round-headed tree was once a very great capitan, who, in order that his death might be as beneficent to his people as his life had been, was changed into the foodful pine. Whether the legend is true or not, certain it is that if you sit down by a piñon, wherever found, and stay long enough, you will see Indians. They might come in the Spring looking for taboose, or later for willows and grasses for basketry, for seeds of sunflower and chia, to shoot doves by the water-holes or to hunt chuckwallas. A chuckwalla is a lizard, a kind of dragon in miniature, barred black and white, and as offensive to look at as he is harmless, in fact very good eating and not too plentiful. Mojaves, Shoshones, Paiutes, Pimas, all the tribes of the sage-brush country, have this in common, that they live very close to the earth; roots, seeds, reptiles, thick pads of the cholla cactus, even the grass of the field, serve them. They look, indeed, as though they had been made of the earth on the very spot that produced them, of the black rock, the brown sand, and the dark water that collects in polished basins of the wind-denuded ranges.
Very little rain gets past the heaven-raking crest of the Sierra Nevada into the sage-brush country; the most that falls is blown up from the Gulf of California along the draw created by the close, parallel desert ranges. It is precipitated usually under atmospheric conditions that produce violent drops and changes. All that the traveller is likely to find of it is in these rock reservoirs under the run-off of some bare granite cliff, or in the rare, persistent "water-holes" hollowed out by beasts or men, marked in the landscape by one lone tree perhaps, or a clump of shrubby willows. Often there will be no mark at all except the frequency along the trail of skeleton cattle or wild sheep, pointing all in one direction, as they died on their way to the far-between drinking-places. There are districts in this back-door country where evaporation from the body is so rapid that death overtakes the chance prospector even with water in sight or in his canteen across his back. For years a notorious outlaw protected himself in the Death Valley region, by filling in all the springs in a circle about the territory to which he had retreated. Beyond that waterless rim even the law could not penetrate.
And yet how the land repays the slightest moisture! Years when the Kuro-Siwa swings closer to our coast and the winds are friendly, I have seen all that country, from Tehachapi, outside the wall, to San Gorgiono, one sheet of blue and gold. Seeds of a hundred tender annuals lie in the loose sands for years between the shrubby sage, their vitality unimpaired by the delayed resurrection of a chance wet spring. Often I have sifted the sand in my fingers looking for a sign of the life-giving principle which bursts so suddenly into beauty, without finding it. Yet after years in which there is no alteration in the aspect of the country, except the insensible change of the sage tints from grey to green and grey again, the miracle takes place, the blossomy wonder is upon the world.
As a matter of fact, the sage-brush country is by no means the desert that it looks to the casual eye. Besides the social shrubs which have each their own blossom and seed time, even the driest years will afford a few blooms of crimson mallow, and in the shelter of every considerable shrub some dwarfed and delicate phacelia or nemophilia. Even out of dunes which bury its hundred old trunks to the new season's twigs, the mesquite will bear its sweet foodful pods. If you know at what hours to look for it, wild life is never absent, but it is not ordinarily to be found by white men blundering about in broad noon.
It is only when you meet, in the midst of great open valleys wherein there is nothing growing higher than the knees of your horse, and nothing moving bigger than the little horned toad under the cactus bush, bands of Indians well fed, cushiony with fat of mesquite meal and chia, that you understand how little you know of the land in which you move.
There is a Paiute proverb to the effect that no man should attempt the country east of the Sierras until he has learned to sleep in the shade of his arrows. This is a picturesque way of saying that he must be able to reduce his wants to the limit of necessity. Those who have been able to do so, and have trusted the land to repay them, have discovered that the measure is over-full.
A man may not find wealth there, nor too much of food even, but he often finds himself, which is much more important.
INDEX
The illustrations are indexed in italics.
- Alcatraz, 112
- Alviso, 112
- Angels, 138
- Antioch, 112, 119
- Arbolado, 84
- "Arroya," definition of, 30
- Bakersfield, 129, 132, 133
- Berkeley Hills, 108, 114
- Blue Lake, Lake County, 155
- Buena Vista, 122
- Cabrillo, 49, 108
- Cahuenga, 47, 48, 67
- Calaveras, 139
- Camulas, 41
- Cañon in the Sierra Madres, 49
- Carmel, 74, 77, 80, 83
- Carmel River, 76
- Carmel Valley, 78
- Carquinez, 112
- Carquinez Strait, 107, 119
- Castle Crag, Rattlesnake Cañon, 136
- Castro, 66
- Catalina, 49
- Cemetery, The, Santa Barbara Mission, 56
- Cession of California from Mexico, 48
- Clear Lake, Lake County, 134
- "Coasts of Adventure, The," 47-60
- Colorado River, 166
- Contra Costa, 117
- Coronado, 23
- Coronel, Don Antonio, 48
- Corta Madero, 116
- Coso, 165
- Coulterville, 139
- Cypress Point, near Carmel, 75
- Death Valley, 166, 172
- Donner Lake, 142
- Donner Lake, 140
- Drake, Sir Francis, 9, 43, 108
- Eagle Rock, 47
- Emigrant Gap, 140
- Eucalyptus Grove, A, 33
- Exeter, 135
- Faralones, The, 113
- Farmington, 139
- Fort Point, 67
- Francis of Assisi, 10, 108
- Franciscan "Frailes," 9, 12
- Frémont, 66
- Fresno, 135
- Fuca, Juan de, 108
- Glendale, Valley of the San Gabriel, 40
- Golden Gate, 107
- Golden Gate and Black Point, 107
- Gulf of California, 161, 171
- Half Dome, The, Yosemite, 166
- Hamlin, Jack, 137
- Harte, Bret, 137, 138
- Hetch Hetchy Valley, 159
- "High Sierras and the Sage-Brush Country, The" 149-174
- Hôtel Del Monte, 76
- Humboldt Mountain, 170
- Indian Wells, 166
- Inyo Valley, 162
- Jackass Hill, 139
- Jimtown, 139
- Jumping Frog, the, 139
- Kaweah Mountain, 133
- Kaweah River, 129
- Kern River, 129, 132, 134, 155
- King's Mountain, 159
- King's River, 129
- King's River Cañon, 137
- Klamath River, 143
- Kuro-Siwa Current, 49, 172
- Laboratory Point, 68
- Lake Mono, 165
- Lake Tahoe, 165
- Lake Tahoe, 158
- "Land of the Little Duck, The," 107-124
- Laurel Lake, Upper Sacramento, 145
- Lindsay, 135
- Looking down on Monterey and the Bay, 65
- Lopez, Francisco, 47
- Los Angeles, 29, 35
- Los Angeles River, 30
- McCloud River, 139
- Madera, 135
- Maldonado, 108
- Mare Island, 116
- Mendocino Country, 141
- Merced River, 129, 135
- Mill Valley, 113
- Mirror Lake, Yosemite, 129
- Mission Dolores, 108
- Mission Point, 69, 81
- Mission River, 17
- Mission of San Carlos Borromeo, 76, 78
- Mission San Fernando, 47
- Missions, ruins of, 19
- Mokelumne River, 140
- Monterey, 11, 18, 35, 55, 60
- "Monterey, the Port of," 63-84
- Monterey Cypress, 72
- "Mothering Mountains," 27-24
- Mount Oppapago, 160, 162
- Mount Shasta, 5, 143, 150
- Mount Shasta, 161
- Mount Whitney, 6, 137, 150, 159, 162
- Mount Williamson, 159
- Napa, 118
- Noriega's, 134
- Olancha, 165
- "Old Spanish Gardens," 87-103
- Pacific Grove, 75
- Padre Jayme Bravo, 7, 17, 18
- Padre Lausan, 66
- Padre Serra (Junipero Serra), 11, 76, 78
- Paiute Indians, 96
- Pajaro, 54, 93
- Pajaro river, 64
- Pala, 19
- "Palatingwas," 20
- Palo Corona, 80
- Panamint, 165
- Pasadena, 34
- Paso Robles, 56
- Patio, The, Old Spanish Residence, 88
- Pescadero, Monterey Bay, 72
- Pieoras Blancos, 83
- Point Conception, 67
- Point Lobos, 71, 81, 84
- Point of Pines, 67
- Point Pinos, 70, 81
- Point Sur, 70
- Portersville, 135
- Portola, Don Gaspar de, 11, 55, 93, 108
- Redlands, 16
- Redwoods, 131
- "Rio," A, 30
- Riverside, 33, 39
- Sacramento, 112, 123
- Sacramento River, 107, 127, 135, 140
- "Sage-Brush country," meaning of term, 163
- Salinas, 83
- Salinas River, 64
- Salton Sea, 166
- Sausalito, 116
- San Antonio, 57
- "San Antonio," the, 10
- San Bernardino, 7, 33, 39, 149, 166
- San Carlos, 79
- San Clemente, 48
- San Diego, 22, 78
- San Diego, Bay of, 9
- San Diego, looking towards Point Loma, 9
- San Emigdio, 128
- San Fernando, 41, 128
- San Francisco, 67, 107, 108, 110
- San Francisco, Bay of, 112
- San Gabriel, 36
- San Gabriel Valley, 27, 33, 40
- San Gorgiono, 41, 172
- San Gorgiono, Pass of, 6
- San Jacinto, 5, 27, 149, 166, 170
- San Joaquin, 128, 132, 139, 166
- San Joaquin River, 107, 112, 123, 127, 129, 130, 140, 150
- San Joaquin Valley, 162
- San Jose, Señor, 10
- San Juan, 83
- San Juan Bautista, 65, 66
- San Juan Capistrano, 18, 48, 50
- San Luis Rey, 19
- San Pablo, 112
- San Pablo Bay, 116
- San Quentin, 116
- San Raphael, 116, 118
- Santa Barbara, 58
- Santa Catalina, 48
- Santa Clara, 54
- Santa Cruz Coast, 74
- Santa Cruz Mountains, 55, 64
- Santa Cruz Mountains, the Coast Range, 78
- Santa Inez, 48, 58
- Santa Margarita, 56
- Santa Rosa, 48
- Sequoia, origin of name, 155
- Shasta—Snow Clouds, 168
- Sierra Madre, 27, 28, 37, 40, 42, 44, 149
- Sierra Nevada, 128, 163, 171
- Sierra Nevada, origin of name, 149
- Sierras, the, 4
- Solano, 78
- Sonoma, 107, 118, 144
- Sonoma County, 92
- Sonora, 138, 140
- "Sparrow-Hawk's Own, The," 3-23
- Squaw Creek, 139
- Stanislaus River, 137
- Stockton, 123
- Suisun, 112, 119
- Sur, 80, 83
- Sycamores, a Coast Range Cañon, 59
- Table Mountain, 138
- Tall Chaparral, Santa Cruz, 62
- Tamalpias, Mount, 109
- Tamalpias, 110
- Tasajara, 83
- Tehachapi, 128, 150, 172
- Tehipite Valley, 159
- Tejon, 129
- Tejon Pass, 89, 128, 132
- Temblors, The, 128, 133
- "Three Brothers, The," Yosemite—Frontispiece
- Tiburon, 112, 116
- Trinity River, 143
- Truthful James, 138
- Tulare, the, 120
- Tule River, 129
- Tuolumne River, 129
- Turlock, 139
- Twain, Mark, 138, 139, 165
- "Twin Valleys, The," 127-146
- Valley of the Yosemite, 163
- Visalia, 129
- Viscaino, Sebastian, 9, 63, 76, 108
- Waiting for Duck—Los Baños, 120
- Walker's Pass, 150
- Warner's Ranch, 20
- Yerba Buena, 108
- Yosemite Falls, 152
- Yosemite Valley, 135, 137, 157, 159
THE END