Along in January, after the holiday festivities are over, and the youngsters have gone back to school or college, and the Christmas presents have been paid for, Mr. American Business Man and his wife, to the number of many thousands, escape from the inclemency of an Eastern winter by “taking a run out to the coast.” They usually choose one of the southern routes—the trip being prefaced by an animated family discussion as to whether they shall go via the Grand Cañon or New Orleans—getting their first glimpse of the Golden State at San Diego. After taking a shivery dip in the breakers at Coronado so as to be able to write the folks back home that they have gone in bathing in midwinter, they continue their leisurely progress northward by the table-d’hôte route, picking oranges at Riverside, taking the mountain railway up Mount Lowe from Pasadena, stopping off at Santa Barbara to see the mission and the homes of the millionaires at Montecito, playing golf and whirling round the Seventeen Mile Drive at Del Monte, visiting Chinatown, the Cliff House, and the Barbary Coast in San Francisco, and returning to the East in the early spring via Salt Lake City or the “C. P. R.,” having, as they fondly believe, seen pretty much everything in California worth the seeing.

They turn their faces homeward utterly unconscious of the fact that they have only skirted along the fringe of the State; that of the great country at the back, which constitutes the real California, they have seen absolutely nothing. To them Sacramento, Stockton, Merced, Fresno, Bakersfield, Lake Tahoe, the San Joaquin, the Big Trees, the Yosemite, the High Sierras are but names. They do not seem to appreciate, or it may be that they do not care, that the narrow coast zone dedicated to the amusement of the winter tourist is no more typical of California than the Riviera is typical of France. Though it is true that the Californian hinterland has no million-dollar “show places” and no huge hotels with tourists in white shoes and straw hats taking tea upon their terraces, it has other things which are more significant and more worth seeing. The visitor to the back country can see the orchards which supply the breakfast-tables of half the world with fruit and the vineyards which supply the dinner-tables of the other half with grapes and wine and raisins; he can see flocks of sheep so large that the hills on which they are grazing seem to be covered with snow; he can see oil-fields which produce enough petroleum to keep all the lamps in the world alight until the crack of doom. And, if this is not sufficient inducement, he can motor along the foot of the highest mountain range in America, he can visit the most beautiful valley in all the world, he can picnic under the biggest trees in existence. A country of big things: big distances, big mountains, big trees, big ranches, big orchards, big crops, big pay, big problems—that’s the hinterland of California.

Now, that you may the more easily follow me in what I have to say, I will, with your permission, refer you to the map of the regions described in this volume. (See end of book.)

The mountain systems, as you see, form a gigantic basin which comprises about three fifths of the total area of the State. The eastern rim of this basin is formed by the Sierra Nevada and the western rim by the Coast Range, these two coming together at the northern end of the basin in the great mountain wall which separates California from Oregon, while to the south they sweep inward in the form of a gigantic amphitheatre, being joined by a minor range known as the Tehachapis. Reaching Mexicoward is the continuation of the Coast system known as the San Bernardino Range, forming, as it were, a sort of handle to the basin. The only natural entrance to the basin is the Golden Gate, through which the two great river systems—the San Joaquin and Sacramento—reach the sea. Lying between the Coast Range and the Pacific is that narrow strip of pleasure land, with its orange groves, its silver beaches, its great hotels and splendid country houses, which is the beginning and end of California so far as the tourist is concerned. The northern part of the great basin, which is drained by the Sacramento River, is called the Sacramento Valley, while its southern two thirds, whose streams run into the San Joaquin River, is commonly known as “the San Joaquin,” the whole forming the Great Valley of California. “Valley” is, however, a misnomer. One might as fittingly call Mount McKinley a hill, or Lake Superior a pond. It is a plain rather than a valley; a plain upon whose level reaches Belgium would be lost and Holland could be tucked away in the corners. From the rampart of the Sierra Nevada on the east to the wall of the Coast Range on the west the rich brown loam has an average width of half a hundred miles. North and south it extends upward of four hundred miles—as far as from Pittsburg to Chicago. What Rhodesia is to South Africa, what its prairie provinces are to Canada, the Great Valley, with its millions of incredibly fertile acres, level as a floor and checker-boarded with alfalfa, fruit, and vine, is to California—the storehouse of the State.

Before the railway builders came the Great Valley was one of the most important cattle-ranges in the West, and hundreds of thousands of longhorns grazed knee-deep in its lush grass. With the railway came the homesteaders, who, despite the threats of the cattlemen, drove their stakes and built their cabins and started to raise wheat. Then a dry year came, and on top of that another, a heart-breaking succession of them, and the ruined wheat growers sold out to the cattle barons. In such manner grew up the big ranches—holdings ranging all the way from ten thousand to half a million acres or more—a few of which still remain intact. But a drought that will kill wheat will kill cattle, too, and after one terrible year a hundred thousand horned skeletons lay bleaching on the ranges. And so the cattlemen evacuated the valley in their turn and their places were taken by the diggers of ditches. Now the Lord evidently built the Great Valley to encourage irrigation. He filled it with rich, alluvial loam, tilted it ever so slightly toward the centre, brought innumerable streams from the mountains and glaciers down to the edge of the plain, ordered the rain and the blizzard to stay away and the sun to work overtime. All this he did for the Great Valley, and the ditch did the rest—or, rather, the ditch allied to hard work, for without sweat-beaded brows, calloused hands, aching backs, the ditch is worthless. A social as well as an agricultural miracle was performed by the watering of the thirsty land. The great ranches were subdivided into farms and orchards. Settlers came pouring in. Communities of hardy, industrious, energetic folk sprang up everywhere and these grew into villages and the villages became towns and the towns expanded into cities. School bells clanged their insistent summons to the youth of the countryside, church spires pointed their slender fingers toward the sky, highways stretched their length across the plain, and before this onset of civilisation the moral code of the frontier crumbled and gave way. The gun-fighter took French leave, the gambler silently decamped between two days, and in many communities the saloon-keeper tacked a “For Sale” sign on his door and took the north-bound train. Civilisation had come to the Great Valley, not with the dust of hoofs or beat of train, but with the gurgle of water in an irrigating ditch—and it had come to stay.

Of the effect produced by this spreading of the waters we saw many evidences as we fled southward from Sacramento across the oak-studded plain. Throwing wide the throttle, the car leaped forward like a live thing. The oiled road slipped away from our wheels like an unwinding bolt of grey silk ribbon. The grain-fields were wide, the houses few. Constables there were none. Vineyards and orchards, trim rows of vegetables, neatly fenced farms alternated with seas of barley undulating in the wind. Such a country, however prosperous, offers little to detain a motorist, and we went booming southward at a gait that made the telegraph poles resemble the palings in a picket fence. Occasionally a torpedo-shaped electric car, a monstrous thing in a dull, hot red, the faces of its passengers grotesquely framed by the circular port-holes which serve as windows, tore past us with the wail of a lost soul. Whence it came or whither it went was a matter of small moment.

The factory whistles were raucously reminding the workers that it was time to take the covers off their dinner pails when we swung into the plaza of the city whose name perpetuates the memory of the admiral who added California to the Union and drew up before the entrance of the Hotel Stockton. If you should chance to go there, don’t let them persuade you into lunching in the restaurant with its fumed oak wainscotting and the Clydesdale furniture which appears to be inseparable from the mission style of decoration, but insist on having a table set on the roof-garden with its vine-hung pergola and its ramparts of red geraniums. That was what we did, and the meal we had there, high above the city’s bustle, became a white milestone on our highway of memories. Had it not been for the advertisements of chewing-gum and plug tobacco which stared at us from near-by hoardings, I would not have believed that we were in the United States at all, so different was the scene from my preconceived notions of the San Joaquin Valley. We might have been on the terrace of that quaint old hotel—I forget the name of it—that overlooks the Dam in Rotterdam. Stockton, you see, is at the head of navigation on the San Joaquin River, and the hotel stands at the head of one of the canal-like channels which permit of vessels tying up in the very heart of the city, so that from the terrace on its roof you look down on as animated and interesting a water scene as you will find anywhere: pompous, self-important tugs, launches with engines spluttering like angry washerwomen, stern-wheel passenger steamers, little sisters of those upon the Mississippi, and cumbersome, slow-moving barges, their flat decks piled high with bagged or barrelled products of the valley on their way to San Francisco Harbour, there to be transshipped for strange and far-off ports.

As a result of the Powers That Be at Washington having recently had a change of heart in respect to motor-cars entering the Yosemite, every valley town between Stockton and Visalia has announced itself as the one and only “official gateway to the valley,” and has backed up its claims with tons of maps and literature. As a matter of fact, the Department of the Interior has announced that motorists desiring to visit the Yosemite must enter and leave it by the Coulterville road, and this road can be reached from any one of half a dozen valley towns with equal facility. Coming, as we did, from the north, the most convenient route led through Modesto. As a result of the sudden prosperity produced by a modern version of the Miracle of Moses, water having been brought forth where there was no water before by a prophet’s rod in the form of an irrigating ditch, the little town is as up to date as a girl just back from Paris. Its lawns and gardens have been Peter-Hendersonised until they look like the illustrations in a seedsman’s catalogue; the architecture of its schools and public buildings is so faithful an adaptation of the Spanish mission style that they would deceive old Padre Serra himself; and its roads would do credit to the genius of J. MacAdam.

If you will set your travelling clock to awake you at the hour at which the servant-girl gets up to go to early mass you should, even allowing for the five-thousand-foot climb, reach Crocker’s Sierra Resort, which is the nearest stopping place to that entrance of the Yosemite assigned to motorists, before the supper table is cleared off. It is necessary to spend the night at Crocker’s, as the government regulations, which are far more inflexible than the Ten Commandments, permit motorists to enter the valley only between the hours of ten and one. Leaving Crocker’s at a much more respectable hour than we did Modesto, we reached the first military outpost at Merced Big Tree Grove shortly before ten, where a very businesslike young cavalry officer put me through a catechism which made me feel like an immigrant applying for admission at Ellis Island. If your answers to the lieutenant’s questions correspond to those in the back of the book and your car is able to do the tricks required of it—to test the holding power of its brakes you are ordered to take a running start and then throw the brakes on so suddenly that the wheels skid—you are permitted the pleasure of paying five dollars for the privilege of entering the jealously guarded portals. They stamp your permit with the hour and minute at which you leave the big trees, and if you arrive at the next military post, which is nine miles distant, at the foot of the Merced River Cañon, in a single second under an hour and seventeen minutes you are fined so heavily that you won’t enjoy your visit. I remember that we sneered at these regulations as being unnecessary and absurd—but that was before we had seen the Merced Cañon grade. As my chauffeur remarked, it is a real hum-dinger. It is nothing more or less than a narrow shelf chopped out of the face of the cliff.

“I wonder if those soldiers were quite as careful in examining our brakes as they should have been?” anxiously remarked one of my companions, glancing over the side of the car into the dizzy gorge below and then looking hurriedly away again.

“Oh, there are some perfectly lovely wild flowers!” suddenly exclaimed the Lady, who had been choking the life out of the cushions. “If you don’t mind I’ll get out and pick them ... and please don’t wait for me, I’ll walk the rest of the way down. Yes, indeed, I’m very fond of walking.”

It is only fair to warn those who propose to follow in our tire tracks that, entering the Yosemite by automobile, you do not get one of those sudden and overwhelming views which cause the beholder to “O-o-o-oh-h-h-h-h!” and “A-a-a-ah-h-h-h-h!” like the exhaust of a steam-engine. On the contrary, you sneak into the famous valley very unostentatiously indeed, along a winding wood road which might be in New England. Nor are you permitted to tear about the floor of the valley whither you list, for no sooner do you reach the Sentinel Hotel than a khaki-clad trooper steps up and orders you to put your car in the garage and keep it there until you are ready to leave.

The Yosemite is not, properly speaking, a valley. That word suggests a gentle depression with sloping sides, a sort of hollow in the hills, which have been moulded by the fingers of ages into flowing and complaisant lines. The Yosemite is nothing of the sort. It is a great cleft or chasm, hemmed in by rocky walls as steep as the prices at a summer hotel and as smooth as the manners of a confidence man. It is the exact reverse of that formation so characteristic of the Southwest known as a mesa: it is a precipice-walled plain. One might imagine it to be the work of some exasperated Titan who, peeved at finding the barrier of the Sierras in his path, had driven his spade deep into the ridge of the range and then moved it back and forth, as a gardener does in setting out a plant, leaving a gash in the mountains eight miles long and a mile deep. When flocks of wild geese light in the Yosemite, so John Muir tells us, they have hard work to find their way out again, for, no matter in which direction they turn, they are soon stopped by the wall, the height of which they seem to have an insuperable difficulty in gauging. They must feel very much like a fish in an aquarium which is for ever battering its nose against the glass walls of its tank. The wall looks to be only about so high, but when they should be far over its top, northward or southward according to the season, back they find themselves once more, beating against its stony face, and it is only when, in their bewilderment, they chance to follow the downward course of the river, that they hit upon an exit.

Standing in the centre of the valley floor, on the banks of the winding Merced, is the Sentinel Hotel, which, barring several camps, is the only hostelry in the valley. It is a cosy, homelike, old-fashioned place, the fashion in which the rooms open onto the broad verandas which run entirely around both the lower and the upper stories recalling the old-time taverns of the South. As there are neither dance pavilions nor moving-picture houses in the Yosemite, the young women employed as waitresses at the Sentinel Hotel frequently find their unoccupied time hanging heavy on their hands, this tedium occasionally leading them into exploits calculated to make the hair of the observer permanently pompadour. One of these girls, a slender, willowy creature, anxious to outdare her companions, climbed to Glacier Point and on the insecure and scanty foothold afforded by the Overhanging Rock, which juts from the face of the sheer cliff, three thousand two hundred feet above the valley floor, proceeded to dance the tango! Evidently feeling that this exhibition, which had sent chills of apprehension up the spines of the beholders, was too tame, she balanced herself on one foot on the ledge’s very brink and extended the other, like a première danseuse, over three fifths of a mile of emptiness.

An unobtrusive but interesting feature of the Yosemite which may well escape the notice of the casual tourist is the little settlement of Indians, who dwell in a collection of wretched shacks at the base of the valley’s northern wall. Like all the California Indians, this remnant of the Yosemite tribe are entirely lacking in the picturesqueness of dress and bearing which characterises their kinsmen of the Southwest. Their presence in the Yosemite possesses, however, a certain romantic interest, for, had it not been for them, it may well be that the famous valley would still remain unfound. Their story is an interesting and pathetic one. As a result of the injustices and outrages committed upon the peaceful Californian Indians by the settlers who came flocking into the State upon the discovery of gold, the tribes were driven to revolt, and in 1851 the government found itself with a “little war” upon its hands. The trouble ended, of course, by the complete subjugation of the Indians, who were transferred from their hereditary homes to a reservation near Fresno. The Yosemites proved less tractable than the other tribes, however, and, instead of coming in and surrendering to the palefaces, they retreated to their fastnesses in the High Sierras, and it was while pursuing them that a troop of cavalry discovered the enchanted valley which bears their name. They were captured and carried to Fresno, but the humid climate of the lowlands wrought such havoc among these mountain-bred folk that the survivors petitioned the government for permission to return to their old home. Their petition was granted, and during the half century which has passed since their return to the valley which was the cradle of their race they have never molested the white man and have supported themselves by such work as the valley affords and by basket weaving.

It was quite by chance that I stumbled upon these copper-coloured stragglers from another era. While riding one afternoon along the foot of the sheer precipice which hems the valley in, my eye was caught by three strange objects standing in a row. They resembled—as much as they resembled anything—West African voodoo priests in the thatched garments which they wear on ceremonial occasions. Upon questioning the Indian woman who appeared, however, I elicited the information that they were chuck-ahs, and were built to store acorns in. The Yosemite chuck-ah looks like a huge edition of the hampers they use in the lavatories of hotels to throw soiled towels in, thatched with fir branches and twigs, covered with a square of canvas to shed the rain, and mounted on stilts so as to place its contents beyond the reach of rodents. As the Yosemites, who are bitterly poor, largely subsist upon a coarse bread made from meal produced by pounding the bitter acorn, the chuck-ah is as essential to their scheme of household economy as a flour barrel is to ours. The copper-coloured lady who painstakingly explained all this to me in very disconnected English told me that her name was Wilson’s Lucy. Whether she was married to Wilson or whether she was merely attached, like her name, I did not inquire. Flattered by my obvious interest in her domestic affairs, she disappeared into the miserable hut which served as home, to reappear an instant later carrying what at first glance I took for a small-sized mummy, but which, upon closer inspection, proved to be a very black-haired, very bright-eyed, very lusty youngster, bound to a board from chin to ankle with linen bandages which served the double purpose of making him straight of body and keeping him out of mischief.

“What’s his name?” I inquired, proffering a piece of silver.

“My name Wilson’s Lucy,” the mother giggled proudly. “He name Woodrow Wilson.”

So, should the President see fit to present a silver spoon to his copper-coloured namesake, he can address it care of Yosemite Valley Post-Office, California.

Of the Yosemite, Herr Karl Baedeker, to whose red guide-books every travelling American clings as tenaciously as to his letter of credit, and whose opinions he accepts as unreservedly as a Mohammedan accepts the Koran, has said: “No single valley in Switzerland combines in so limited a space such a wonderful variety of grand and romantic scenery.” Aside from its unique scenic beauties, the chief attraction of the Yosemite, to my way of thinking, is the altogether unusual variety of recreation which it affords. Excursions afoot, ahorseback, or acarriage to a dozen points of charm in the valley and its environs; trail rides along the dizzy paths which the government has built to skirt the cañon’s rim; fishing in the icy mountain streams, in whose shaded pools half a dozen varieties of trout—Steelheads, Speckled, Brook, Rainbow, Dolly Varden, and others—await the fly; al fresco luncheons in the leafy recesses of the Happy Isles, with the pine-carpeted earth for a seat, a moss-covered boulder for a table, and the mingled murmur of waterfalls and wind-stirred tree tops for music; it is days spent in such fashion which makes of a visit to the Yosemite an unforgettable memory.

A half-day’s journey south by stage from the Yosemite brings one to the lovely Sierran meadow of Wawona, above which are marshalled that glorious company of Sequoias known as the Mariposa Big Tree Grove. Just as Ireland has its lakes, and Switzerland its mountains, and Norway its fiords, so California has its Sequoias, and in many respects they are the most wonderful of all. The Big Trees, as they are called, are of two genera: the Sequoia gigantea, found only in the lower ranges of the high Sierras, and the Sequoia sempervirens, which are peculiar to the region lying between the Coast Range and the sea. There is no more fascinating trip on the continent than that from the Yosemite to the Big Trees of Mariposa, the road, which in the course of a few miles attains an elevation of six thousand five hundred feet, commanding magnificent retrospects of the Bridal Veil Falls, El Capitan, Cathedral Spires, and Half Dome, then plunging into the depths of a forest of cedar, fir, and pine, crossing the south fork of the brawling Merced, passing the hospitable verandas of the Wawona Hotel, and ending under the shadow of the redwood giants, traversing, en route, a tunnel cut through the heart of a living Sequoia. In their exploitation of the Big Tree groves, the railway companies have had the rather questionable taste to advertise these monarchs of the forest by means of pictures showing six-horse coaches being driven through them, or troops of cavalry aligned upon their prostrate trunks, or good-looking young women on horseback giving equestrian exhibitions upon their stumps. To me this sort of thing smacks too much of the professional showman; it is like making a Bengal tiger jump through a paper hoop or a lion sit up on his hind legs and beg like a trick dog. The Sequoias are too magnificent, too awesome to thus cheapen. When once you have stood in their solemn presence and have attempted to follow with your eye the course of the great trunks soaring skyward, higher than the Flatiron Building in New York, half again the height of the shaft on Bunker Hill; when you have made the circuit of their massive trunks, equal in circumference to the spires of Notre Dame; when you have examined their bark, thicker than the armour of the dreadnought Texas; you will agree with me, I think, that the Big Trees of California need no circus performances to emphasise their proportions and their majesty.

According to the rules promulgated by the government, motorists are permitted to leave the Yosemite only between the hours of six and seven-thirty in the morning. After I had crawled out of a warm bed into the shiveryness of a Sierran dawn—for the early mornings are bitterly cold in the High Sierras—I felt inclined to agree with Madame de Pompadour that “travelling is the saddest of all pleasures.” But when we were sandwiched in the tonneau of the car again, with the long and trying grade by which we had entered the valley safely behind us and the river road to Merced stretching out in long diagonals in front, we soon forgot the discomforts of the early rising, for the big car leaped forward like a spirited horse turned loose upon the countryside, and the crisp, clear air dashed itself into our faces until we felt as buoyant and exhilarated as though we had been drinking champagne. After “checking out” at the Big Tree military outpost, we turned down the road which leads through Coulterville to Merced, the walls of the cañon gradually becoming less precipitous and the rugged character of the country merging into orchards and these in turn to farms and vineyards as we debouched into the San Joaquin again.

Leaving Merced in the golden haze behind us, we swung southward, through the land of port wine and sherry, to Madera, the birthplace of the American raisin, and so down the splendid Kearney Boulevard—fifteen miles of oiled delight running between hedges of palms and oleanders—to Fresno, the geographical centre of California and the home of the American raisin and sweet-wine industry, which in little more than a dozen years has elbowed Spain out of first place among the raisin growers of the world and has caused ten thousand homes to spring up out on the sandy plain. Unleashing the power beneath the throbbing bonnet, we tore southward and ever southward, at first through growing grain-fields and then across vast barren stretches, waiting patiently for reclamation. Draped along the scalloped base of the moleskin-coloured foot-hills, where they rise abruptly from the plain, was a bright green ribbon—the citrus belt of the San Joaquin, where the orange groves nestle in the sheltered coves formed by the Sierras’ projecting spurs. In the region lying between Visalia and Porterville frost is an almost negligible quantity and, as a result, it is threatening the supremacy of the Riverside-Pasadena district as a producer of the golden fruit.

Visalia is the starting-point for the Sequoia and General Grant Big Tree Groves, which have recently been opened to automobilists. The route to the Sequoia Park lies through Lemon Cove and then over a moderately good road, extremely dusty in summer, to Rocky Gulch, on the Giant Forest Road, where the motorist is halted by a cavalry patrol and the customary five-dollar admittance fee to national parks exacted. From Visalia to Camp Sierra, in the heart of the Sequoia, is fifty-five miles, to cover which, allowing for the mountain grades, the indifferent condition of the roads, and the delay at the park boundary, will require a full half day. The monarch of the Sequoia Grove is the redwood known as “General Sherman,” two hundred and eighty feet in height and ninety-five feet in circumference. Taking height and girth together, the “General Sherman” is, I believe, the largest tree in the world, though in the little-visited Calaveras Grove, the northernmost of the Californian groups of big trees, the “Mother of the Forest” is three hundred and fifteen feet high and the prostrate “Father of the Forest” is one hundred and twelve feet in circumference. If, however, the size of a tree is gauged by its girth only, there are several trees larger than any of the Californian Sequoias—the gigantic cypress near Oaxaca, in Mexico, known as the “Great Tree of Tule,” whose trunk measures one hundred and sixty feet in circumference but whose height is barely more; the great banyan in the botanical garden at Calcutta, and the “Chestnut Tree of a Hundred Horses”—said to be the largest tree in the world—at the foot of Mount Etna. I do not know whether these bald figures convey anything to you, but they certainly do not to me and I am not going to burden you with more of them. I have done my duty in giving you the dimensions of the largest of the Sequoias, which, I might add, is almost the exact height of the Flatiron Building. A vast deal of nonsense has been written about the age and other features of the Californian redwoods. It is not enough for the visitor to learn that the oldest Sequoia was probably a sapling when Rameses drove the Israelites out of Egypt, but the guide must needs draw upon his imagination and add another six or seven thousand years on top of that. The Sequoia, the noblest living thing upon our continent to-day, would appear, even at the age of five-and-twenty centuries, to be capable of much added lustre, for I was gravely assured that it was probably from these very groves that Solomon obtained the pillars for his temple.

It is in the neighbourhood of fourscore miles from Visalia to the delta of the Kern, most southerly of the Sierra’s golden streams, along whose banks rise the gaunt, black skeletons of the oil-derricks. So vast is the extent of the Great Valley of California that, though it contains the greatest petroleum fields in all the world, the traveller may zigzag through it for many days without seeing a sign of the industry which lights the lamps and provides the motive power for trains, boats, and motor-cars from the Straits of Behring to the Straits of Magellan. It is not an attractive region. Hungry and bare are the tawny hills, viscous the waters of the stream that meanders between them, weird and gibbet-like the forest of derricks which crowns them. There is a smell of coal-oil in the air, and the few habitations we passed were, by their very ugliness, obviously connected with this, the unloveliest of the earth’s products.

Bakersfield marks the virtual end of the Great Valley, a few miles south of it the converging ranges of fawn-coloured plush being linked by the Tehachapi, which is the recognised boundary between central and southern California. Bakersfield owes its abounding prosperity to the adjacent oil-fields, its streets being lined by the florid residences and its highways resounding to the arrogant honk honk of the high-powered motor-cars of the “oil barons,” as the men who have “struck oil” are termed. I like these oil barons because with their loud voices and their boisterous manners and the picturesqueness of their dress they typify a phase of life in the “Last West” which is rapidly disappearing. There is something rough-and-ready and romantic about them; something which recalls their get-rich-quick fellows in Dawson and Johannesburg and Baku. Most of them have acquired their wealth suddenly; most of them have worked up from the humblest beginnings; and most of them believe in the good old proverb of “Easy come, easy go—for there’s more where this came from.” Red-faced, loud-voiced, with a predilection for broad-brimmed hats and gaudy ties, you can see them playing poker for high stakes in the back rooms of the saloons or leaning over the hotel bars in boisterous conversation. After I had watched them for a time I no longer doubted the assertion that Bakersfield buys more spittoons than any city in the country.

Although from the gilded cupola of Bakersfield’s truly beautiful court-house you can look out across a quarter of a million irrigated acres, though you can see a solid block of alfalfa covering forty squares miles and fattening twenty-five thousand head of steers a year, these form but a patch of green on the yellow floor of the valley’s gigantic amphitheatre. As a matter of fact, the development of the country around Bakersfield has been seriously retarded by the enormous holdings of two or three great landowners who neither improve their properties nor sell them. One of these great landlords, who numbers his Californian acres alone in the millions and who boasts that his cow-punchers can drive a herd of his steers from the Mexican frontier to the Oregon line and camp on his own land every night, obtained his enormous holdings near Bakersfield long years ago under the terms of the Swamp and Drowned Lands Act, which provided that any one who applied could obtain title to any land which he had gone over in a boat. So he put a boat on a wagon and had it hauled over hundreds of thousands of acres which he has since reclaimed. He was an ingenious fellow.

You will need to journey far to find a region more desolate and forbidding than that lying between Bakersfield and the summit of the Tehachapi. Never shall I forget the deadly monotony of that long, straight road along which we pushed in the teeth of a buffeting wind, with its whistling telegraph-poles, its creaking iron windmills at regular intervals, and its barbed-wire fences all converging to a vanishing-point which looked to be perhaps five miles ahead but at which we never seemed to arrive. There are no trees to obstruct the view of the barren hills which rim the distance, and for many miles there is not enough cover to hide a grasshopper, for the soil is poisoned by alkalis and the poor, thin grass dies of a broken heart. But as the car panted its tortuous way from the floor of the valley up the face of the mountain wall which hems it in, the scenery became more varied and interesting. Great patches of the mountainside were clothed with masses of lupin of the coldest, brightest blue you ever saw. Once we ran through a forest of tree yuccas whose spiked, fantastic branches looked as though they were laden with hedgehogs. Sometimes the road would dip quite suddenly into a charming little hollow in the hills, shaded by venerable live-oaks and with a purling brook running through it, only to emerge again and zigzag along the face of the mountain, clinging to the bare rock as a fly clings to the ceiling. Several times we had to stop for flocks of sheep—thousands and thousands of them—moving to pastures new, driven by shaggy, bright-eyed sheep-dogs which hung upon the flanks of the flock and seemed to anticipate every order of the Basque shepherds. I noticed that all these herdsmen wore heavy revolvers at their hips and had Winchesters slung at the pommels of their saddles, for the ancient feud between cattlemen and sheepmen still exists upon these Sierran ranges, and there is many a pitched battle between them of which no news creeps into the columns of the papers. The frequency of these flocks considerably delayed our progress, for the road is narrow and to have driven through the woolly wave which at times engulfed the car would have meant driving scores of sheep over the precipice to death on the rocks below.

The change in scenery as we emerged from the mouth of the pass at Saugus was almost startling in its suddenness. Gone were the dreary, wind-swept plains; gone was the endless vista of telegraph-poles; gone the dun and desolate hills. We found ourselves, instead, at the entrance to a valley which might well have been the place of exile of Persephone. Symmetrical squares of bay-green oranges, of soft gray olives and of yellowing vines turned its slopes into chessboards of striking verdure. Rows of tall, straight eucalyptus trees made of the highway a tunnel of blue-green foliage. The mountains, from foot to summit, were clothed with lupins of a blue that dulled the blue of heaven. The oleanders and magnolias and palms and clumps of bamboo about the ranches gave to the scene an almost tropical luxuriance. This was the vale of Santa Clara—not to be confused with the valley of the same name farther north—perhaps the richest and most prosperous agricultural region for its size between the oceans and certainly the least advertised and the least known. Unlike the residents of other parts of California, its residents issue no enticing literature depicting the surpassing beauties and attractions of their valley as a place of residence, for the very good reason that they do not care to sell, unless at prohibitive prices. They have a good thing and they intend to keep it. Less than twoscore miles in length, the Santa Clara Valley, which begins at Saugus and runs westward to Ventura-by-the-Sea, comes nearer to being frostless than any region in the State, save only the Imperial Valley. But its industries are by no means restricted to the cultivation of citrus fruits, for the walnuts it produces are finer than those of England, its figs are larger than those of Smyrna, and its olives more succulent than those grown on the hills of Greece.

As with engines droning like giant bumblebees we sped down the eucalyptus-bordered highway which leads to Santa Paula, the valley was flooded with the rare beauty of the fleeting twilight of the West. The sky, a moment before a dome of lapis lazuli, merged into that exquisite ashes-of-roses tint which is the foremost precursor of the dark, and then burst, all unexpectedly, into a splendid fiery glow which turned the western heavens into a sheet of rosy coral. But, like most really beautiful things, the Californian sunsets are quick to perish. A few moments only and the rose had dulled to palest lavender and this to amethyst and this in turn to purple and then, at one bound, came the night, and our head lamps were boring twin holes in the velvety, flower-scented darkness. Before us the street lights of Santa Paula burst into flame like a diamond necklace clasped about the neck of a lovely woman.

The region of which Lake Tahoe is the centre is difficult to describe; one is drawn illusively into over-praising it. Yet everything about it—the height of the surrounding mountains, the vastness of the forests, the size of the trees, the beauty of the wild flowers, the grandeur of the scenery, the colourings of the lake itself—is so superlative that, to describe it as it really is, one must, perforce, lay himself open to the charge of exaggeration. There is no lake in Switzerland or, for that matter, anywhere else in Europe which is Tahoe’s equal. To find its peer you will need to go to Lake Louise, in the Canadian Rockies, or, better still, to some of the mountain lakes of Kashmir. Here, set down on the very ridge-pole of the High Sierras, is a lake twenty-two miles long by ten in width, the innumerable pleasure craft whose propellers churn its translucent waters into opaline and amaranthine hues being nearly a mile and a quarter above the surface of the Pacific. To attempt to describe its ever-changing and elusive colourings is as futile as to describe the colours of a sunset sky, of a peacock’s tail, of an opal. Looked at from one point, it is blue—the blue of an Ægean sky, of a baby’s eyes, of a turquoise or of a sapphire—but an hour later, or from another angle, it will be green: a gorgeous, glorious, dazzling green, sometimes scintillating like an emerald of incredible size, sometimes lustreless as a piece of jade. In the bays and coves and inlets which corrugate its shores its waters become even more diverse in colouring: smoke grey, pearl grey, bottle green, Nile green, yes, even apple green, lavender, amethyst, violet, purple, indigo, and—believe me or not, as you choose—I have more than once seen Tahoe so rosy in the reflected alpenglow of twilight that it looked for all the world like a sheet of pinkest coral. Its shores are as diverse as its colourings, pebbly beaches alternating with emerald bays; pine-crowned promontories; snug coves on whose silver beaches bathers disport themselves and children gambol; moss-carpeted banks shaded by centenarian trees; cliffs, smooth as the side of a house, rising a thousand feet sheer above the water; and, here and there, deep and narrow inlets so hemmed in by vertical precipices of rock that to find their like you would have to go to the Norwegian fiords. Completely encircling the lake, like watchful sentinels, rise the snow peaks—not the domesticated mountains of the Adirondacks or the Alleghenies, but towering monsters, ten, twelve, fifteen, thousand feet in height and white-mantled throughout the year—the monarchs of the High Sierras. From the snow-line, which is generally about two thousand feet above the surface of the lake and ten thousand feet above the level of the sea, the coniferous Sierran forests—the grandest and most beautiful in the world—clothe the lower slopes of the mountains in mantles of shaggy green which sweep downward until their hems are wet in the waters of the lake.

One of the most distinguishing and pleasing characteristics of these Sierran forests is their inviting openness. The trees of all the species stand more or less apart in groves or in small, irregular groups, enabling a rider to make his way almost anywhere, along sun-bathed colonnades and through lush, green glades, sprinkled with wild flowers and as smooth as the lawns of a city park. Now you cross a forest garden ariot with wild flowers, now a mountain meadow, now a fern-banked, willow-shaded stream, and ever and anon emerge upon some granite pavement or high, bare ridge commanding superb views of majestic snow-peaks rising grandly above the intervening sea of evergreen. Every now and then you stumble upon mountain lakes tucked away in the most unexpected places, gleaming amid the surrounding forest like sapphires which a jeweller has laid out for inspection upon a green plush cloth. The whole number of lakes in the Sierras is said to be upward of fifteen hundred, not counting the innumerable smaller pools and tarns. Another feature of the High Sierras are the glacier meadows: smooth, level, silky lawns, lying embedded in the upper forests, on the floors of the valleys, and along the broad backs of the ridges at a height of from eight to ten thousand feet above the sea. These mountain meadows are nearly as level as the lakes whose places they have taken and present a dry, even surface, free from boulders, bogs, and weeds. As one suddenly emerges from the solemn twilight of the forest into one of these dreamy, sunlit glades, he looks instinctively for the dainty figures of Watteau shepherdesses or for the slender forms of sportive nymphs. The close, fine sod is so brightly enamelled with flowers and butterflies that it may well be called a meadow garden, for in many places the plushy turf is so thickly strewn with gentians, daisies, ivesias, forget-me-nots, wild honeysuckle, and paint-brush that the grass can scarcely be seen.

In certain of these mountain meadows I noticed a phenomenon which I have observed nowhere else save in Morocco: the flowers, instead of being mixed and mingled in a huge bouquet, grew in distinct but adjacent patches—a square of blue forget-me-nots here, a blanket of white daisies there, a strip of Indian paint-brush over there, and beyond a dense clump of wild lilac—so that from a little distance the meadow looked exactly like a great floral mosaic. It was very beautiful. On the higher slopes the scarlet shoots of the snow-plant dart from the soil like tongues of flame. Around it hangs a pretty native legend. Two young braves, so the legend runs, made desperate love to an Indian princess, who at length chose the one and turned away the other. On the marriage day the rejected lover ambushed himself in the forest, and, as his rival went riding past to claim his bride, sent an arrow twanging into his breast. But, though wounded unto death, the lover clung to his horse and raced through the forest to die in the arms of his bride. As he sped his heart’s blood, welling forth, left a trail of crimson splotches on the ground behind him. And wherever a drop of blood fell, there a blood-red flower sprang into bloom. If you doubt the story you can see and pick them for yourself.

Set high on the western shore of Tahoe, and so appropriately designed that it seems to be a part of the forest which encircles it, is Tahoe Tavern—a long, low hostelry of shingles, stone, and logs, its deep verandas commanding an entrancing view of the lake and of the mountainous Nevada shore, for the California-Nevada boundary runs down the middle of the lake. Just as the smart set along the Atlantic seaboard flock to Newport, Narragansett, and Bar Harbour in the summer, so the corresponding section of society upon the Pacific Coast may be found at Tahoe from July to September. A narrow-gauge railway, leaving the main line of the Southern Pacific at Truckee, two hundred miles or so east of San Francisco, hugs the brawling Truckee to the Tavern, a distance of a dozen miles, whence steamers convey the visitor to the numerous hotels, camps, and cottages which dot the shores of the lake. The summers are never warm on Tahoe, nor, for that matter, ever uncomfortably cool, while the air is as crisp and invigorating as extra-dry champagne. From the first of July to the first of October it almost never rains. And yet ninety-nine Easterners out of a hundred pity the poor Californians who, they imagine, are sweltering in semitropic heat.

One never lacks for amusement at Tahoe. Lean power-boats tear madly from shore to shore, their knife-like prows ploughing the lake into a creamy furrow. Hydroplanes hurtle by like leaping tunas. There is angling both in Tahoe and the maze of adjacent lakes and lakelets for every variety of trout that swims. There is bathing—if one doesn’t mind cold water. At night white-shouldered women and white-shirted men dip and hesitate and glide on the casino’s glassy floor to the impassioned strains of “Get Out and Get Under” and “Too Much Mustard.” But trail riding is the most characteristic as it is the most exciting, diversion of them all. It is really mountaineering on horseback—up the forested slopes, across the gaunt, bare ridges, and so to the icy summits, on wiry ponies which are as sure-footed as mountain-goats and as active as back-yard cats. The narrowness of many of the trails, the slipperiness of ice and snow, the giddiness of the sheer cliffs, the thought of what would happen if your horse should stumble, combine to make it an exciting amusement. You can leave the shores of the lake, basking in a summer climate, with flowers blooming everywhere, and in a two hours’ ride find yourself amid perpetual snow. It is a novel experience, this sudden transition from July to January, and not to be obtained so readily anywhere else that I know, unless it be in a cold-storage plant. On the Fourth of July, for example, after a late breakfast, the Lady and I waved au revoir to our white-flannelled friends on the Tavern’s veranda and before noon were pelting each other with snowballs on a snow-drift forty feet deep, with Lake Tahoe, gleaming beneath the sun like a gigantic opal, three thousand feet below us. There may, of course, be more enchanting vacation places than this Tahoe country—higher mountains, grander forests, more beautiful lakes, a better climate—but I do not know where to find them.