CHAPTER I.
THE SACRAMENTO VALLEY: A GENERAL VIEW, WITH HINTS TO TOURISTS AND SPORTSMEN.
The State of California extends over somewhat more than ten degrees of latitude. If it lay along the Atlantic as it lies along the Pacific coast, its boundaries would include the whole shore-line from Cape Cod to Hilton Head, and its limits would take in the greater portion of ten of the original States.
It contains two great mountain ranges—the Sierra Nevada and the Coast Range. These, running parallel through the State, approach each other so closely at the south as to leave only the narrow Tejon Pass between them; while at the north they also come together, Mount Shasta rearing its splendid snow-covered summit over the two mountain chains where they are joined.
Inclosed within these mountain ranges lies a long, broad, fertile valley, which was once, no doubt, a great inland sea. It still contains in the southern part three considerable lakes—the Tulare, Kern, and Buena Vista—and is now drained from the south by the San Joaquin River, flowing out of these lakes, and from the north by the Sacramento, which rises near the base of Mount Shasta. These two rivers, the one flowing north, the other south, join a few miles below Sacramento, and empty their waters into the bay of San Francisco.
That part of the great inland plain of California which is drained by the Sacramento is called after its river. It is more thickly inhabited than the southern or San Joaquin Valley, partly because the foot-hills on its eastern side were the scene of the earliest and longest continued, as well as the most successful, mining operations; partly because the Sacramento River is navigable for a longer distance than the San Joaquin, and thus gave facilities for transportation which the lower valley had not; and, finally, because the Sacramento Valley had a railroad completed through its whole extent some years earlier than the San Joaquin Valley.
The climate of the Sacramento Valley does not differ greatly from that of the San Joaquin, yet there are some important distinctions. Lying further north, it has more rain; in the upper part of the valley they sometimes see snow; there is not the same necessity for irrigation as in the lower valley; and though oranges flourish in Marysville, and though the almond does well as far north as Chico, yet the cherry and the plum take the place of the orange and lemon; and men build their houses somewhat more solidly than further south.
The romance of the early gold discovery lies mostly in the Sacramento Valley and the adjacent foot-hills. Between Sacramento and Marysville lay Sutter's old fort, and near Marysville is Sutter's farm, where you may still see his groves of fig-trees, under whose shade the country people now hold their picnics; his orchards, which still bear fruit; and his house, which is now a country tavern.
Of all his many leagues of land the old man has, I believe, but a few acres left; and of the thousands who now inhabit and own what once was his, not a dozen would recognize him, and many probably scarcely know his name. His riches melted away, as did those of the great Spanish proprietors; and he who only a quarter of a century ago owned a territory larger than some States, and counted his cattle by the thousands—if, indeed, he ever counted them—who lived in a fort like a European noble of the feudal times, had an army of Indians at his command, and occasionally made war on the predatory tribes who were his neighbors, now lives upon a small annuity granted him by the State of California. He saved little, I have heard, from the wreck of his fortunes; and of all who were with him in his earlier days, but one, so far as I know—General Bidwell, of Chico, an able and honorable gentleman, once Sutter's manager—had the ability to provide for the future by retaining possession of his own estate of twenty thousand acres, now by general consent the finest farm in California.
As you go north in California the amount of rain-fall increases. In San Diego County they are happy with ten inches per annum, and fortunate if they get five; in Santa Barbara, twelve and a half inches insure their crops; the Sacramento Valley has an average rain-fall of about twenty inched, and eighteen inches insure them a full crop on soil properly prepared. In 1873 they had less, yet the crops did well wherever the farmers had summer-fallowed the land. This practice is now very general, and is necessary, in order that the grain may have the advantage of the early rains. When a farmer plows and prepares his land in the spring, lets it lie all summer, and sows his grain in November just as the earliest rain begins, he need not fear for his crop.
There is less difference in climate than one would suppose between the Sacramento and the San Joaquin valleys. Cattle and sheep live out-of-doors, and support themselves all the year round in the Shasta Valley on the north as constantly as in Los Angeles or any other of the southern counties. The seasons are a little later north than south, but the difference is slight; and as far north as Red Bluff, in the interior, they begin their harvest earlier than in Monterey County, far south but on the coast. Snow rarely lies on the ground in the northern counties more than a day. The best varieties of the foreign grapes are hardy everywhere. Light frosts come in December; and in the flower-gardens the geranium withers to the ground, but springs up from the roots again in March. The eucalyptus flourishes wherever it has been planted in Northern California; and as far north as Redding, at the head of the valley, the mercury very rarely falls below twenty-five degrees, and remains there but a few hours.
As you travel from Marysville, either northward or southward, you will see before and around you a great wide plain, bounded on the west by the blue outlines of the Coast Range, and on the east by the foot-hills of the Sierra: a great level, over which as far as your eye can reach are scattered groves of grand and picturesque white oaks, which relieve the solitude of the plain, and make it resemble a well-planted park. Wherever the valley is settled, you will see neat board fences, roomy barns, and farm-houses nestling among trees, and flanked by young orchards. You will not find a great variety of crops, for wheat and barley are the staple products of this valley; and though the farms here are in general of 640 acres or less, there are not wanting some of those immense estates for which California is famous; and a single farmer in this valley is said to have raised on his own land last year one-twentieth of the entire wheat crop of the State.
Northwest of Marysville the plain is broken by a singularly lovely range of mountains, the Buttes. They rise abruptly from the plain, and their peaks reach from two to three thousand feet high. It is an extremely pretty miniature mountain range, having its peaks, passes, and cañons—all the features of the Sierra—and it is well worth a visit. Butte is a word applied to such isolated mountains, which do not form part of a chain, and which are not uncommon west of the Mississippi. Shasta is called a butte; Lassen's Peaks are buttes; and the traveler across the continent hears the word frequently applied to mountain. It is pronounced with the u long.
Along the banks of the Sacramento there are large quantities of land which is annually overflowed by the river, and much of which is still only used for pasturage during the dry season, when its grasses support large herds of cattle and sheep, which are driven to the uplands when the rains begin to fall. But much of this swamp and tule land has been drained and diked, and is now used for farm land. It produces heavy crops of wheat, and its reclamation has been, and continues to be, one of the successful speculations in land in this State. It will not be long before the shores of the Sacramento and its tributaries will be for many miles so diked that these rivers will never break their bounds, and thus a very considerable area will be added to the fertile farming lands of the State.
Already, however, the Yuba, the Feather, and the American rivers, tributaries of the Sacramento, have been leveed at different points for quite another reason. These rivers, once clear and rapidly flowing within deep banks, are now turbid, in many places shallow, and their bottoms have been raised from twenty to thirty feet by the accumulation of the washings from the gold mines in the foot-hills. It is almost incredible the change the miners have thus produced in the short space of a quarter of a century. The bed of the Yuba has been raised thirty feet in that time; and seeing what but a handful of men have effected in so short a period, the work of water in the denudation of mountains, and the scouring out or filling up of valleys during geological periods becomes easily comprehensible.
All our Northern fruits thriftily in the Sacramento Valley, and also the almond, of which thousands of trees have been planted, and a few considerable orchards are already in bearing. The cherry and the plum do remarkably well, the latter fruit having as yet no curculio or blight; and the canning and drying of peaches, plums, apricots, nectarines, and pears are already, as I shall show in detail farther on, a considerable as well as very profitable business. Dried plums, in particular, sell at a price which makes the orchards of this fruit very valuable. Excellent raisins have also been made, and they sell in the open market of San Francisco for a price very little less than that of the best Malaga raisins. The climate, with its long dry summer, is very favorable to the drying and curing of every fruit: no expensive houses, no ovens or other machinery, are needed. The day is not distant when the great Sacramento plain will be a vast orchard, and the now unoccupied foot-hills will furnish a large part of the raisins consumed in the United States. For the present the population is scant, and cattle, horses, and especially sheep, roam over hundreds of thousands of acres of soil which needs only industrious farmers to make it bloom into a garden.
The farmer in this State is a person of uncommon resources and ingenuity. I think he uses his brains more than our Eastern farmers. I do not mean to say that he lives better, for he does not. His house is often shabby, even though he be a man of wealth, and his table is not unfrequently without milk; he buys his butter with his canned vegetables in San Francisco, and bread and mutton are the chief part of his living, both being universally good here. But in managing his land he displays great enterprise, and has learned how to fit his efforts to the climate and soil.
The gathering of the wheat crop goes on in all the valley lands with headers, and you will find on all the farms in the Sacramento Valley the best labor-saving machinery employed, and human labor, which is always the most costly, put to its best and most profitable uses. They talk here of steam-plows and steam-wagons for common roads, and I have no doubt the steam-plow will be first practically and generally used, so far as the United States are concerned, in these Californian valleys, where I have seen furrows two miles long, and ten eight-horse teams following each other with gang-plows.
Withal, they are somewhat ruthless in their pursuit of a wheat crop. You may see a farmer who plows hundreds of acres, but he will have his wheat growing up to the edge of his veranda. If he keeps a vegetable garden, he has performed a heroic act of self-denial; and as for flowers, they must grow among the wheat or nowhere.
Moreover, while he has great ingenuity in his methods, the farmer of the Sacramento plain has but little originality in his planting. He raises wheat and barley. He might raise a dozen, a score, of other products, many more profitable, and all obliging him to cultivate less ground, but it is only here and there you meet with one who appreciates the remarkable capabilities of the soil and climate. Near Tehama some Chinese have in the last two years grown large crops of pea-nuts, and have, I was told, realized handsome profits from a nut which will be popular in America, I suppose, as long as there is a pit or a gallery in a theatre; but the pea-nut makes a valuable oil, and as it produces enormously here, it will some day be raised for this use, as much as for the benefit of the old women who keep fruit-stands on the street corners. It would not be surprising if the Chinese, who continue to come over to California in great numbers, should yet show the farmers here what can be done on small farms by patient and thorough culture. As yet they confine their culture of land mainly to vegetable gardens.
To the farmer the valley and foot-hill lands of the Sacramento will be the most attractive; and there are still here thousands of acres in the hands of the Government and the railroad company to be obtained so cheaply that, whether for crops or for grazing, it will be some time before the mountainous lands and the pretty valleys they contain, north of Redding, the present terminus of the railroad, will attract settlers. But for the traveler the region north of Redding to the State line offers uncommon attractions.
The Sacramento Valley closes in as you journey northward; and at Red Bluff, which is the head of navigation on the river, you have a magnificent view of Lassen's Peaks on the east—twin peaks, snow-clad, and rising high out of the plain—and also of the majestic snow-covered crag which is known as Shasta Butte, which towers high above the mountains to the north, and, though here 120 miles off, looks but a day's ride away.
Redding, thirty miles north from Shasta, lies at the head of the Sacramento Valley. From there a line of stage-coaches proceeds north into Oregon, through the mass of mountains which separates the Sacramento Valley in California from the Willamette Valley in Oregon. The stage-road passes through a very varied and picturesque country, one which few pleasure travelers see, and which yet is as well worth a visit as any part of the western coast. The Sacramento River, which rises in a large spring near the base of Mount Shasta, has worn its way through the high mountains, and rushes down for nearly a hundred miles of its course an impetuous, roaring mountain stream, abounding in trout at all seasons, and in June, July, and August filled with salmon which have come up here through the Golden Gates from the ocean to spawn. The stage-road follows almost to its source the devious course of the river, and you ride along sometimes nearly on a level with the stream, and again on a road-bed cut out of the steep mountain side a thousand or fifteen hundred feet above the river; through fine forests of sugar-pines and yellow pines many of which come almost up to the dimensions of the great sequoias.
The river and its upper tributaries abound in trout, and this region is famous among Californian sportsmen for deer and fish. Many farm-houses along the road accommodate travelers who desire to stay to enjoy the fine scenery, and to hunt and fish; and a notable stopping-place is Fry's Soda Spring, fourteen hours by stage from Redding, kept by Isaac Fry and his excellent wife—a clean, comfortable little mountain inn, where you get good and well-cooked food, and where you will find what your stage ride will make welcome to you—a comfortable bath. The river is too cold for bathing here in the mountains because of the snow-water of which it is composed. About ten miles south of Fry's lies Castle Rock, a remarkable and most picturesque mountain of white granite, bare for a thousand feet below its pinnacled summit, which you see as you drive past it on the stage.
Fry's lies in a deep cañon, with a singular, almost precipitous, mountain opposite the house, which terminates in a sharp ridge at the top, one of those "knife-edge" ridges of which Professor Whitney and Clarence King often speak in their descriptions of Sierra scenery. If you are a mountain climber, you have here an opportunity for an adventure, and an excellent guide in Mr. Fry, who told me that this ridge is sharp enough to straddle, and that on the other side is an almost precipitous descent, with a fine lake in the distance. If you wish to hunt deer or bear, you will find in Fry an expert and experienced hunter. He has a tame doe, which, I was told, is better than a dog to mark game on a hunt, its sharp ears and nose detecting the presence of game at a great distance. If you are a fisherman, there are within three minutes' walk of the house pools abounding in trout, and you may fish up and down the river as far as you please, with good success everywhere. In June and July, when the salmon come up to spawn, they, too, lie in the deepest pools, and with salmon eggs for bait you may, if you are expert enough with your rod, take many a fat salmon.
It is astonishing to see how the salmon crowd the river at the spawning season. The Indians then gather from a considerable distance, to spear and trap these fish, which they dry for winter use; and you will see at this season many picturesque Indian camps along the river. They set a crotch of two sticks in a salmon pool, and lay a log from the shore to this crotch. Upon this log the Indian walks out, with a very long spear, two-pronged at the end and there armed with two bone spear-heads, which are fastened to the shaft of the spear by very strong cord, usually made of deer's sinews. The Indian stands very erect and in a really fine attitude, and peers into the black pool until his eye catches the silver sheen of a salmon. Then he darts, and instantly you see a commotion in the water as he hauls up toward the surface a struggling twenty-five or thirty pound fish. The bone spear heads, when they have penetrated the salmon, come off from the spear, and the fish is held by the cord. A squaw stands ready on the shore to haul him in, and he is beaten over the head with a club until he ceases to struggle, then cleaned, and roasted on hot stones. When the meat is done and dry it is picked off the bones, and the squaws rub it to a fine powder between their hands, and in this shape it is packed for future use.
From one of these pools a dozen Indian spearmen frequently draw out four hundred salmon in a day, and this fish forms an important part of their food. Of course they kill a great many thousand female salmon during the season; but so far, I believe, this murderous work has not been found to decrease the number of the fish which annually enter the river from the ocean, and go up to its head waters to spawn.
If you visit this region during the last of June or in July, you may watch the salmon spawning, a most curious and remarkable sight. The great fish then leave the deep pools in which they have been quietly lying for some weeks before, and fearlessly run up on the shallow ripples. Here, animated by a kind of fury, they beat the sand off the shoals with their tails, until often a female salmon thus labors till her tail fins are entirely worn off. She then deposits her eggs upon the coarse gravel, and the greedy trout, which are extravagantly fond of salmon eggs, rush up to eat them as the poor mother lays them. They are, I believe, watched and beaten off by the male salmon, which accompanies the female for this purpose. When the female salmon has deposited her eggs, and the male salmon has done his part of the work, the two often bring stones of considerable size in their mouths to cover up the eggs and protect them from the predatory attacks of the trout.
And thereupon, according to the universal testimony of the fishermen of these waters, the salmon dies. I was assured that the dead bodies often cumber the shore after the spawning season is over; and the mountaineers all assert that the salmon, having once spawned up here, does not go down to the ocean again. They hold that the young salmon stay in the upper waters for a year, and go to sea about eighteen months after hatching; and it is not uncommon, I believe, for fishermen hereabouts to catch grilse weighing from two to four pounds. These bite sometimes at the fly. The salmon bite, too, when much smaller, for I caught one day a young salmon not more than six inches long. This little fellow was taken with a bait of salmon eggs, and his bright silvery sides made him quite different from the trout which I was catching out of the same pool. His, head, also had something of the fierce, predatory, hawk-like form which the older salmon's has.
Fry is an excellent fisherman himself, and knows all the best pools within reach of his house, and, if you are a mountaineer, will take you a dozen miles through the woods to other streams, where you may fish and hunt for days or weeks with great success, for these woods and waters are as yet visited by but few sportsmen.
And if you happen to come upon Indian fishermen on your way—they are all peaceful hereabouts—you may get the noble red man's opinion of the great Woman Question. As I stood at the road-side one day I saw an Indian emerging from the woods, carrying his rifle and his pipe. Him followed, at a respectful distance, his squaw, a little woman not bigger than a twelve-year-old boy; and she carried, first, a baby; second, three salmon, each of which weighed not less than twenty pounds; third, a wild goose, weighing six or eight pounds; finally, a huge bundle of some kind of greens. This cumbrous and heavy load the Indian had lashed together with strong thongs, and the squaw carried it on her back, suspended by a strap which passed across her forehead.
When an Indian kills a deer he loads it on the back of his squaw to carry home. Arrived there, he lights his pipe, and she skins and cleans the animal, cuts off a piece sufficient for dinner, lights a fire, and cooks the meat. This done, the noble red man, who has calmly or impatiently contemplated these labors of the wife of his bosom, lays down his pipe and eats his dinner. When he is done, the woman, who has waited at one side, sits down to hers and eats what he has left.
"Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow." Miss Anthony and Mrs. Cady Stanton have good missionary ground among these Indians. One wonders in what language an Indian brave courts the young squaw whom he wishes to marry; what promises he makes her; what hopes he holds out; with what enticing views of wedded bliss he lures the Indian maiden to the altar or whatever may be the Digger substitute for that piece of church furniture. One wonders that the squaws have not long ago combined and struck for at least moderately decent treatment; that marriages have not ceased among them; that there has not arisen among the Diggers, the Pit River Indians, and all the Indian tribes, some woman capable of leading her sex in a rebellion.
But, to tell the truth, the Indian women are homely to the last degree. "Ugly,"said an Oregonian to me, as we contemplated a company of squaws—"ugly is too mild a word to apply to such faces;" and he was right. Broad-faced, flat-nosed, small-eyed, unkempt, frowzy, undersized, thickset, clumsy, they have not a trace of beauty about them, either young or old. They are just useful, nothing more; and as you look at them and at the burdens they bear, you wonder whether, when the Woman's Rights movement has succeeded, and when women, dressed like frights in such Bloomer costume as may then be prescribed, go out to their daily toil like men, and on an equality with men—when they have cast off the beauty which is so scornfully spoken of in the conventions, and have secured their rights—whether they will be any better off than these squaws. When you have thoughtfully regarded the Indian woman perhaps you will agree with Gail Hamilton that it is woman's first duty to be useless; for it is plain that here, as in a higher civilization, when women consent to work as men, they are sure to have the hardest work and the poorest pay.
As you ascend the Sacramento you near Mount Shasta, and when you reach Strawberry Valley, a pretty little mountain vale, you are but a short ride from its base. It is from this point that tourists ascend the mountain. You can hire horses, guides, and a camp outfit here, and the adventure requires three days. You ride up to the snow-line the first day, ascend to the top the following morning, descend to your camp in the afternoon, and return to the valley on the third day. Mount Shasta has a glacier, almost, but not quite, the only one, I believe, within the limits of the United States. The mountain is an extinct volcano. Its summit is composed of lava, and if your eye is familiar with the peculiar shape of volcanic peaks, you can easily trace the now broken lines of this old crater as you view the mountain from the Shasta plain on the north.
There are many extremely pretty valleys scattered through these mountains, and these are used by small farmers, and by sheep and cattle owners who in the winter take their stock into the lower valleys, but ascend into the mountains in May, and remain until October. This is also a timber region, and as it is well watered by permanent streams you see frequent saw-mills, and altogether more improvement than one expects to find. But, proceeding further north you come upon a large plain, the Shasta Valley, in which lies the considerable town of Yreka, notable during the last winter and spring as the point from which news came to us about the Modoc war.
From Yreka you may easily visit the celebrated "lava beds," where the Indians made so stubborn and long-continued a defense against the United States troops; and at Yreka you may hear several opinions upon the merits of the Modocs and their war. You will hear, for instance, that the Indians were stirred up to hostilities by mischievous and designing whites, that white men were not wanting to supply them with arms and ammunition, and that, had it not been for the unscrupulous management of some greedy and wicked whites, we should not have been horrified by the shocking incidents of this costly Indian trouble, in which the United States Government for six months waged war against forty-six half-starved Modocs.
The Shasta Valley is an extensive plain, chiefly used at present as a range for cattle and sheep. But its soil is fertile, and the valley contains some good farms. Beyond Yreka gold mining is pursued, and, indeed, almost the whole of the mountain region north of Redding yields "the color;" and at many points along the Upper Sacramento and the mountain streams which fall into it, gold is mined profitably. One day, at the Soda Spring, several of us asked Mr. Fry whether he could find gold near the river. He took a pan, and digging at random in his orchard, washed out three or four specks of gold; and he related that when he was planting this orchard ten years ago he found gold in the holes he dug for his apple-trees. But he is an old miner, and experience has taught him that a good apple orchard is more profitable, in the long run, than a poor gold mine.
A large part of the Sacramento Valley is still used for grazing purposes, but the farmers press every year more and more upon the graziers; and the policy of the Government in holding its own lands within what are called "railroad limits"—that is to say, within twenty miles on each side of the railroad—for settlement under the pre-emption and homestead laws, as well as the policy of the railroad company in selling its lands, the alternate sections for twenty miles on each side of the road, on easy terms and with long credit to actual settlers, prevents land monopoly in this region. There is room, and cheap and fertile land, for an immense population of industrious farmers, who can live here in a mild climate, and till a fertile soil, and who need only intelligence and enterprise to raise profitably raisins, orchard fruits, castor-oil, peanuts, silk, and a dozen other products valuable in the world's commerce, and not produced elsewhere in this country so easily. It is still in this region a time of large farms poorly tilled; but I believe that small farms, from 160 to 320 acres, will prove far more profitable in the end.
The progress of California in material enterprises is something quite wonderful and startling. A year brings about changes for which one can hardly look in ten years. It is but eighteen months ago that the idea of a system of irrigation, to include the whole of the San Joaquin Valley, was broached, and then the most sanguine of the projectors thought that to give their enterprise a fair start would require years, and a great number of shrewd men believed the whole scheme visionary. But a few experiments showed to land-owners and capitalists the enormous advantages of irrigation, and now this scheme has sufficient capital behind it, and large land-holders are offering subsidies and mortgaging their lands to raise means to hasten the completion of the canal. Two years ago the reclamation of the tule lands, though begun, advanced slowly, and arguments were required to convince men that tule land was a safe investment. But this year eight hundred miles of levee will be completed, and thousands of acres will bear wheat next harvest which were overflowed eighteen months ago. Two years ago the question whether California could produce good raisins could not be answered; but last fall raisins which sold in the San Francisco market beside the best Malagas were cured by several persons, and it is now certain that this State can produce—and from its poorest side-hill lands—raisins enough to supply the whole Union. Not a year passes but some new and valuable product of the soil is naturalized in this State; and one who has seen the soil and who knows the climate of the two great valleys, who sees that within five, or, at most, ten years all their overflowed lands will be diked and reclaimed, and all their dry lands will be irrigated, and who has, besides, seen how wide is the range of products which the soil and climate yield, comes at last to have what seems to most Eastern people an exaggerated view of the future of California.
But, in truth, it is not easy to exaggerate, for the soil in the great valleys is deep and of extraordinary fertility; there are no forests to clear away, and farms lie ready-made to the settlers' hands; the range of products includes all those of the temperate zone and many of the torrid; the climate is invigorating, and predisposes to labor; and the seasons are extraordinarily favorable to the labors of the farmer and gardener. The people have not yet settled down to hard work. There are so many chances in life out there that men become overenterprising—a speculative spirit invades even the farm-house; and as a man can always live—food being so abundant and the climate so kindly—and as the population is as yet sparse, men are tempted to go from one avocation to another, to do many things superficially, and to look for sudden fortunes by the chances of a shrewd venture, rather than be content to live by patient and continued labor. This, however, is the condition of all new countries; it will pass away as population becomes more dense. And, meantime California has gifts of nature which form a solid substratum upon which will, in a few years, be built up a community productive far beyond the average of wealthy or productive communities. This is my conclusion after seeing all parts of this State more in detail than perhaps any one man has taken the trouble to examine it.
