It is quite as well. These people are more germane with enterprise and hurry, and with the winding-up drink at some vulgar tavern when the hired hands are paid off, and gather to have “a real nice time with the boys.”
This was over. The herds of men had poured back to their cities, and wandered away among distant mines as far as their earnings would carry them.
A few stranded bummers, who awoke from their “nice time” penniless, still lingered in pathetic humiliation round the scene of their labor, rather heightening that air of sleep which now pervaded every ranch in the Sacramento valley.
We quitted the hotel at Chico with relief, gratefully turning our backs upon the Chinamen, whose cookery had spoiled our two days’ peace. Mr. Freeman Clark will have to make out a better case for Confucius, or else these fellows were apostate. But they were soon behind us, a straight, dusty avenue leading us past clusters of ranches into a quiet expanse of level land, and beneath the occasional shadow of roadside oaks. Miles of harvested plain lay close shaven in monotonous Naples yellow, stretching on, soft and vague, losing itself in a gray, half-luminous haze. Now and then, through more transparent intervals, we could see the brown Sierra feet walling us in to eastward, their oak-clad tops fainter and fainter as they rose into this sky. Directly overhead hung an arch of pale blue, but a few degrees down the hue melted into golden gray. Looming through the mist before us rose sombre forms of trees, growing in processions along the margins of snow-fed streams, which flow from the Sierra across the Sacramento plain. Through these silent, sleepy groves the seclusion is perfect. You come in from blinding, sun-scorched plains to the great, aged oaks, whose immense breadth of bough seems outstretched with effort to shade more and more ground.
Alders and cottonwoods line the stream banks; native grapes in tropical profusion drape the shores, and hang in trailing curtains from tree to tree. Here and there glimpses open into dark thickets. The stream comes into view between walls of green. Evening sunlight, broken with shadow, falls over rippling shallows; still expanses of deep pool reflect blue from the zenith, and flow on into dark-shaded coves beneath overhanging verdure. Vineyards and orchards gather themselves pleasantly around ranch-houses.
Men and women are dull, unrelieved; they are all alike. The eternal flatness of landscape, the monotony of endlessly pleasant weather, the scarcely varying year, the utter want of anything unforeseen, and absence of all surprise in life, are legible upon their quiet, uninteresting faces. They loaf through eleven months to harvest one. Individuality is wanting. The same kind of tiresome ranch-gossip you hear at one table spreads itself over listening acres to the next.
The great American poet, it may confidently be predicted, will not book his name from the Sacramento Valley. The people, the acres, the industry seem to be created solely to furnish vulgar fractions in the census. It was not wholly fancy that detected in the grapes something of the same flatness and sugary insipidity which characterized the girls I chatted with on certain piazzas.
What an antipode is the condition of sterile poverty in the farm-life of the East! Frugality, energy, self-preserving mental activity contrast sharply with the contented lethargy of this commonplace opulence. Mile after mile, in recurring succession of wheatland and vineyard, oak-grove and dusty shabbiness of graceless ranch-buildings, stretches on, flanking our way on either side, until at last the undulations of the foot-hills are reached, and the first signs of vigorous life are observed in the trees. Attitude and consciousness are displayed in the lordly oaks which cluster upon brown hillsides. The Sacramento, which through the slumberous plain had flowed in a still, deep current, reflecting only the hot haze and motionless forms of the trees upon its banks, here courses along with the ripple of life, displaying through its clear waters bowlders and pebbles freighted from the higher mountains.
Our road, ascending through sunny valleys and among rolling, oak-clad hills, at length reaches the level of the pines, and, climbing to a considerable crest, descends among a fine coniferous forest into the deeply wooded valley of the Pitt. Lifted high against the sky, ragged hills of granite and limestone limit the view. The river, through a sharp, rocky cañon, has descended from the volcanic plains of northeastern California, cutting its way across the sea of hills which represents the Sierra Nevada, and falling toward the west in a series of white rapids.
Our camp in the cool mountain air banished the fatigues of weary miles; night, under the mountain stars, gave us refreshing sleep; and from the morning we crossed Pitt Ferry we dated a new life.