Monday morning, when we rode away from the scene, a dense fog hung over the river. Others were coming where we were leaving. Our day’s journey was back to the Mammoth Springs Hotel. For us the Park was a finished book, however many the pages which we had skipped, and however imperfectly we may have read the few passages that fell under our eyes. Streams and meadows, cliffs and mountain peaks covered with snow, lined the way outward bound, but it seemed to me that, somehow, the falling of the waters and the glimmering of the colors of the Canyon, dimmed all other things.
V
Seattle, Washington, August 19: After spending a few hours in Livingston, which has a sightly location, at the mouth of a canyon and in sight of a mountain on which the snow lies for ten months in the year, we proceeded westward. From Montana we passed into Idaho, where the tree butchers are cutting up the last remnants of the white pine. It is, for the most part, a dreary country, where the timber has been cut over and where forest fires have left masses of charred stumpage. Waste everywhere and nothing but waste! The American lumberman in the past has picked out the best and left the rest to the desolation that follows the man with the axe and the torch. It has been the working out of the practical American idea of getting the most money with the least care about the future. It is pity and disgust and indignation that one feels. But such are the ravages of commerce in a commercial era among a commercial people.
The next day we reached Spokane, on the other side of the Rockies, mistress of a vast industrial area, reaching up into the mountains on one side, with their mines and their lumber, and stretching out over the Washington wheat fields, on the other. A great city, the creation of a few years, but to the casual traveler, more or less uninteresting, broiling and sizzling in the August sun, treeless, for the most part, and to that extent cheerless. But the volume of business transacted is large and the business buildings are fine and the people, grown richer, are building new houses and surrounding themselves with the luxuries which American people everywhere seek after and prize.
Leaving Spokane, going westward, one enters the great wheat country, a plateau lying between the Rocky Mountains and the coast ranges. Where the railroads run, the country is more or less rough, with here and there formations that suggest “bad lands,” but much of the country is level and productive. It is a vast treeless region; rainless in summer. The mercury rises as high as 100 in the night time. When the wind blows, which it is apt to do, dust fills the air. Much of the soil seems to be as fine as flour and very light when it is very dry. We rode for hours without seeing a drop of water, in creek or lake. What a precious thing water must be to the people—in summer time, when they need it most! There are no homes in these wheat fields. Here and there are scattered hovels which the sowers and the reapers use in their seasons, but no permanent abodes. Wire fences are stretched across the fields, far apart. How different it all is from the farming countries of the Mississippi Valley, with their well fenced farms, the homes of the farmers in the midst of groves and orchards and the grazing herds of cattle and flocks of sheep. Here and there one saw a horseman riding in a pillar of dust. The trails of dust one sees are the only evidences of highways, or of travel. It is a great wheat producing country, when it has been revived by the rains of winter, but the men who grow that wheat ought to be well paid for their labors. It was night when we reached the Columbia River, the mighty stream that wends across these wheat fields, deep down in its channel, so deep that the use of its waters for purposes of irrigation seems almost hopeless. The winds that blow across the plateau may solve the question.
Seattle is a marvel in the way of city building. It is growing in every direction and in every way. Located on a great inland sea, in sight of the mountains and blest with a climate of wonderful evenness, at the end of the great transcontinental railways and where the large vessels are loaded and unloaded for the orient and the coastwise trade, the destiny of this city can hardly be overdrawn. Seattle has absorbed the major energies of the American northwest. The men who founded the city laid out its streets in almost impossible places, but modern engineering is cutting down the hills and filling up the hollows. There is no end to the enterprise of the people in these respects. Every breath one breathes in Seattle is a city breath. Men from the prairies of Iowa have become city builders in Seattle. Industrial reverses may overtake them, they likely will, and their winters are said to be atrociously foggy and wet, but they are going to make Seattle a place of which all Americans will be proud, one of the great commercial cities of the Pacific Ocean.
VI
San Francisco, August 24: After spending a few days in Seattle we started southward, with Los Angeles as the end of our journeying in that direction. Tacoma has been out-distanced by Seattle, but it is itself a great and growing city. Portland, in Oregon, is a city of older appearances than Seattle. It has more leisure and more culture and, perhaps, more realized riches. It has a great river, mountains around it and the ocean only a few miles away. Portland is building for the future and the growth of Pacific Ocean commerce is in the dreams of all the business men.
On the way to San Francisco we rode up the Rogue River valley, which we found not equal to its fame, and around Mount Shasta, grand and glorious in the sunshine that fell around its snow-covered peak. The next morning we were in the wheat belt of California, the wonderful Sacramento Valley. In August it is barren enough, nothing green in it except the fields of alfalfa, an occasional plum orchard and the wonderful live oaks scattered over the landscapes, always with the range of mountains in the perspective. Wheat growing in these valleys has about reached its limit. The continual cropping has left the soil impoverished and there is talk of cutting up the big ranches into individual small farms, watered artificially. What there may come out of this form of development is problematical. Some persons who had lived in the valley assured us that the heat is often so intense that it scalds the fruit on the trees. On the western slope of the coast range the climate is much better for fruit and also for gardening. Incidentally, it may be remarked that the American is hardly the race that will develop this form of intensive farming. They want to do things on a bigger scale and they shun the manual labor that is necessary to make it successful. Portuguese colonies are said to be prospering in the culture of fruit and the Japanese also are making headway. They are willing to do such work and to do it for wages that are not considered adequate by Americans. Under present conditions nothing seems to me more hopeless than the establishment of fruit farms, by American farmers from the Mississippi Valley, in the valley of the Sacramento, the Rogue River or even the Yakima and the Yellowstone.
San Francisco has recovered marvelously from the earthquake and the fire. It is a city in the process of rebuilding and the rebuilding is all along greater and better lines. Old Chinatown is no longer a city of rookeries, but of substantial brick and steel, with shops that would do credit to any city. The haunts of vice are fewer and the old devotees of oriental vices complain bitterly that the “town” has lost its “atmosphere.” If it has, it is so much for the better. San Francisco has been hampered and handicapped, but its business men are striving to retain the commerce of the Pacific for which so many other cities are now striving and for which Seattle has made so much headway.